Page 21 of Entangled By You
“Well, yeah. Unless you’re telling me you’ve somehow been seeing someone else since he vanished, and I missed it.”
The laughter bubbles up from deep in my belly before bursting from my chest in a breathless wave. I can’t stop. I’m gasping through it, and the tears return, but this time for a far better reason.
Pierce has gone quiet, probably wondering if I’ve finally lost my damn mind, but I don’t care.
All this time, he’s been completely clueless.
When he stormed out of that doctor’s office, instead of putting two and two together and getting four… he somehow landed on negative five.
And this is the man I’m having a baby with?
He’s always been a little slow to catch up, but he more than makes up for it with what he can do with his hands.
Oh, God. Now I’m thinking about his hands. And all the things they’ve done to me.
“Earth to Lexi.” He snaps his fingers in front of my face, pulling me back from the haze.
I blink, dragging myself out of the delirium, and meet his confused stare.
“Explain, Princess.”
That one fucking word in his husky tone sends a shiver sliding down my spine.
“I haven’t been with Evan in months. Like, months before he disappeared. Things between us were... complicated. You know what? That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that there was no one else after him. No one—except you.”
I watch the realization spark behind his eyes like a match catching flame.
He finally gets it.
“You mean…?”
“Yeah. I thought it was pretty damn obvious. Guess not.”
“So, what does that make us?”
“Co-parents? I mean… I kinda hope one day we can be friends again.”
“Friends?” His brow arches, and there’s a teasing note in his voice.
I hold my hand out between us. “Friends.”
His strong fingers wrap around mine, warm and familiar, but instead of the firm shake I expect, his thumb traces a slow, deliberate path across the sensitive skin of my wrist.
“For now,” he says, low and certain.
HELLO FATHERHOOD, GOODBYE LIFE
PIERCE - THREE MONTHS LATER
Lexiand I have been tiptoeing around each other and the house ever since she dropped the bomb that we’re having a baby. She’s been avoiding me like the damn plague. Ditching her usual couch-potato nights and holing up in her bedroom, leaving me alone to stew in my own restless energy, twiddling my fucking thumbs.
The only time she emerges from her self-imposed exile is when I cook. And even then, it's a coin toss whether she’s going to inhale the food like she hasn’t eaten in days or yell from the hallway that the smell is making her morning sickness worse.
She was already too thin when I moved in. Frail in a way that didn’t sit right with me from that night my hands met her waist at the clubhouse. Whatever softness she had left on her petite frame had withered away.
Harlow leaving after everything with Evan hit her harder than she’s letting on to her best friend. She’s been retreating into herself ever since, refusing to take care of her physical needs, let alone her mental ones. Shutting the world out until it comes knocking is easy when she thinks no one is payingattention. Between the weight loss and the constant nausea that hasn’t let up, she needs me—even if she won’t say it out loud. Hell, maybe especially because she won’t.
So, I cook. Every night. It’s the only way I know how to pull her back into the world of the living, even for a little while.
