Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance)(80)
I shake my head. I can’t even… I can’t even—
“Since you were a teenager,” he says, waving his hand at me. “Don’t act so surprised. It’s for your own protection.”
“My protection?” I cry.
“All of our protection. To make sure nothing sensitive gets out. You know how dangerous it can be in our situation. You know that we’re constantly targets… the police, the other families. Anything they can get their hands on, they’ll use against us. Against you. They will absolutely root through our garbage. It was for your own protection.”
I shake my head at him in disbelief. Everything I’ve thrown away since I was thirteen was rooted through… seven years of my privacy violated, maybe more.
“Was it always Frank?”
Dad shakes his head. “Not always. But most of the time.”
I bury my face in my hands. I can’t believe it.
All these years.
It makes me sick!
“Get over it,” Dad says. “Your trash is not that interesting. Nobody’s is.”
“You violated my privacy. Do you have any idea how I feel right now?”
He sighs, folds his big arms over his barrel-chest. He’s put on comfort weight as he’s gotten older, but beneath that is still a strong, ex-boxer’s body.
I am physically afraid of my father.
That just makes me even sicker.
“I’m not going to repeat myself more than this last time, Deidre,” Dad warns. “It was for our protection.”
“You should have told me.”
“Then you’d just hide things.”
“I have the right to!”
“Not from me!” he yells, shocking me into silence. “Not from your father!” He points at the pregnancy tester. “Explain this now.”
“What’s to explain?”
“Who is the father?”
I lick my lips and lie: “Someone I met at a party.”
Predictably, Dad’s face morphs into shocked judgment. He’s so old-fashioned.
“I didn’t raise you that way.”
“You didn’t raise me at all.”
“Not this again.”
“You think you were a good father? You never cared about me, especially not once Duncan came into the picture.”
I know why I’m doing this, just to get him off-balance… anything to drive him off-topic. To not make it obvious that his surrogate son, the one he thought he could adopt and then shape into a better version of himself, the one he tried – and failed – to tame, is the father of my baby.
“What’s the boy’s name?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he cries in disbelief. But then the expression on his face flattens. I can see the cogs in his mind whirring. He’s starting to suspect I might be lying. He knows I wouldn’t forget something like that.
“You’re lying to me, don’t think I can’t tell.” He lifts his hands up, claps them together, rubs them out of frustration. “My own daughter, my own flesh and blood, the daughter I raised, gave a good life. I spilled blood for you, and this is how you repay me?”
“You never once did anything for me!” I fire back at him. “You only did it for yourself, for your empire! You never hid how disappointed you were to have a daughter. You even went out and adopted a fucking son!”
“You watch your fucking mouth,” he snarls. “That’s not how a lady talks. And you’re right,” he says. “I regret that your mother couldn’t give me a son. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy to have you.”
“Fuck you, Dad,” I say, pointing a trembling finger at him. “You were never happy to have me. Not once.”
“That hurts,” he says, comically touching his chest. “You’d say that to your own father.”
I shake my head, fold my arms. He’s so fucking manipulative. “I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“Why won’t you tell me who the father is? If he’s just some boy you… had relations with at a college party.” He winces as he says the words. “Then why do you care?”
“I know what you’ll do to him.”
“What is it you think I’ll do?”
“Have Frank pay him a visit, and then I’ll be reading his obituary.”
Dad sighs over-dramatically. He always was a bit of an actor. He always did think of himself as playing some kind of part in some kind of script.
Real life… never seems to be real to him. Especially when others suffer at his feet.
“I’ll raise the child as my own,” he says, voice stone-cold and resolute. “If it’s a boy, he’ll be my son.”