but at least it was step one.
Telling him about my pregnancy was a problem I had yet to resolve, but I intended to get it done sooner rather than later. These kinds of secrets had a way of getting out to bite you in the ass if you didn’t deal with them correctly. I’d seen the movie and read the book too many times to think it would end any differently for me.
No. There would be no secret pregnancy or secret baby. This baby’s daddy was going to be told, and if he flipped out, well then, so be it. I still would’ve respected him enough to have told him the truth.
Besides, I didn’t know how Caleb felt about children, but maybe after the initial shock, it wouldn’t be so bad. With that thought in mind, I punched in the next number of my to-do list.
Caleb answered with a quiet, gruff, “Hello?”
“Hey. It’s me. Kelly.” Holy moly. It felt like someone had poured all the sand in the desert down my throat.
Unfortunately, Caleb didn’t sound excited to hear from me either. Instead, he sounded flat and maybe even a little pissed. “Hey, Kelly. What’s up?”
“Not much,” I answered hurriedly, unless you count me growing your baby at this exact moment in time—though I didn’t add that bit. “I was wondering, could I come over to your suite later?”
Given how enthusiastically he’d tried to keep me there the other night, I wasn’t expecting the hesitant tone that I got. “Uh. Sure. Okay, what time?”
“Couple of hours?” I suggested. Caleb agreed, again not quite as enthusiastically as I might’ve hoped, but we agreed on a time and hung up.
When the time came for me to go to his suite, I was a puddle of sweat and nerves. I knocked softly on his door and was surprised when he opened it looking like he’d gone a few rounds with the devil himself.
Whatever was bothering him though, he pushed it back when he saw me and wrapped me up in a warm hug. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said simply, following him into the room. I declined his offer of a drink and took a seat on one of his couches, making myself at home as he’d invited me to do. “What’s up with you? You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks,” he scoffed, a rare, shy smile curling up the corners of his lips. “I feel okay, though it’s no thanks to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I took your advice. I called Elizabeth.” I froze as he said it. It’d been my idea, and I’d wanted him to follow through, but I also thought I’d know when he saw her.
I couldn’t let him see that I was suddenly plagued by uncertainty and worry about whether seeing her had made him realize that he was, in fact, still in love with her. “How’d that go?”
Caleb smiled and raked a hand through his hair. His shoulders seemed lighter. Whatever else had happened, it had to have to been worth it to see him looking so much more carefree.
“It went well. I’m glad I did it. It made me feel much better about the whole thing.” The truth was in his eyes when he spoke the words, and it was a beautiful sight to see. Caleb was finally free of Elizabeth and all the messed up, lingering emotions that’d been festering for so long.
I wished that I didn’t have to drop a fresh bomb on him, that he could’ve had just one day of peace. But the truth had to come out, and I knew that despite my personal feelings on the timing, sooner was always better than later.
The words wouldn’t come to me as I stood there watching him, the way he moved so much freer now. Should I just blurt it out? How the hell did I tell him?
Just as I was about to launch into the conversation, things took a turn for the worse. The much, much worse.
“Seeing her and speaking to her about what happened back then, it made me think a lot. It made me realize some things about the life I’d chosen when I chose Destitute over her.”
“It did?” My voice was small now as I waited for him to finish his thought process. A part of me already knew what was coming though. By instinct or powers of deduction, I didn’t know. I just did.
“Yeah. For example, she made me realize that I’d make a terrible damn father right now. Kids were always part of