Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
“Who in the fuck told you that?” Kane asked, fingers at his temples.
I wrung my hands. Everything I’d built my life around these past few months was slowly falling apart. Not that the proverbial building itself was structurally sound in the first place.
“Brax,” I said in little more than a whisper, the thunder drowning out his name.
“What? I can’t hear you?” his voice was harsh, still much too loud, much too cold.
“Brax,” I said louder, my throat thick. “He, um, I told him, and he told me that you wanted me to … get rid of it.”
Kane’s mouth fell open, the tips of his ears going fire-red. I’d thought he was angry before. No, I hadn’t seen anything yet. My stomach curdled with true fear. Kane was pissed off at me before, he’d been furious. But I was never in danger. I’d never seen a truly violent or deadly side to him, not even that day in the kitchen.
Until right that second.
“Well, Brax is going to fucking die,” he seethed, almost to himself.
I shivered at his tone, what he said. He was not speaking in metaphors.
“Back to this.” He motioned to my bump. All hardness rapidly left his gaze, a … tenderness in place that almost brought me to my knees.
I was already having a hard time being upright, but that tenderness? That was ten thousand times harder to handle than his wrath.
“You know what we had, Avery,” he shook his head. There was no tenderness in his voice. It was cold. Goose bumps erupted on my arms.
What we had.
Past tense.
Needless to say, I’d already mourned what we had. Or thought I had. My version of mourning was cursing his name throughout the day and hating myself for longing for him during the night.
But seeing him in that moment, understanding that there had been some kind of miscommunication and that he hadn’t said what Brax told me made me mourn him all over again.
Because he had been mine. When I’d seen the two lines. When I’d been scared but also excited—deep, deep down. About having something with Kane. Something permanent. In that second, I’d imagined a snapshot of a life I could have.
With Kane.
Then reality came in and kicked our asses.
That life was gone, no matter what came after this. Because of me.
“You know what we had,” he repeated, his eyes filled with emotion as he looked over my shoulder. “Yet you let Brax convince you it was nothing in one fuckin’ conversation.”
There was accusation there. Some of which I might’ve deserved. I definitely shouldn’t have made such a big, permanent decision based on secondhand information from an unreliable source.
And maybe part of the reason why I’d believed Brax so readily was because I didn’t believe that Kane and I would last. And because I knew that I wouldn’t survive him rejecting me to my face.
“He knew about Vermont,” I told him, putting my hands on my hips. Maybe I had some blame in all of this, but I wasn’t just about to submit. Pregnant or not, I had a backbone, and I was suddenly ready for a fight. Suddenly, I was ready for war.
Something skated over the outrage on Kane’s face, rippled past it. Confusion? Shock? Who knew? I didn’t have it in me to inspect Kane’s expressions. Not when they were so full of contempt.
“You told him about Vermont, and he said it was a story you told all your … women,” I continued, failing to keep the jealous bite from my voice.
It was better than the pathetic heartbreak that had been seeping from my every cell.
“And the note telling me to get rid of it was in your handwriting.”
Kane stood there, staring, waiting. I didn’t say anything else.
“That’s it?” he eventually asked quietly. “That’s all it took for you to give up on me, on us? To run away and take my child from me?” There was a slight snarl to his lip. He felt betrayed. “You didn’t try to see me? Didn’t talk to Victoria? I informed her directly that all decisions were yours to make.”
I released my chewed-up lip to reply. “Victoria was out of reach when I found out.”
“How long, Avery?” he screeched. “How long was she out of reach for? Did you wait one day, two? Did she call you back?”
I opened my mouth then closed it, unable to answer the rapidly asked questions, shot at me like bullets from a gun.
“I know she called you back because she fuckin’ told me, after Brax delivered the news that you were gone,” he seethed. “That you’d left me. I got in touch with Victoria, told her to find you because I might’ve been blind to what a complete piece of shit Brax is, but I knew not to trust the motherfucker with something so precious.”