Page 47 of Part of Me (The Seaside Chronicles 2)

My heart started to pound in my chest.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” My mother jumped up. “You’re pregnant!”

“What?!” My father stood so quickly his chair fell back. He looked like he was ready to lunge across the table and kill Brody.

“Oh my gosh! We’re going to be grandparents, Ken!” Janet jumped up as well and started hitting Brody’s dad on the shoulder excitedly.

Ken looked confused as hell before quickly pulling away from his wife. “Jesus, Janet, that’s my good swinging arm for golf!”

Brody leaned over to me and said, “Do something now before your father leaps across the goddamn table and murders me with a butter knife!”

I stood. “I’m not pregnant! But I wanted Brody to move in with me, and I knew that you’d all frown on that.”

Both moms deflated into their chairs.

“Oh, for the love…Sutton,” my father said. “This is 2022, we’re not that old-fashioned.”

We all looked at him.

He sat down and put the butter knife back on the table. “Thank you, Brody, for respecting my old-fashioned ways.”

Brody wiped away a bead of sweat and simply nodded.

My father cleared his throat. “Well, so…you’re married. Jack is back. And there are no buns in the oven.”

“Or shrimp,” Ken said with a chuckle.

“Is that all you wanted to tell us, sweetheart?” my mother asked.

I nodded. “Yep. That’s it. We’re married. Yay! We went to the Justice of the Peace this afternoon, and this is our first dinner as a married couple. We wanted to spend it with our parents.”

Janet and my mother both dabbed at the corners of their eyes.

“That is so sweet of you, darling,” Janet said as she beamed at me, then at her son.

“Can we eat now? I’m starving.” Ken reached for the serving spoon and scooped out a healthy portion of lasagna.

Brody had been a complete gentleman all evening at my parents’ house. He’d held my hand, kissed me on the cheek, and played the new doting husband—while I’d fought to keep from crawling on top of him every time he’d touched me. He played the part well. Too well.

When we left to head back to my house, he was silent the whole way. After we walked inside, he still didn’t say a word. When I returned downstairs after my shower and found him on the back porch drinking a beer, he still remained silent.

“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” I asked.

He slowly shook his head. “You flat-out lied to our parents, Sutton. It’s bad enough we’re going to have to put on a show for the whole town, but now we have to do it with our parents as well.”

I sat down and reached for his beer. I took a long drink and handed it back to him. “I panicked, Brody.”

“No shit.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth.”

He turned and looked at me. “Sutton, your dad is not going to have another heart attack.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t just that,” I said quietly. “I failed so badly with my first marriage, and if they knew the whole truth, and that my second marriage was a sham…I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing the pity or embarrassment on their faces.”

Brody stared at me for a good minute before he closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and then focused back on me. “Sutton, they wouldn’t have felt either of those things.”

“Are you terribly angry with me?”

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