Page 24 of Settling the Score (The Karma Club #4)

How could she not? Wasn’t it obvious? ‘It took every ounce of my strength to walk away from you. So much was on the line. Not just for me, but for Blake and Mom. Even for my dad. He’d have ended up killing one of us if we didn’t get the hell out of there.’

‘Aiden…’

‘I never wanted to hurt you.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, unevenly. ‘But you did.’

‘I know.’

She turned back to the ocean, taking a sip of her tea, then gripping the railing with one hand. Her skin glowed white at the knuckles, as though she were holding on for dear life. As though she were bracing herself for an inevitable fall.

In the end, though, it was Aiden who fell. Aiden whose whole reality crumbled apart at the seams, when she uttered, so softly the words were almost carried away on the sea breeze, ‘I was pregnant, Aiden. That’s why I was calling you.’

* * *

‘What?’ He couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d told him his face had sprouted shimmery golden wings. ‘What did you just say?’ He moved closer, urgency in the words.

She held her ground, even when she felt all light-headed and dizzy after admitting something to him she’d thought she never would.

But somehow, standing there together, reaching back into their shared past and discussing his not taking her calls, she’d felt a need to set the record straight.

To make him understand something about what that had been like for her; how badly he’d hurt her.

And why she hadn’t been able to let him go.

They’d created a baby together. They’d lost that baby.

And she alone knew it. She alone had known and grieved.

Suddenly, it felt like the baby deserved for Aiden to be aware of this important event.

‘I wasn’t calling to get you back. I was calling to tell you that you were going to be a dad.’

‘Holy fuck.’ He closed his eyes and reached for the railing. His Adam’s apple jerked in his throat and his jaw was perfectly angular. ‘I… Sienna. I didn’t… you could have… you should have texted me, for Christ’s sake.’

She felt her eyes go buggy. ‘Please don’t tell me what I should have done.

I was sixteen, alone, scared out of my brain and my boyfriend – who I was still very, very much in love with – had left town, and told me he never wanted to see me again.

Told me to move on, just like he had. So…

forgive me if I didn’t explore absolutely every possible avenue here. I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.’

He dipped his head once, his face screwing up in silent apology. ‘Fuck.’

‘You said that already.’

‘I don’t understand. Can we just – I need to sit down,’ he admitted, looking inside before stalking back through the doors and grabbing the single seat and positioning it so he could swing his big legs across the pad and brace his elbows on the back.

She moved inside gingerly, as if wary now of the can of worms she’d opened into their shared past. A shared past she’d lived and breathed all on her own.

‘What happened?’

She hesitated. Her heart hurt. Her stomach twisted.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her whole body trembled in a visceral reaction to remembering that awful night.

‘I lost the baby.’ Somehow, the words emerged stiff.

As if her voice box had 100 per cent got the memo on what would happen if she gave into even a hint of weakness and grief.

His curse tore through the room, a violent eruption. An apology. Pain and grief. ‘Our baby.’

Our baby.

Tears scratched the back of her throat. She pressed her teeth together, trying not to let that possessive, partnershippy phrase land with a thud in her heart.

‘Yeah.’

His skin was so pale beneath his tan she actually thought he might pass out, and out of nowhere, she had the strangest image of a huge, old tree in a forest being felled.

Men like Aiden didn’t faint as though they were some Regency romance heroine.

But his hand shook as he lifted it to his thick dark hair and dragged it through, like he could somehow brush some comprehension into his brain that way.

‘I should have known,’ he said, after a beat, frowning. ‘I should have been there for you.’

More words she didn’t want to hear because of how much they had the capacity to bend and fold parts of her heart she’d long ago hardened, especially to Aiden.

‘It’s okay,’ she said with a practised, dismissive shrug. ‘It wasn’t meant to be. I was okay. I mean, not at the time. But I met Cory and Melanie, and bit by bit, I started getting my life back on track.’

‘Without me,’ he said, his voice giving nothing away.

‘Well, yeah. You were… what’s the phrase I’m looking for again? Ad Meliora . Onto a brighter future.’ She swallowed to clear the acid in her throat. ‘I googled it.’

