The Rogue (The Moorehouse Legacy #4)(54)

“Are you pregnant?” It wasn’t at all what he’d wanted to lead with. But she was taking off fast, and if nothing else, he had to know.

She froze, then looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were narrow. “No, I’m not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I do.”

“Did you take a test?” God, this was not going well. He’d wanted to try and reach her, try to explain…something, anything. Instead, they were locked into this clinical conversation that was making him sick to his stomach and clearly pissing her off.

“I’ll call you if there’s a problem, okay?”

“A child with you wouldn’t be a problem for me,” he whispered.

As her eyes popped wide, he realized he’d spoken the thought out loud.

“Well, it would be for me,” she snapped.

Spike had to look down at the dock. He’d been slapped a number of times in his life. Punched much more frequently. Stabbed twice, too. But nothing in his memory could touch the pain that was barreling through his body right now.

“Yes, I could imagine it would be,” he replied quietly.

There was a long silence. When he finally looked up, she was staring at him with an odd expression.

“At least you seem to regret what happened in Greenwich,” she said.

“Of course I do.” He would rather have told her about the past himself. Maybe her reaction would have been different.

But then he thought about the way her mother had died. Ah, hell. Probably not.

“I have to go,” she said.

He wanted to make her stay. Didn’t have any right to. “I’m so…very sorry.”

Her eyes went to the sea and he was willing to bet she wished she had stayed out there. “Me, too.”

“Will you let me know if—”

“Yes, I will.” Against the darkening skies, her profile was a stark, pale contrast, like a cameo pin. “But I’m not pregnant.”

“You don’t know how to find me. Let me give you my number—”

“Sean will have it, right? So I’ll talk to him if I need to reach you.”

With that, she turned away.

Spike watched her walk off, her duffel bag brushing against her hip and her braid swinging from side to side. Her strides were even, her footsteps sure. She did not look back.

For some strange reason, his vision was suddenly eclipsed by memories of the moment when his whole life had changed over a decade ago. He remembered pounding up the stairs to a grungy apartment, saw himself throwing open the door, and then…the horror of his sister on the floor, curled into a ball, arms protecting her head. Above her, a six-foot-two man with a baseball bat lifted high.

Spike shuddered and refocused on Mad.

She was entering the clubhouse now, and as the door shut behind her, he realized his life had changed yet again. One door opening, twelve years ago in that run-down apartment; one door closing at this very moment, in a ritzy private club.

Neither event was significant on the surface; doors were used every day, passed through every day.

Some, though, some turned you into something else…or in this case, kept you right where you were. On some very basic level, Spike realized his future was going to be nothing more than decades of his present: A lonely stretch, made lonelier now because he’d had a glimpse of what together might have been like.

After a long while, he went around the clubhouse, walked out to the parking lot and got on his Harley.

Doing the whole ride back to the Adirondacks would be tough this late, but he could get a head start. Or maybe he would just drive through the night. His arm was aching, but he didn’t care. Nothing could reach him right now. Nothing.

And his numbness gave him a strange, troubling kind of invincibility.

As he started Bette, the first raindrop fell.

*

Mad’s knees were loose as nylon ropes as she walked into the clubhouse. After she picked up her package from the front desk, she went upstairs to the ladies’ lounge. The large airy space was done in the club colors of red and white and it usually cheered her. But not now.

When she dropped her duffel from her shoulder, she didn’t hear it hit the floor, but she was careful with the FedEx box, setting it down right next to her bag. Taking a deep breath, she went over to the bank of sinks and washed her face. With water dripping off her chin, she grabbed a white towel with the N.E.Y.C. insignia on it and draped it over her entire head.

Six weeks…six weeks she’d spent thinking about Spike and running through that morning at the Greenwich house over and over again, seeing him reach out for Amelia, hearing him say, You’re the one.

Mad was desperate for some way she might have misconstrued the situation and this was dangerous, like reading the wind when you were out at sea racing and badly behind. The peril in looking too hard was that you would invariably convince yourself that what you wanted to find was out there. When it really wasn’t.

She thought of Spike in all that leather just now. He’d said he only wore the supple armor if he was traveling long distances. So obviously he’d come all the way down to Rhode Island to see her. Why had he—

He’d wanted to find out whether she was pregnant. That was the why.

And she truly wasn’t. She’d wondered about the same thing and had taken a test right before she’d left the Bahamas. It had been hell to do, so hard for her that her hands shook the whole time. But the really sick part of those minutes when she’d stood over the sink, checking her watch and looking at the stick, was that part of her wanted to be. Which was flat-out insane. She couldn’t possibly handle being a single mother, which was what she would be; Spike being in her life was not healthy for her—not that he’d offered anyway.