The Christmas Proposal - Miley Maine Page 0,53

watched as she softly closed the door behind her. I didn’t know what I was going to do about facing Sebastian again. Though he hadn’t said anything specifically to me, I had felt the disappointment radiating off of him in waves. I hated feeling like I had let him down, but I guessed in some ways I had.

It was unfair. Why couldn’t he just accept that Grayson and I were happy together?

I yawned, and decided that that was a question for another day. For the moment, I needed some rest, and badly.

I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Chapter Twenty

Grayson

I should have realized that Serenity was gone when she didn’t come to me in the middle of the night with a nightmare asking to sleep in my bed. I should have realized that something was wrong when she didn’t ask to sleep in my bed again. But I was a fool, and so terribly oblivious.

So it was only when I went to her bedroom to get her up in time for work that I realized something was wrong. She wasn’t in her bed, not in the bathroom, and none of the other places that I looked. She hadn’t left a note, or a text, or a call, and I was about ready to call the police out of panic by the time I had finished scouring the house.

Instead I dialed her number, praying that she would pick up, praying that nothing had happened to her.

She didn’t. Instead my phone went to the voicemail box after two rings, which meant that she had declined my call.

“Serenity, please call me back and tell me what’s going on, I’m really worried. I just want to know that you’re okay.”

I hung up, and sent her a text along the same lines, but there was no answer.

Was there a chance that she had been kidnapped? It didn’t look like there had been any sort of break in, my alarm system hadn’t been tripped, nothing had been taken, and there was no ransom note.

I went back up to her room, to find that all of her things had been taken, packed away. So she must have left voluntarily.

If she was declining my calls, then I had to at least make sure that she got back home safely.

I dialed up Sebastian without even thinking about it, forgetting in my panic that the two of us were no longer on good terms. Thankfully, my call went through and not to straight to voicemail and he picked up after a few rings.

I could tell he was angry, even without him saying anything.

“Sebastian—”

“She’s back here if that’s what you want to know, came in early this morning.”

“Thank you.”

“No, don’t thank me. You don’t have any right to do that. You know what, I don’t even know why I bothered to answer you in the first place.”

“Sebastian, why can’t we talk about this?”

“Oh, you want to know why we can’t talk about this? Because the situation’s even worse than I first thought. How dare you do that to my sister? She came home crying to our mom, because you used her and got her pregnant and now she’s the one who’s suffering. And she’s right, you don’t deserve to be in hers or her baby’s life. Goodbye.”

“Se—” He hung up on me before I could stop him, ask what was going on, demand some sort of explanation.

Serenity, pregnant? Was that why she had gone home?

But that was preposterous. The two of us had always used protection, and even if we hadn’t, could she really have gotten pregnant in that short of an amount of time?

On a hunch, I headed to her bathroom, looking in the trash can. Sure enough, right at the top, there was the discarded strip of a pregnancy test, with two stripes, marking it positive.

So she was pregnant then.

I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, not without talking to her first. But how had Sebastian wound up thinking that I had gotten her pregnant? And what was I supposed to do to fix this?

I couldn’t very well just leave things the way that they currently were, with misunderstandings all over the place and the woman that I loved six hours away from me and pregnant with someone else’s baby. There had to be something that I could do.

But I couldn’t do anything right now. It was getting late in the morning, and I knew that Ryan had to be worrying since I hadn’t shown up