“On what grounds?” I asked, flabbergasted. I didn’t think I had ever done anything that could count as wrongful termination.
Beth worked to come up with some sort of answer, but before she could, Devin stepped in. “If you do, I’ll personally testify about the fact that you not only lied but fabricated evidence and tried to convince your boss to fire a good employee,” he said. “Something tells me the judge might not be so willing to listen to you if you’re a proven liar.”
Beth’s face darkened. I couldn’t help but feel grateful to know that in spite of everything else, Devin was still on my side.
“Beth, you know I have to let you go,” I said.
Her eyes turned stormy, but she seemed to know that she had lost. Without another word, she turned on her heel and walked out of there, slamming the door shut behind her.
I rubbed a hand wearily across my face. “Devin, I’m sorry,” I said honestly. “I should have gotten all the facts.”
Devin shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. He grinned crookedly. “So you and Rian?”
For a moment, I debated not telling him about her still. I remembered what it had felt like to think she was trying to get with him, though. If I said no, I was giving him all the entrance that he needed to flirt with her in the future. If that wasn’t something that I wanted to witness, then I had to come clean to him. Whatever it might mean for my job and for the company.
Suddenly I realized that there were much more important things than my position with the company.
“Yeah,” I said. “No one knows about it, but yeah.”
Devin nodded. “I had a feeling something was up the other day. Glad you told me before I really made an ass of myself.” He winked at me. “So I assume if you got that mad at me, you haven’t talked to her about it yet?”
I groaned. “I confronted her,” I admitted. “And when she tried to tell me that she hadn’t done anything wrong, I basically told her that she was lying and that I never wanted to see her again.”
Devin winced. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I think I have an idea,” I said slowly.
I only hoped that Rian was willing to take me back. I knew I had fucked up royally, but I had an inkling of a plan that might make her realize how serious I was about her. I just hoped it would work.
Chapter 28
Rian
There was a knock on the door. I knew I should probably get up and answer it. But what did it matter? I didn’t care about who was on the other side of that door. Ronny was at school, and I had quit my job. That meant as far as I was concerned, unless Ronny’s school called me, the rest of the world didn’t need to exist.
I knew I needed to pull it together. Find a new job, move on, even if it meant moving out of Nebraska again. Ronny depended on me. I couldn’t let things go to shit just because I was sad.
But I was damn sad, and I had basically been moping ever since things had gone bad with Wes. I couldn’t help feeling bitter about the way things had gone down. Wes didn’t trust me, and even though there was no reason he should, it still hurt.
I had let myself expect so much more this time. Last time, there hadn’t been any expectations. Last time, it had just been a one-night thing, and even though it hurt, I told myself it was never meant to be a forever thing.
This time, I had let myself start to picture a future with him. This time, I had actually thought that things might work out with Wes. He had given me every reason to believe he was over the way things had happened before, and that he wanted to be there in the future.
Somehow, it had all gone up in smoke. Somehow, I had lost him again, this time through no fault of my own. I kept thinking things over, wondering if there was any way I could have done things differently, if there was any way I could have shown him I truly never wanted to leave. That I wanted us to be a family, forever.
Still, knowing there was nothing I could have done differently didn’t make things any better. Instead, I just felt hopeless. It made it hard to get out of bed in the mornings, even if I knew I had to hold things together for Ronny.
In part because even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything differently this time, it didn’t change the fact that I hadn’t told him about Ronny years ago. I wasn’t a liar about everything, but that was a huge thing to keep from him.
Somehow, I had thought that he might give me a second chance. Apparently not, though.
When I wasn’t sad, I just felt angry. How dare he use the past against me like that. How dare he accuse me of lying about the other job. It would have been one thing if he had asked me if I had applied to other jobs. I would have told him straight up that he was an idiot to think that that was even a possibility.
Instead, he had yelled at me, convinced that I had not only applied for other jobs but chosen to accept one of them, without even having the guts to tell him. He had expected me, I guess, to just disappear in the middle of the night, to never let him see his daughter again. What the hell kind of a monster did he think I was?
I felt entirely out of sorts. Things had been starting to really feel good here. But now, all of that was over.
The knocking on the door became more insistent. For a moment, I snuggled deeper into my blankets. But suddenly, I faced a moment of panic. Did I even know where my cell phone was at the moment or if it was even charged? What if something had happened to Ronny and the school had tried to contact me but I hadn’t gotten the message?
I was out of the bed in a flash. Whatever personal drama was going on in my life, it didn’t give me any excuse to shirk my duties as a mother. I ought to be ashamed of myself.
I rushed to the door, still in my pajamas, and flung it open. For a moment, I could only stare at Wes standing there. There was a part of me that wanted to slam the door shut in his face. Who the hell did he think he was, just showing up here?
There was a bigger part of me, though, that ached just to see him standing there. I didn’t know how I was ever going to trust him again either. I didn’t know what he even wanted. At the same time, I had to hear what he was there to say. I had missed him more than I could ever have imagined.
