Filthy Beast(118)

She comes out into the kitchen, smiling. “You know, I’m pretty spoiled by this.”

“Didn’t you have a chef back home?”

She grins and nods. “But you’re much better.”

“Oh, I’m sure I am.” I give her a plate and a cup of coffee before serving myself and sitting down across from her.

I watch her eat for a second, sipping my coffee. She’s so goddamn beautiful and she makes me so happy, which is why I hate that I feel like I have to have this conversation with her. I wish we could just keep going like this as she gets more and more pregnant, and then we’d raise our child together, and just live in bliss.

But the real world is still out there, and the real world is very unhappy.

“What?” she asks me with a little smile.

I smile back. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“Uh oh,” she says. “You have your serious face on.”

“I don’t have a serious face. All of my faces are serious.”

“Well, that’s not true,” she says, laughing. “Your come face isn’t too serious.”

I grin at her. “That’s the most serious of all faces, Sadie girl.”

She sighs and leans back in her chair. “Okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“First I want to tell you something.” I grab her hand and hold it tightly. “Having you here these last two weeks… they’ve been the happiest two weeks of my life. Do you understand that?”

She nods, smiling, and squeezes my hand back. “I feel the same way.”

“Good. So now you understand why it’s so hard for me to say that I think you need to go home.”

She pauses, very surprised, and slowly pulls her hand away. “What?” she asks. “Why?”

“Not permanently,” I say quickly. “Hell, not even for very long. But Sadie, you need to tell your family that you’re pregnant.”

She lets out a sharp breath. “I thought you were kicking me out.”

“I’m not,” I say. “I promise. But you do need to tell your parents, and I think it’ll be best if you do it in person.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” she says quietly. “Do you have any idea how they’ll react?”

“They’re probably pretty fucking mad already,” I say, grinning. “I did beat the shit out of one of their workers.”

She bites her lip and looks down at her place. “I know that. My brothers have been calling me every day since I left.”

“Peter too?” I ask.

“Peter too,” she confirms. “Not answering has been hard. But it’s the right thing for me.”

“You can’t hide this forever,” I say. “We don’t need their support or their blessing. But we do need them to understand.”

“Why?” she asks suddenly, almost pleading. “You know they’ve treated me like a dog for years, right? This is the safest I’ve ever felt. This is the most free I’ve ever been.”

“I know,” I say softly, and it breaks my heart just a little bit. “And so far, they haven’t really tried to bring you back. But they will, sooner or later, and they’ll try hard.”

“You can keep me safe,” she says.

“You’re right, I can. And legally speaking, you’re an adult, so you can do whatever you want. But we both know your family doesn’t need to follow laws.” I sigh, leaning back in my chair to look at her. “If they understand why you’re here, why you’re with me, we may be able to stay together.”

She looks at me quietly for a second and I can tell that she’s been wrestling with this ever since she came to me. Despite everything with her family, Sadie does love them, or at least she loves her brother Peter. Her parents haven’t treated her well, but she was raised to take pride in her family and to believe that the family’s best interests were more important than her own.

So it must be incredibly difficult now to go against all of that. Frankly, maybe it’s easy to think she’s just a silly rich girl with nothing at all, but I see so much more.

She’s strong. Just getting away from her family takes strength. She gave up so much by running away. I know I’ll never fully understand. Not only will she likely be removed from the will and the family, leaving her with nothing financially, she also lost her identity as a Tillman. Her family is more than just a family, it was her whole life, the person she was born and bred to be.

And yet she saw how unhappy it all made her, and she ran away. She figured it out, and now she’s here.

It’s impressive, no matter what people might think. I admire her.