“I hope so.” Provided what he said wasn’t, I’m gonna get our child taken away from you. She held Mercy a little tighter.
“You will,” Casey said. “Uncertainty’s always worse than whatever reality you’re putting off facing.” He looked thoughtful a moment, then spoke softly. “Just know that whatever happens, and no matter how bad it might be . . . If he turns out to be a monster, like the worst possible scenario you could imagine, just know he’ll be taken care of.”
She studied his face, unsure. “You mean like . . .” You mean what? That you’d run him out of town? That you’d kill him? Casey’s shady reputation notwithstanding, she couldn’t imagine him going there. Vince? Maybe. Just maybe. “What do you mean?”
“I mean if it comes down to your safety or the baby’s safety . . .” He shrugged, leaving her upended. Spending the night with him had been heaven, but this conversation was a stark reminder that this man who treated her so well was still far from a saint. She needed to keep that reality at the forefront of her mind, to combat the weakness of her body and her heart.
Unless James went psycho—which wasn’t beyond possibility, if he’d stooped to stalking her—he didn’t deserve a beat down. What he deserved, in fact, was answers. She steeled herself, trusting that everything would be better once she’d talked to him.
It was only too bad that the anticipation was such a bitch.
• • •
Abilene looked up as Casey squeezed her foot. They were sitting on the couch, her lying down, trying to breathe deep, and him sitting at one end with the dozy baby propped on his lap. She could hear Miah and his father talking in the ranch’s office down the hall, two matching, distant baritones, and also the drone of the radio in the kitchen, where Christine was puttering.
“Almost time,” Casey said. He was acting calm, though he had his silver lighter in one hand and was turning it around and around.
Abilene eyed the clock, heart thumping hard and quick. Five minutes to nine.
Casey shifted the baby’s weight and dug in his pocket, handed her his phone. It was a chunky old thing, branded with the logo of a pay-as-you-go carrier. He had a smartphone, too, and she wondered anew why he needed both.
Bet I don’t want to know.
“I think I’ll—” She jumped as the thing buzzed in her hand, breath leaving her in a whoosh. “I’ll go upstairs,” she finished, and hurried out of the den. She ran up the steps, huffing and shaky as she hit TALK on the third ring and managed to say, “Hello?”
“Abilene?” That familiar voice, deep and cool and hard, like an echo from a grave.
“Yeah. Hang on.” She slipped inside her room and shut the door. Once she was cross-legged on the bed, she said, “Okay.”
There was a pause before he replied, the noise of a word nearly being spoken, then not. A long breath hissed through the line. “Well.”
“I’m ready to talk.” She hugged her middle with her free arm. Her back ached and she was shaking like she’d drunk ten coffees.
“Good. It’s about goddamn time. What the fuck have you been playing me for, shutting me out? I find out from Vince Grossier that you’re even pregnant to begin with; then you won’t even do me the courtesy of a visit? Or a fucking phone call?”
“I know. But I was scared, after the way we ended things.”
“Scared of what?”
“That you’d be mad.”
“That I’d hurt you?”
“Maybe.”
“If I was cold enough to hurt you, I’d have been cold enough to leave your ass exactly where I found it, now, wouldn’t I?”
“I was scared of more than just that. I was scared you’d have wanted me to get rid of it. Or that once she was born you might try to take her away, because of . . . because of how I was. When we met.”
“It crossed my mind, don’t doubt it. But, sweetheart, you really think an ex-con stands a chance at getting custody of his kid?”
Sweetheart. She’d gotten so used to hearing a different man call her honey, that word sounded obscene coming from this one.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. If some social worker investigated her past, they wouldn’t be impressed, and they’d also discover she was employed under a fake name, that she’d had no permanent address in six years, that she’d been a teenage runaway. Ex-con was bad, but was she really any less problematic, on paper?
“So why have you been hiding?” he asked.
“I have it real good now. Not perfect, but I have a job I like. Friends I like.”
“Friends who don’t know the real you?” James supplied, reading between the lines.
“I might not have all my crap together,” she said, “but I’m working on it. And there’s a lot I could lose, if you decided to tell people how I was, when you met me.” Raina might’ve looked the other way about her lying to get her job at Benji’s, but Duncan wasn’t half as lax about legalities. As for Casey . . . She couldn’t bear to have him find out who she really was.
“You think I’d try to fuck all that up for you?” James asked.
“Maybe I did. I mean, I saw how you can get, with folks who crossed you.” He didn’t just hold grudges—he went after people. He hurt people. She didn’t think he enjoyed it, necessarily, but he could go there, and coldly. Easily. Like it was just part of the gig.
“You’re not some shitbag who stiffed me on business. You’re the mother of my child . . . Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“She’s yours,” Abilene said in a small voice. “It could have only been you.”
“I’m choosing to believe that. But it was fucked-up, you keeping me in the dark all this time. It was cruel, and it was selfish.”
“I know. But I was scared. I had no idea how you’d react, what you’d do. And I doubted you’d want a child, especially with me, so I told myself it was a kindness, to not bother you about it. Plus I was sick of relying on men all the time. I thought it’d be easier, just dealing with it on my own.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Vince said he had to tell you.”
“And you would’ve just let me go on with my life, never knowing about it, if he hadn’t?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s pretty fucking cold. You think that little of me, that I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, go and deal with our mistake, all on our own?”
“She’s not a mistake,” Abilene cut in sharply, her spine snapping smartly into place. Beat her down all you liked, but don’t bring her baby into it.
“Fine—our little miscalculation. You think I’d just be like, ‘Fuck you, bitch. Not my problem’?”
“I wanted to deal with it on my own. I had a job and a place to stay. I wanted to leave all that ugly stuff behind me and make something better for her.”
“You heaping me in with all the ugly stuff?”
“You knew the old me. I didn’t want that following me.” No witnesses, no judgment.
“Guess maybe you fucked up, then, telling Vince Grossier.”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know anybody, only his name, and that he lived in Fortuity.” James had called her when he’d been arrested and told her to find Vince if she ever needed a favor. Like an olive branch he’d held out after the way things ended, she’d thought in hindsight. “I had no choice. I had to see a doctor once I knew, and I needed money.”
He sighed through the line. Abilene rubbed her foot; the thing felt like ice.
“I’m trying to make this right now,” she said, firmly and without apology. It wasn’t a voice he’d be used to hearing from her—the time they’d spent together had been typified by an erratic mix of honey and venom. But this was the new Abilene, ready or not. “What do you need to say, or to hear?”