* * * *
Gavin pulled his hand back. Of all the things Dex could have had said, this shocked him most. He turned to Slade and saw the same look of concern and compassion on his face. No anger. No horror or exclusion. They simply waited for him to tell the story.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked incredulously.
Slade nodded. “Yes. I heard. I’m going to tell you the same thing Dex said. I love you, and I’m here for you. Just get it all out so we can deal.”
Their faces were grim, but they hadn’t walked out on him. They’d shown solidarity, offered support. Fuck. His brothers had told him that they loved him.
Dex sent him a solemn stare. “I take it Nikki was pregnant when she decided to down a bunch of pills. How is that your fault, Gavin?”
“Let me enlighten you.” He hated the nasty edge to his words.
Gavin had known this would be hard, but their seeming acceptance made it harder. What if they heard the details and decided that he was a murdering prick after all? He scrubbed his raw eyes with the heels of his hands. Then they would finally understand. None of that changed the fact he owed them the truth before the press splashed it all over the front page.
“Nikki and I had a volatile relationship, as you know. It was interesting at first. A nice diversion from all the other shit in my life. We had some hot sex. She loved to f**k, and I enjoyed obliging her. For a while, it was worth all the drama. Then she got demanding. I found myself in this constant state of making up and breaking up with her. I have to admit, the more we fought, the hotter the sex became. It was damn good. And when the former Black Oak board was trying to eat me alive, I needed the release.” He shrugged. “I got addicted to the sex and the anger. They made me forget work for a while. Our parents were dead. We didn’t have a lot of other family. You two were in college, far away…so Nikki became a fixture in my life. I never planned to marry her. I knew she was bad for me.”
“But she was there and we weren’t.” Guilt ravaged Slade’s face. He shook his head, his shoulders slumped.
“Hey, you two had to go to school,” Gavin rebuked. The last thing he needed was Slade or Dex feeling responsible. “This fiasco was all my doing. I was an adult.”
“You were twenty-two, Gavin,” Dex growled. “Most twenty-two-year-olds are drinking beer and trying to figure out where to get a job. They aren’t dealing with multi-billion-dollar companies and hostile takeovers. They aren’t trying to keep everything together.”
“Stop trying to justify this, Dex. Being young doesn’t absolve me of anything.” The liquor was wearing off. He needed more to get through this, but he felt sure his brothers would object at the moment. After he told them the rest, though, they might decide they didn’t give a damn after all and let him drink himself to death.
“You’re not f**king perfect. Don’t expect yourself to be,” Slade insisted.
“Perfect?” Gavin scoffed even as his stomach threatened to revolt. This was the part he’d dreaded. “Hell, I wasn’t even close. When I decided to break this perverse cycle Nikki and I were in, I told her we were done for good. I made the break clean. I got a new phone. I told the security at the office and the condo to keep her out. She still managed to get my number. And she’d call, leave these long messages begging me to come back because she needed me. Then she told me she was pregnant.”
“Had she ever told you that before?” Slade asked.
“She’d had a couple of scares, even though she claimed she was on the Pill. And I always used condoms with her.”
But with Hannah he hadn’t. He hadn’t even thought of protecting her. He’d just lost himself and flooded her with every ounce of his seed. God, his brothers were going to hate him—and they had every right to.
Gavin sighed. “Nikki had tried to get me to marry her twice before by claiming that she was pregnant.”
“So when she announced it this time, you didn’t believe her for good reason.” Slade sat back in his chair.
“I also didn’t believe her when she said she was going to kill herself because I’d heard that before, too.” Gavin’s stomach turned again. “She called. I was at a party. I didn’t even bother to step outside to talk to her. She asked if I even cared about our baby. I told her there wasn’t a baby. She said she’d taken some pills. She’d threatened suicide before and hadn’t followed through, so I didn’t alert anyone. I didn’t lift a damn finger.” Dex’s face softened. “This isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known she was serious.”
“I should have guessed or done something, just in case. Instead, I told Nikki to do what she had to do. Then I hung up on her. An hour later, her sister called me to tell me that she was dead.”
“Damn it, Gavin, you didn’t force her to take the pills.”
“But I didn’t even try to save her.” Gavin stood and kicked the chair across the room. “She really was pregnant, a few weeks along according to the coroner. He kept it quiet for me.” Slade winced. “You are not going to want to hear this, Gavin, but how can you be sure the baby was yours?”
He’d asked himself that question a million times. “Does it really matter? If I had taken her threat seriously, that child would be alive today.”
Dex shook his head. “You would never have intentionally hurt her or that baby. I know it.”
“You’re obviously missing the fact that through my negligence, I killed both a woman and a child.”
“No,” Slade said in an even tone. “You didn’t. You broke up with a woman who wasn’t stable, and she decided to go off the deep end. She needed help, man.”
“I didn’t give it to her. Damn it, you two are not listening to me.” It was maddening. “I left her there. I let her die.”
“She chose to take the pills herself. She didn’t care about the baby in her belly. She didn’t call for an ambulance. She didn’t want to live. That’s not your fault.” Slade stood and began to pace, his hand running through his hair. “You’ve seriously wasted years of your life over this?”