Her mouth fell open as she noticed the boat sitting on the living room floor—and the baby nestled within it.
Gina’s gaze shot to mine. Somehow I could feel her accusations without her saying a thing.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
But it was too late for soft words. The baby was screaming again, and Sadie was going nuts upstairs.
And I was staring at my best friend, feeling guilty for reasons I couldn’t explain. Guilty and regretful and…anguished. There was no other way to put it, even if I didn’t have the faintest clue why.
I hadn’t ever even really thought much about having kids. And I’d definitely never imagined I would be anything but happily married if I somehow had a family of my own in the far off future.
My reality was now very different.
“Shut the door.”
Gina didn’t move. If anything, she grew even more still. She might as well have been rooted to the floor, her flyaway dark hair half up and half down and her beautiful dark eyes wild. Her apron from the diner was still hooked around her neck but bagged loose in the front as if she hadn’t had time to remove it all the way before she drove to my place.
She was always by my side. Always.
I went to the door and closed it, leaning hard against my hands on the heavy wood. I drew in a deep breath and turned back to her, unsurprised she’d shifted just enough to meet my gaze once again.
“Bee, I have a baby.”
Three
I’d never had an out-of-body experience in my twenty-four years. Despite their prevalence in the spooky shows on the supernatural channel I liked to watch with Luna and Ryan, I had to imagine they were fairly rare among the general population.
Yet I was having one right now without the aid of scrying mirror or crystals or so much as a witchy thought.
I was possibly going to hyperventilate too, just to add some fun to the night’s events. Could someone lose the ability to breathe when they weren’t even in their body any longer?
Let’s find out, folks.
Since Jared was a trained officer of the law—and since he was more familiar with this whole baby concept than I was, apparently—he saw my distress and hurried forward to guide me past the boat to the couch.
There was a boat in the center of the living room. No water to speak of.
Upstairs, Sadie was howling. The baby that was Jared’s was screaming ever louder in competition with the dog.
And I was bent over with my head between my knees.
“I’ll get you some water,” Jared said and fled.
Typical man. Create a mess and disappear.
He’d hooked up with some random woman—I assumed she was random, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I’d served her at the diner. For all I knew, I could’ve seen her walking around with a belly full of Jared’s baby.
What was left from the hurried dinner I’d had of soup and crackers at the diner threatened to bolt back up my throat. I coughed and cupped my mouth, shaking my head frantically when he held out a brimming glass of iced water as promised.
Watching me, he drank it down in one long gulp himself.
I was getting a headache from the literal cacophony of sound. That was not the usual here. Jared’s place on the lake was typically a respite from the hustle and bustle of the Cove.
When I could take no more, I stood up, put two fingers in my mouth, and whistled. I didn’t know if it’d work on these two females, but it used to work on the kids in Little League when I helped coach softball.
Dog and child instantly quieted.
“Wow,” Jared said, clearly awed.
I took that blessed moment of silence to look down at the baby. And shocked myself by starting to laugh.
Hard.
“You stuck her in a pillowcase?”
“I didn’t have anything small. She spit up on the blanket in the basket so I threw it out.”
“We have these new inventions called washing machines,” I reminded him, crouching near the boat despite my inclination to run away.
Like literally go right out the front door and never come back until I could rewind this night and pretend it had never happened.
Jared hadn’t gotten someone pregnant. Hadn’t made this tiny squalling girl with feathery dark lashes and apple cheeks with twin dots of red and a little nose that turned up slightly at the end. Her lips were puckered and moving as if she wanted something. Probably the bottle on its side in the boat.
Swallowing deeply, I grabbed it and lifted it to her mouth. She latched on immediately, her small hands grasping for it instinctively. I brushed her downy dark hair back from her forehead, and she kept sucking, watching me with her owl-like blue eyes.
Like his. They just had to be his eyes.
I hated myself for it, but I had to move. To pace off some of the ridiculous anger and sense of futility inside me. So many feelings were churning around in my belly with nowhere to go.
His baby was beautiful.
Of course she was. How could she have been anything else?
I went into the large kitchen I’d spent so many hours in, laughing while we made meals that were half flops and half successes. We liked to watch cooking competitions and try some of the stuff we saw, even though neither of us was particularly gifted in that way.
Didn’t matter. We’d had fun.
I went to the big farmhouse-style sink with the double basins and turned on the cold water. I let it flow over my hands and wrists until they were nearly numb and then splashed my face.
“I’m sorry,” he said miserably from the doorway.
It was a small comfort he felt bad. For what, exactly? Because he’d somehow had an affair with someone in the past year without needing to mention it to his best friend? So much for that. How could you sleep with someone and not tell your bestie?
“I would tell you if I had sex,” I muttered. And subsequently wished I would die.
Right on the spot.
“You would?” He sounded strangled.
I wrenched off the faucet and thought about it for a minute. In my universe, sex had been a nonissue for a while. Not the entire length of our friendship but close. When we’d started getting tighter, I’d actually had a boyfriend. Jared hadn’t liked him much, and in time, I’d come to agree.
But we’d never discussed my bedroom activities with Ray. It hadn’t occurred to me. Having a dude for a best friend wasn’t the same as a chick. Talking about penis size got awkward real quick.
Since I couldn’t answer his question without grabbing a pan off the rack hanging over the island and heaving it at his head, I breezed past him to go down the hall.
“Bee—”
I was already on my way up the stairs. It was cowardly, but I couldn’t deal with that baby right now. Not when she was so cute and sweet and his.
Sadie leaped on me as I opened the door to the bedroom where he’d stashed her. I hugged her close and buried my face in her thick, soft golden fur.
“There’s a girl. There’s a sweetheart. Daddy locked you up in here for no reason. You’re the best girl ever, aren’t you?”
Sadie swiped her big tongue all over my cheeks in silent agreement.
I closed my eyes at Jared’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “We need to talk,” he said a moment later.
“You have a child to keep an eye on.”