My eyes narrowed at her, and I watched her progress as she approached me, staring up at me through eyelashes that I had used to consider charming.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. My head was reeling. What the hell could she mean by that? And why had she just dumped this on me this morning? Couldn’t she have waited until I’d at least had a cup of coffee? Or ten?
She reached out a delicate hand to rest on my crossed arms, but I flicked her off, though I refused to take a step back to escape her. That would only make her think she had the power. I would never back away from this woman; never show her any sign of deference. And I was getting tired of having to do it too. Most people would learn after a few tries at dominance, rejected tries, that the person they were trying to strongarm wasn’t playing ball. Asa never had. She constantly tried to challenge me in subtle ways that she thought I wouldn’t notice.
That was her first and most basic mistake. Asa was exactly the type of person who got caught up in her own way of thinking that she didn’t understand for a second how the world operated. I was a man. I understood body language and posturing better than she ever could, and every small power play she made was keenly tracked and stored into my mind’s eye. I would continuously deflect her attempts to subjugate me on a baser, animal level like she was fly to my goddamn bull. And I’d resent her every step of the way.
She pulled her hand back with a slight smile on her lips. It looked less like a sneer now and more of a smirk. I preferred the sneer.
“I kept some of your sperm,” she explained. “There was always so much of it when we were together. We spent so much time in bed that it was easier for me to freeze some than you might think.” She shrugged, clearly pleased with herself. “And when the time was right, I impregnated myself.”
I resisted the urge to let my jaw drop in disbelief. That bitch. How could she do something like that? How could she get away with it? Was I going to let her? If she was truly pregnant with my child, what could I do to stop her?
Was there some law against this? And, if there was, was it really a law I could afford to subject myself to the scrutiny of? It would only be a matter of time after involving the authorities that they would begin to find things out about the business I now controlled that would cause me to join my father in prison. Probably not even the same prison. I’d get the worse area and have to defend myself more against guys who wouldn’t understand that I’d ratted Asa out to the cops because she was fucking crazy.
This was not good. She had my balls in her hand, and she was squeezing. It made me feel sick to the extent that she’d played this out. She had clearly had it in her head since my dad had gone to prison, if not before. Definitely before now that I thought about it.
Because she’d clearly been waiting. How long did it take to get pregnant? A few weeks? How long had my dad been in prison?
A few weeks.
Her eyes flashed. “Speechless honey? I hear new fathers get like that when they hear the exciting news.”
I thought back to what Sasha had said about Asa. She was sad, so pathetically lonely and sad that she might just stoop to any measure to get what she wanted. That wasn’t wholly what Sasha had said, but surely a logical extension of it. Asa was sad enough that she was trying to trap me with her.
“I don’t believe you.” It was accurate enough. I was definitely in a state of disbelief. But I also knew—as probably she did too—that I wasn’t in a position to turn her away. I had a great degree of honor, or at least liked to think that I did. If she really was pregnant with my kid and I shunned her, I would never forgive myself.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not,” she countered, cocking her head to the side and regarding me with cool eyes. “It’s what’s happening.”
Those words cut me like a knife because I knew she had a point. If what she was saying was true, my disbelief would only end in me hating myself. If what she said was a lie, my disbelief would hardly do anything to disprove what she said.
Then there was the point that if I called the cops on her and wound up in prison myself, I could leave an unborn baby, which could actually have been mine, essentially an orphan. Was that something I was willing to live with?
“What do you want?” I expelled through clenched teeth.
I could feel the vein pulsing on my forehead, the blood pulsing under my skin. I was so furious that I really couldn't see. And she just watched, looking for all intents and purposes like she was ready to break out into raucous laughter.
She loved this. She loved that she had taken a part of me that she knew—the honorable part of me—and perverted it into something she could use for her amusement. Maybe she didn’t want anything at all. I wouldn’t have put it past her. Maybe the only thing she was after in all this was my balls on the chopping block. That might be the most preferable option, since they were already there.
“I think you should do the honorable thing,” she said, enunciating the word “honorable” as if she didn’t already know I was going to do exactly that.
“And what’s that?” I asked, pretending to be civil. Trying to calm myself down never worked unless I started with the outside. My anger was like a piping hot bowl of oatmeal. My grandmother had used to make one for me every morning when I stayed at her house, drizzled with golden syrup in a spiral that had a golden circle of deliciousness in the middle. The middle had always been the most appetizing part to start eating. And that’s the way that people often think about anger; it’s the best place to start.
But you couldn’t start in the middle. Or, at least, I couldn’t. It was too hot there. I would only get burned, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. So I started with the outside of the bowl and worked my way in, letting my eyes trace the spiral of syrup all the way to the no longer seething hot center.
