He’d told her the truth. Wasn’t it time she did the same? It took courage to open up, to lay his cards—battered, ripped and stained—on the table. Could she be as brave? Maybe it was time for her to try.
“I can’t believe that I am rehashing this!” The words sounded harsh on his lips, but Piper understood that feeling angry was better than feeling sad. “I trust you will keep this to yourself? I’ve never told anyone, not even my siblings, about that attempt at reconciliation.”
“Why not?”
Jaeger shrugged, and the smallest smile touched his lips. “Those two months with Andy and Jess, they were—” he tipped his head up and looked for a word. “—magical. I just wanted to keep those memories of her and I, together again, to myself.”
Piper nodded. She understood the need to hold a memory close, not to rob it of its magic. That was the way she felt about Milan and the time they’d spent together last summer. It didn’t matter that he didn’t remember her, didn’t recall the magic they’d shared.
It was enough that she did.
She had to tell him. She would tell him. She just had to find her words.
“Jay, I—” God, this was so hard. Tears burned her eyes and she looked at the ground, softly blowing air over her lips. “God, I—that is...”
Jaeger bent down and placed Ty back in the stroller, pulling the straps over his sleeping frame. Jaeger tested the lock to make sure Ty was strapped in tight and looked up at her. “Can we walk and talk? I need to head back to Manhattan. I’ve got to whip Beck’s ass at racquetball.”
Piper jerked her head back. “Oh! Well, um, I thought—okay.” Explaining about Ty would take some time, and it wasn’t a conversation they should have while rushing. No matter what his reaction was, he’d have, at the very least, questions.
“I interrupted you,” Jaeger said, using his free hand to hold hers. “What were you going to say?”
“It’ll keep,” Piper replied.
This wasn’t news that she wanted to blurt out, especially so soon after hearing about his daughter’s death. She didn’t want Jaeger to feel she was presenting Ty as a replacement for Jess. She didn’t want to diminish his loss.
She understood that Jess was irreplaceable.
But now she knew she had to tell Jaeger the truth. And soon.
Ten
Crawling exhausted Ty. He was in bed a half hour sooner than normal, and Piper was intensely grateful. His crawling exhausted her, too, and Jaeger keeping her up most of last night didn’t help. She was finished with her work, and all she wanted was to lie down on her couch, watch some mindless TV and drift off. Jaeger hadn’t said whether he was coming back and a small part of her hoped he didn’t. She could use a solid night’s sleep.
She also needed some emotional distance and a chance to rehearse how to tell him about Ty. She needed to present him with a coherent, logical explanation why she’d kept Ty a secret, how convinced she’d been that he’d be a disinterested father. If they managed to have a rational conversation about all of that, she’d tell him she was Mick’s daughter. She wanted to open up to Jaeger completely and explain how her nonrelationship with Mick had deeply scarred her.
She might also tell Jaeger she loved him. She’d explain that she’d loved him from the first time she’d seen him in Milan and she hadn’t stopped loving him since. Love, to her, meant going all in, risking everything. Love had to stand in the light of truth to flourish. If she loved Jaeger then she had to trust him with her secrets, with her past, her thoughts and her insecurities.
Yeah, telling him the truth was scary, but she had no choice.
Piper took a sip of wine, tapped her finger against the glass and tried not to worry about how he’d respond. Jaeger had never once intimated that they had anything more than a sexual connection and a fond friendship. Was she setting herself up for a fall? And if he did feel something for her, would their oh-so-fragile relationship survive the truth?
But love wasn’t love when it lived in the dark.
God, thinking so much was exhausting. It had been a hell of a week, one of the craziest of her life. She picked up the remote to start her downtime when her phone rang. Digging it out of the back pocket of her jeans, she frowned at the unfamiliar number on the screen before answering.