am I? And exactly how much did I drink to get here?”
Rocco breaks the news since the concern on Dimitri, Smith, and Estelle’s faces steal their ability to talk. “You’re in the hospital. Dimitri shot you.” His last two words come out with a groan, compliments of Dimitri’s fist landing in his stomach.
Always willing to push the boundaries when it comes to Dimitri, Rocco laughs before asking, “Was I supposed to keep that a secret? My bad.”
I half groan, half laugh, the humor in Rocco’s voice too strong for the bland white walls and antiseptic smell surrounding me to discount. I’ve awoken in a room like this before. Thankfully, this time around, I’m not alone.
“It was for the best,” Smith says, not only jumping into the conversation but between Dimitri and Rocco before they come to blows. “Your appendix was a mess. When it ruptured, the infection spread to your abdomen. The sepsis was severe. In a way, it was lucky Dimitri shot you. It forced your stubborn ass to the hospital and allowed the doctors to treat the infection before it became life-threatening.”
He’s joking, right?
He honestly doesn’t want me to believe being shot saved my life.
Actually, come to think of it, it sounds about right. I’m nothing close to ordinary, so why wouldn’t a bullet be my savior?
As memories of what had me admitted slowly roll into my head, my heart dives down low. So deep, I feel its thuds in my toes when I ask, “Is Audrey okay?”
“She’s alive,” Dimitri answers calmly. “Thanks to you.”
“Did she…” I don’t want to finish my sentence. I’ve given Dimitri enough reasons to hate me. I don’t want more added to the stack. My parents hurt his wife. They treated his daughter like scum, so I really don’t want to tell him everything isn’t as it seems.
Dimitri scoops up my hand in his in an almost-nurturing manner. Almost. He still has a little bit to go in regard to being gentle. I don’t mind. I like him rough and ready. His dominance is one of his most alluring features. “She told me everything.”
“Everything?” I shouldn’t be interrogating him. I’m neither his wife nor the mother of his child, but I can’t help myself. The connection between us has always been explosive, and even with me being laid up in a hospital bed, it is the most blistering it’s ever been. It has me thinking I can do no wrong and more than willing to risk punishment just to see how far my newfound abilities extend.
My heart sinks even lower than my toes when Dimitri signals for us to be left alone. Rocco and Smith are his closest confidants, so for him to want privacy from them means this must be big. It honestly makes me feel ill, like more than my life is on the line right now.
Dimitri waits for Estelle to press her lips to my temple and join the boys outside before he says way too casually, “Audrey told me everything. How India forced her to come to Hopeton to gather semen samples. The surrogacy. India’s last-minute change of heart when she held on longer than expected after Fien’s birth, and how you tried to save her even knowing she could one day be your competition.” His gaze clings to my face as the slightest smirk curves his lips. “She even told me how India tried to kill her when she confessed to pouring a mixture of tomato soup, baby oil, and corn starch over your nightgown when you passed out so Maestro would believe you had miscarried.”
What is he saying?
I don’t understand what he means.
Dimitri doesn’t laugh, joke, or glower at the shocked mask slipped over my face. He merely clears it away with the quickest brush of his fingers. It’s a callous yet gentle touch that makes my heart rate soar as much as his murmured comment, “You didn’t miscarry, Roxanne.”
If he’s about to say I didn’t miscarry because I was never pregnant, he can stop right now. I saw our baby, clear as day, directly in front of me. I’m not skilled at pregnancy, and I’ve never trained to be a sonographer, but I know what I saw. Deep down in my heart, I know that the little black blob on the screen was our baby.
It looked almost identical to the jellybean on the strip of images Dimitri dangles in front of me. “Does this look familiar?”
I clamp my hand over my mouth to hold back my