Perfect Fling (Serendipity's Finest 2)

His lips turned down. “Then you see something my old man doesn’t and your brothers sure as hell don’t.”

Anger at Jed surged through her. She definitely wouldn’t be bringing him any more of her mother’s casseroles. As for her brothers, they would come around once they got over the shock of her pregnancy.

“Your father’s a harsh, unforgiving man who obviously wanted a clone of himself. Nothing less would make him happy. That’s not who you are. Your mom wouldn’t have left town with you if she didn’t want better for you both.” He still held her hand and she squeezed tighter.

“My mom’s great,” he agreed.

“And she took you away from Jed, right?” She held her breath, hoping he’d tell her more. That the intimacy of her lying here on an exam table, of seeing the black-and-white sonogram of their baby, would help him want to confide in her.

“I was a handful, make no mistake. The harder Jed pushed at me, the more I rebelled. So when he threatened to send me to military school, going so far as to make the calls and hang the brochures on the refrigerator, I knew something had to give.”

“What happened?”

“Got myself arrested. It was stupid. I was drunk. Me and another guy graffitied a wall downtown.” Cole grinned sheepishly, as if the memory had the power to embarrass him.

Despite the seriousness of the subject, Erin laughed. “What happened?”

“I wasn’t calling my dad.” He let out a harsh laugh. “I called Mom. She came and talked to me through the jail cell bars. She said she’d take me away from here and we’d make a life somewhere else, but only if I swore getting away from Jed would turn me around.”

“Wow.”

He nodded, his expression pensive and pained. “I promised. Hell, I wanted nothing more than to get away from the old man. Imagine my shock when I found out she felt the same. Her sister, my cousin Nick’s mother, gave her start-up money and the name of a friend in New York who’d promised to rent her an apartment. She took a secretarial job at a local PD and met Brody. He’s my stepdad.”

Erin fell a little in love with his mother at that moment, even if she barely remembered her. “Cole?”

“Hmm?”

She knew she was treading in dangerous territory, but the doctor hadn’t returned and she wanted so badly to get inside his head and understand him better. “If your mom was so good to you, why doesn’t her belief in you overshadow your father’s lack of it?”

Cole ran his free hand through his hair and groaned. “There’s only so many times you can hear negative shit before you start believing it yourself. By the time we got out, I’d had sixteen years of disappointing Jed under my belt.”

His words seared through her and she decided to change the subject to a more pleasant one. “Tell me about your stepdad.”

“That’s easy. Brody Williams is a good man. He fell hard for my mother, and she must’ve been miserable long before she left Jed

because she was open to a new relationship pretty fast.”

“Was he a good stepfather?” she asked, hoping Cole had had a positive male role model in his life at some point in time.

He nodded, his facial muscles relaxing with the new topic. “The best. He did everything he could to turn my head around. He got my arrest expunged from my record. If not for him, I wouldn’t have gone to the police academy, that’s for damn sure. I didn’t want anything to do with a legacy that was my father’s.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I wanted Brody to be proud of me.” Cole shrugged his shoulders, indicating it was that simple.

Maybe it was. Erin had certainly always strived to please her parents, though they hadn’t pressured her into her good-girl mode. For her it came naturally.

“Then you need to focus on the things Brody said to and about you, not the things Jed said.”

Cole treated her to a rare smile, and her stomach flipped at the sight.

“You can be damned sure he’ll be my role model for how to be a good parent,” he said, and Erin nodded in understanding.

She hurt for the childhood he’d had and the way his father emotionally abused him. Cole had so many more scars and dark places than Erin had realized, and it made her mad. Unlike Cole, she’d been blessed with a loving family. Sure, they had their share of dysfunction—her mom had been pregnant with Mike, another man’s child, when she’d married Simon Marsden. And just last year, Mike’s real father, Rex Bransom, had surfaced, bringing painful secrets with him. But her family had pulled together and survived because of the love they shared and the solid background her mother, Ella, and her dad, Simon, had given their children.

Erin wanted that same sense of security for her baby, and she just knew Cole felt the same way. He didn’t believe they could provide that environment together because he’d return to undercover work, but so what? Did that mean he couldn’t come back to her when he was finished? If that’s what they both desired? They wouldn’t know unless they tried to make things work between them before the baby was born.

She was scared, she admitted to herself, and suddenly she was ready for her parents to come home so she could confide in her mother. Ella had been through something similar . . . Why hadn’t Erin realized it before now?