Page 79 of RomeAntically Challenged
“So you can feel sorry for me? No thanks,” he said, and considering the amount of water he had to trudge through, he was moving rather quickly.
“You wantmeto feel sorry foryou? The guy with a booty-call list a hundred sticky notes long?” Hearing about someone else’s shitty night might distract her from her own.
“Yeah, you know me,” he said, tossing his arms in the air, then winced. He cracked his neck and went on—talking and walking. “The town stud, theplay it fast and looseguy, the guy who gets to see his kid only on weekends, the guy who no one fucking thought to tell that his dad, who didn’t give two shits about him growing up, now sits in his seat at family dinners.”
Right, his dad.His stage-three cancer patient of a dad whose secrets she was legally bound to keep. Not that this would be the time to reveal them. The way Emmitt held his head every time he passed a streetlight was a good indication that if he didn’t take his pain medicine and lie down, he was in for an unpleasant night of pain.
“How blurry is your vision?” she asked, and he came to a hard stop.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t lecture me, don’t diagnose me. And please, God, don’t go all Nurse Annie on me. I don’t want a ride. I want peace and quiet.”
“You can kiss that ride home goodbye,” she said, but she was talking to the air because he’d taken off again. This time when Annie pulled up alongside him, she made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere. He glared at her. “And I’m a PA, not a nurse. I’m pretty much a doctor who can’t do surgeries. Which means I am a badass in a white lab coat. It also means you can’t tell me where to drive.”
She thought she heard him chuckle, but he could have been mumbling for her to fuck off.
“It’s your night,” she continued. “Spend it how you want.”
Clearly, he wanted to spend it walking home in the pouring rain. And since he seemed set on this ridiculous plan, Annie followed right alongside him.
Him in the rain, her in her car, the entire way. Every so often, she’d flash her headlights at him and he’d flash her the bird in return. It wasn’t until he reached the driveway that he finally stopped—keeping his back to her.
“They kept it from me,” he said, his voice getting lost in the wind. “All of them. Even though they knew how strained my relationship with my dad is,knewI didn’t want him around Paisley, they still went behind my back and let it happen. The people who I thought were my family put Paisley in a position to hide things from me.”
With a shrug that spoke volumes on his emotional state, he turned and met her gaze. Annie felt the air leave her lungs in one long gasp, because he wasn’t angry, as she’d previously thought. No, he was shell-shocked and devastated.
Absolutely, positively heartbroken.
“Oh, Emmitt. I don’t even know what to say. That must have been hard for her to keep from you. And so incredibly hard for you to find out.” Especially the way he did.
Emmitt was already uncertain about his role in Paisley’s life, so desperate to do right by her, to be an active and meaningful presence in her life, that keeping something like this from him was cruel.
“This isn’t a one-time thing either. He’s been coming to dinners for more than four years. Four years! Can you believe that shit?”
“No. I can’t.” Annie knew how crushing it had been to learn that Clark wanted out of their relationship. She couldn’t even imagine the anguish a secret this destructive could cause. “But I am sorry for how this all played out.”
“Me too,” he said, the defeat in his voice nearly tearing her heart in two.
A flash of light cut through the night’s blackness, quickly followed by a booming rumble that had goose bumps dotting her arms. The temperature had fallen, making the drops of rain feel more like little pinpricks against her chilled flesh.
When lightning lit the sky again, he gripped his head and sucked in a few harsh breaths.
“If I were being PA Annie, I’d tell you I have some Excedrin in my purse, but I don’t want to rouse Grumpy Emmitt.”
That earned her a little smile, but she didn’t imagine he’d be vertical longer than it took to stumble through the door and onto the couch.
With a few colorful words directed at Mother Nature, Emmitt made his way up the driveway but stopped short of the front porch, standing in the rain as if it were penance.
Annie parked the car and, grabbing her mom’s pot, climbed out. By the time she reached him, her hair was plastered to her head, her clothes soaked through. The only dry part of Emmitt was the patch of forehead his ballcap protected.
The wind blew the rain sideways, and the streetlights flickered on and off before plunging the entire block into darkness. When Emmitt didn’t move, Annie resigned herself to wait it out by his side until he told her differently. She knew what it was like to be on the outside, and maybe having her next to him would make it a little less painful.
Breathing deep through his nose, he cupped the rim of his cap over and over, tilting his head to the sky. Eyes closed, he let the rain wash down his face.
“Just once,” he said, breaking the silence. “Just one damn time, I’d like to be in the know when it comes to my kid. She’s my fucking kid.” He dropped his head all the way to his chest. “Where do they get off keeping something like this from me?”
She hiked the pot against her hip and with her free hand touched his cheek. As he had the other day, he leaned into it and closed his eyes. “I wish I had been there so you wouldn’t have felt alone in such an emotionally charged moment.”
He looked up at her through rain-spiked lashes. “You can’t help yourself, can you? Annie the Protector is on a mission,” he teased warmly. “Were you born taking care of others or—”
