Page 62 of This Wild Heart

God, his family. I sank my head into my hands and groaned. “I don’t even know.”

“Well …” Louise sighed. “One good thing I’ll say about all this.”

I lifted my head. “What?”

She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead, easing the bottle out of his mouth and shifting him to her shoulder to pat his back.

“Little Leo here just stole all your thunder, sunshine. I don’t think anyone will be watching you too closely now.”

“True.”

“Or,” she amended. “They’ll be even more curious since you’re now raising his surprise son together with no warning, and they’ll watch you like a hawk to see how you’re going to react because this family is notoriously protective of their own.”

I gave her a long look. “Does that feel helpful?”

“Nope.”

Chapter 16

Parker

Anya found me sitting at the foot of my bed, elbows braced on my thighs and my head in my hands.

“Louise just left. She brought supplies and somewhere for Leo to sleep tonight.”

Leo.

Something sharp lanced through my ribs, and I breathed through it.

“I’ll keep him in my room tonight,” she continued, eyeing me carefully. “I’m guessing you don’t have much experience with babies.”

I managed a slight shake of my head, my eyes pinching shut slightly.

Everything hurt. Ached. My skin and my bones. My head was pounding. My chest tight. Not a single inch of my body didn’t feel the impact of this.

“He’s been fed, and we got him back to sleep. We don’t … we don’t know his sleep schedule, so it’s hard to say how long he’ll be down. When Willa was this age, she still woke up several times every night.”

How was she so calm?

It felt like someone locked a scream deep in my chest, and it pressed violently inside me, clawing desperately to find a way out, but I fucking refused to let it. I’d absorb it into my skin, even if it meant feeling the unease for days.

This situation right here was what that saying was made for: fuck around and find out.

I’d done that. I’d done that plenty, and this was what happened. I couldn’t look Anya in the eye and tell her a single solitary thing about the woman who dropped off that baby. Other than where she lived at the time, yet I sure as hell couldn’t find my way back there if someone asked.

It felt like a sick cosmic joke, coming on the heels of that incredible sex with Anya.Oh, you think you’re getting better? You think it’s this easy to move on?

Think again, asshole.

My eyes remained closed, and it took a second to make sure my throat worked well enough to form words. They were heavy in my chest, and the effort it took to dredge them up was considerable.

“How old is he?” I asked, and the scraping, rough sound that came out of my mouth sounded like someone else was speaking.

“Based on his birth certificate, about six weeks.”

Something horrid and bitter clawed up my throat, but I swallowed that down. The tattoo on the side of my ribs felt like it was screaming too, like it was writhing on my skin. If that was fresh when I met her, when we … when I spent the night with her, it wasn't long before my dad died.

Anya came closer, and each step had my heart rate spiking. At my feet were photo albums that I’d torn from the closet. Sheila sent them with me when I was home a few months earlier.

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