A baby.
Drake’s son or daughter.
A small piece of him who would live on through her. His legacy.
Almost as soon as the calming, joyful thoughts took over her battered mind, reality crept in and with it, heartbreak and desperation. She no longer had any reason to be here in the city. The one good thing Drake had done was to deposit a large sum of money into her parents’ account as well as buy them a mortgage-free house and a new vehicle, effectively rendering them debt free with plenty of money on reserve to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
Which meant that she no longer needed to worry about working to support her beloved mother and father. She could go to school, like she’d always wanted. Get an education. Earn a degree and be able to support herself and her child.
She could go home and have the support of the two people who loved her the most in this world. They would help her and after the baby was born, Evangeline could enroll in school and enlist the aid of her parents in caring for the baby while she was in class.
They would never be ashamed of her, especially if they knew the truth, but she would never tell them what caused her and Drake to break up. If she told them, then there would be inevitable questions that would lead them to arrive at suspicious conclusions. No matter what Drake had done, that he hadn’t loved or trusted her, she wouldn’t brand him a criminal in her parents’ eyes. For that matter, she had no idea what he dealt in, so she couldn’t be sure if he had illegal dealings or not. And now it no longer mattered because she was no longer in the picture.
Guilt and shame surged to life inside her even as she chastised herself for feeling either. Under any other circumstances she would never dream of keeping her child’s presence from his or her father. But Drake scared her. His power and his wealth and his connections frightened her in a way nothing else did. Because she knew, because of his own upbringing, just how adamant he would be that he be in their child’s life. If that was all he demanded, she’d go face him down tomorrow and tell him the news of his impending fatherhood.
But the fear that because he hated her so much, he would simply take her child from her, prevented her from ever going to him with her secret.
She had decisions to make and they had to be made soon. Closing her eyes, she pressed her forehead to her drawn-up knees and savored a quiet, private moment with her child, whispering promises to always keep the baby safe. Telling her child how very much he or she was already loved.
She rocked in silence with no idea of the passing time. The realization of what she was doing, what she was allowing, was sharp and unforgiving. Once again, she was being kept by a man. The only difference now was that she wasn’t in a relationship with Silas. In some ways that made it worse, because she was taking advantage of his generosity without giving him anything in return.
She reached for her phone lying on the counter next to the sink and pulled it down to her. She opened a browser and typed in the URL for an airline she knew that flew into the medium-sized city just thirty miles from her small town.
The ticket was expensive, given it was a short-notice departure, but oh well. She would use one of the credit cards Drake had given her. The least he could do was get her home. It would be the best five hundred dollars he’d ever spent because it would also get her forever out of his life.
She checked the time and then calculated how long she needed to get to the airport—again, she could use the credit card for the cab fare—in time to check in and board and realized that if she booked the flight and left within the next half hour, she could get out tonight on one of the evening nonstop flights.
She dug around in her purse for the credit card and punched in the number before finishing the transaction. After checking her e-mail for the confirmation and flight number and arrival time, she called her mother next.
There was little point in trying to hide anything from her mother. It wasn’t as if she’d be clued in when Evangeline told her she would be arriving that night. She just hadn’t planned on sobbing all over her mother over the phone. As a result, it took the better part of twenty minutes for Evangeline to explain the situation. By the time she hung up, she had only ten minutes to get on the road. Then she laughed. It wasn’t as though she had anything to pack. She’d take the jeans and shirts Silas had bought for her. Those could be packed in a carry-on bag.