Not Quite Over You
Page 34

He surprised her by taking her hand in his. “Jeez, Silver, I’m sorry. I never thought about it before, but you were pregnant. I mean you had a baby growing inside of you for nine months. I signed some paperwork and I was done. I’ll bet it was hard.”
She briefly closed her eyes and wished he wasn’t being so understanding. In some ways, that made it harder to tell him.
“Leigh, that’s Autumn’s mom, was so wonderful to me. We became like sisters. She’d known from the time she was a teenager that she couldn’t have children. It was a congenital defect and she knew she wanted to adopt. We got really close and after Autumn was born, I stayed with them for a while.”
He pulled back and stared at her. “You lived with our baby?”
She nodded. “Just for a few weeks. Then I came back to Happily Inc, but I couldn’t settle. I started getting into trouble. My uncle gave me the tough love lecture and I ran away.” She raised a shoulder. “Not my most mature moment. Anyway, I ended up back in LA and I moved back in with Leigh.” She cleared her throat. “And her husband, of course, and Autumn.”
His expression tightened. “For how long?”
“Two years. I worked, went to community college and—”
“Two years?” He came to his feet and glared at her. “You lived with our baby for two years and never said a word?”
“What was I supposed to say?” she asked as she stood, telling herself to stay calm. This was all new to Drew and of course he would react.
“Drew, you weren’t interested in our child. You said it yourself—you signed the paperwork and you were done. I’m not trying to be mean or judge you, I’m just pointing out that it was different.”
“Of course it was different. You had a relationship with our child and you never told me. You kept it a secret from me all this time.”
She felt her temper flaring. “It’s not as if you were asking for information. You went on with your life. I’m sorry if you feel like you missed out on something, but if you do, it’s only in the last five seconds. Because for the last eleven years, you haven’t given her a single thought.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “You are wrong. I did think about her. I wondered. You’re right—you were the one dealing with your pregnancy and I was in college. Fine. I accept that. But once you stayed in touch with her, you should have said something. You owed me that. If not then at least now.” He waved his arm toward the rest of the room. “We’re supposed to be business partners. We’re sleeping together and starting something personal between us. How am I supposed to trust you now when you kept this from me? And where on earth do we go from here?”
Instead of waiting for an answer, he turned and walked out. The door slammed behind him.
Silver shivered slightly, then sank onto the chair. Her eyes burned, but she didn’t cry. She told herself to keep breathing, that he would calm down and they would talk again later. Because there was a whole lot more he had to know.
* * *
DREW CALLED HIS assistant from his car and told her he wouldn’t be coming back into the bank today. He pulled off his tie, tossed his suit jacket into the backseat and drove east nearly seventy miles before turning around and driving back.
For the first hundred and ten miles, he cursed Silver and told himself he hadn’t done anything wrong. For the last thirty, he thought maybe there might be more than one side to the story. He exited the freeway just before he reached town and drove for a few minutes. It was nearly two o’clock when he pulled up at a pair of big gates and pushed the intercom button to connect to the main office in the stable.
“Drew?” Cade’s voice was scratchy through the speaker system. “What’s up?”
“You got a second?”
“Sure. I’m in back, in my office.”
“Thanks.”
Drew knew the way. He drove around the large farmhouse to the parking area by the massive stables. It was a sunny day and several people were exercising the horses Cade bred. Drew got out of his car and walked toward the biggest barn and Cade’s office. His friend met him just inside the open double door.
Cade took one look at him and shook his head. “How bad?”
“No one’s dead.”
Cade didn’t say anything.
“No one is dead or injured or arrested,” Drew amended. “Good enough?”
“For now.”
Cade led him to his large office. There was a desk with a computer, a dry erase board mounted on the wall and a few file cabinets. In the back was a battered sofa. Drew took a seat on it and Cade pulled up his desk chair.
“It’s Silver,” Drew started, then paused, not sure what exactly to say. He was still processing information, still trying to figure out what he felt. Confusion, sure. Anger. Maybe a little guilt. But more than any of that, he felt a massive sense of betrayal while at the same time he wasn’t sure he had the right.
“You remember when I told you Silver got pregnant that summer?”
“Sure.”
“There’s more. I hadn’t wanted to break up when I left for college, but she insisted. She said I’d want to be free to do whatever I wanted at college. I fought her on it, but in the end I agreed. Three weeks into my freshman year, I knew she was right. I missed her but it wasn’t the same.”
Cade waited, his expression both concerned and patient.
“She showed up around my sixth week and told me she was pregnant,” Drew admitted. “Scared the crap out of me. I was angry and horrified and resentful as hell, but I didn’t say any of that.”
“You said before you offered to marry her.”
“I did. She turned me down. She said we should give up the baby. I signed the paperwork and that was that.”
Cade didn’t say anything.
“I thought that was it,” Drew continued. “Or rather I never thought about our kid again. Okay, maybe every couple of years. We had a girl, by the way.” Autumn, he remembered. Her name was Autumn.
“For me, it was done, but not for Silver. She and her uncle found a nice couple and Silver went to live with them so no one knew she was pregnant.”
“I wondered how that had been kept a secret.”
Drew thought about the rest of it. What had seemed like such a horrendous crime a couple of hours ago suddenly didn’t seem so very awful. So why was he angry?
“She stayed in touch with them. The mom and the girl. Autumn. She lived with them for a while. She knows our daughter and she never told me that. Never told me any of it.”
Cade looked at him for several seconds before asking, “Did you want to be told?”
“I don’t know. I never had the chance to wonder. I thought she was just gone, but she’s not. Silver kept her from me.” He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. “Everything is completely messed up. My mother’s back and she’s all about your party. She wants a private audience with the king, by the way, so you’ll want to avoid that. Then Silver and I went into business together.”
“How is that messed up? I thought you wanted to go into business with her.”
“I do and it’s great. Expanding her business is the right thing to do. She and I are getting involved and that’s great. It’s all coming together and now this. She dumped it on me with no warning.” He looked at his friend. “She knows our kid and I don’t.”