In this case, it was more a matter of making my face do something that I didn’t want it to do. If I started by trying to be less angry internally, it would only get tripped up by my angry expression later on, as if I were being reminded of how pissed off I was.
“Marrying me of course,” she said brightly.
My stomach churned. All thoughts of losing my anger screamed out the window like a bat out of hell. Everything suddenly turned upside down, and I was ready to lay blows.
I would never hit Asa, of course. Not just because she was possibly carrying my child. It wasn’t because she was a woman, either. I had no qualms with hitting a woman if it was an even match and she was actively engaging in a fight. I had met plenty of women in my day that could lay me out flat if I took one wrong step in a fight. Asa was not one of them. She was soft, but not in the same way that Sasha was soft. The planes of her face and her eyes were cold as burnished steel and cut like a blade. Her body was bony and unyielding, and she’d always felt more fragile than I thought a person should. It was something about the way that she didn’t bend. She broke.
Sasha bent. She was malleable. I didn’t worry about hurting her because she seemed fully aware of each of her limbs and where they could bend. But Asa seemed detached from her body sometimes like she was leaving a cold, limp husk while she took shelter in her head and plotted up schemes. Schemes like this shit.
“You want me to marry you?” I spat out.
She nodded. “It’s only right.”
Now she was trying to be innocent, all wide eyes and pouty lips. There was a time that might have even worked on me. When I was younger and stupider, of course. But I wasn’t young and stupid now; just trapped, like a caged lion.
Didn’t she know what a dangerous game she was playing?
I was almost touched when I took a moment to think about it. She did know what game she was playing. Exactly what game. Because if she had tried this on anyone else, the variables alone might have been her downfall. There were men who would turn and run. There were men who would beat her. There were men who would laugh in her face and tell her to move the hell on.
I was none of those men
. And she knew it. That’s what was touching. She knew me well enough, had taken the time to study me enough, to feel assured that I wouldn’t turn my back on a responsibility.
She was wily like a goddamn fox. I would have respected her if I didn’t loathe everything she stood for, and if her preferred method of torture wasn’t so inhumane. A life sentence! With her! I would’ve rather been shot in the head right there and then.
I wanted to tell her no. It would have been smart, at least, to ask for DNA testing. But I had now way of knowing how she would react to that. No way of discerning which stop the crazy train would make next. Asa had always been a loose cannon, and if I agreed—however falsely—to go along with this, it would at least give me a chance to secure her. If only for a little while.
“I want to go to marriage counseling first,” I said.
She blinked, surprise coating her features. I wondered how much of a fight she had prepared herself for. Did she think that I would rage and roar and that she’d have to pull out another trump card to back me in? Did she have another trump card? I was glad, suddenly, that I’d had enough brainpower to realize that the best way to resist was to go along with it.
“You want marriage counseling?”
Look who was repeating herself now.
“Yes,” I barked. “If we’re going to do this, we need to figure out our problems first.”
She cocked her head to the side, studying me warily. She had been expecting a much, much bigger fight. I wondered if she had cleared her whole day for this. That was probably why she had started so early, waking me up at first light so she could begin a fight that was scheduled to take us through to the afternoon.
“What problems are those, exactly?” she drawled, amusement beginning to glint in her eyes. She was getting over her surprise and moving on to her next stage of careful, articulated planning. Joy.
“What the fuck do you think, As?” My anger had returned. “You stole my sperm and impregnated yourself. We’ve got fucking problems.”
She took a step back, and I could’ve groaned with frustration. Asa didn’t step back. That wasn’t her way of dealing with my anger. She was taking on a passive act just to make me look like a brute. She inhaled sharply, feigning surprise. Maybe even fear.
I shook my head. “It is way too early in the morning for this shit.”
She sniffed. For the love of God.
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I’m carrying your baby.”
I hoped to God she was joking and didn’t actually expect me to believe this sorry act. This woman was a born manipulator. I wondered how she would fare against Sasha.
I rolled my eyes and tossed myself back down onto the couch, resting my arm on my face to block out the light. “I’ll sort out some counseling for us, okay babe?”
I said the word “babe” like a curse, but I could feel from the shift in the air around me that she had gobbled it up like it was the sweetest candy the world had to offer. It made me sick.
Life was beginning to look like a clusterfuck of horrible experiences that chose to strike at the exact time I was beginning to think things were looking up. One moment I was riding the hottest babe I’d ever banged, the next I was being told that I had a baby on the way with the most ruthless bitch I’d ever banged.
And it was only Wednesday.
