Page 39 of The Tiger's Secret Baby (Savage Shifters Special Ops 4)

18

Damian

Iswore that my world just got turned upside down. I felt as though I had been hit in the head with a sledge hammer.

I have a daughter. I am a father.

Those thoughts rolled through my head non-stop. I simply could not grasp the concept that I had a daughter. I had a daughter for ten years that I never knew about.

I had never been so confused in my life.

First, I was angry. Seething angry. How dared Ember keep a secret like this from me. How dared she not tell me when she found out she was pregnant. She should have told me when I came back from boot camp.

I got that she was trying to protect me and herself. I needed to go with Lucian, to have his back, so he didn’t get himself killed when he was blind with grief over Cedric’s death. However, many men and women are in the military and they have children. And they are darn good parents, too. I would have liked to have the choice.

Second, I was so angry and sad that I missed ten years of my daughter’s life. I missed her first steps, her first words, her first shift, everything. I missed it all. It was stolen from me.

And I knew that I would have been a wonderful father. She missed out on having a mother and a father in her life. That was not fair to either of us.

Third, I was caught between being so angry at Ember that I never wanted to see her again and being in love with her.

Ember never did anything out of meanness or spite. She didn’t keep Rose from me because she was angry with me or was hurt because we drifted apart. She truly thought that she was doing the right thing.

I guessed that she simply hadn’t looked at all sides of the issue before she made her decision. She didn’t think about what Rose would miss out on and what I would miss out on if we never knew each other.

There was also the other issue of when she decided to finally tell me. She should have told me before the mission ever began. She should have taken me aside when she first laid eyes on me at the security office and told me, “Oh, by the way, when you come out to the farm you are going to meet your daughter.” There were numerous other occasions when she could have told me as well.

I was also extremely humiliated by the fact that everyone else in the entire world knew that Rose was my daughter except for me. Gage knew. The other kids knew. I didn’t know. I was too blind to see what they saw.

To be fair, though, I did have half of the culpability in this situation. I let my relationship with Ember slide. I hadn’t kept in touch during these last ten years. I was the one who stopped writing letters as often. She was the last one to send a letter. I never answered it.

When I left the army, I could have sought her out. I could have asked how she was doing.

I will also admit that I knew what the consequences would be of having sex with Ember without protection. I knew that’s how babies were made. When we made love, I was excited about the idea of starting a family with her, and the sooner the better. I wanted a whole streak, consisting of Ember, me, and a lot of cubs.

I knew that a woman could get pregnant the first time she had sex. We had sex a couple of times before I left. It simply never occurred to me that I managed to get her pregnant, and I never asked.

How could I be angry with her when I was just as much at fault?

Going back to the love aspect -- I loved Ember. I was man enough to admit that I was in love with her and always had been. That was why I never had a serious relationship with anyone else.

Could I marry a woman I couldn’t trust?

Then, I had to ask myself why couldn’t I trust her? She never lied to me. She never tried to hide anything from me. She did try to talk to me and tell me about Rose. I was the one who interrupted her.

If I had known that Ember was pregnant, what would have changed? I would have still gone to war with Lucian. What would our relationship had been like? Would Ember have made the difference in the lives of the shifter kids who needed her so much?

My brain was on a see-saw, and I felt as though I were going insane.

I spent a week at the office going out of my mind. I was supposed to be writing a detailed report on everything that happened during the last week. All I could think about was Ember and Rose.

On Wednesday, I called Ember and asked if I could pick up Rose and take her for some dinner. She readily agreed.

I could tell that she wanted to talk to me about us, but I cut her off before she could say anything. I wasn’t ready to deal with that quite yet.

Rose was waiting outside for me when I arrived at five that afternoon. We decided on some Mexican food. Apparently, that was her favorite kind of food. I had so much to learn about my little girl.

After we ordered our food, Rose started talking. She told me her favorite color (forest green), and her favorite kind of music (classic rock – especially KISS, Def Leppard, and Journey), and that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. She told me everything that she thought I needed to know about herself.

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