Page 34 of Bad Boy Bakers, Vol. 2

Grey swung his attention back to his son.

“Before. I’d always felt a kinship with you.

I chalked it up to the fact that you were Rebecca’s.

It was, in a small way, a means of maintaining a connection I missed.

But I didn’t notice the similarities until I was going through all my parents’ stuff.

In the face, you look so much like your mother, but there are other physical characteristics, like that cowlick swirl on the back of your head, that are just like my dad. So I started to wonder.”

“Is that why you came back?” Rebecca whispered.

He looked at her, seeing shades of the girl she’d been, the one he’d loved so much. “Partly. I wanted to know. But I came back for you. For a shot at what we both walked away from all those years ago.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her voice was ragged as she spoke again. “I tried to tell you. New Year’s Eve, when we were clearing the air about our fight. But you didn’t want to talk about the past anymore, and I didn’t want to destroy what we were starting.”

He thought back to that night. To her earnest, worried expression. Grey, I need to tell you—

He’d cut her off, making assumptions. What would he have done if she’d pressed on and revealed the truth then? Would it have changed anything? He supposed that depended on the details.

“Tell us now.”

“Fuck that!” Jonah exploded.

Rachel stepped into his path, into the line of emotional fire. “Jonah, simmer down.”

“How the hell can anyone expect me to calm down? My whole fucking life has been a lie.”

She framed his face. “Let her explain.”

“Explain? How can there be a reasonable explanation for this?”

Every harsh syllable had Rebecca curling in on herself. She’d been wrong to keep the secret, but she didn’t deserve this ambush. Hearing her side of the story had to be the first step toward sorting this shit, and that meant Jonah had to reel in his reaction.

“Ferguson! Find some fucking decorum!” His thundered order reverberated through the kitchen.

Jonah snapped to attention, years of training overcoming his emotional outburst, even as he aimed a baleful glare at Grey. “You aren’t my CO anymore.”

“I don’t give a good damn. Sit. Down.”

Sick and shaking, Rebecca watched the standoff.

For a long moment, it looked as if Jonah was going to mouth off, but Grey simply waited, unblinking, every inch the commander he’d been trained to be.

Resentment rolled off her boy in waves, but at last, Jonah sucked in a slow breath and reached for a chair.

His arms were crossed, his jaw dialed to belligerent, but he sat.

Rachel dropped into the chair next to him, close but not touching.

Grey took the last seat, close enough Rebecca could’ve reached out to touch him.

But she didn’t dare. She didn’t know if she’d have the right after this.

Struggling to find some kind of control, she wiped at the tears. “Grey and I were together the summer after high school.”

“Were you with Dad, too?

This was what her son thought of her? That she’d sleep with both of them at once? Fighting down the insult of that, she simply answered with the truth.

“We’ve already told you that Lonnie, Grey, and I were the three musketeers all through childhood.

By the time we hit high school, that dynamic started to change.

Everybody was growing up, and life wasn’t quite as simple as it had been.

I don’t know quite when I realized that Grey and I had chemistry.

It didn’t matter. When I was around him, there was always Lonnie as the buffer.

Lonnie to remind me of the consequences of upsetting the status quo.

Then his cousin got him a job working construction down in Nashville for the summer.

It was good money, so he left for a few months to do that, and Grey and I were still here, spending all our time together like we always had.

But without that buffer, there was nothing to stop all that tension that had been simmering between us from changing things. ”

Was this how Grey remembered it? Rebecca couldn’t bring herself to look at him to check.

Jonah made a disgusted noise. “Spare me the gory details.”

“You’re the one who demanded to know if I was with Lonnie at the same time, like I was some kind of revolving door, so you can damned well sit still and listen,” she snapped. “It wasn’t cheap or tawdry. We were best friends. Then we became more.”

She’d been determined to take the chance.

To find out if that heat would flare up, then out, or if it was the embers of something so much bigger.

She hadn’t been prepared for the explosion of that kiss.

Hadn’t expected the joy and excitement of first lust and love to consume them so quick and fast. But she hadn’t regretted it. Not for a moment.

“We didn’t exactly define things, but we were inseparable after that.

Everything just felt like it was falling into place.

There was the lingering question of how we were going to tell Lonnie when he got back, but we never really talked about it.

We were more pulled into long, deep talks about life. About what was really important.”

“That was what sent me to the recruiter’s office.”

