Facing West (Forever Wilde 1)

West’s head snapped up as he sensed me approaching, and his eyes narrowed when he realized who I was. I was at a loss as to what to say to him. I didn’t want to appear weak—to allow him or anyone else in that shit town to think I wasn’t capable of handling my family situation.

“Who’s the father?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the bundle in his arms. Might as well get the important part out of the way. If he was the father, maybe this had been a wasted trip and I could get back to San Francisco and my regular life there.

He looked at me but didn’t speak, so I continued. “Why isn’t there a dad in the picture?”

West seemed to choose his words carefully before replying. “The baby doesn’t have a father.”

Ah. So that’s how it was. Some kind of random-hookup deal. Now that fit more in line with the Adriana I’d known.

“I see.”

“What does that mean?” he snapped.

I felt my eyes widen in surprise at his defensiveness. “Just that I understand now why I’m the one who got custody of her.”

“You’re not keeping her,” he said. It was a statement, not a question, and it got my hackles up immediately.

“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want to, asshole,” I barked. “Hand her over.”

The time for niceties was gone, as if it had ever been there in the first place. I’d be damned if I was going to let some holier-than-thou Dr. Perfect tell me what I was and wasn’t going to do with my sister’s baby.

His eyes narrowed to angry slits, and he held the bundle closer to his chest. “I’ll hand her over to you when hell freezes, jackass.” His voice was a low, thunderous growl, and it brought goose bumps up all over my skin.

Suddenly I had the ridiculous mental image of two rams going at it—butting heads over and over again and ending up with nothing but sore heads. I couldn’t help but laugh, which, of course, just pissed the man off even more.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked. “Your sister is dead, your niece is an orphan, and you’re laughing?”

“Yes, I’m laughing. Because you don’t have a fucking leg to stand on in this, and you know it. And I sure as shit don’t need to explain myself to you. You have no idea how I feel about losing my sister. Matter of fact, you don’t know me at all.”

West’s nostrils flared, and he hissed his response. “I know that when she was seventeen years old and fell off a boat, she screamed your name. I know that when she was eighteen and her stepfather refused to pay for a girl to go to college, she wished you were there to help change his mind. I know that after she gave birth to Pippa, the first thing she said was that the baby had your crazy-ass ears.” He looked at me in defiance, never taking his sparkling green eyes off me. “I know these things because I was here. And you weren’t.”

My heart felt like it was going to break into a thousand pieces all over again. Adriana needing me didn’t make sense. The sister I’d left hadn’t needed me for anything. And West mentioning a stepfather I’d never really had knocked the breath out of my chest. But I wasn’t about to let that asshole have the satisfaction of seeing me cry. So I clenched my teeth and balled my fists to hold it all in.

“You don’t know shit. If she called out my name after falling off a boat, it’s because she pushed me off one when I was fourteen and must have fucking learned how shitty that was. And if she wanted to go to fucking college, she could have fought tooth and nail to pay for it herself like I had to. So fuck you for thinking you know a goddamned thing about me and my sister.”

West’s face seemed to soften in surprise, but he still held the baby close to his chest.

“I’d like to meet my niece. Please,” I said as evenly as possible. Something inside was clawing at me, pressing me forward to get my hands on the one remaining link between me and my family.

I saw West’s jaw tighten, but he stood up and loosened his hold on the bundle so he could reveal her to me—not to hand her to me but to let me get a glimpse of her.

I stepped forward to peek at her face. There, staring up at me, was the smallest human being that had surely ever lived. Her skin was absolute perfection, smooth, creamy white with hints of blushing pink. Her tiny plump lips were deep red, and her eyes were the same mix of green and blue I saw every time I looked in the mirror. As she turned in West’s arms to stretch, one tiny ear revealed itself from behind a fold in the blanket, and sure enough, it was a ridiculous Dumbo ear. It was too much.