She bit her tongue. She didn’t want to serve up all her feelings for everyone to judge. It was hard enough to say them to Brent, let alone to her big brother. She didn’t feel she needed to defend her heart. Some things were personal. Some things were private. Like the fact that she was falling again for someone who was tender and kind, rough and fiery, funny and sexy, and who only had eyes for her.
Someone who was putting her first.
“He’s different. I am, too. That’s what has changed,” she said in a crisp voice.
Michael closed his eyes, gripped the side of the table, and breathed out hard. “I have no idea why you would want to do this. After everything that happened,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at her.
“Nothing that happened was his fault.”
Michael’s eyes widened. “If it wasn’t his fault, whose fucking fault was it?”
“Both of ours,” she said, holding her ground, even as something darkened inside her.
“Shan,” he said in a heated whisper, as if that was the only thing keeping him from shouting, and Michael Sloan never shouted. Michael Sloan never raised his voice. Michael Sloan stayed in control of his emotions at all times.
Except when it came to his sister. “I was with you in London. You were devastated,” he said, his eyes black and hard.
“Of course I was.”
“You were torn in pieces,” he said between gritted teeth.
She slammed a hand on the table. “I know! I fucking know. I was there. It was my body. Goddammit, Michael. I’m sorry you don’t like him, but I’m seeing him again and I care about him. And I’m not asking for your approval. I’m simply telling you because I don’t like to keep secrets from you. So if you could just chill out, that would be great.” She pushed back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping against her wood floor in a shrill shriek. The sound jolted her brother.
“Shan,” he said gently.
She held up a hand. Don’t come closer. Not now. “I need to get changed,” she said, and tipped her forehead to her bathroom. She wasn’t ready for him to say he was sorry for getting mad.
“I’ll be done soon,” he said, in a gentler tone.
She shut the door to her bedroom, headed to her bathroom, and stripped off her clothes as she turned on the shower. As she stepped under the hot stream, the water pelting her, she closed her eyes, returning to ten years ago.
* * *
Brent had been gone for a few weeks, and she was six days late. She’d hoped and prayed and bargained and bartered with the universe that she was simply that—late. Women all over the world were late, and it didn’t mean they’d been stupid. It didn’t mean the pill hadn’t worked. It only meant they were late, but that red was coming.
Right?
Right, she told her freaked-out brain.
While they’d stopped using condoms a long time ago, she was on the pill. She’d switched prescriptions, though, since the one she was on had been giving her headaches. They’d used condoms during that time, but something must have gone wrong. Hell if she knew when the little bastard sperm had breached her body.
She pressed a hand to her belly, alone in her tiny Brooklyn bathroom in a room she rented for one month from an older couple, fingers crossed behind her back, trying to remember if a condom had broken during those times they’d relied on them. But when the two pink lines appeared, churning her stomach and stabbing holes in her future, it didn’t really matter if she could recall the moment when the protection failed.
Her body had spoken, changing her life yet again.
Twenty-one, pregnant, and alone in her first job out of college. With the father of the baby on the other side of the country and out of the picture. Without a clue what to do, how to feel, what to think.
She sank down onto the toilet seat, dropped her head in her hands, and asked the universe for a redo. She waited for the tears to roll from her eyes, to saturate her cheeks. But, strangely, they didn’t come. Maybe she’d used up her lifetime supply when her daddy had died. Maybe whatever droplets were left had been reserved for the re-opening of that wound with her mom’s letters.
She did what shocked women around the world have done for years when confronted with two pink lines: retraced her steps to the drug store, glanced furtively around in case she saw anyone she knew, and grabbed another test from the shelf. She bought it, ran home, then peed on the stick again.
Another pair of pink lines punished her with their clarity.
You’re knocked up, bitch, the twin lines seemed to say with a cruel sneer.
She sank to the floor of the cramped bathroom, parking her rear on the cold teal tiles. Options flickered before her eyes. But really, the choices were very few. Terminating a pregnancy wasn’t on the table. That wasn’t anything she’d ever do.
So it came down to this—keep the baby or give up the baby.
Keep. Give up. Keep. Give up.
Over the next month, Shannon swung back and forth by the day, by the hour. Depending on what she ate, or what she didn’t eat. What she wore. How hunched over the toilet she was at West Side Story rehearsals. How well she hid her morning sickness from her boss.
If there was one thing Shannon Paige-Prince knew how to do it was keep her own damn secrets.
She hid it so well that no one knew why she kept popping into the ladies room to yack up her morning toast. Mercifully, the morning sickness didn’t last long.
As she packed up her bags for London, ready to move with the cast and crew to open the show on the West End, she picked up her cell phone. She flipped it open, ran her thumb across the screen, and started to dial the most familiar string of numbers in the world to her. The ones she’d called during college, every night, every day. Her man’s number.
She didn’t know what to say. Or what to do. Maybe it was better that way. A call for help. Let him listen. Let him talk. Let her not have to make this decision alone.
She ran a hand over her belly, still terribly flat. She threw caution out the window and dialed his number. She didn’t wait long to hear a voice.
“This cell service has been disconnected,” a recording said, tinny in her ear.
She tossed the dumb thing on the floor, and it clunked dully on her rug as she cursed her own stubbornness—she should have taken his calls those first few days. He was truly gone now. Off in Los Angeles, living his new life, with his new Los Angeles phone number that she didn’t know.
Or perhaps this was the sign that she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, so she flew to London, no one the wiser that she was stowing away an extra passenger in her belly. She saw a doctor twice. An ultrasound told her the baby was growing perfectly.
That made her sway closer to the keep side.
So damn close.
But then there was work, and her future, and those things seemed to tug her back to the give up side.
Work consumed her in London as the production began. Indecision swamped her nights and gripped her dreams. She and Brent had both wanted kids. They’d talked about having a family, but as a someday-down-the-road possibility. Knowing he’d wanted to though, eventually, was a heavy weight on her. Telling him would kill two birds with one stone—she’d have him back, and she’d have a decision. She could track down his number, call him, and tell him she was pregnant. If she did that she knew that they’d be together again.
He was too good, too upstanding, and too family-centric to ignore his duties.
He’d leave Late Night Antics in the blink of an eye, fly to London, and be by her side. As she rehearsed the cast through Officer Krupke on the new stage, her fingers itched to track him down again. She could drop this bomb on him, and he’d come running back to her. She desperately wanted him in her life again.