His words made me shudder.
I’d hated being pregnant. Loathed it. Even before I’d been raped by a sicko who’d found my new curves sexy, I’d hated it.
Some women were maternal, then there was me—the alien in the room.
“Well, loving being pregnant doesn’t mean she’s stealing the baby. She can’t keep it inside her after nine months,” I pointed out dryly.
There was a sniff. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
I arched a brow. “I understand that you’re overreacting. Scott, she didn’t answer the phone—maybe she had it on silent. Maybe she was sleeping. You sleep a lot when you’re pregnant, and when the baby’s getting bigger and sits on your bladder all the damn time, you get the rest you can—”
“I knew I shouldn’t have called you,” he sniped, but I heard the quiver in his voice that spoke of an incoming barrage of tears that were heading my way.
“You should have called me,” I said, rather gallantly I thought. Scott knew I found it hard to handle these emotional outbursts. “You knew I’d be the one to make you realize you were being—”
“What? Stupid?” he snarled.
My temper never surged—it turned frigid.
Coldly, I answered, “No. Not stupid. Over-emotional and quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. Let the damn woman get some rest. She’s the one making a baby.”
“It’s not as if you’d understand what I’m going through. Why would you?” He sobbed. “We’re fighting to have our child, and you threw yours away!”
For a moment, I couldn’t believe he’d uttered those words.
My mind froze as I tried to process how this short telephone call had derailed.
I knew I wasn’t the warmest of people, and that wasn’t only to do with the things that had been done to me in my past.
A lifetime of being ostracized because of my mother’s antics, being tarred with the same brush, certainly had helped matters.
Still, this was Scott.
He’d held me when Brady Jensen had grabbed my boob in the hall and the principle had put me in detention, not him, because I wore a camisole and Brady had told the faculty that ‘I was asking for it.’
I’d held him when his stepdad had tried to kick him out of the family home for being gay.
I sucked in a breath, sharp words on my tongue, but I refused to let them fall.
This was Scott.
“Scott, I think you should apologize.”
There was no intonation to the words, not an ounce of emotion in them.
Unlike his next ones:
“I don’t think I should. You have no idea what we’re going through. I don’t even know why I thought you’d care that someone was trying to steal our baby. It’s not like you even ask about Sarah or Andrea and how they’re doing.”
Mouth tightening, I demanded, “So why did you call? Free law advice? Is that it?”
A sharp gasp sounded in my ear. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” I replied coldly. “I can’t believe you’d imply that I ‘threw my baby away’ when you, more than anyone, know what I went through.
“I don’t ask about Sarah or Andrea for the same reason that you don’t ask about my charities—lack of interest—”
“So you don’t care about my baby?”
“I care, but I don’t want to know when Andrea pukes or if her milk’s come in. Why are you being so aggressive?” I snapped.
“Because Andrea is trying to steal my baby!”
“For God’s sake, how many times did you call her?”
“I’ve been trying her since yesterday and she won’t answer the phone or the door.”
Okay, that didn’t look good.
“Did you call the cops?”
“No. I don’t want to get her into trouble.”
“What if she fell or fainted and that’s why she didn’t answer the phone—”
A gasp sounded down the line, and a moment later, I heard the vacuum of nothing.
He’d cut the call.
I stared at the congealing soup on the counter, feeling like a blizzard had just torn down the front door and had blasted the place with three feet of snow.
“He had no right to say that.”
A complex combination of shame and mortification curdled inside me, and my head whipped around to snap at whoever had intruded on my privacy.
When I saw Giulia watching me, her gaze calm, I clenched my teeth. “That was a private conversation.”
“You shouldn’t have had it on speaker then,” she countered, her lack of embarrassment clear. What I noticed, however, was her curiosity. Great. “You were pregnant?”
Thoughts of Wynter always had me backpedaling—today was no different.
My throat felt thick with tears I couldn’t shed, making it difficult to grind out, “When I was younger, yes.”
Her head tipped to the side. “You had an abortion?”
“No.”
I froze her out, grabbed a sponge so I could wipe down the counter, but the process made the smell of cheese surge all around me and the need to puke was strong.
As a groan escaped me, Giulia stormed forward, demanding, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just a cramp.”
I wasn’t about to tell her that I wanted to vomit.
“You work too hard,” she chided softly, her hand coming to my elbow as she forcibly steered me toward the table. “Sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
“I should be getting you the water,” I argued even as I plunked my ass down on the chair.
Rubbing my stomach, I watched her as she filled a glass with water from the refrigerator door, murmuring, “I’m not sick. I’m just creating hellspawn.”
Blinking, I told her, “You shouldn’t joke.”
She sniffed. “Why not? I am. We’re talking two sets of demon DNA percolating to create the original Damian.”
“Hardly,” I argued, but I accepted the glass with relief. “It’s not like Nyx…” I broke off. “He had good reason to do what he did.”
She hummed. “Maybe. Depends on who you ask. Thought you’d be on the side of the law.”
“I’m on no one’s side.”
“Apart from the person who pays the most?”
The words shouldn’t have hurt me. I could tell that she wasn’t judging me; if anything, she sounded impressed.
But combined with Scott’s judgmental sniping, it hit me hard.
“Sometimes,” I rasped, my fingers sliding through the puddle of condensation on the table.
“Nyx once told me you and Carly were friends. Was that true?”
“Would Nyx dare lie to you?” I countered, gritting my teeth at the question as I wondered where the hell she was going with it.
Giulia laughed. “Yeah, he would. He’s not as whipped as his brothers make out. It’s a mutual whipping. It’s the only way I work.”
I didn’t need to know that.
Frustrated, I grabbed the glass and pressed it to my forehead.
“You coming down with something?” Giulia asked, watching me with keen eyes. “I heard you puking earlier.”