“Sloane, please.” He slid off the sofa and knelt in front of me. “Please,” he repeated. “I want this baby. I want you. I need you to tell me you understand what I’m saying.”
I looked into his eyes. “I don’t.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll tell your parent
s and mine. We’ll go to them together. Tell them we’re getting married—”
“Have you lost your mind?” I shrieked, wrenching away from him. I stood and stalked into the kitchen. “No! God! I’m not marrying you, Tackle.”
“But—”
When he stood in front of me, I shoved him away. “Get out! Just leave.”
He came right back and put his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not leaving. We have a lot to talk about.”
“You’re wrong. We have nothing to talk about.” I stalked down the hall and into the bedroom, closing the door and locking it behind me. It wouldn’t make him leave, but he also wouldn’t break the door down.
I lay on the bed and waited, knowing that at any second, he’d beg me to let him in, telling me we needed to talk. Instead, I heard the front door close. After a few minutes of silence, I crept from the bedroom and out to the living room. It was empty. I walked over, threw the deadbolt, turned off the lights, and peered out the window. Sure enough, his car was no longer in the driveway. Racing into the kitchen, I grabbed my phone when something occurred to me.
Punching in his name, I hurriedly unblocked his number and called him.
“You better not be on your way to my parents’ house,” I said when I heard him answer.
“Wow,” he muttered. “After all this time hiding the fact that you were pregnant, refusing to see me or talk to me, blocking my number, that’s what you wanted to say?”
“It isn’t your place to tell them. I’ll tell—”
“I would never do that, Sloane.”
20
Tackle
I ended the call, tossed the phone on the passenger seat, pulled off on a side street, parked, and rested my head on the steering wheel.
Thoughts raced through my head faster than I could process them. That’s what she thought of me? That when she refused to marry me, I’d rush over to her parents’ house and tell them to force her to?
Why didn’t she want to marry me? She was pregnant with my baby. Why the fuck hadn’t she told me? Why had she kept it from me? Was I really that bad of a guy? What had I ever done to make her think I was?
Clearly, Halo didn’t know the baby was mine. If he did, he wouldn’t have been able to hide the fact he knew. More, he probably would’ve beat the shit out of me long before this.
Who in the hell had she told him the father was? How had my friendship with him reached the point where he didn’t think he could confide in me about this?
“Poor peanut,” he’d said. “She’s got enough of her own shit to deal with.”
I counted back the number of weeks since he’d returned from Italy. Everything that had happened made so much more sense now.
That was the emergency. Sloane was pregnant. He’d arranged for a place for her to live, underwrote her rent, because she was pregnant. He’d even hesitated going to New York this weekend, almost passed up the chance to see Tara, because Sloane was pregnant.
I counted again. This time, the number of weeks between the first time she and I had had sex, when the condom broke, and when she had the mysterious illness.
I didn’t know a damn thing about how women felt when they were pregnant; maybe Sloane didn’t either. I knew she never got the message about the broken condom because it showed up on my phone as not being delivered.
I put the car back in gear. Instead of going to the duplex, I drove home—to my parents’ house.
“Everything okay?” my mother asked when I walked in the door that led from the garage into the kitchen.
“I need to talk to you, Mom.”