He stared at her and then stood. Again, she thought of the tree being felled and grimaced.

‘You should stay sitting down.’

He ignored her. ‘Sienna.’ He caught her hands and lifted them between their chests.

Such a simple act, but somehow, it had the power to totally erase the past – just for a moment – and form a little bubble outside of time.

They were just Sienna and Aiden, as incontrovertible and whole, as if they were their own shared being, as they’d ever been.

Then, now, him, her, they were just a confluence of cells living outside normal space and time.

‘If I had known, I would have come home to you. I would have been there.’

‘But you didn’t know,’ she said, keeping her heart hard as a matter of urgency. ‘You wouldn’t even speak to me. You’d moved on, I remember.’

His Adam’s apple jerked again.

‘And Ashbury Falls stopped being your home the moment you left.’ Her smile was wistful, dredged right up from inside her heart. ‘We both know that.’

A muscle throbbed low in his jaw.

‘You were always destined for this. Your bright future. Fame. Riches. You know, global superstar.’

He flinched as though she’d just called him the worst name under the sun. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Yeah? Well, I do.’

‘Sienna… you must have felt… I wish?—’

She pulled at her hands, freeing them from his grip, taking a step backwards.

‘Please, don’t. It doesn’t matter what you wish, now.

It’s not going to change a damned thing.

’ For a minute, heat sparked in the words.

Angry, frustrated heat. She forced herself to smile, to at least give the appearance of quelling her turbulent emotions.

‘Did you – do you know how – why – the baby?’

He was incapable of forming complete sentences, but she understood it. He was in survival mode. Totally overwhelmed by what he’d just learned, and the myriad spinning wheels it sparked as to their versions of the past.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It just happened.’ She drew her lip between her teeth. ‘The doctor said I could run tests, but… I couldn’t afford them.’

He swore softly, but with an intensity that sheared the room in two.

‘I was in the hospital for a night. I lost a lot of blood.’

‘I would have helped.’

‘You weren’t you then, Aiden. I mean, sure, you’d signed with that college, but that was just a scholarship. It’s not like you had a couple of thousand bucks sitting in a bank account.’

He shook his head. ‘I would have found a way.’

‘I found a way.’ She tilted her chin defiantly. ‘I coped.’

‘How?’ he pushed. ‘You were still in school.’

‘Yeah? Well, I got a job.’

‘Babysitting,’ he murmured.

‘What’s wrong with that?’

Another visible twist of his throat. ‘Nothing.’

But she could sense his tension and disapproval, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why.

She’d met Cory through babysitting. And she’d dated him on and off for a few years.

It hadn’t been serious. They both knew it was more about Mel than anything else, but also, he’d been someone for Sienna to cling to as her whole life seemed to spike off into a direction she’d never foreseen.

The baby. The miscarriage. Her father’s accident.

The moment police came to the door and charged him.

The court case and pathetic public defender.

Her father being found guilty and sent to prison.

Sienna had been solitary, and weak. She’d felt as though a strong breeze might knock her to the ground with enough force to guarantee she’d never get back up again.

But there’d been Cory and Melanie, and for all Cory was not someone she could see herself with long term, he was dependable, and he was there.

Even more important, he needed her, and that had been like a balm to her soul.

So too losing herself to Melanie’s sweet toddler arms and smiles at that time of her life.

‘They were a lifeline, you know,’ she said, thinking aloud.

‘It wasn’t just the baby. There was some other stuff, around the same time.

’ She worried at her lower lip, wondering if he’d heard anything about her dad.

She’d always presumed the news must have got to him – if good news travelled fast, in Sienna’s experience, bad news was gossiped about way faster – and subconsciously his failure to reach out even over that had been almost the hardest thing to stomach of all.

She waited, breath held, for him to nod.

To confirm that yeah, he’d heard about the charges. How was the old man?

‘Like what?’

Her heart fluttered. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘I think it’s pretty fucking clear that your life after the night I left is a total mystery to me.’ He sucked in a ragged breath. ‘What happened, Si? What else was there?’