When the Bough Breaks (Rose Gardner Investigations #6) - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,48
died. That didn’t happen.”
He lifted his bottle to his lips and took a sip. “Your decisions made that agreement null and void.”
“Is that what we had?” I asked, unable to keep the anger out of my voice. “An agreement?”
“Wasn’t it?” he asked casually. “Friends with benefits? It was your suggestion, if I remember correctly. You’re the one who changed the terms.”
He sounded perfectly reasonable, but the slight tremor of his hand clutching the bottle gave him away. My presence had shaken him, and it wasn’t just because he’d believed he had an intruder.
“When did you pair up with Hardshaw?”
He studied me for a long moment. “That is irrelevant to the reason you’re here.”
“Is it?” I asked, taking a step toward the island. “Did you get Mike hooked up with them?”
He paused, then took a drink, and as he lowered the bottle, he said, “Figured that part out, did you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Although admittedly, it took me longer than it should have.” Resting my hands on the island counter, I held his gaze. “Violet put it together somehow. She had evidence he was up to somethin’, and she gave it to her attorney to be released to me after her death. The day after she died, there was a break-in at her attorney’s office, only her attorney didn’t realize that his safe had been opened until a few days later, when I went in for the reading of her will.”
His brow lifted. “Is that so?”
“I know you broke in and stole it, James.”
His brow shifted even higher. “That’s a bold accusation, Rose.”
“And it was a bold and skillful break-in. Totally within your wheelhouse.”
He finished off his beer, only to get up and grab another from the fridge. He lifted his bottle to me and said, “I’d offer you one, but under the circumstances…”
His voice trailed off as his gaze dipped to my stomach—then it quickly lifted, as though staring at the evidence of my betrayal was too much to bear, because the other option was that he’d had a change of heart about the baby, and my nerves were too fried to entertain that possibility.
He twisted off the cap and took another long drink.
“What did you steal from Violet’s attorney’s office?” I asked in a hard tone.
“Steal’s an ugly word, Rose.”
“What did you take from Violet’s attorney’s office, James?”
“I didn’t take anything from Gary Gilliam’s office,” he said good-naturedly, then took another long drink.
“Don’t play games with me, James Malcolm,” I said, getting pissed. He’d used the attorney’s name to toy with me. When he didn’t answer, I let loose. “You think I betrayed you, but you betrayed me long before I found out I was carryin’ our baby.” My voice broke. “Our baby.”
He shook his head with a sharp jerk. “That baby sure as hell isn’t mine.”
“Then why didn’t you sign the papers giving up paternal rights?”
“Because you wanted me to.” I expected there to be vindictiveness in his voice, but I saw an unexpected flicker of emotion in his eyes.
Fear washed through me. Did he want to be part of the baby’s life? If so, that was a good thing, right? But I thought about his life—his garage door hadn’t opened, and his response had been to walk into his house presuming someone was waiting to ambush him. How in the hell could he help raise a baby in that kind of environment?
But even if he’d changed his mind, there was no way in hell I’d cut Joe out of his or her life. Family was more than DNA. It was love and commitment, and Joe had shown us that in spades.
“What do you want, James?”
His mouth parted in surprise, but then he recovered, his eyes turning hard. “It’s too late for what I want.”
“To get rid of this baby? That was never gonna happen. But you clearly want something else, otherwise you would have signed those papers and been done with me. So I’m gonna ask you again: What. Do. You. Want?”
He started to say something, but he raised the bottle to his mouth instead, downing the rest of the beer before wordlessly returning to the refrigerator—this time bypassing the fridge and reaching above it to grab a bottle of whiskey.
I was about to tell him that getting drunk wasn’t the answer, but I was too hung up on wondering why he was getting drunk. It wasn’t lost on me that he hadn’t kicked me out. Would the alcohol loosen his tongue enough that he would finally tell