Page 19 of Tiny Precious Secrets (The Brothers of Calloway Creek The Montanas #4)

Asher

I dress quickly and am out of the hotel before the sun rises.

In less than an hour, I’m ascending the outside stairs and knocking on the door to Allie’s garage apartment.

There’s no answer. I contemplate ringing the doorbell to the main house.

If she’s having some sort of crisis, maybe she went to her parents after calling me.

But then I check the knob. It turns.

“Allie?” I call quietly so as not to alarm her.

I don’t know if she has a bat or a gun. I’m an unexpected intruder.

She has no idea I was in the city. I didn’t tell her I was coming.

Not after she begged off the last two times I was here.

This time, the plan was to do my job then come to Calloway Creek and catch her off guard—and to not let her leave until I’d said what I came to say.

God, she sounded gutted on the phone. She was too wrecked to even speak.

I wanted to crawl through the phone and wrap her in my arms. Let her cry on my shoulder.

Hold her all day and tell her that whatever it was, it’ll be okay.

That I’ll never let anything or anyone hurt her.

That I love her more than I ever thought I could love another woman.

As I turn the corner, I quietly call her name again. The living room is dark. The place is quiet, the only light being that of the rising sun starting to shine through the skylight. I lean against the back of the couch pondering my next step when I hear a sound from the bedroom.

Springing up and crossing the room, I stop dead in the bedroom doorway when I see her lying on the bed sleeping.

Her phone is on the floor. That’s what I heard.

Her phone dropped onto the carpet next to the bed.

She turns over again, eyes closed as she continues her fitful sleep as if her body still hasn’t recovered from the nightmare.

I want to go to her. Climb in bed and hold her still. Comfort her in her sleep.

I don’t. Because I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me in her bed anymore. Or maybe even her life.

But she called.

All I can do is stand here and stare at her.

Like in the living room, there’s a skylight in her bedroom.

The more the sun rises, the brighter the room becomes.

She’s on her side, facing me but still sleeping.

Her features become clearer to me and my heart clenches.

My soul hurts. Her face is puffy. Her eyes swollen.

How long had she been crying before she called?

How long after? What sort of nightmare could cause that visceral reaction?

Still wrestling sleep, she turns and lays flat on her back, the sheet falling to the side. She’s not even in pajamas. It looks like she’s wearing workout clothes. A sports bra and those tight pants women wear when— Wait, what the hell?

There’s a small protrusion on her belly. Over the past seventeen months, I’ve gotten to know every inch of her body. This is not the body I know. Stepping forward for a closer look, I think my eyes are deceiving me. Until my brain finally catches up to what I’m seeing.

She’s… she’s… pregnant .

“What the fuck?” I say loud enough to wake her.

She startles awake and looks around the room like she’s still in a dream. Her eyes land on me. “Asher?” She rubs her eyes with the palms of her hands. Then she looks back at me. Realizing I’m not, in fact, an aberration, she pulls the sheet over her. “What are you doing here?”

“Allie,” I say sternly, my eyes trained on her stomach. “Is it mine?”

The words echo in my head and fear grips me as I wait for an answer.

Of course it’s not mine. That’s why she’s been avoiding me.

In an instant, it all starts to make sense.

The complete one-eighty she did on me in Antigua.

I thought it was because of what Bug did.

But the way she avoided my texts the day of the wedding.

And how sad she looked when I arrived at her bungalow.

Sex that night was goodbye. Because that was the day she found out she was pregnant with another man’s baby.

I lean over and put my hands on my knees, feeling all the life drain out of me. I want to scream at her. Hit the wall. Curse God. But all I can do is think of how much I still love her. And how I still want her. Even if she is having a baby that’s not mine.

Is that why she panicked and called? Does she still have feelings for me even though she was with someone else?

All sorts of shit goes through my head as I await her answer. The answer I fear will destroy me.

She doesn’t respond. But she does nod.

“What?” My head is reeling. “It’s mine?”

She nods again. Sadly.

I want to smile and take her in my arms, but then the reality of the situation hits me. She’s pregnant. She’s so pregnant she’s starting to show. And she kept it from me. And she’s… sad. Really, really sad.