At Grey’s quiet confession, she dared to look and saw the raw pain in his eyes.

“What?”

“I wanted to be more than I had been. For you. I wanted to be worthy.”

She hadn’t thought she could bleed any more from this. But she’d been wrong. “Grey.” For a moment, she had to close her eyes to get her emotions under control. “I wish you’d told me before. God, I wish we’d actually communicated about so many things.”

“He didn’t tell you until after he’d enlisted?” Rachel’s quiet interjection reminded her of why she was telling this story.

“No, he didn’t tell me about the Navy ROTC scholarship until just before he left in August. I didn’t take it well.

I saw my whole life here. I couldn’t imagine a life of moving from one naval base to another, uprooting our family all the time, having the father of my children gone for months at a time. I didn’t want to imagine it.”

“You already knew about me?” Jonah demanded.

“No. Not then. But family was what I always wanted. It was something we’d talked about in the future we imagined.

The one I thought we both wanted. But he was moving to the other side of the state, and the terms of the scholarship meant he’d be gone every summer.

We wouldn’t get to see each other beyond the occasional holiday, and I wanted more than that.

I just knew that if he got a taste of life somewhere else, he’d never want to come back to me. So we fought, split up, and he left.”

So many bitter words and so much heartache. And that had been only the beginning.

“His parents moved by Labor Day, eliminating any reason for him to come home, and I thought that was it. He had no more ties here. It was nearly October by the time I realized I was pregnant. I was so scared, and I felt so alone, and I didn’t know what to do.

” Though it felt like slicing open a vein, she knew she owed Grey the respect of looking him in the eye.

“I knew if I told you, you’d come back. You’d do right by me.

You’d give up your dream and be trapped.

You didn’t want the small town family life that I did.

And even if we could’ve somehow figured out a way to make that work, you’d have lost your ROTC scholarship and your shot at college.

All I could see if I told you was that I’d be putting you in a cage and giving you a million and one reasons to resent me.

And potentially the child we’d made. I didn’t want that for any of us. ”

If he understood her reasons, accepted them, he didn’t show it. “How did Lonnie come into it?”

“He found me up at the lake. I went there a lot after you left. He knew I was upset about something and poked at me until I spilled everything. When I finished, he asked me to marry him. He argued that he wanted what I wanted. That he’d loved me for a long time.

He knew I didn’t feel the same—not beyond friendship—but he was willing to gamble that we’d grow into it in time.

And either way, he wanted to do right by the brother of his heart, so you could go chase your dream. So I said yes.”

“That must’ve torn you in two,” Rachel murmured.

“Every day. But we got married. I never told Grey, and as far as I knew, he never came back, so I thought I made the right choice for all of us. There was never a reason to bring it up.”

“Not a reason?” Jonah snarled. “You let me believe for years that he was my father. That I came from that weak, spineless excuse for a man.”

With every word, Rebecca’s heart cracked open further.

“Honey, what good would it have done you, after Lonnie and I split, for me to suddenly bring up the fact that you had another biological father out there who didn’t even know you existed?

We had no idea how he would react to you.

I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

I didn’t know if he was still in the Navy, and honestly, I was afraid to look because I didn’t want to know what kind of life he’d built without me. ”

Because they were shaking, she knit her fingers together, determined to push through to the end. “But after all this time, he did come back. And I knew I had to tell you both. But I didn’t know how. I kept hoping I’d come up with the right words, the right way to say it.”

“There’s no right way, no easy way, to drop this on us, Mom. But sitting on it has to be one of the worst.” Jonah’s eyes were hard and furious. She’d seen this look on his face before, but never directed at her.

“I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be.

I know keeping this secret was wrong, but you need to understand that I was eighteen years old and scared to death.

I made a decision, and I’ve lived with the consequences of that decision every day for more than thirty years.

So please take that into account before you condemn me. ”

Jonah exploded out of his chair. “I need some air.”

He prowled out the way he’d come. When the front door slammed, Rebecca flinched as if it were a gunshot. Heart hammering, she looked to Grey, who’d said next to nothing. She couldn’t read his expression, and that was almost worse than Jonah’s outright fury.

Eyes burning, throat tight, she managed to choke out a few more words. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“So am I.” Shoving back from the table, he strode out after their son.

And as the door shut quietly behind him, the tears she’d fought back spilled over, unleashing what she knew would be an endless tide of grief that she’d brought entirely on herself.