Craving Cecilia (The Aces' Sons 6)

“Keep your swamp ass away from me,” I replied, trying to dodge his hand as he reached for me. “You better have washed your hands!”

“Of course I did,” he said, flicking water in my face.

“Ew,” I groaned. “Why didn’t you use a towel?”

“I heard something about breakfast and I was in a hurry,” he replied, chuckling.

“Help me clear the table,” my mom ordered Cam. “We can set this stuff on the counter.”

“I can grab that,” Mark said apologetically.

“No biggie.” My mom waved him off.

I watched as she and Cam cleared the table while Mark grabbed supplies out of the fridge and spoke quietly to my dad. Shit just kept getting weirder and weirder.

“You haven’t had any water since you got here,” Mark said as he set a glass of ice water down in front of me. “Didn’t you say you were supposed to be drinking a lot of it?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” I replied. I tilted my head back to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Why are you supposed to be drinking water?” my mom asked, watching us in confusion.

When I didn’t answer right away, Mark did it for me.

“Because of the breastfeeding.”

“The breastfeeding?” my mom replied. Her eyes shot to the baby.

“It’s not what you’re thinking—” I said, shaking my head.

“You told us that you had your friend’s baby with you,” my dad said, his voice low and angry.

“Yeah, about that,” Mark waded in, pointing at my dad. “You could have filled me in.”

“She is my friend’s baby,” I said at the same time. God, this wasn’t how I wanted to tell them. My parents were staring at me like they wanted to throttle me, and I couldn’t really blame them. I hadn’t given them the full story when I’d called them, and now they were having this huge bomb dropped in their lap with no warning.

I looked at Mark, whose face had lost all expression while he waited for me to explain what the hell was happening. I hadn’t exactly been straight with him, either.

I looked down at the baby’s sleeping face and took a deep breath before lifting my head again.

“I was a surrogate.”

Chapter 6

Mark

“You were a surrogate,” Cecilia’s mom Farrah said, dropping into a chair at the table.

“Yes,” Cecilia confirmed. “I carried her, but she was never supposed to be mine.”

“The fuck?” Cam muttered.

“She’s not genetically linked to me,” Cecilia said, her voice strained. “I was just the gestational carrier. I just, you know, grew her because Liv couldn’t.”

“And Liv’s the friend who was gunned down at her house last night?” her dad asked. Casper looked like he was ready to hit something, but he also oddly looked like he wanted to hug his daughter.

“Yeah,” Cecilia said. Her fingers started pulling at her bottom lip.

“So—” Farrah started to speak, then seemed to lose her train of thought. She shook her head and ran a hand down her face. “So, she belongs to your friends. Do they have any family? Where is she gonna go?”

If I hadn’t known Cecilia so well once upon a time, and maybe if I hadn’t been watching her so closely, I wouldn’t have seen the way her arms tightened around the baby. She lifted her chin.

“She stays with me,” Cecilia announced.

“Don’t think it works that way,” Cam said, disbelief threading his words. “You can’t just take her if she’s got family.”

“The only family she has is gone,” Cecilia shot back. “Cane has a grown son, but Liv was afraid of him. She’s not going to him.”

“Wait, how old was your friend’s husband?” Cam asked.

“You don’t get in the middle of family shit, Cecilia,” Casper said at the same time.

“Jesus,” Farrah muttered.

“Stop,” Cecilia snapped, smacking her hand on the table. “None of you have any say in this.”

“The hell we don’t,” Casper replied darkly.

Cecilia rose from the table. “If you wanna go rounds with me,” she said softly, staring unflinchingly into her dad’s angry eyes, “I’m all for it. But you don’t make my decisions for me, and you haven’t in a long ass time.”

“What you’re doin’ is wrong,” Casper replied slowly.

“That’s a little like the pot calling out the kettle, isn’t it?” she shot back. Then she turned and left the room.

We all stood silently, digesting everything we’d heard. I didn’t know what to fucking think. She’d carried the baby and I knew she loved her, but if baby girl belonged to someone else, it wasn’t any kind of right for her to keep her.

“What a godawful mess,” Farrah said, running her fingers through her hair the exact same way Cecilia had done the night before. “She can’t be serious about keeping that baby.”

“I feel for her,” Cam said, leaning back in his chair. “She was havin’ that baby for a couple that’s dead now. She wasn’t growin’ her for some relative to raise.”