“Bullshit, Luke. She’s why you were late. You should have told me. If you had told me, I wouldn’t have been blindsided. I could have prepared myself for this, but now … now…” My throat closed, choking off the words.
His dark brows came together. “I should have called you in the middle of all this and told you I was going to Wendy’s? That I didn’t know what she’d do to herself if I didn’t? What was I supposed to do, Tess? And then … then she told me … she told me she’s…” The words died in his throat.
He couldn’t even say it, and in that moment, I wanted to feel sorry for him. I wanted to understand.
But I couldn’t. It was too fresh, too raw, and I was too tired to be reasonable or logical.
“I can’t do this,” I said, my voice broken.
And his face crumpled. “Do this? With me?”
I shook my head. “I can’t talk about this right now. I can’t. There’s nothing I can say, no way I can be rational. I … I need … I need to think and I need to try to understand and I need to get away from you to do that.”
He searched my face, took my hands, and I let him, too tired to fight. “This happened before you, before I left LA—”
“Stop,” I sobbed, removing my hands from his. “Please. I don’t … I don’t want to know the details. Not yet, not when I just…”
“Tell me it’s going to be all right. Tell me you trust me still.”
“I … I can’t.”
He stilled. “Because you don’t?”
“Because I don’t know.”
Something cracked behind his eyes. “I don’t love her, Tess. And she knows I’m in love with someone else.”
My eyes widened, locking on his. I was made of stone. “Luke, do not finish that thought. Do not say those words right now.” Shaky words. Shaking hands. Knees locked. Feet stuck.
The knot of his throat rose and fell. A nod, small and resigned. His gaze fell to the ground.
And I did the only thing I could.
I turned and ran.
20
Heart Burn
LUKE
I watched my heart walk out the door.
A space in my chest opened up, empty but for tingling static, sharp with electricity, frenetic and edged with pain. One day ago, my life had been on a different trajectory, one lit with hope and possibility. Twenty-four hours ago, my biggest concern had been a sunflower supplier and the length of time I’d have to endure before I could hold Tess.
Now I’d lost her.
She needed time—unsurprising, as well as I knew Tess—time to get her bearings, to figure out what she thought, how she felt about the succession of bombs that had detonated. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that time would not fix this. Time wouldn’t reverse the impact. It wouldn’t change the fact that Wendy was pregnant.
I couldn’t imagine how it’d happened—Wendy’d been on birth control since I’d known her. But the why and how of it didn’t matter. Everything had changed with the knowledge, and everything had fallen apart with Wendy’s announcement.
And now, Tess was gone. The magazine shot was potentially ruined. My family was upside down. All because of me.
So I’d have to fix it all. Starting with what I could.
I turned, heading numbly into the shop where my siblings were busy disassembling the broken installation with flat lips and drawn brows and far too much silence for the number of Bennets in one room. They glanced up as I entered the room, pausing and gathering around when I stopped. Accusation weighed heavy on their faces.
With a painful swallow, I started with the first and most important thing.
“I’m sorry.”
I don’t know if it was the sight of me or the tone of those two little words, but their faces softened in unison.
I shook my head, glancing at the ground. “She told me last night. I was going to tell you guys as soon as I talked to Tess and this meeting was done. I thought I had at least that long. Should have known better.”
Laney shifted at my side and laid her small hand on my arm. “Luke … how did you get yourself into this mess?”
I tried to swallow the stone in my throat. “We went out before I left LA. She … she’s always been on birth control, so I didn’t think to…”
Laney and Jett shared a look, but it was Marcus who said what they all seemed to be thinking.
“Do you think she did this on purpose? To trap you?”
“I can’t believe you’d even say that,” I snapped.
“Come on, Luke,” he urged. “It’s not an unreasonable assumption. The shop is doing better—”
“That wasn’t the case when we slept together.”
“Are you sure she’s even really pregnant?” Laney asked.
“She wouldn’t lie about being pregnant.”
“Why not? Fake a miscarriage. Get out from under the lie, but lock you down first,” she postulated.
A defensive wind blew through me, hot and bitter. “I know you all think she’s conniving and predatory, but it’s not the truth, and deep down, you know it. I know you want to protect me, but villainizing her, making up your own story? That doesn’t help any of us. I’ll be the first to admit that she would use me—trust me, of all of us, it’s me who has a front row seat to that particular truth. But there are things she would lie about and things she wouldn’t. Trust me. Please, trust me.”
None of them looked convinced.
“Okay, let’s assume she’s pregnant then,” Kash said. “Are you sure it’s yours?” He glanced at our siblings, adding, “She had a boyfriend she conveniently failed to mention until after she slept with Luke.”
Outrage and hope sparked in the room, a strange, heavy combination of emotions. A couple of curses. Half-smile here and there. A disbelieving, scoffing laugh under someone’s breath.
I stood in the center of them, numb.
In the hours I’d spent in solitude last night, I’d worked it all out, knowing it could go either way. Her story made sense, timeline-wise. It explained Wendy’s coming back, her insistence to see me. I took that information, applied it to the opposite—maybe it wasn’t mine, and she’d made the whole thing up to trap me. And then I’d accepted both possibilities as best I could, packing it away so I could focus on this meeting, the ruins of which lay in crumpled piles in the window.
I scrubbed a hand over my face. Sighed with a breath drawn from the very bottom of my lungs. “It’s possible. I don’t know when she’s due or how far along she is. She was hysterical when she told me, and I had to get back to the shop with supplies. There was no time to get into it. And today … well, you saw how much was accomplished today.”
Marcus’s face darkened. “You need to nail this down and get confirmation from a doctor. I know you want to believe her, but—”
“I don’t want to believe her, Marcus. I don’t want this to be true, not with her, not like this. If it is, you know I won’t walk away. But I’m under no illusions when it comes to Wendy or her intentions, especially when her back’s against the wall. I have something to do with why she’s back, and either it’s because I’m the father of her child or because she wants me to be.”