Page 22 of Ruined

Tristan sighed, sadness ringing in his eyes. “I thought so,” he whispered.

Tears silently slid down my cheeks in quick succession as I looked down at my flat belly—my flat belly that was probably growing Joey’s little kid.

I sobbed, my lips trembling and my shoulders shaking.

Tristan sat beside me against the wall and pulled me onto his lap, wrapping his arms around me. I burrowed against his chest, resisting the urge to wail. How cruel could the creator be?

“How can you not hate me right now?” I asked Tristan, my voice muffled against his muscular, bare chest.

Tristan sighed, tightening his arms around me. “I could never hate you, Addy,” he confessed. I sniffled. Could he still love me so much that he was okay with me carrying another man’s baby—anotherpresident’sbaby? Arival’sbaby? “Does it upset me that you’re carrying another man’s baby? Yes, of course, it does, but I can’t be angry atyou. You and Joey were having sexwaybefore I stepped back into the picture.” Still, despite his words, bitterness lingered in his voice. I knew he hated the fact that I felt so much for Joey, that I loved him so fucking much.

At the mention of Joey, my tears came harder. “I’m pregnant with his kid, and he’ll never know,” I sobbed. “I’ll never get the opportunity to see him hold his baby. He would have been a fucking fantastic dad,” I cried. Joey was a hardass, and we were toxic as fuck, but headoredkids. He was so fucking good with them.

Tristan tightened his arms around me. “He would have been ecstatic about it, Addy,” Tristan tried consoling me. “Joey would have gone above and beyond to make sure you and your baby were well and taken care of.”

I wrapped my arms tightly around Tristan’s torso as I cried harder. “What am I going to do?” I asked.

“I think you meanwe,” Tristan gently corrected me. I looked up at him in confusion, my tears clouding my vision. He reached up and gently wiped some of my tears off of my cheeks before he wrapped his arm back around me. “We’re in this together, Addy baby.”

I sniffled. “You’re too damn kind for your own good,” I grumbled as I buried my face back against his chest.

Tristan let out a husky, sexy laugh that had my belly twisting with desire for him, but I tamped it back down. “I just love you, Addy.” I swallowed thickly as my heart skipped a beat. “That has never changed. If loving you means that I have to father a kid that’s not mine, then that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll love this baby as if it were my own,” he promised me.

I tightened my arms around him. Fuck… what in the hell did I ever do to deserve a man like Tristan?

Chapter Eleven

Tristan

Being extremely careful not to wake Addy up, I eased out of bed, not even breathing until my entire body was off the mattress. Now that I knew that she was pregnant, I was going to make sure she got all of the rest that she needed and that she took extremely good care of herself. All of this toxic shit that she had been doing had to come to an end. She wasn’t just thinking of herself anymore.

But I knew that was going to be a fucking fight.

I walked into my connected bathroom and got a quick shower so I could go deal with club shit. I knew I needed to get a run organized and get ready to distribute funds at church today. I’d been slacking on my duties while trying to get Adelaide home.

After getting dressed in a pair of black cargo pants, my black steel-toed boots, a black t-shirt, and my cut, I walked out into the bar room, where Jesup was already behind the bar, talking to a couple of club women about cleaning up the mess from the welcoming back party last night.

Jesup arched an eyebrow at me when he noticed me. “You’re up early,” he noted.

I shrugged. “So are you,” I retorted.

Normally after a welcome home party, all of the club members, including myself, slept extremely late. Like well into the afternoon kind of late. But there had been too much shit on my mind to sleep, Addy being pregnant at the top of that list.

Jesup grinned at me. “I was expecting you to be balls deep inside of Adelaide for a while,” he lightly teased. I scowled at him. He shrugged at me. “What? It’s been years since you’ve been with her.”

I shook my head, thinking about Joey’s death, and then the fact that she had just found out that she was pregnant with his kid on top of it all. No fucking way was I about to sleep with her, much lesstryanything like that. I was a bastard, but I wasn’t that damn cruel. She wasn’t near ready for that kind of intimacy yet.

I nodded my head in the direction of the chapel, signaling for Jesup to follow me into the room. Once we were in the chapel, I shut the doors and locked them. Walking over to one of the windows, I crossed my arms over my broad chest and looked out at two of the prospects working on a car in the garage. “I think she’s pregnant,” I bluntly informed him, cutting straight to the chase.

“Woah,what?” Jesup snapped in surprise. I turned to face him. His face was a mask of absolute shock and disbelief. “You’re fucking serious?” he asked after a moment. “She’s fuckingpregnant?”

I shrugged and heaved a deep sigh. “She woke up in the middle of the night last night to throw up. Probably a bit TMI foryou, but I asked her when her last period was since she didn’t seem sick to me. No high temperature, not throwing up actual food since she didn’t eat anything yesterday. Her period is late.” Jesup’s eyes widened. “I’m going to take her to Dr. Howard when she wakes up so he can run a pregnancy test. She needs to know for sure.”

“Holyfuck, man,” Jesup breathed as he ran his hand through his hair. “How do you feel about that?” That was the question I was dreading. He shook his head. “On second thought, how the fuck doesshefeel about this?”

I was dreading that question even more.

I grunted and stuffed my hands into the pockets of my cargo pants. “I’ll step up and do what I need to do for her,” I told him, though I knew Jesup already figured that much. “I love Addy. I always have. If she’s pregnant with Joey’s kid, it’s not going to change how I feel about her.” I swallowed hard, blowing out a harsh breath as I glared at the table in the center of the room that had the club emblem engraved into it. “As for her… well, she fucking cried herself to sleep last night on the bathroom floor,” I told him quietly, pain lancing through my chest as I thought about how fucking heartbroken she had looked last night. “So, I don’t know how the fuck she’s feeling about this shit. She just lost Joey, only to find out she’s probably carrying his kid. It makes his death a double-edged sword straight through her heart.”

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