If I had any other option, I would run as fast and as far from that house as I could. But I was broke, and going home to my father was not something I could even begin to contemplate.
Daddy was recovering from a lifetime of alcohol abuse, and the thought of arriving home, nineteen and pregnant, wasn’t something that filled me with warm, fuzzy feelings. I had a pretty strong suspicion that my pregnancy would derail daddy’s sobriety, not to mention my fear of what he would do to me. He had a nasty temper, and the man could flip as quick as a light switch.
No, I was just going to have to save up as much money as I could before the baby was born, so I could get my own place.
Cam was my best friend though, and I knew it should be her bringing me home. She was the one who had sat with me day in, day out, since I’d been hospitalized, well, her and Mike.
But I just couldn’t face her…She wouldn’t understand my calling Mike; in fact she would probably be furious. I understood why; Mike and Kyle were brothers, a lieu estranged ones.
Mike had played his part in the whole ‘make a fool out of Lee’ charade, but the difference was-and it was an important one-that Mike hadn’t lied, hadn’t hurt me, couldn’t hurt me. Not like Kyle had, or could.
Mike didn’t own any piece of my heart and I knew I could trust him. He was on my side, he had said as much when he arrived at the hospital.
I had screamed my head off at him when he’d showed up, two days after I had the operation that removed my fallopian tube and my dead baby inside it.
I’d told Mike to leave…But he didn’t.
Unlike Kyle, Mike had stayed, and he’d taken everything I threw at him- and I had thrown a lot.
I’d had a lot of dark moments in the first two weeks; fear, doubt, anger, injustice were all potent emotions that had been swirling inside me at the start. When those feelings had lifted, a cloud of sadness took place. But Mike had stuck around on my worst days. And then he’d kept coming back.
He’d told me he was sorry he didn’t tell me that he and Kyle were brothers, that the guilt was eating him. He’d said that he wished he’d warned me from the start, about Rachel, but to be fair, he hadn’t known I was involved with Kyle, until I was so deeply devoted, that even I had to admit, I probably wouldn’t have believed him.
Mike hadn’t known about Rachel’s trickery and had been horrified over the lies Rachel had spun Kyle.
I had been, too.
It wasn’t every day you met a girl, who would go to the extremes of faking a pregnancy and hysterectomy, to secure a man for money.
God, I hated that bitch.
Rachel Grayson would forever be on my shit list.
I’d accepted Mike’s apology because he was my friend. He’d been my friend before I was ever involved with his brother. I accepted his comfort and friendship because I needed it. I needed one person in my life that was solely there for me.
As good as Cam was to me, and as nice as Derek was, they were Kyle’s friends too, and dragging them into the middle of this was unfair.
A tiny part of my conscience, protested that I was using Mike, but I needed him right now. Mike was mine, not Kyle’s.
I had a lot to thank both Mike and Cam for. Even though they weren’t overly keen on each other, they had both spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past six weeks, visiting me.
“You sure? Have you got some papers you need to sign?” Mike asked, interrupting my reverie.
“I just have to wait for the nurse to return with the papers,” I replied, tugging my overstretched t-shirt down over my thighs.
It was embarrassing as hell that my jeans didn’t tie.
I’d been wearing pajamas for the six weeks and hadn’t noticed how much extra weight I’d gained. But my clothes had.
Earlier, when I was tying my jeans, I had a ‘fat moment,’ when they only zipped half way. They were catching on my butt and my widely spreading hips. And if my hips weren’t big enough before; they now seemed to be two inches on the wrong side of curvy.
The swell of my belly was prominent now, but it looked like I’d gained a few pounds of fat, than the look of being five months pregnant.
Five months.
I still found it crazy to believe, that I had sailed through more than three months of pregnancy without knowing. It was unsettling.
There was a knock on the door and I grimaced when a nurse rolled a wheelchair into my room.
“Are you ready to go home, Miss Bennett?” She asked chirpily.
I zipped up my suitcase and smiled.
I wasn’t anywhere close to being ready, but I slapped on my brightest smile. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Secretly, I was petrified.
The thought of facing Kyle, and the possibility of seeing Rachel again, made it hard to keep my breathing even. I didn’t want to face him.