to unpack the others lanced him to the core. Was that how she really saw him? A self-indulgent player who didn’t give a damn about anything but the next good time and his dick? Was that the real reason she’d kept Ben from him? The pain bloomed in his chest, radiating outward in a toxic, blazing red mushroom. “You said that before, and I call bullshit. Because it implies that you gave me a choice. When you didn’t, Charlotte. You stole two years of my son’s life from me that I can never get back,” he finished, voice hoarse with fury, hurt...grief.
He’d missed his son’s first smile. His first word. His first step. Ross knew nothing about Ben. Not his favorite food or toy. Not how cranky he could be when he was tired. Not his laugh.
The hole that yawned wide inside him spread big enough for him to plummet into and never hit the bottom.
“Are you serious, Ross?” She speared him with a look of such disgust it rolled over his skin, polluting him. “Is this the game you’re going to play? You don’t remember telling me to get rid of our son?” She snorted. “Plausible deniability doesn’t become you. Neither does playing dumb.”
He almost lashed out with a reply designed to strike and hurt. But then her words penetrated his skull. You don’t remember telling me to get rid of our son? The question ricocheted inside his head, and he almost stumbled back from the vileness of it. The acidic horror that crowded into his throat and spilled onto his tongue.
“Charlotte, please,” he rasped. When she parted her lips, no doubt to blast him with more contempt, he held up a hand, palm out. “Just...pretend I don’t know, and tell me. What do you mean I told you to get rid of Ben?”
She glared at him, her chest rising and falling on loud, staccato bursts of breath. For a moment he didn’t believe she would grant him that. But then she shook her head, huffing out a hard chuckle. “This is crazy,” she muttered but then waved a hand. “Fine. Where should I start this trip down memory lane?”
“The beginning. And leave nothing out.”
“Right.” Another abbreviated laugh that wasn’t a laugh, and she said, “A few weeks after I left Royal, I realized I was late. I called you. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” he ground out. How could he forget? For four weeks, his pulse had leaped every time his phone rang. Only for his stomach to drop and his anger to rise when it turned out not to be her. So when her name had appeared on his screen, and her voice had caressed his ear, taunting him with its sultriness and sweetness that he could no longer have, he hadn’t been welcoming. Hadn’t been kind. “You mentioned nothing about being pregnant.”
“No, but I tried. You didn’t give me a chance to, because you had to go. A date that you couldn’t be late for,” she reminded him.
He’d lied; his ass had been planted on the couch in his sitting room at the ranch while he treated himself to his father’s eighteen-year-old scotch. But his pride hadn’t allowed him to admit that to her. He’d made up the date so she didn’t know he hadn’t been with a woman since she’d left him.
“Here’s how you should’ve gone about that, Charlotte. ‘Before you go, Ross, I’m pregnant.’ Which, I repeat, you didn’t do.”
“No, I didn’t,” she replied, an edge honing her tone until it could slice clean through his sarcasm. “But I did try again. And when the call went straight to voice mail, I tried the ranch. The housekeeper told me you weren’t home, but before I could hang up, she transferred me to Rusty. He demanded to know why I was attempting to contact you when I’d quit. I think...” She faltered, and this time, she did wrap her arms around herself and her gaze slid over his shoulder to the large window behind him. “I was so stunned that I just blurted out the truth about the pregnancy. He ordered me to get rid of the baby. That his son, an Edmond, would not end up raising a child with ‘the help.’” Her lips twisted into a grim caricature of a smile, and his fingertips itched to rub those lips, smudge that ill-fitting smile from her mouth like faded lipstick. “He also told me he knew about our...relationship. Courtesy of you. And you’d assured him