Page 30 of Fighting His Fate
“You don’t get to decide how I handle this.”
“I’m keeping you from making the biggest mistake of your life. Don’t worry about the twins. I’ll turn around and get Razorback to come with me. If he can diagnose a disease from a purple diaper, he can damn well change one, too.”
“Stop it. I don’t want to go home, I don’t want to talk to John, I don’t want to be engaged to him, and I absolutely will not beg him to take me back!”
Brett took the exit. “This is all my fault. I never should have brought you with me.” He flew through the EZ-Pass lane.
“Damn it, you’re not listening. Pull over.”
“No.”
“I said pull over. I’m not your hostage and you don’t get to order me to go home because you disagree with me. Now pull the fuck over, Champion!”
He swerved into the parking lot of a diner, pulling diagonally across two spaces and throwing the transmission into park. “Tell me it isn’t because of me.”
The lie sat on the tip of her tongue, but he was right when he’d judged her so quickly, saying she was honest. That hadn’t always been the case. Her credibility had been hard-won over her first few years in the Bryant family, and it wasn’t something she was willing to give up now, even if it meant looking like a fool. “It isn’t just because of you,” she hedged.
“Goddamn i—”
She touched his arm. “Hear me out.” Tears threatened, but she held them in check, the things she was about to share touching parts of her memory that clutched tightly to pain, even after all these years. “I was adopted.” She waited for him to interrupt, but he seemed to understand this was important. “I spent some time in foster care before I came to live with the Bryants. About a year and a half.”
“How old were you?”
“Eight. Almost ten when I got out.” She made sure her voice was steady before she spoke again. “The Bryants were good people, the kind who knew right from wrong, but I wasn’t like them. At least, not when I first got there. I was a liar and a thief. I had no credibility whatsoever.”
She’d never told anyone this, not the raw side of the equation, not the hole that had been punched in the wall of her childhood. “I wanted them to keep me, but I knew I had to be good. Better than I’d ever been in my life.”
“You had to be perfect.”
She nodded, a tear falling. “And I never stopped.” She took a ragged breath, mentally cursing her emotional display. “I’m twenty-seven years old, and I was going to marry a man I didn’t love just to make them happy.” She could see it now, see it clearly. All her discomfiture, all her misgivings.
“You don’t love him?”
She shrugged with her whole arms. “He was nice.” She pointed to a man in a polo shirt and khaki shorts getting out of a minivan. “That guy seems nice, too. Does that mean I should marry him? Is that what a rational person would do?” A stream of children filed out of the van, along with a woman.
“I think he’s already taken.”
She smacked his arm. “You know what I mean.”
He reached across and opened the glove box, withdrawing a small packet of tissues and handing them to her. “Razorback’s a wuss. Ten bucks says there’s a nail file in there, too.”
She pulled a tissue out of the package. “Thank you.”
He crossed his arms, exhaling on a hum. “So.”
“So.”
“So this isn’t really about me.”
“Nope.”
“Not even a little?”
She sighed on a smile. “Fine, if it will soothe your ego, it was a little bit about you.”
“How, exactly?”
“Chemistry.” She looked at her hands. “I never felt that before.”
