Coming Clean

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to the Reader

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

By C. L. Parker

About the Author

“Okay, now. I need you to roll over and get on your hands and knees for me.”

Cassidy's eyes popped wide. “On my hands and knees? But why?”

“Because it'll give me a better angle to work with,” said the British gentleman that Cassidy had insisted we use. Though I was seriously considering how much of a gentleman he truly was at this point.

I could do nothing but watch as Cassidy complied with the soft-spoken command, her movements awkward as she shifted around in the small bed, much like a turtle on its back. When she finally assumed the position, the sheet slipped off her hips, falling to barely dangle from her delicate ankles and exposing her ass for all to see. For the first time in my life, I couldn't get hard at the sight of a naked woman's backside, even though it was attached to the woman I loved.

“Cassidy, I want you to listen very carefully. What I'm about to do might be a bit uncomfortable, but I need you to try to relax as much as possible.” The deep timbre of the male's dreamy accent—dreamy, per my girl—pulled me out of my trance, and I had to stop myself from launching across the bed and knocking the bloke away from her. Especially when he slipped his large hand between her legs and started doing God knows what to her vagina.

My vagina.

I heard Cassidy's slight intake of breath, followed by a string of mumbled curses, and my stomach heaved in protest. The lousy cup of stale coffee I had earlier threatened to make a reappearance on the linoleum and my knees started to give. Before I could kiss the floor, a none-too-gentle shove had me seated in a nearby chair with my head between my legs.

“Is everything okay?” Cassidy's voice came from far away, sounding as weak as I felt.

A cool cloth made its way around my neck and the nausea eased somewhat so I could respond. “I'm fine, sweetness.”

“Not you, Shaw. The baby. What's going on?”

“There, I've got a pulse,” Dr. Edwards, a.k.a. Dr. McDreamy, said. “Not a bloody good one either. Get the lot of them in here. Now.”

I lifted my head as the door opened and what seemed like a swarm of people scurried into the room like ants at a free-for-all buffet. Controlled chaos reigned over the room as IV bags were hung and nurses scuttled around, grabbing supplies and placing them on the bed. Someone wearing blue colored scrubs and a surgical mask around her neck stood at the head, pushing medicine into Cassidy's IV. Words like
emergency C-section
and
prolapsed cord
were singled out of the verbal montage coming from different people in the room. I couldn't tell who was saying what.

All the while, Dr. McDreamy still had his arm up my woman's no-no zone and hadn't even broken out in a sweat. Maybe that was because I was sweating enough for the both of us.

My eyes darted to the fetal monitor beside the bed. The volume had been turned all the way down, though the heart icon continued to flicker. I had no idea what the flashing numbers meant, but the hurried movements of the staff had panic rising up with the force of a tsunami.

I had never felt so fucking helpless in my life. The room seemed to shrink and my vision blurred around the edges until I couldn't catch my breath. I struggled to hold on to my resolve with each passing second. Shit wasn't going right, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it except be there for her.
With
her.

“Shaw…Oh no! Shaw, something's wrong!” Cassidy's voice acted as my lifeline and pulled me back into the moment. I turned to see the woman who had become my reason for breathing looking panicked and afraid as she was rolled off of her knees and onto her back once again. And that scared the shit out of me. Nothing frightened Cassidy Whalen. She was fierce, a force to be reckoned with, unshakeable. But the tears swimming in her green eyes confirmed just how fragile she was and how I needed to man up.

Working the boulder-sized knot down my throat, I feigned a confidence I in no way possessed and pushed between two nurses, ignoring the one giving me the evil eye as I did so. Being careful not to show my own worry, I gave the mother of my soon-to-be-born child's hand a reassuring squeeze. “Everything's going to be okay, sweetness. I promise. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and then a tear slipped down her cheek.

Fuck. I'd just made a promise I knew I couldn't keep, seeing as I really had no control over the situation. If anything happened to our child, if anything happened to Cassidy…I just couldn't go there. But someone in this room had better damn well make sure I wouldn't have to.

