The Baby Pact (Babies and Billions #5) - Holly Rayner Page 0,25

almost certainly been lying to her knowingly, then, at least about that part.

Was it possible he had known about all of it? Could that be why he’d failed to reach out to her all these years? Could that be why he had decided to end their friendship?

She didn’t want to believe it. Even when she had been her most angry at him, she had never thought of him as a bad person. But if he could have participated in stealing from her family—if he had known about this theft all along and had kept it from her—

I can never trust him again.

Her father was right. Zach wasn’t the right kind of person for her to associate with. Not because of how much money he did or didn’t have, but because he might be someone who could steal from a friend.

And Stephen was right too. She couldn’t continue to see him. Not knowing what she knew now.

She lay back on her bed, feeling as if her heart was going to break. The past two weeks had been magical. She had felt as if something she’d wanted all her life, something she had never even realized she was wishing for, was coming true.

And now I have to give it up.

What was she going to say to him? How was she going to explain this? Could she really bring up something that had happened fifteen years ago, something that his father, who was now dead, had done?

She couldn’t.

But she also couldn’t live with it.

She was going to have to end things.

Chapter 9

Rhea

Rhea was distracted from her research by the sound of the phone ringing.

She sighed, muted the device, and put it in her desk drawer. Every time it rang or chirped out a text message alert, she felt a flood of guilt.

She knew that what she was doing—ghosting Zach instead of talking to him about what she had learned—was morally questionable. But what else could she do?

She had tried multiple times to imagine having the conversation she needed to have with him. She had imagined over and over how it might go. But she couldn’t bring herself to actually bite the bullet and do it. She would have to accuse his father of a crime against her family. His deceased father.

It was too cruel.

She still thought there was a possibility that Zach simply hadn’t known anything about his father’s crime. And if that was the case, perhaps it was best if he never found out. She didn’t want to damage his memories of his father. She cared about him too much for that.

But if he had known, then Rhea didn’t owe him an explanation. She didn’t owe him anything.

Either way, though it was painful, she convinced herself she was doing the right thing by not taking any more of his calls. There was really nothing left for the two of them to say to each other if they weren’t going to talk about this. And Rhea definitely didn’t want to talk to him about this.

Then there was the matter of her family. Even Stephen, who was the most easygoing of all of them, seemed to have felt betrayed when he’d learned that she was seeing Zach again. Rhea couldn’t imagine how that information would make her father feel. She couldn’t allow her relationship with Zach to infect her relationship with her family. It was clear that she had to make a choice.

And though she hated it with every fiber of her being, family came first. She had to put her family ahead of the romance that had started to develop.

But it was so hard to let go of him!

About a month had gone by since her conversation with her brother. She and Zach hadn’t spent Thanksgiving together, as they’d planned. She kept getting ads on her social media sites from the company she’d been shopping in search of the perfect Christmas present for him, a present she now knew that she would never buy.

She was amazed—flattered and distraught in equal measure—that he was still calling her so frequently. She would have thought he would have given up on her by now.

I wish he would give up on me.

This would all be much less painful once he stopped calling all the time. And he would have to give up eventually. Sooner or later, Zach would realize that Rhea was never going to contact him again, and then this would all fade into memory.

But right now, with her phone ringing several times a day, it