One to Tell the Grandkids (29 page)

“Fight about what?” The words came out exactly the way he looked—tired and sad.

“That is a remarkably stupid question.”

“There’s nothing to fight about. I told you why this can’t happen,” he said, gesturing between the two of them.

“You told me a really sad story about a woman who took your daughter away from you. It sucks. What she did to you sucks. What I don’t get is what that woman has to do with me.”

Caleb raised his head, his eyes flashing with irritation. “I know how this story ends.”

“That’s a bunch of bullshit.” Her breath caught in her throat, and she had to swallow down her fear of her next question. She needed to know. She would go crazy if she didn’t know. “Tell me you don’t love me.”

Instantly, he looked down. His shoulders rose and fell sharply.

“Tell me,” Taryn said again, “so I can finally get it out of my head. Tell me I was stupid for thinking it was more than just sex. Tell me you just needed a distraction.”

He looked up with fire in his eyes. “You were way more than a distraction, Taryn. I told you the first time it meant something. It
means
something.”

Despite the fact they’d never been together, after Caleb started ignoring her, Taryn had gone through the inevitable tenets of any break up. She’d replayed most every day, every conversation they’d had over and over in her head. The night Ann died had featured prominently. She’d turned those simple words inside out and upside down trying to read between the lines. “
What
? What does it mean?”

He growled and paced away from her, rubbing the back of his neck like Slate always did when he was agitated. “What do you want me to say? You want me to tell you I love you? I do, but it’s worse than all that. When I’m with you, I want it
all
. I want to be there to hold your hand when you give birth. I want to be the one who gets up with you at all hours of the night.”

Taryn’s head spun as she tried to process his rambling rant. It was hard to get past the first bit, the “I love you” bit. That one seemed important. She swallowed hard. “If you love me, if you want all those things, then why all the drama?”

He paused mid step to stare at her. “Because it’s insanity. We met eight months ago because you and my best friend slept together.”

“Slate has no problem with our being together.”

“He doesn’t now. That might not always be the case.”

“It doesn’t matter if he ever does. I’m not in love with Slate. I’m in love with you.”

He took a step toward her, and Taryn’s heart soared with hope. There was a tension in the room that had nothing to do with fear or anger. It was a pull, and it was getting increasingly difficult to ignore. This man was the most frustrating human being on the planet, she was sure, but it didn’t make her want to kiss him less.

Caleb dropped his hands to his side and looked away from her. “This is history repeating itself. Take it from me, trying to fix my broken family by picking up another one doesn’t work so well.”

“My family isn’t broken.” She crossed the room to him and grabbed his arm, pulling him so he was facing her. “I don’t know what the deal was with you or that other woman, but I’m not her. I have a family.” She touched a hand to her belly. “Rory has a family. Maybe it’s not the nice, neat nuclear unit but whatever. That’s overrated. Who has a nuclear family these days?

“I have Slate. He’s never going to be my husband, but he’s my friend, and he’s my partner in this. I have Rob and Mel to fall back on. I have my parents and my overbearing big brother. And yeah, they all have their issues, but they aren’t broken. We aren’t broken.

“I don’t love you out of some nesting instinct. Like since I couldn’t make myself love Slate, you were the next available option. That’s not what this is about. Unless you want to tell me you love me because, what? You fall for any single pregnant girl who comes along?”

“No. No, that’s not why at all.”

“Damn straight, because I think I’m a pretty awesome person, and I deserve better than someone who’s only looking to fix me.”

“No, I don’t want to fix you. You’re perfect the way you are.”

“Then what?” she cried, exasperated. “What is it that’s holding you back?”

“I’m glad you don’t get it. I hope you never have to. I hope you never have to lose a child, because it’s not something I can go through twice. I know she isn’t mine, but I love her anyway. I love her because I love you and I love Slate.”

“And that should be all you need to figure out you can’t lose her. If we tried something and it didn’t work out, you’re Slate’s brother. If you can get your head out of your ass, you’d see it doesn’t matter what I have to say about it. Even if I was as cruel as this Lisa woman was to you, you still have Slate. You’re his family, so you’re Rory’s family.”

He hesitated, his brow furrowed in thought, but Taryn was done. She was frustrated and tired and cranky, and she wasn’t going to ignore the incessant pull anymore. She grabbed him by his shirt collar and yanked him down the few inches she needed to kiss him.

Caleb gasped and then groaned into her mouth, but it was only a second before he gave in. His hand splayed against the small of her back, and he pushed her flush against him as returned her kiss with fervency.

For too many long weeks, Taryn had craved this. She craved it with a hunger, like most pregnant women craved certain foods, like it was a necessity, like she couldn’t imagine living without it. This was passion, she was sure of it. Passion and not some attempt to fill a hole. The way he kissed her, with the same urgency, the same heat, made her believe the same was true of his motives whether or not he believed it himself.

Taryn was trying to decide if it was deviant to coax him out of his clothes—she was so big—when a pain hit her hard enough to make her gasp and stumble backward a few steps.

Caleb panted, his expression perplexed. “Are you okay?”

Taryn’s heart had begun to pound out of control, a different rhythm than the erratic tattoo from just a moment before. Her stomach had been twisting, cramping, all night. Progressively. Systematically. The pain she’d just felt was distinct and hard enough to take her breath away. She put her hand to her stomach. “Oh. Oh no.”

Realization dawned in Caleb’s eyes, and he moved back to her side, his arm around her. “Contractions?”

