Page 47 of The Backdraft
“You’ve got it?”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
Dropping what she was doing, she ran to the bed and flung herself down beside me. When I didn’t move to click on it, she shoved me gently.
“Open it! What’s the big deal? You know it’s one of them.”
Nodding absently, I clicked on the email. I followed the link to the results on auto-pilot, as I tried to keep myself from spiraling. Shayna was right, I did know that it was either Archer’s or Liam’s. The big deal was that I suddenly cared a lot more about which one of them it was.
TWENTY ONE
ARCHER
Darcy:I’m on my way.
Darcy:I got the snacks this time.
Darcy:And we can stop one time. One.
I chuckled, reading her texts as they came through. Message received. I typed out a text and sent it, even though she’d be pulling into my driveway in a couple of minutes.
Me:So you don’t want me to bring the trail mix?
Her response was almost instant.
Darcy:Leave your bird food at home.
I didn’t respond to that, not wanting her to continue texting while driving. Grabbing my bag off the foot of the bed, I headed downstairs, double checking to make sure everything was locked up on my way. This trip back to her parents’ was shorter than the one we took for Thanksgiving, and the way my schedule landed, I didn’t need to take any time off. My plan had originally been to talk up the trips to visit Darcy’s family in front of the guys, and especially the chief, but over the last couple of weeks, I’d found myself talking about her without trying. When a couple of the men were discussing what they were getting their wives and girlfriends for Christmas, I chimed in. When Ryan started talking about how his Thanksgiving went, I’d told him about Darcy’s family traditions. What would’ve felt like oversharing in a conversation two months ago, suddenly felt oddly natural.
When I wasn’t talking about her, I was thinking about her. It would’ve been annoying if I didn’twantto think about her. But I did. I liked her sass, the way she’d hit me with these out-of-pocket witty comebacks that had me simultaneously wanting to burst out laughing, and wrap my hand around her brown tresses she usually threw into a ponytail. I liked how she was unapologetically her in almost every scenario she walked into. More than anything, I liked how, for the first time in forever, opening up to someone about my past didn’t feel terrifying—didn’t feel like a weakness or something to be pitied. Being in her presence felt like a balm to every broken part of me, and even though she might not be able to fix it, she dulled the pain until it was tolerable. Despite how good it felt, it still scared the shit out of me. Letting her in, letting her see all the dark parts of my past, was terrifying. My instinct was to shut her out, to push her away, but now there was a piece of me that was growing bigger by the day that fought against that instinct. I wanted to let her in, and that was something I was struggling to wrap my head around.
When her car pulled into the driveway, I noticed there was an absence of music playing, and her smile as I opened the passenger door was significantly less forced this time around.
“Good morning!” she greeted, and the color in her cheeks reminded me of the way she looked the other day when I walked in on her with her vibrator. Her hair had still been tousled from the ride home, her lips rosy against her flushed skin, and they looked so damn soft, I’d wanted nothing more than to kiss her senseless. But that would’ve broken the rules we set, and never had I hated a boundary more than in that moment, watching the purple length of her toy disappear between her legs. I shouldn’t have stayed, her breathy moans had driven me mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I had driven the short drive back to my house hard as a rock, replaying her every movement, her every whimper, on repeat in my head. The first thing I did when I pulled into my driveway was run straight to the shower, taking myself in my hand until I painted the walls the way I wanted to paint her—
Shut it down.
“Good morning,” I said, clearing my throat. “How’d you sleep?” I read that pregnancy made women have to pee a bunch, and some got insomnia that could keep them up for hours in the middle of the night. It sounded like hell.
“Pretty good! I miss sleeping on my stomach, but I’ve adjusted.” Backing us out of my driveway, she shot me a smile. “I got you a coffee. It’s black, but there’s cream and sugar in the bag if you want it.”
“Black is great. Thank you.” I grabbed the coffee and took a sip, letting the hot, bitter liquid wake me up as she drove us through town. When we got to the highway, she took the turn sharper than I’d anticipated, my coffee splashing up and onto my sweatshirt.
“Crap! I’m sorry!”
“No worries—that’s the beauty of black sweatshirts. You got napkins somewhere?” I asked as I opened the glove box. The napkins were there, scrunched up in the corner, but right next to them were ultrasound photos.
Darcy noticed my pause. “Oh, yeah. I had the twenty-week anatomy scan yesterday. Those are the photos they gave me. You can look at them if you want.”
Napkins forgotten, I grabbed the strand of black and white photos and flipped them until they were right-side up. The first thing I saw was the teeny slope of a nose, the dip where its eyes were, and the little outline of lips. Two feet were sticking straight up, little toes poking out from the ends. It wasn’t cute—it was a grainy, splotchy, black and white photo—but something about it had me fighting back a smile.
Darcy cleared her throat, teeth chewing at her bottom lip anxiously. “I guess now’s a good time to tell you that I got the paternity test results back the morning after you walked in on me um . . .” She trailed off, her cheeks turning a soft pink as she cleared her throat. “Anyway, I was going to text you, but then I thought you might want to hear it in person.” Her eyes slid my way. “But now I’m thinking that might’ve been a mistake.”
Three things happened at once: my chest tightened, my stomach dropped, and the rest of me stilled, waiting on whatever words she was going to say next. There were only two things she could say, and in the seconds I had before she continued, I mentally ran through both, but neither one eased my anxiety.
“What’d it say?”
She took her eyes off the road for a couple of seconds to lock with mine. “It’s a match. You’re the dad.”
