“She’s four, and she’s definitely one of ours,” Gavin dropped the bomb. He swore quietly, then louder. I could practically hear him stepping on the accelerator with more force. “I can’t believe she fucking lied to us.”
That same thought was thumping along with my heartbeat in my ears. A heavy dose of additional stress weighing on me at the thought that I had a kid all these years and hadn’t been there for her.
“How did your shitty PI not find this out before now?” I’d never trusted that shady Jack Bloom, and Gavin clearly didn’t either. But he was rich enough that the money he wasted on the subpar service was barely pocket change.
“I don’t know. Christ, he’s even more useless than I thought.” Gavin huffed. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Right now, I’m headed back to the house. Allie’s probably gonna beat me there. Hopefully we can get her to talk to us after—” He cut himself off, then changed gears. “Well, she’s pretty pissed at me. But you and Luca should be in the clear.”
And that was how we ended up here, standing in the dark in front of our rental house, watching Allie and Luca come up the beach path together. Thick as fucking thieves.
Something about that image, about the almost guilty way Allie dropped Luca’s hand, made me even angrier. “What the hell, Allie? You weren’t going to tell us one of us could have a kid?”
She strode forward a couple of steps, showing that she wasn’t intimidated by our ambush attempt. “She’smykid. I don’t see why this should matter so much to you.”
Fucking hell. As if we’d all be fine knowing we’d accidentally been deadbeats for five years. Gavin let out a humorless laugh.
“That’s bullshit, Allie. You just didn’t want to deal with the consequences. Just like when you ran away from us in the morning in Vegas.”
“I’m the one who’s dealt with the consequences this whole time!” Allie snapped, and I flinched back. “Anyway, was I just supposed to tell you three that any of you could be the dad when I had no idea? At least now I’ve figured out it’s not Luca, but?—”
“Wait,” Gavin stopped her. “How do you know?”
Allie hesitated, her eyes flashing in the moonlight with something I couldn’t quite parse. She stammered out, “I—I got a paternity test. Ruled him out.” Her little shrug was hardly nonchalant. Still, the chances of me having a child had now risen to fifty-fifty, and that only heightened my anxiety. As if she wanted to turn the screws on me, Allie added, “I’ve got another test in the works. So we’ll know about Cade soon enough.”
Fuck, fuck,fuck.I’d always wanted to be a dad, but I’d hoped to go about it the traditional way. Find someone who wanted to marry me, wanted to have my kid. Settle down. After Jordyn, I’d pretty much given up that dream, but that didn’t make me want it any less. If ever a woman were to have my baby, I wanted her to be my wife, for us to be in it together. I wanted to bethere. For them both.
But there was no way to go back now. If Allie’s daughter was mine, then I’d already missed out on all of the crucial earliest stages of her life. My chest was in pain at the thought.
“You’re sneaky, aren’t you?” Gavin almost muttered under his breath, but in the quiet of the night, Allie could hear him fine. She shrugged.
“I just needed to know. For the annulment. It doesn’t matter to me so much beyond that. None of you are obligated to be involved in Daphne’s life.” She clenched her jaw. The way she’d called the child hers, the reluctance to tell us about her existence…it all painted a picture that Allie wasn’t just relieving us from obligation; she didn’twantto share. But the implication that we’d be fine with staying out of things, that I wouldn’t want to be in my daughter’s life if I knew she was mine, rankled me.
“I’m not a deadbeat,” I gritted out between my teeth. “If she’s my kid, I want to know her. To be part of her life in whatever way she wants me to be.”
Gavin was quiet, not as sure on this front as I was, but he didn’t step up to proclaim he wanted nothing to do with Daphne or Allie either. I saw the hint of surprise on Allie’s face. A subtle softening in her expression that sent another little pang through me, though I couldn’t figure out what it meant.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Gavin finally said, his voice even and logical. That was the way he usually worked. Thinking over feeling. It made him a good CEO, I guessed, but sometimes I didn’t quite get him.
“In the meantime, we still have to figure out the marriage thing,” Allie added, and now that some of the heat in the conversation had cooled down, there was a sense of togetherness between us all. At least, that was how it felt when Allie looked carefully at each of us—Luca first, then Gavin, and finally me—as if trying to sense which of us was her legal husband. Ever the go-getter, Gavin jumped into action.
“I’m working on it. I’ve got a PI checking it out,” he admitted, breezing past that detail as if he hoped Allie wouldn’t notice. She quirked a brow, but Gavin pushed on. “I’ll arrange a meeting with him once he’s got it figured out. With all of us. Might as well all go in case there’s any paperwork to get done.”
“Might as well,” Allie deadpanned. She cocked her hip, placing a hand on it in a sassy pose that emphasized her curves and was annoyingly mouthwatering. “Well, you guys know how to reach me. Are we done here?”
Gavin shrugged, and as he was the pseudoleader of the group, that seemed to work for her. I was still too frozen in place to say anything, so I added my own small nod to the mix, which Allie caught. I expected her to walk away then, to cut her path through us and make a beeline to her car with haste. And she did, but not without turning to Luca with a pointed look first.
“You feel free to reach out anytime,” she said to him with an undeniably seductive tone, and she left all three of us completely slack-jawed when she went up on her toes to kiss Luca full-on the lips. And with that blatant power move, she was gone, climbing into the car I now saw as her mom mobile and driving away.
Christ, why did that little display send a jolt of jealousy through me? Especially with this new layer of mess, the little girl named Daphne who may or may not be mine, I had no business lusting after Allie Tate.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that, considering what happened the night we met her,” Gavin let out, pinning his gaze on Luca. “But it’s bold as hell for her to kiss you like that after the night she and I had together.”
I looked at Gavin questioningly, though I already knew what he’d say before he confirmed my suspicions aloud.
“Allie and I fucked in the bathroom at the bar I took her to. Like…forty-five minutes ago, tops.” He at least had the sense to look a little sheepish at this reveal. Luca and I exchanged a glance as if on cue, the former with a slightly red face. Combined with the dazed expression he’d worn since Allie kissed him in front of us, he looked fully lovestruck. A damn puppy.
By contrast, I felt like a pissed-off Doberman itching to attack.
It was stupid as hell, but my immediate reaction to Allie’s moves on my friends wasn’t judgment or the usual urge to give them kudos in a bro-code kind of way. It wasn’t even jealousy. No, it was a pang of sadness—a feeling of being left out, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since I got picked last for dodgeball in elementary school gym class. As if some part of me had held onto the fantasy of that night in Vegas all these years.