“We need to move, people. The baby is in distress.”

“We're going to OR C. Call NICU for standby.”

“I'm only thirty-eight weeks. It's too early. Can't you stop it? You were supposed to stop it.” Cassidy was frantic, begging for answers from anyone who would give them.

“Shh, sweetie, you need to calm down,” one of the nurses with a gentle voice said as she patted Cassidy's arm. “Yes, it's early, but luckily, not too early. Your baby should be fine. You've got the best of the best working for you, but we need to take the little one now.”

“Should be? Should be fine?” I repeated, hung up on those two little words.
Should be
was not a guarantee, it was an opinion. It might be worth noting to this particular nurse, however caring she might be, that this child's mother and father preferred fact to opinion. I'd just been unscrambling the words in my jumbled-up brain to do so, but I was too late. The “best of the best” were on the move.

“Shaw, don't leave me.” Cassidy's hand slipped from mine as I was jostled to the side as if I were of no importance to the woman carrying the baby they were trying so hard to save. But how do you get mad about something like that when it's your baby?

The hospital staff pulled the bed away from the wall, yanked the cord from the monitor, and proceeded out the door. I went to follow but an iron grip wrapped around my wrist and held me back.

“I need to go with her.” I growled the words and tried to yank out of Nurse Evil Eye's hold.

“And you will,” she promised. A scowl was etched in her face, accentuating her features into one long line of disapproval. She slapped a plastic-covered package to my chest. “As soon as you put this on. I'll be waiting just outside the door to escort you when you're ready.”

“Okay.” I ran my fingers through my hair, not really sure where to start, but knowing I needed to get my ass in gear.

“Unless you want to miss the birth of your child, I suggest you get a move on,” Nurse Evil Eye said, reading my mind. Or maybe she'd just done this a gazillion times during her career and had already known what to expect.

“Right.” Dropping the package at my feet, my fingers went straight to the button of my jeans.

“No, no, no,” my escort said, stopping me. “They go over your clothes, genius. Hurry up.” And that was all she said before she turned and made a speedy exit, shutting me in the room that had been bustling with activity only moments before and leaving me all alone.

Alone. I definitely felt the weight of that word, but I didn't have to because I wasn't the only one likely freaking out about all of this. Though she was no doubt surrounded by too many people, Cassidy was the one who was alone. The medical staff—adept as they may be—were strangers. Not the father of her soon-to-be-born child. And that wasn't okay with me.

Holy shit, I was about to be a father. I'd had thirty-eight weeks to prepare for this moment—actually, twenty-eight weeks, considering Cassidy had been eight weeks along when she'd first found out but had waited another two weeks before telling me—and I was suddenly aware of how unprepared I really was. From the moment I'd heard those two little words, “I'm pregnant,” I'd gone through a whole lifetime of emotions.
My
lifetime.

I'd had the shittiest parents in the world. They couldn't even be called parents, as far as I was concerned. Born the only child to a swindler father who was never around and an alcoholic mother who wished she wasn't, I'd been left to fend for myself on the brutally hard streets of Detroit. I'd seen nightmares happen before my very eyes, survived by any means necessary, and my seed donors never knew or even cared to know how I'd done it. I was a burden, plain and simple, just an extra mouth that they never fed, but the government funding sure was a nice bit of icing on their dysfunctional cake.

I was going to be different. I was going to make my child, gender as yet unknown, the center of my world. Everything I did from here on out would be all about making a better life for him or her. Fuck my hang-ups over my own parents. Fuck the flip-flopping among being terrified, anxious, happy, and then terrified again. Failure had never been an option for me, and it sure as shit wouldn't ever be now.

Besides, I had the most determined partner in life that I'd ever known. Cassidy Whalen.

We'd started out as adversaries, and not one single person I'd ever encountered in my life had been able to give me a run for my money quite the same way Cassidy had. Not even close. We'd gone toe-to-toe for a partnership at the same sports agency where we'd worked, Cassidy winning, though I'd ended up with the title when she'd turned it down. And what had started out as an underhanded evasive maneuver to throw her off her game and into my bed had only managed to catapult her into my heart instead.

