“Did you and Jesse have a fight?”
“Something like that.” I kicked off my boots and dropped down on the couch. Lana walked in through the still open door with Drake behind her like always. There was tension radiating from him, and I knew it was because of me. Was he scared I was going to pack up and take Lana far away from him? Trust me, the thought had crossed my mind more than once on the drive home.
But I wasn’t going to run away. I refused to give up Emmie and the life that my sisters and I had here just because I had been stupid enough to fall for a guy that would think the worst of me. I wasn’t going anywhere unless Emmie, and only Emmie, asked me to leave. “Go home, guys.”
“Layla…” Drake gave me an almost pleading look. “Call me before you decide anything crazy, okay? Don’t run.” His eyes went to Lana who stood just a few feet in front of him. Don’t take her away from me, his eyes seemed to say.
“I’m not running,” I assured him and saw his shoulders noticeably relax. “But you need to go. I’m not strong enough to deal with you here right now.”
Nik still stood over me, frowning. “Tell me what happened, Layla. Maybe I can help.”
I glared up at him. “You can’t help. Nothing you say or do will fix what happened tonight. Nothing, not even a time machine could change any of it. Not unless you have a way of extracting DNA from someone’s gene pool.”
He only looked more confused now. “Did you and Jesse break up?”
“Oh, yeah. We definitely broke up.” I told him with a laugh that held little humor.
Nik opened his mouth to say something, but Drake stopped him. “Let’s go, bro. She just needs some time to get tonight straight in her head.” Nik sighed but nodded, and I was relieved when both rockers left without another word.
Once the door was shut behind them, Lana dropped down beside of me on the sofa and without a word, pulled me into her arms. Like a child, I buried my face in her hair and held on as the tears fell freely. My past had come back to bite me in a big way…
My mother, Lydia, had only been sixteen when she met Tommy Kirkman. Sixteen to his thirty-five. Of course she hadn’t told him that she was only sixteen. I was sure that she hadn’t even been a virgin when she had willingly climbed into the rocker’s bed. She had meant to get pregnant. It was all part of her plan to become a rocker’s wife, or at least his play thing for longer than a night.
Tommy had picked up and moved on the next day, but Lydia had made sure that he knew that she was pregnant. When I was born, a court ordered paternity test was done, and Tommy had forked over some big time money, but made sure that my mother knew that he wanted nothing to do with me. She had been disappointed that I wasn’t enough to keep the rock star on a leash for at least a little while, but the money he had shelled out had been enough to console her.
I hadn’t really thought about the man that was my father growing up. I had known who he was from the time I was old enough to ask about who he was. It wasn’t until my mother kicked me out when I was sixteen that I tried to contact him.
I had nowhere to go, was living in a shelter and barely getting anything to eat. I had been desperate, so I had went to one of his concerts. It hadn’t been easy, but somehow I had managed to sneak onto his tour bus and waited for him. He had been high on the adrenaline from his performance and maybe something stronger, but he hadn’t been so stoned that he didn’t understand who I was when I told him I was his daughter.
Tommy Kirkman had been less than pleased to see me. I didn’t have a copy of my birth certificate to show as proof, but I didn’t really need one. I might have looked a little like my mother, but I had more of my father in me. My chocolate brown eyes, the rich cinnamon color of my hair, the angle of my chin and the shape of my nose—that was all Tommy.
“So what do you want?” he had snarled after I told him who I was.
“I…My mom threw me out. I don’t have anywhere to go,” I had told him, putting my pride aside because I had nothing left.
“That’s your problem.” He moved around the bus until he found a half empty bottle of whisky. He pulled the top off and started drinking directly from the bottle. “That settlement I gave your slut mother was to make you go away. I signed over all my rights, and she got her money.”
“But…” I knew I was fighting a lost cause. He wasn’t going to help me. Not unless… “I’ll sell my story to the papers. I’m sure that all your fans would love to read about your bastard in the gossip pages.” Not to mention I was likely to get a good price for selling my story. “And wouldn’t the world like hearing how you got a sixteen year old pregnant?” Maybe it was the truth, or maybe I was just trying to bluff him into helping me out. I wasn’t sure. I could never really know. I was a scared, desperate girl then, but I left with that threat ringing between us.