My momentary elation turns to anger. “What the hell, Allie? Is this why you’ve been avoiding me? Why haven’t you told me? What kind of game are you playing?” I turn and pace, hands running through my hair as my anger continues to grow. “Did you think I’d bail? You know how much I love kids.”

Ah, shit, maybe it’s the opposite. I turn and face her. “You decided you were done with me and then this happened and you didn’t want to be tied to me in any way? Is that it? Are you so goddamn selfish you would keep my own child from me?”

Through my rage, I almost miss the fact that she’s crying again. No, not just crying. She’s having another panic attack. Shit .

I race to the bed. “Calm down. This can’t be good for the baby.” I sit and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry I yelled.”

So many emotions are raging through me right now, I don’t even know how to process them.

I’m excited because I never thought I’d have the opportunity to have another child.

I’m pissed because she didn’t take my feelings into consideration.

I’m sad because it seems like this isn’t at all the fairytale ending I’d wished for us.

Most of all, I’m worried because of how she’s reacting.

If she loved me—if she even just liked me a whole lot—she’d have told me.

There’s no time to deal with my own emotions while she’s breaking down next to me. All I can do is try to comfort her.

“Breathe, Allie.”

My touch seems to calm her, something I’m grateful for even if I am still pissed as hell.

“I need a minute,” she says, getting off the bed and crossing to the bathroom.

I hear the faucet run. Then the toilet flushes. Then the faucet runs again. Finally, she emerges.

The few minutes she’s been in there have my anger growing again.

She sits in the chair across the bedroom, legs pulled up, arms around her knees, apparently wanting to be as far away from me as she can.

I stand, trying to maintain a modicum of self-control, but doing a shit job of it. “There isn’t a single goddamn thing you could tell me to justify withholding this from me.”

Tears start to fall down her cheeks. “I lost a baby.”

My heart falls into my stomach and I want to throw up. It’s like all in one fell swoop, I’ve been given everything I wanted, but just as quickly, it was yanked away. “You… lost the baby?” The words are stuck in my throat and barely come out past the forming lump. “Are you having a miscarriage?”

She shakes her head. “Not this baby. I lost another baby.”

Again, my emotions are all over the fucking room, plastered to the wall in spits and spatters. I’m elated yet saddened all at the same time. I don’t know which way is up. I’ve no idea what to think, how to feel. I can barely feel my own skin.

“Al, you’re confusing the shit out of me. Can you please start from the beginning? This is my baby?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s okay?”

A painful sob heaves out of her. “I don’t know.”

My head is about to explode. I try to remain calm because me freaking out is not going to help this situation. I walk over to her and get on my knees. “Allie, what’s going on?”

“I had a baby. His name was Christopher.” She sniffs and wipes at a tear. “I was nineteen.”

Was . His name was Christopher. Past tense. And she was nineteen. Fuck .

There are so many questions on the tip of my tongue, but I hold them all in. Because I get the feeling this is why she called. This was her nightmare. And I have to let her get it out. After… that’s when I’ll ask her everything I need to know.

Her tears just keep coming, streaming down her face in a never-ending flow. When her body begins shaking, I gather her into my arms and carry her to the bed. Setting her down, I crawl in beside her and wrap my arms around her. “Shhh. It’s okay.”

Her chest rises and falls rapidly, but soon her breathing evens out.

“When they put him in my arms, he was perfect. He was smaller than average babies, but he looked like every other new baby I’d ever seen.

He had ten fingers and ten toes—but his fingers were different, overlapping in an odd way.

He cried sometimes, but it was so weak, like a mouse squeaking.

And occasionally, he’d struggle to breathe.

” I watch a tear roll down the side of her head.

“Every time it happened, I also struggled to breathe.

“My mother was there. She’s the only one who was. But even she had a hard time watching it. I think it was my agony that she couldn’t bear. So she’d have to leave every few hours, probably so I didn’t have to see just how sad she was.

“The neonatologist reiterated what the obstetrician told me. That comfort measures were what was important. That interventions like intubation and medication wouldn’t make a difference and would only prolong the inevitable.

That the best thing I could do for him and myself was to hold him, cuddle him, feed him”—she chokes up—“and love him for as long as he would hold on.”

Hot tears flow down the side of my face as I picture a young Allie, just a kid herself, holding a dying child.