Bond (Klein Brothers 1)

The fuck was that?

“Huh?”

Holding her hands in the air, she started moving them around like she was showing me what she meant. When I just stared blankly at her, she moved them back to the first position she’d had them in and then explained each movement.

“Babies normally move, so they’re head down in preparation for the birth. As you get closer to your due date, your bump drops on the outside—normally—because the baby moves into position inside you. Nemi refused to go into that position, regardless of what they did to help her, so her ass was where her head should be.”

My head jerked back at the mental image of that description. Her ass and head were in the right places now, so what the hell?

Reading me accurately, she waved her hands around in front of me. “I don’t mean they were like that on her body. I mean inside me, she had her butt in the place a baby’s head should be down here.” She pointed to her lower stomach.

Seeing I was following now, she continued, “Babies can be born breech, but it’s painful, and there can be more complications from it, so they did a c-section on me.”

“And Nemi’s dad didn’t want to be there for it? Has he ever seen her?”

I wasn’t jealous or resentful of someone I’d never met, far from it, but I still felt my muscles harden slightly as I asked it. My issue was that he had a link to both of them that I didn’t. That wasn’t jealousy, it was insecurity on my behalf.

“He’s seen photos of her, but his mom is very controlling, so he thought it was in both of our interests that he wasn’t linked to Nemi in any way. From what he told me, she’d probably have tried to take her from me and raise Nemi herself, and I got the impression she wasn’t very good at it.”

I wanted to take the story at face value, but a part of me wondered if it was his way of getting out of being a dad or paying out for his child.

“I can see where your mind’s gone—Dad and Cash were the same,” Heidi murmured. “Nemi’s dad is part of a high profile family in New York. His dad is a business mogul, and his mom is a high society woman who’s on the board of many big charities. Because of that, she has a lot of ears to whisper into and a lot of money to use to get her own way—like with getting custody of her granddaughter.

“The dad—Joel—he’s been in therapy since he left home at eighteen because of her, but he wouldn’t tell me what for. All I know was that he was almost religious about attending the appointments, and he never accepted any dates or invitations to events on a Monday and Thursday night when they were scheduled for.”

I had many ideas about what his mom had done to him, but I guess assuming things wouldn’t get us anywhere. What it did do was make me feel guilty for jumping to conclusions about his character, though.

“Did you ever meet her?”

“Not properly, no.” Heidi shook her head, her mouth in a thin line. “I could tell from day one there was an issue there with how Joel tensed up and avoided the subject. Then, on our second date, she turned up at the restaurant we were eating at, and I swear it was like he turned to stone as soon as he heard her voice. He tried to introduce me to her, just by saying my name, but she just sneered and tried to rearrange his hair. It was… creepy.”

Given that Heidi was thirty-one and Nemi was about to turn three, that would have placed her at roughly twenty-six or twenty-seven—depending on how long they were together for. If Joel had been the same age, yeah, that would have been a bit creepy.

“How long were y’all together for?”

Blowing out a breath, Heidi stared out at the lake. “Okay, please don’t think I’m a slut who fucks around.”

“I won’t.”

And I wasn’t lying. We all did things and had aspects of our past that embarrassed us, and there was no way anyone would look at Heidi and think the word ‘slut.’ Who was I to judge her on anything, especially if she had reasons for doing whatever she’d done.

“You said that quickly, but you seem to forget people do judge single moms. They assume we either don’t know the dad or got pregnant to get money from them. The truth is, I don’t get any money from Joel, although he did give me some to help toward her birth, the bills, and what she needed, and he’s promised to help pay for her to go to college when she’s eighteen.”