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“I don’t know if you’re drunk or if you’ve lost your mind, but this conversation is over.” She turns and hurries to her room, a room she hasn’t spent any time in in a week except to get dressed and showered, and I should have known then, the other day when I told her to move all her stuff into my room, and she refused saying she thought it was best we still had our space, that she still had one damn hand up, holding me back while barely letting me in.

Now I know why.

I’m still standing, glaring at the spot she was in before she went to her room, when she returns. In the distance, Lucy’s whining, this sad, soulless moan, but all I see is the bag in Cara’s hand.

“Sober up and when you realize how big of a dick you’ve been to me tonight, maybe I’ll talk to you. But don’t you ever think you’ll get anything from me again, unless it has to do with the baby. You can go to hell, Braxton, you jumping to your worthless conclusions tonight tells me one damn thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That I’m glad I realized you’re the asshole you are when I’m only starting to fall in love with you, not after I’d completely fallen, because the pain I feel right now, listening to this bullshit, would tear me to shreds if it happened later.”

I slam back on my heels. Love? Fucking love? Bullshit. Before I can call her on it, she closes the space between us, not because she wants to be close to me, but because I’m blocking her way to the door and her freedom.

And it’s only then, as she gets close, that I see the devastation on her face, in her eyes.

She’s not fucking lying.

I’ve destroyed her.

“Thank you for showing me that the words you told me about treasuring me were just a bunch of bullshit, just like every other man I’ve ever known, except for Jimmy. Thank you for showing me who you really are now, before I was in too deep to get out.”

“Cara,” I say, my voice ragged. My tongue is thick. Holy fuck. How much Scotch did I down tonight?

I reach for her but she slides by me.

I’m too slow to move, and all I see is her backside, her beautiful ass in that dress that in any other circumstance, I’d want to tear off her to get to the prize beneath, and I must be drunk, and stupid, because even now, as pissed as I still am, as hurt as she is, I still want to do that.

“Cara.”

She pulls open the door, and then turns, giving me a blank expression. I haven’t seen it since the night I first brought her here. And it kills me.

Kills me like a damn knife to my chest.

“Graham…that guy I was with tonight? He’s gay. He’s been my friend since we were kids and I’d tell you why I was out with him tonight, instead of with my parents, but you don’t deserve an explanation. Fuck you for not thinking better of me.”

The slam of the door behind her is almost as loud as her parting shot.

Chapter 26

Cara

I’m in desperate need of coffee and eye drops as I shuffle into Graham’s kitchen the next morning. My head is pounding, I’ve had barely an hour of sleep, and my stomach is screaming for me to fill it. I showed up at his front door, unable to call him and hoping like hell he hadn’t moved in the year since I’ve seen him, and as soon as he opened the door, I collapsed into his arms.

He held me while I sobbed, barely able to get out the story through my crying and wretched sounds until I could cry no more, but had lost my voice.

I’ve lost more than my voice.

I still can’t believe the way Braxton spoke to me. The callous, hurtful things he said are permanently etched into my brain and every time I blink, my eyes sting from the pain but it’s the flash of his furious face when I first looked at him after seeing he had a picture of Graham that hurts more than anything.

He thinks I’d cheat on him. He thinks I’d go to a bar and get drunk while pregnant. He thinks I’d betray him in such horrific ways, I still can’t fathom it. And he might have been drinking, but he wasn’t so completely wasted as to not understand what he was saying.

“God,” I groan, filling my cup of coffee from the prepared pot on the counter. Screw decaf today. One cup of the good stuff won’t hurt anything.

“Not God,” Graham says. His voice makes me jerk, and coffee sloshes over the side of my mug. “But perhaps your knight in shining armor.” He walks straight to me, and I don’t have time to brush the spilled coffee off the dress I’m still in from last night. I passed out on the couch before I could change.

“How’s my princess?” He presses his lips to the top of my head and sniffs. “Besides stinky.”

“Broken.”