She gives me a watery smile. “It’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it. When I was sixteen, my appendix ruptured. There was a lot of damage to my fallopian tubes. I was told I’d never be able to conceive.” A tear slides over her cheek, and I can’t handle it.
I move in close and pull her into my arms. She comes willingly. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “You didn’t need me to lay all that out for you.”
“Hey.” I wait for her to lift her head and look at me. “I want to know you.” I wipe at her tears with my thumbs. “This is a part of you, and I’m glad that you told me.” She nods and sits back, blowing out a breath.
“Blakely’s mom, she died in a car accident when Blake was just a month old. Cassie and I were best friends too.” I give her a sad smile.
“Declan, you don’t have to share just because I did.”
I reach out and lace her fingers with mine. I bring her hand to my lips and kiss her knuckles. “I want to know you, and I want you to know me. For the first time, I want that more than anything.”
She nods, so I keep going. “She was in a relationship. His name was Boyd. Cassie and I had been friends since high school. Small town and all that. Anyway, Cassie and Boyd were on again and off again. One night she showed up at my place with a bottle of vodka and a gallon of orange juice and told me it was over for good, and she wanted to get drunk. Who was I to stop her? Their relationship was toxic, and I was glad she’d finally kicked him to the curb.”
“I hate that for them. Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, even when you know what that is.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “So we drank. A lot. As in, neither one of us remember most of the details of the night. The next morning we woke up naked in bed together. There was a condom in the trash and a wrapper on the floor. We swore to never talk about it again and went on with our lives. It was a drunken mistake. That’s until about two months later when she landed back on my doorstep. This time she had a gallon of orange juice sans vodka. That night changed my life.
“She found out she was pregnant.
“She was on birth control but had been on medication a couple of weeks before for a sinus infection. Neither one of us thought anything about it. We’d used protection, but the proof was there in the ultrasound picture she handed me. What was worse is that she didn’t know if the baby was mine or Boyd’s.”
“Oh, Declan.” She squeezes my hand, which is still laced with hers.
“I had to tell my family that I might be a father. There was a fifty-fifty chance that her baby was mine. As you can imagine, Boyd was furious. He was always pissed off and accusing us of being more than friends, and there was nothing between us. Well, not until that night. Even afterward, it was the same between us. I didn’t see her that way, and she didn’t see me that way either.”
“That had to be so hard for you.”
I nod. “Boyd was convinced it was his baby. He insisted on a prenatal paternity test. Cassie fought him about it for a few weeks. The doctor assured her that she and the baby were perfectly safe, so she finally agreed.”
“She was yours.”
“She was mine.
“Boyd and Cassie fought all the time. She spent more nights in my spare room than she did in the home that she shared with him. After Blakely was born, the fighting continued. He had a hard time with the woman he loved being the mother to another man’s baby. I get it. I understand, but I’d like to think if I was in that situation… if the situation were reversed, and I was broken up with my girlfriend, and this happened, I would love that baby because it was a part of her. Boyd, however, didn’t feel that way. To be honest, I don’t know how I would feel, but I know how much I love my daughter. Any baby is innocent in all of this.”
“How could you not love an innocent child?”
“It’s hard to say how I would react or feel. I’d be pissed and hurt, I’m sure, but to turn her and the baby away. If I truly loved her? I don’t think I could do that. Hell, if I loved her that much, I never would have pushed her into a breakup to be in that kind of position to begin with.”
“You’re a good man, Declan Kincaid.”