Within ten seconds he was asleep.
“He’s asleep?” Jaeger asked, his eyes wide with surprise. “How does he do that?”
Piper smiled. “That’s—” she pulled back the your just in time “—my son. Want me to put him back into his stroller?”
Jaeger shook his head. “I’ll carry him.”
They resumed walking, and Piper flicked a glance at him. “You were telling me about Andrea?” she prompted him.
“Yeah.” Jaeger blew out his breath. “One minute we were college students. The next we were about to be parents with no friggin’ idea what we were doing. Andy threw herself into being a stay-at-home mom, spending money and preparing for the baby. It was all she could think about, all she could talk about.”
“She was excited?”
“Insanely.” Jaeger’s bottom lip disappeared between his teeth. “Her entire focus became the baby. She couldn’t think about anyone else, even me. I was competing for her affection with our unborn child and I was losing.”
“You loved her,” Piper stated.
“I did. She was my world. Then Jess arrived and we seemed to gel into a family. I was working part-time for the company, still studying, but life was good. Andy was happy being a mom, Jess was amazing and things smoothed out.”
Jealousy oozed into Piper’s veins. Lucky, lucky, lucky Andrea to be the first and probably only woman to be loved by this amazing man. “What happened?”
Jaeger placed his hand on Ty’s back, his jaw brushing the top of Ty’s head. “It was a Sunday morning. Andy nursed Jess and put her down in her crib. I went to check on her fifteen, twenty minutes later and she was gone. Just...gone.”
Piper placed her hand across her mouth, knowing what was coming. “Oh, God.” she murmured. “SIDS?”
Jaeger nodded. “I tried to resuscitate her, but I knew my efforts were useless.”
Piper blinked her tears away. What an absolutely horrible thing to have happened. “I’m so sorry, Jaeger.”
“Yeah. It was rough. Andy fell apart. Our relationship fell apart. Everything fell apart,” Jaeger stated. “It was a very bad time.”
“Could you not stay together?” Piper asked, hearing the pain in his voice and wishing she could crawl inside him and fix his cracked heart.
“I tried. For about six months, we tried to go back to what we were, what we had, but she was in a very bad place. Eventually we split up. She went back to live with her folks, and it took her a while to deal with the loss, to conquer the depression.”
There was still more to this story, Piper thought. “Did you ever see her again?”
Jaeger nodded. “About four years later, I called her to see how she was doing, and we met up. She told me that she missed me, that she still loved me.”
“And you still loved her?”
“Yeah. I wanted her to move in with me, to pick up where we left off, but she refused. She said we had to take it slow, get to know each other again. I hated waiting. I wanted to live with her, be with her. But I was thrilled she was coming back to New York. To me.”
Piper felt a cold fist squeezing her heart. “Oh, Lord. What happened?”
“Out of the blue she up and married a guy she’d been seeing since she moved back home. She sent me a text message ten minutes before she walked down the aisle, saying she loved me but every time she looked at me, she remembered Jess and it hurt too much. That she couldn’t live her life like that,” Jaeger said, his voice flat.
“Oh, sweetie.” Piper had to touch him. She snuck her hand under his leather jacket and placed it directly over his heart. She knew there was nothing she could say, nothing that would help. She just kept looking into his eyes with her hand on his chest.
His antimarriage, antikids stance made sense now. He’d almost had it all, and then his dreams for love and a family were ripped away. He wasn’t a selfish man, or a selfish father. He was just a guy trying to protect himself. Who could blame him?
Him not wanting children or not wanting to make a commitment had nothing to do with wanting to be free. Jaeger wasn’t shallow, and she was embarrassed she’d bought the tale he’d told the world, even if it was the tale he’d spun so well.