The impossible had been made possible by her doing. She'd tamed me.

I loved her. Really fucking loved her. And I'd never thought the emotion was possible for a man like me, who'd done a damn good job of keeping illogical shit like that at bay. If it wasn't driving the bottom line, it didn't deserve my time. Now, because of her presence in my life, I was a regular guy; a domesticated man with a little woman at home and an unofficial family, her family, in Stonington, Maine.

And our family was getting bigger. Christ, moments from now, I'd know if I had a son or a daughter. I'd be someone's daddy…provided he or she survived the birth process. My heart hammered hard and fast in my chest with trepidation and anticipation.

Shoving one leg after the other into the scrubs, I grabbed the rest of the blue stuff in the bag and donned it the best I could figure out. I'd just tied the cap on my head when Nurse Evil Eye popped the door open again.

“They're not going to wait on you, sunshine. Let's go.” Why couldn't I have gotten the nice one?

Cassidy had a death grip on my hand and it was starting to hurt, but I refused to tell her that. Not after seeing all she had been through over the last few hours. Shortly after 3:00
A.M.
this morning, she had woken up with contractions strong enough to take her breath away. Things seemed to move pretty fast after that and there wasn't time to think about how early the baby was coming, how unprepared I felt, and how scared shitless I was at the thought of being a dad. When Cassidy's water had broken in the car, I'd wished to hell I had said yes to those stupid birthing classes. I was starting to feel light-headed as my breathing picked up and matched a laboring Cassidy's erratic pace.

Now sitting on a small swiveling stool in the OR, my fingers were about as numb as the rest of me.

Cassidy tugged at my arm. “Can you see anything? What's happening?”

God, please don't ask me to peek over the blue drape. I don't think my stomach can take it.

“Aren't you, like, supposed to be knocked out or something? Why are you awake?”

Not waiting for a reply, I repeated the question to the doctor beside me, the same one who had given Cassidy medicine through her IV earlier in her room. “Why is she awake?” My leg was doing an imitation of a Mexican jumping bean under the paper scrubs I was given back in the hospital room. Juicy Couture, they were not.

I had since learned that said doctor was the anesthesiologist and would be making sure Cassidy would be comfortable during the C-section. When I came into the OR, I was directed to sit down on this tiny stool and told to stay behind the drape. Panic bubbled and fizzed inside my gut and I was suddenly unprepared for this moment. The constant beeping from machines coming from something that resembled a prop used on a
Dr. Who
episode wasn't helping. And I had yet to figure out if I should be concerned with all those squiggly lines dancing across a monitor, spiking up and down in an erratic pattern.

“She's fine, Mr. Matthews. And she has an epidural for pain relief. She should be fairly comfortable throughout the procedure.”

“Fairly?” First
should be
and now
fairly
. I had the sudden urge to ask everyone present in the room for their credentials. Starting with the anesthesiologist, a.k.a. Dr. Feel Good.

“What the hell does that mean?” Cassidy asked as she tried her best to give Dr. Feel Good the stink eye. Which, admittedly, was kind of hard to do when you were strapped down to a table with your insides about to be brought out to play by the medical staff.

Ugh, that visual is so not helping you, Matthews.

“It means you might feel some tugging shortly, Mrs. Matthews, but that's totally normal.”

“Ms. Whalen,” Cassidy corrected her. “We're not married.”

“My apologies,” Dr. Feel Good said. With a curt glance in my direction, I might add. “What you shouldn't feel is pain. If you do, let me know.”

At that point, Cassidy winced and I leaned in closer, kissing her cheek. Sweat coated her face and neck, her copper hair damp. She looked what she would call a hot mess. But she was my hot mess, and she was about to give birth to my child.

She had never looked more beautiful.

“You okay?” I didn't like the way Cassidy's color seemed to have drained from her face.

“Yes…it's just…a lot of pressure.” She managed a weak smile.