“Yes? No? Maybe? I don’t know.” She shook her head. “No. Never mind. No. It’s not. I’m fine.”

“Taryn—”

“I’m fine!” She dug her fists into the small of her back, rubbing as though she could rub the residual ache away. “This is not happening. Not while Slate is in jail and I’m thirty miles away from my birth plan.”

“Hey, hey. Look at me. Look at me, Taryn.” He took her face in his hands and tilted her head up. When she looked, his eyes were calm. It was the kind of calm she could grab on to, and she let it soothe her quickly spiraling nerves. “It’s going to be okay. Labor takes a while, remember? We can make it back to Orange, no problem. Slate will probably make it in time, too.”

Taryn winced. She’d been trying to put off thinking about long labors. Really, she’d been trying to put off thinking about labor at all. “You’re not going to make this drive three times in one night.”

“For you I will. Of course I will.”

She whimpered. She hated feeling like such a coward.

“Come here.” Caleb pulled her into a tight hug, and Taryn readily wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her head against his neck. The smell of his warm skin soothed her. A little.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he murmured. His breath was shaky, and his words tremored a bit, but his arms were steady as he held her. “I’ll be right here. I promise. I’m not going anywhere.”

Taryn twisted her fingers in the back of his shirt. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

B
y the time Caleb and Taryn arrived back at her place, she was calmer. They had entered some kind of silent agreement where they could be friends again without thinking about what they might be now that they’d admitted their love for one another. They had a lot to sort out, but he had promised to be here for her labor at least.

So she let him hold her hand over the shifter when a contraction hit. She needed him for that much. She didn’t want to wake everyone up yet. She didn’t want to call Kaylynn when she was already stressed about Slate. It could wait until Slate was released.

Caleb drew her a bath. While she relaxed, he made oatmeal with milk, brown sugar, and bananas. If the harrowing task of giving birth didn’t warrant comfort food, he didn’t know what did.

“It makes me nervous to eat. I don’t want to poop in front of the doctors.”

“Oh, honey.” Caleb brushed her hair back away from her face in an affectionate gesture. “There’s no getting around that. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. You might as well get some breakfast out of it.”

She groaned and put her hands over her eyes. “That’s horrible. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“It’s not so bad. Poop is going to be part of your daily life for years. You should get used to it.”

When Taryn was done with breakfast, Caleb tried to convince her to at least attempt a nap.

“Are you kidding me? Let’s forget the part about me being in active labor, which by all accounts is an escalating scale from that-was-uncalled-for to rending-me-in-two-would-have-been-more-humane. Even without that. Caleb, I’m going to be someone’s mother. Today.”

Caleb took her hand in both of his on top of the table. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call
your
mother?”

“Very sure. She’d spend every minute worried about if every pain I have is normal. By the time I deliver, she’ll have convinced herself both Rory and I are going to die.” Taryn shuddered, and he squeezed her hand. “The less time we give her to worry, the better.”

“Okay. How about a movie, then?”

They watched a movie and then the morning news. Taryn rested with her head on his shoulder and let him rub her back. Hours passed. The pain got worse. Taryn tried her best to walk, hanging on to his hand all the time.

“You’re so calm it’s annoying,” Taryn grumbled, beginning the awkward shuffle back and forth across the living room after the latest contraction.

“It helps that I know what to expect.” He hesitated only a moment before he continued. He owed her this—the whole story. “It was just Lisa and me when Trinity was born. Lisa was scared out of her mind, poor thing.”

Taryn scoffed. “I don’t know that I could feel sympathy for a woman who stole my kid.”

Caleb flinched. It was never going to be easy to accept what Lisa did. That moment of remembering was always a sharp stab of pure agony, a punch to the gut. He shook it off, reminding himself this moment wasn’t about him.

“Despite what she did to me, I don’t think she was a monster. That’s one of the problems with rushing into things. I didn’t know until it was too late she was the type of person who would take a clean break if she could get it. I think she thought she was in love with me as much as I thought I was in love with her.

“She was hired to the customer support department at the company where I worked. We met in the break room. She seemed so nervous. It was her first day, so maybe that was understandable. I invited her to lunch.”

“That was very sweet of you to make her feel welcome.”

“Some people say I’m a sweet guy.”

Taryn side-eyed him but gave him a tired smile. “You have your moments.” She sucked in a breath and bent at the waist. Her hand grasped the air, and when he reached for her, she clung to him. “Keep talking,” she said through clenched teeth.

“Long story short? No one had ever taken care of Lisa and very few had treated her kindly. She was grateful, and she mistook that for love. I think I understand that. Before we met, she was alone in the world. She had no idea how she was going to raise her baby with no support and a brand new job.

“It started out innocent enough. I bought her lunch a lot because I thought she was too skinny for a pregnant woman. Then, as I started to realize how little she had, I bought her things for the baby. The car seat. The crib.”

“The things our parents bought us,” Taryn said.

“Yes.”

“Well, I can definitely understand why she was playing nice.”

“I don’t think she ever played games with me. It was a while before she told me she was pregnant, let alone that she had no support. We liked each other. We could have been good friends. It wasn’t all her fault by a longshot.

“It was what I needed at the time. I couldn’t deal with the fact there was nothing at all I could do for Ann. Here was someone I could help, whose life I could change for the better. And she adored me, Taryn. For a while there, it was like she thought I was, as they say, the bee’s knees.”

He was rewarded with Taryn’s tired smile. “It was a built-in family.”

“Yeah. A girl who doted on me and a pretty baby.”