the curiosity grow across his serious face. “It’s a girl?”
If I’d had any more joy to lose, it would have been gone. How did this fucker not even know he had a daughter? Jesus Christ. I had mentioned that in my last email. He hadn’t even had the balls to read it and make sure she’d been born alive and fine? Was this a motherfucking joke?
I was going to kill him and throw his ass in a swamp. That was it. I’d lived a good life. Grandpa Gus and Peter could raise her just fine. They’d come visit me in jail. Luna would be a great mother figure for her.
And then he kept going with the stupid questions.
“Babysitting, eh? I thought you didn’t like wee ones?”
Babysitting?
Oh. Oh. He was going to get it for sure. For fucking sure.
I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself. If he wanted to play stupid, okay.
I looked at him, smiled sarcastically and said, “It’s not babysitting if she’s mine.”
His normal expression had been there one second… and the very next it was gone.
Jonah’s face instantly fell. The color in it doing the same, and I knew I didn’t imagine him giving the slowest blink ever. Or that it took him a moment before he literally choked, “Yours?”
The sarcasm was stronger in me than usual today. “You want me to be specific? She’s ours.”
I was an idiot. How could I have been so wrong and stupid to have wasted months of my life getting to know him? How the hell had he been able to fool me so bad? I had honestly thought he was a good guy. A really good guy. A wonderful one. Wonderful, and I didn’t throw that word around lightly.
But here he was—
He stopped breathing, his skin color going damn near almost white. I almost missed his croaked, “Pardon me?”
I blinked at him, ignoring the tone of his voice and the way he was blinking himself from across the table. I leaned forward and planted a kiss on her forehead in an apology for making this dipshit her dad. I’d make it up to her somehow. “She’s ours, dumbass. Who else would she be?”
I remember hearing someone say once that time had, at one point, stopped for them, but it didn’t seem like one of those things that was real. Like… your life flashing before your eyes when you think you’re close to death. Once, when I had been younger, my godfather had snatched me out of the way of a moving car, and I hadn’t thought of anything until I’d been on my back, wondering what the hell had just happened.
But as I sat there, I watched it happen. I watched Jonah suck in a breath through his almost perfect nose. I watched his head jerk…
Witnessed his mouth fall open.
And I saw that tall, solid body wobble in place for a second before his hands shot out to the back of the chair in front of him. Those long, strong fingers wrapped over the top, becoming the only thing holding him up. If I thought his face had been pale thirty seconds ago, whatever color had been left, leeched out too.
And none of it, none of it, made any sense.
What he said next had my head jerking back.
“You’re saying she’s my daughter?”
Chapter 6
“Jonah, it’s Lenny. Look, you really need to call me back. I’m not fucking with you. Seriously.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He was lucky I had Mo in my arms when that stupid question came out of his mouth, because if I’d had my hands free, I would have been sliding over the desk like I was on Dukes of Hazard to choke the shit out of him.
I was pretty sure a lawyer somewhere would have let me plead Jonah’s murder as a crime of passion. But unfortunately, I was never going to find out because of the kid sitting in my lap. Her simple existence was saving me from a life in prison and saving her dad—not that she knew he was her dad—from being murdered.
I could feel my face getting hot as I stared at him like I had never stared at anyone, not even someone I was competing against that I had beef with. His same stupid question rang in my ears all over again.
Why didn’t you tell me?
Why the fuck didn’t I tell him? Was he shitting me? Was he delusional?
Yeah, my nostrils were flaring, my face was hot, and my eyelid suddenly felt like