Addicted to You (36 page)

“Do you want some water or anything?” he asked once he’d sat down next to her.

She shook her head. He couldn’t decipher her expression. “Are you . . . are you going to be sick?” he asked dubiously after a moment.

“Quite possibly,” she whispered.

He cursed under his breath and put his arms around her. He leaned back, taking her with him. A spasm shook her, and the sounds of her soft sobbing reached his ears. Even though she cried, he was relieved to feel the tension in her muscles began to ease.

“Shhh,” he whispered as he stroked her upper arm and back with a hand that felt like it’d gone partially numb. “It’s going to be okay, Katie. Everything will be okay.” His tongue felt as rubbery as his hand, but he continued anyway, desperate to soothe that flattened expression he’d seen on her face in the bathroom a minute ago.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was the last thing I expected. I thought . . . maybe I was . . . but that seemed so unlikely . . . and the test yesterday came back inconclusive, so I wasn’t sure. Then today . . . this test said . . . Do you think it could be wrong?” Katie rambled wetly against his chest.

“My understanding is that false positives are pretty rare. We’ll make an appointment at the doctor, though, just to make sure,” he said as he continued to stroke her.

She lifted her head and peered at him through teary eyes.

“I can’t believe you’re being so sweet about this. I thought you’d be furious.”

He cupped her jaw with his hand. “How can you think that? I told you I’d always care about you, Katie. Why in the hell would I be mad at you because you’re pregnant?”

A fresh wave of tears spilled from her eyes.

“Do you want to keep the baby?” he asked her gently.

“God, yes,” she whispered.

He nodded. “We’ll take good care of you, then. Everything is going to be okay.”

She nodded and gave him a watery smile. He tried to smile back, but his facial muscles didn’t seem to cooperate. Instead, he concentrated on trying to dry her cheeks with his thumb.

“Katie?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to tell me who the father is? If you don’t, I’ll understand.”

“What do you mean?” she asked slowly.

“The father . . . of the baby.”

He blinked in surprise when she straightened with a jerking motion. His embracing arms fell down around her hips.

“You’re the father, Rill.”

He knew he’d done the wrong thing immediately when he laughed. Anger sparked in Katie’s eyes.

“May I ask what you find so funny?” she asked stiffly.

He forced all the humor out of his face, suddenly realizing he was laughing as he maneuvered around a minefield. “It’s just . . . I’ve used protection every time we were together, Katie. I was careful. Even if there had been a mistake, we’ve barely been having intercourse for two weeks. I mean . . . I know these tests are supposed to detect things early, but Jaysus . . .
this
early? I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you don’t think so, huh?”

He just stared at her for a moment, doing the math in his mind repeatedly, but no matter how he worked the numbers, it didn’t make any sense.

“You can’t be serious, Katie.”

She pushed off his chest roughly and stood. “You saw that little ‘plus’ sign as clearly as I did. How much more serious can it be?” she asked in a high-pitched voice.

“So there was no one else?”

“No.”

“No one in California, before you came to Vulture’s Canyon? Wouldn’t that make more sense, timing-wise, than you thinking the father was
me
?”

She crossed her arms under her breasts. “Either it’s you, or I’m the latest candidate for immaculate conception.”

“But—”

“It’s all pretty clear-cut,” she bit out. She paused when she saw his face and seemed to reconsider. “Look . . . I know what’s confusing you. I can explain—”

“I think I might have an idea of what’s going on,” he interrupted.

“Really?”

He nodded grimly. “You’re upset about what I said last night.”

Her mouth dropped open. Understanding began to dawn slowly on her face.

“That’s what you think? That I’m saying you’re the one who got me pregnant because I’m trying to get the commitment out of you that you weren’t willing to give last night?” she asked shrilly.

“No,” he said as he stood. He put out his hand to touch her, but Katie backed away from him like she thought he suddenly had gone rabid. “I just meant that you’re probably still upset about what I said. On top of that, you find out about the pregnancy, and . . .”

“I go so mad out of my love for you that I make up a lie in order to trap you, saying you were the one to get me pregnant?” she finished for him.

“No, I just mean that under the stress of the moment, your mind might have leapt to what you
wanted
the truth to be instead of the logical answer.”

“No, my mind leapt to the
truth
. Period.” More drops skittered down her face, but her tone and her stiff posture told him that unlike the earlier ones, these tears were of the outraged variety.

“Katie . . .” His mind grasped for the right words, but he felt himself sinking. “Didn’t you hear what I was saying before you brought this up? I don’t care if the baby isn’t mine. I’m going to be here for you either way, if that’s what you want.”

Her eyes seemed to overtake half her face.

“Let me guess. You want to be there for me as a
friend
?”

He fell back on the couch, feeling utterly slain.
Jaysus
. Talk about being clobbered. What had happened to the golden, peaceful morning, to the pleasant, growing anticipation of seeing Katie walk through that front door? He’d wanted to make her smile, and now look at what he was doing.

He put his forehead in his hand. “Just tell me what it is you want me to say, Katie. If you want me to say the baby is mine, I will. God knows I deserve it. I’m the one who has taken advantage of you.” He grimaced when he recalled the extent of how much he’d taken advantage of her sweetness . . . how much he’d reveled in it. “I’m the one who has been drowning my sorrows in these woods. When the alcohol wouldn’t do it anymore, I became addicted to you.”

“That’s what this is all about?” He looked up, alarmed by the fact that her voice had gone flat and hollow. He’d much prefer it being so high with fury that it was about to pass out of human hearing range.

“What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

“You’ve been thinking all this time that making love to me was the equivalent of getting trashed on whiskey? You consider me to be . . . what? . . . the drug that helps you forget Eden?”