CHAPTER NINE
Sasha
The shop smelled like hibiscus when I got into work that morning. Most people thought the store only ever had one smell—flowers—but they hadn’t spent enough time in there to pick up on all the different scents that floated around the air. They had no idea.
Maybe I just spent too long amongst the flowers, and that was why I had some sort of weird understanding of the different levels of scents that abounded in the shop. It sometimes felt like every day I would smell something different. It was never new. I could almost always identify a scent. Today was hibiscus, but the lilies that I’d put out on the shelf in the hopes that someone would buy them before they began to droop were playing their tune as well.
I loved walking into the shop first thing. The city was just waking up, stretching its sleepy arms and yawning like a rumbling behemoth beneath my feet. And my little shop and I were ready to be a part of it.
There wasn’t much to do on days like today. Wednesdays weren’t prime flower days. Then again, neither were Tuesdays. Or Mondays. Thursdays through to Sundays I got lots of people coming in, looking for bouquets to bring their dates, or to take to the graves of their loved ones, or to bring to their mother for their weekly Sunday breakfast. The odd week I’d be occupied with preparing flowers for weddings or funerals, but David didn’t take many orders for those. He said it was because he didn’t want to overwhelm me, but I think it was because he made a tidy enough profit without having to bring more business and thus more employees into the mix.
I went through my morning routine: unlocking all the drawers, getting the money out of the safe, counting the float, setting up the cash register, and making sure I had enough supplies to get me through the day without having to call David to get me more.
Everything was as it usually was, and yet nothing was the same. Because of what had happened last night, my shop looked different. Felt different. I could nearly smell Zane’s masculine and worldly aroma; the faintest touch of leather, sweat, and some sort of cologne that I knew, based on my sniffer, I’d never forget.
There was a moment when I was opening up, that I wondered if I’d dreamed the whole thing. It looked so normal in my shop. The only thing that was feeling weird, I realized, was me. But then I felt the dull ache between my thighs and the light tingling from the bruises that had begun to shadow my hips, and I remembered that last night had most definitely happened, and it had been wonderful.
I plastered a smile on my face and got to work. If Zane was to be a memory, I was determined that he would be a good one. I didn’t want to have any problems reliving the things we’d done together in my head. I didn’t want to regret. And I wouldn’t.
It was an uncommonly busy morning, so when the bell on the door chimed for the fourth time that day, it didn’t cause me to look up in surprise as it might have done otherwise. I was on my knees behind the counter, sweeping up some dirt that I’d carelessly spilled bagging up one of the potted plants that I’d insisted to David we keep. He didn’t think them necessary in a florist's, but I thought they gave the place a nice touch. It wasn’t just dying things that graced the shelves of the shop.
The low, masculine sound of someone clearing their throat above me caused me to jolt my chin up. I followed with the rest of my body, my grin widening. I must have looked like a freak to Zane, who was standing there looking every bit as cool and collected and sexy as he had when he’d come in yesterday. I was holding a dustpan in one hand with a bunch of dirt in it, and a little hand broom in the other. I didn’t regain enough control of my mental faculties to put the damn things down until he began to talk.
“I left last night without getting your number,” he said. His blue eyes danced in the light. It was both a joke and an apology. I would take it.
“I went inside last night without giving it,” I said by way of accepting his apology.
He chuckled. “We probably don’t know each other enough to ask favors yet,” he said. “But I have a pretty big one for you.”
I cocked my head to the side, fascinated and fine with showing it outwardly. I didn’t feel like I had to have guards up around Zane. It was strange too because we really didn’t know each other that well. Normally I was pretty cautious with what emotions I allowed to stray onto my face besides the most basic happiness unless I knew the person pretty well.
But with him? I don’t know. It was different. Good, but different.
“I’m intrigued,” I replied. “Does it involve plants? I can probably help with that.”
He laughed, and it felt like he’d needed it. Then I began to notice the signs of stress all over his body. It w
asn’t that he hadn’t exhibited them before, but he’d been hiding them so well that it hadn’t been until his laugh unwrinkled them that I knew they were there. It was the absence of light in the darkness that had allowed me to see the shapes.
His jaw was just a little too set, his eyebrows a little too furrowed. They were such minor details on his face that I was surprised to even have noticed them. He must have been pretty messed up to look as stressed as he did, even if to an average person he wouldn’t have looked anything more than perhaps a little bit wary.
“What happened?” I asked quickly before he even finished laughing.
He calmed down and assessed me, his mouth picking up into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I had a little bit of ex-girlfriend drama this morning,” he explained. “And the way to get through it is going to seem a bit strange to you.”
I chortled. “Zane, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I’m a bit strange. Whatever it is, I can probably handle it.”
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