Wes looked surprised to see me. I wondered if he had expected me to have already left, or if he was just surprised to see how haggard and worn-out I looked. I stared at him expectantly, not even sure what to say to him. If I opened my mouth first, I was probably going to say something that would make the situation worse. I had to hear what he wanted first.
I remembered that final threat, about how he would get lawyers involved if I wouldn’t let him see Ronny. Was he here to serve me with the papers to sue me for custody? I felt like I might cry at the thought of that.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
I stepped back to let him in. “Did you come here to make more accusations?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Wes sighed and shook his head. “No, Rian. No.” He paused, looking uncertain and nervous. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That email I thought that you had sent to Devin, it was all a lie. Beth faked it. I didn’t realize it.”
“I tried to tell you,” I said.
“And I should have believed you,” Wes said firmly. “I should have trusted you. I was just so scared I was going to lose you again.”
Something about the raw note in his voice when he said that unlocked something in my chest. I grinned crookedly at him. He wasn’t all forgiven, but I knew he wasn’t the only one in the wrong here. “I guess,” I said dryly, “that it might be harder to trust me because of the secret I kept.”
Wes shook his head. “That’s still no excuse for my actions,” he said fervently. “It’s not even the fact that I believed you might have gone behind my back to find this other job with Devin. Even after you told me you hadn’t, though, I wouldn’t listen to you. That’s not the way relationships work. There has to be communication or of course things won’t work out.”
He cocked his head to the side, a slow smile spreading
across his face. He still looked nervous, though. “That’s why I lost you the first time, isn’t it? Because we just jumped into bed with one another that night and never talked about what it might mean.”
“And then after I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t tell you about it,” I added. “When you think about it, I guess most of our problems are from the fact that we don’t talk about things very well.”
I paused, wondering if this was the end of it. Just because we knew where our problems were, it didn’t mean we could fix them. Or that he even wanted to fix things. What if he never trusted me again? I looked away from him.
“So what now?” I asked, hating how hollow my voice sounded. To be honest, I couldn’t think of a single way to proceed from here. Things were wrecked between us, and just because we had talked about the argument we’d had, it didn’t mean I suddenly had a job again. Could we put it all aside and build things again? Would they last any longer next time?
“I know you think I’m the one with one foot out the door, always ready to leave, but I’m afraid of that with you as well,” I said, the truthful words spilling out of my lips before I had even paused to consider them. “I know that’s probably not fair to you, because I’m the one who left before. I have to look out for Ronny, though. I hate the idea that I might let you into her life only for you to turn around and leave.”
It would break Ronny’s heart just as much as it would break mine. As it was, I hadn’t told her yet about the fight Wes and I had had. She had asked about him a few times, and I had nearly gone to pieces. I hadn’t known how to tell him that if she ever saw him again, it would be in a different capacity.
Because that would mean telling her he was her dad, and I didn’t know how to do that on my own. What’s more, I didn’t want to do that on my own. It was another thing I had pictured doing with Wes right there by my side. A family kind of thing.
Something that we might never get, now. I couldn’t help feeling depressed at the thought of everything I had lost.
“I’m in love with you,” Wes said suddenly. I looked up at him in surprise. His grin was a little broader this time as he shrugged. “You know, in the spirit of better communication. I’m in love with you, and I want to build a family with you and Ronny.”
I sighed, pessimism engulfing me as he mentioned Ronny. I couldn’t help but circle back around to that threat he had made at the end of our fight the other day. Maybe he was just worried he would lose the custody battle since Ronny had been in my life for all these years while she barely knew him.
“You know I would never keep you from seeing Ronny, regardless of what happens between you and me,” I said to him.
“I know that,” Wes said honestly. I looked back at him, reading the truth there in his eyes. “I’m not just saying this because I want to see more of Ronny. I love you, Rian. I did back in college, too, although I didn’t realize it until it was almost too late.”
I stared at him. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like things were somehow about to go to pieces again. “If you can’t trust me not to cut and run, then you know there’s no point to starting anything,” I said unhappily. I wished I could just trust things, but I couldn’t keep coming back around to this over and over again. It would kill me.
“Then let’s give each other something to believe in,” Wes said seriously. I stared at him as he dropped down on one knee. With a flourish, he pulled out a small box, opening it to reveal a small but elegant ring.
I stared at him, my hand creeping up over my mouth. Was he serious? I couldn’t seem to ask; my lungs felt as though all the air had been punched out of them, in the best way possible.
“If you take this ring, I’m never letting you get away again,” Wes said, still just as quietly serious. “Rian James, will you be mine—forever?”
“Yes,” I heard myself whisper. My hand was shaking as Wes got to his feet and tenderly grasped my fingers, sliding the ring onto my third digit. He looked seriously in my eyes. I might have expected to feel some hesitation, or some nervousness at the very least.