“
No
. That’s not what I meant, Katie. You keep misunderstanding me. I meant that—”

“I don’t think I’m misunderstanding,” she interrupted, letting her arms fall. She suddenly looked small standing there, no longer swelled up with her anger. “I even offered it to you, didn’t I? I said it’d be better if you fucked me blind instead of drinking yourself into a grave. I just hadn’t realized you were taking the idea of trading a bottle of whiskey in for me so literally.”

“Katie, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” he said, launching himself off the couch and stepping toward her. She backed away. He froze in the middle of the living room when he registered the small, sad smile on her face.

“Why should you be so averse to hearing the truth? You’ve been so good about saying it for the past month.” She held up a hand, silencing him when he started to launch into a heated defense. “Firstly, I’m not a liar, Rill. So here are a couple more truths for you, while we’re at it. If I’m pregnant, you’re the father. Not in my fantasy world. In reality. Secondly, I’ve changed my mind. I’m done being the drug that’ll mask your grief for another woman. I hid a bottle of whiskey in the corner of the bottom cabinet. Have at it.”

Rill just stood there in the living room for three solid minutes after Katie stalked out of the room, wondering what the hell had just hit him.

Twenty-five

Katie spent far more time the following morning over at Miles
Fordham’s offices looking through his accounts than she’d originally planned. She was back to avoiding Rill again. At first, she was so mad at him she wanted to spit. Slowly, she’d started to calm down, but it’d taken a good part of the night, which she’d spent alone up in the dormer bedroom.

A small part of her—a teeny-tiny part that began to grow with every hour—felt sorry for him. He didn’t remember seeing her on her first night in Vulture’s Canyon, let alone recall having unprotected sex with her. To discover she was pregnant and have her tell him he was responsible must have confused the holy hell out of him. She’d been willing to calmly try to explain things to him before he’d started to say all that crap about claiming to be the father because he deserved it for seducing her. Then he’d gone on and said that thing about her fantasizing he’d been the one to get her pregnant because she was under so much stress.

Honestly. He didn’t deserve a shred of her pity.

Still, she felt a good deal more prepared to tell Rill the truth about the night she’d gotten pregnant as she left Miles’s office the following day. She turned down Miles’s hopeful offer of lunch and headed up the hill, ready to have it out with Rill.

She found him easily enough, for once. He stepped onto the front porch when she pulled up into the parking space at the end of the drive. She studied him for a few seconds through the windshield. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans. He wore the blue chambray shirt she favored because it brought out the color of his eyes. His expression was sober as he waited for her.

“Hey,” she said noncommittally as she walked up the steps.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked gruffly, his gaze running over her.

“Miles Fordham’s office.” When she saw his expression stiffen, she sighed. “He asked me to look over a few things for him, and I agreed. I had my reasons for doing it,” she said when his expression remained rigid. “And it had nothing to do with my burning lust for Miles Fordham. You were right. The guy’s a weasel.”

She saw him swallow. He seemed partially mollified, but she still sensed the tension in him.

“Will you sit down?” he asked, nodding at the porch chairs.

Katie went over to a wrought-iron chair and plopped into a seat. She watched him as he sat down next to her.

“There’s something I need to tell you. Something you need to know,” he said. “You keep talking like I was dying up on this hill because Eden was killed in that wreck. You were partially right—I loved Eden. Maybe not as much as I’d conjured up in my head, but still. She was a big part of my life, once. But you’re also wrong about how I felt about her.”

“What?” Katie asked, sitting forward slowly. It had been the last thing she’d expected him to do in that tense moment, to start talking about the verboten topic of Eden. She stared at him, riveted. He closed his eyes briefly. Katie had a flash of intuition and suddenly knew how difficult this conversation was for Rill.

“We hadn’t been getting along for more than about a year before she died—Eden and I.”

“Really?” Katie asked in a quavering voice. “But I thought . . . She never said . . . You never said.”

“She never spoke to you about our marriage being in trouble?” Rill asked her, his manner calm.

Katie shook her head. “No. I had no idea you two were anything but happy in your marriage.”

Rill searched her face. After a moment, he nodded. “It was, in the beginning. Happy, I mean. Or at least I thought it was. When she died, the coroner told me she was three months pregnant. It wasn’t my baby, Katie. We hadn’t slept together in over half a year.”

Katie just stared at him, her mouth partially open. The sound of the blood rushing in her veins segued from a dull throb to a roar in her ears.

“Eden was pregnant?” she whispered incredulously. “Who was the father?”

Heat burned in her cheeks when she realized what she’d just said. Rill had just asked her the same question last night. A wave of dizziness struck her.

Holy shit. Rill’s surprising news was bad in more ways than the obvious, she realized with a rising sense of dread.

“I don’t know,” Rill replied. “I was shocked when the coroner told me. You knew Eden. She didn’t socialize much, let alone go out with men. Her coworkers were mostly women.”

Katie blinked. The image of the fury in Rill’s face before he’d tackled Everett in the backyard flashed into her mind’s eye. “Jesus. You thought . . .
Everett
?”

He glanced away, looking vaguely ashamed of himself.

“You did,” she said huskily. It made so much sense now. Everything. Rill’s anger at Everett, his deep depression up here on this hill, his dislike of the world . . . his willingness to sacrifice everything.

“Nothing made sense to you after she died . . . after you found out she’d been unfaithful, did it?”

“I guess not,” he said after a moment.

“You stopped believing in yourself when you realized you couldn’t believe in Eden anymore. She meant that much to you,” she said quietly.