Page 5 of Angel

While she knew her health, as well as that of her baby’s, was not worth keeping her silence, she also knew that Tessa would arrive faster than any ambulance. Tessa and Bear lived in the house next to hers. Plus, she had a key. Not that Angel needed to lock her door—she lived on club property—but she knew the locked door made Bree feel more secure. Angel would do anything to keep Bree happy and healthy. She’d spent too many years in her own personal hell. Angel would not allow her to feel fear again.

Tessa burst through Angel’s bedroom door. Angel was both thankful and not that Bear wasn’t with her. Bear likely was home with their infant daughter, Maggie. Both parents couldn’t leave her alone in the house. But Bear also had a very soothing presence, which was belied by his very large stature. Bear was a giant teddy bear in disguise. If Bree woke up and found Angel bleeding like this, it was Bear that Angel would want with her daughter.

The two had a close bond since Bear had rescued Bree off the side of the road. That friendship was only rivaled by that of Cage’s with Bree.

Cage was Bree’s personal Superman. Her teenage crush on him was obvious, though no one ever mentioned it. Bree looked at Cage like he was infallible. Angel got it; the man had selflessly donated a kidney to Bree, who at the time had been nearly a stranger, and saved her life. Didn’t mean that Angel didn’t wish Bree’s new kidney had come from anyone else.

Tessa immediately went into doctor mode. “We need to call an ambulance.” She put her bag on the end of the bed, putting exam gloves on.

Angel winced. She should have known better. “Bree,” she said with a grimace as an extremely sharp cramp shook her insides.

Tessa carefully leaned over and pulled Angel’s pajama bottoms off. “Give me a second to examine you and then we’ll call someone to stay with her. Get emergency services on the phone and put them on speaker.”

Angel tried not to feel embarrassment as Tessa, one of her closest friends, started to examine her most intimate parts. For some ridiculous reason, Angel worried she’d left a scrap of toilet paper in her pussy lips or if Tessa was judging her for not keeping up with trimming her pubic hair.

“It’s a vaginal bleed,” Tessa confirmed. She pulled gauze pads out of her bag and started to wipe up the bleeding. “How far along are you again?”

That dreaded night at the club’s bar came back to her. Angel had to tighten her jaw to keep her chin from trembling. “Just over five weeks.”

“And your last period?”

Angel swallowed hard. “It was supposed to start last week. That’s why I took the damn test. I know it was early but I’m never late. Not even when I was fighting a damn war.” Angel forced herself to look down her body at Tessa. Her friend’s grave expression said it all. “My baby?” she practically choked over the question.

Tessa licked her lips and shook her head. “We need to get you to the hospital to confirm, but…”

Angel squeezed her eyes shut, wishing and praying harder than she ever had before that this was a dream, a nightmare. She just needed to wake up.

Her baby… A single tear escaped her right eye. Her chin quaked uncontrollably as her heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.

Tessa didn’t have to say it. She knew. A part of her had known as soon as the cramping had started.

She’d lost her baby.

Angel was numb. She barely listened to the OB doctor as she explained that Angel’s pregnancy had never been viable. It was a chemical pregnancy. Angel would have Tessa explain later what that meant in more detail. At the moment, it didn’t matter. She didn’t care that the pregnancy had never been real, as the doctor explained. If it wasn’t for her taking the pregnancy test, Angel likely would have never even known about the baby and would have just had an unusually heavy period that lasted slightly longer than normal.

Angel hated how the doctor kept calling it a false positive or a fake pregnancy. To her, her baby had been real. She’d only known about him or her for a little over two days, but they’d been very real.

Tessa stayed with her the entire time, holding her hand and speaking with the doctor on her behalf. Tessa had been the one to call Bear, who had called Cage to stay with Bree. Angel had been panicked to learn it was Cage coming over, but Tessa had assured Angel that Bear had made it sound like it was Tessa who had needed to leave unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Angel knew that would never fly with Cage. He’d never believe that Bear would allow his wife to leave like that without him, even if he did have the excuse of needing to stay home to watch Maggie.

Angel wasn’t sure how much she cared. Cage would care and protect Bree. That much was certain. But for Cage to learn that she’d been pregnant? That she’d lost her baby?

No. Angel was not ready for Cage to learn about that.

Cage was… Well, Angel didn’t know what Cage was to her anymore. When she’d first arrived in Mount Grove to prospect for the Via Daemonia, Cage had already been a prospect. He’d been so cocky and self-assured. She knew his type well. The kind of guy who could snap his fingers and have anyone with boobs fall all over him. She’d seen it many times with Cage and the Honeys, Cage and the club’s hang-arounds, Cage and the women in town…

She could grudgingly admit that he’d been different since their quick fuck in the hospital bathroom. Angel was still ashamed that she’d had sex with Cage with only a wooden door separating them from her new daughter. Thankfully, she knew Bree had slept through it and didn’t suspect a thing.

Despite Cage’s proclamation that he wanted to date Angel, to see what they could have together, Angel had seen him many times with other women since she’d turned him down. It only proved to her that she had been right in saying no. He was not a one-woman kind of man. That knowledge, though, did not stop the hurt. It didn’t stop the want.

It certainly had not stopped her from getting so blind drunk at Demon’s that she didn’t even know who the father of her deceased baby was. She only had flashes of that night, but the most prominent was seeing Cage in the corner of the bar with some blonde. Using their tongues to check the other’s tonsils. That had been what had prompted Angel to challenge Pumpkin to a drinking contest.

She recalled being horny and feeling the hands of the man on her body. She knew the sex had been consensual. Beyond that, though… Not much.

Hell, there’d been a few heart-stopping moments when she’d tried to figure out if one her club brothers had been the father. After Angel had confessed to the ol’ ladies about her pregnancy, Tessa had pulled her outside to Harper’s back porch.

“Was it consensual?” Tessa had asked.

“What? Yes, of course.”

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