Instead, this felt like the most right thing I had ever done, right up there with giving birth to Ronny.
I stared down at the ring on my finger, noting the way it glinted and sparkled in the light. “Wes, it’s beautiful,” I said, looking up at him, and I hoped he realized I meant more than just the ring itself. It was the promise of it all that was beautiful. We were going to make things work. Neither of us was ever leaving again, or else if we did, we would be leaving together. As a family.
I felt touched and overwhelmed. I felt shocked, but I also felt like this was somehow a long time coming. I remembered how good he had been with Ronny that first night he came over. I could picture years and years of nights like that, us together, a family. Yes, it was the perfect time for this.
Suddenly, I couldn’t hold back. Maybe the whole trouble was that we had rushed into this thing too fast, or maybe it was the fact that after rushing into things too quickly, we had tried to slam on the brakes. I wasn’t sure what it was that had made things so difficult before, but things felt right now. Things felt perfect, in fact.
I grabbed him, pulling him toward me, kissing him with everything I had. It was as though the past seven years’ worth of feelings all came up at once, bubbling over into the kiss. It was messy, it was sweet, it was just this side of painful. It was everything I needed it to be. This, too, was perfect.
Equally perfect was the way my body fit against his and the way his fingers tangled in my hair. Equally perfect was the way he pushed against me as I started unbuttoning his shirt. There was no need to hold back, nothing to hide. No more secrets between us. And Ronny was at school. The whole house, the whole world, was ours for the next few hours.
We were naked in a flash, clothes forgotten on the floor. Wes laid me down on the sofa with a careful ease, looking deep into my eyes as he clambered on top of me. My legs fell open to him, inviting him to take me, to ravish me, to have every single inch of me.
As I grasped at the back of the couch, my ring twinkled again. Body and soul, I was his—forever.
I let him have me, chasing the blissful feeling of the two of us coming together in perfect synchronicity. At long last, we were on the same page, headed toward the same future. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Chapter 29
Wes
Making love to Rian felt like the release of all of my tensions that had been building up over the past few weeks. She said yes. I couldn’t forget about that. Not with the sweet way she smiled up at me, and not with the way she seemed to be letting me in fully for the very first time. I reached out to twist my fingers with hers and could feel the ring there, a promise of what was to come. As if I needed more reassurance than the promise I could see in her eyes.
I knew we had the rest of our lives to explore one another, but I found myself wanting to know everything about her right now, starting with what made her squirm and what made her scream. I wanted to know every single thing I could do to her to get some sort of a response.
I wanted to know her inside and out, body and soul.
I started just kissing her, savoring the sweetness of her skin. I moved on to touching her, trailing my fingers across her curves, memorizing every little divot, every freckle, every line. As she wriggled with anticipation, I found myself smiling, kissing her gently. “Easy,” I murmured. She gave a high-pitched whine in response, gone beyond words for the moment.
She wanted this badly. And I wanted it just as much.
When I finally delved into her depths—first with my fingers and then with my prick—I could feel her body working around me, squeezing out every inch of pleasure she could. She trembled and moaned, fingers clutching at me, legs restlessly flexing as pleasure shook her to the core.
I slowed down the rhythm, and she whimpered, tugging at me, urging me onward. I snapped my hips forward quickly, giving in to her pleas for a few moments before slowing down again. I grinned as her eyes
flew open, and she glared at me.
“Wes, please,” she said breathlessly.
And how could I deny her, when she looked like that?
I resumed my previous rhythm, groaning as she matched me movement for movement. We had always felt so in sync when we were having sex, but this time, things felt even more amazingly intimate and intense.
We had our whole futures spread out in front of us, and she was choosing to spend the rest of her life with me. I knew that things were bound to change, that no matter how beautiful and wonderful she was, no matter how in sync with one another we were, there were bound to be some challenges. But right then and there, the look in her eyes, the way she held onto me, the way that her soul matched up to mine, told me that no matter what those challenges were, we would find some way to get through them.
We came at the same time, crying out one another’s names, shivering as we were engulfed by a powerful pleasure that was greater than any either of us had ever felt before. For one long and stunning moment, nothing existed in the world except for her, this amazing creature that I got to share my life with.
Slowly, the rest of it drifted back to me, starting with Ronny. Our daughter. I wasn’t just going to get to spend the rest of my life with Rian. Even that would have been enough. Rian was everything I had ever wanted, after all, and now I knew she would be mine forever. But even better, she came with an adorable little girl whom I already couldn’t wait to spend more time with.
I had never really been able to imagine myself with a family. I had never really known what I was looking for on that front. Or maybe it was just that I had been trying too hard not to look at Rian, in light of the fact that she had left me that once before.
Now, I was excited to share my life with her, but I was equally excited to become a dad. Or to find out I already was one, rather. I had never really realized that I wanted to have kids, but finding out that I had one, a daughter who was clever and sweet and everything I could have wished for? That was the icing on the cake.
S is for Secret Baby Page 16
