Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(8)

The cops had tracked down Marina Chapen—a known working girl in the area. She told the cops that a redheaded woman had given her the baby and paid her to deliver it to my apartment. She was supposed to hand the baby to me directly, but she’d panicked when she heard all the commotion inside my apartment. Apparently, fifty bucks was the going rate to have someone drop a baby on a doorstep. A real bargain considering that Marina was now facing child endangerment charges and I was waiting on my eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer to meet me at the police station.

“What if the baby is mine?” I asked, pacing a path in the small conference room we’d been escorted to.

“Then you…take care of it?” Ian replied from his chair, cool and calm, his long legs crossed ankle to knee.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You allergic to diapers or something?”

I stopped and planted my hands on my hips. “This is not a fucking joke. You know the shit I lived through.” I ground my teeth as the vise in my chest clamped down, making it difficult to breathe. “I can’t raise a child… I just can’t.”

His voice got low and serious. “You’re not your dad, Caven.”

He was right, but that wasn’t what scared me.

“I’m not saddling a kid with that. My old man’s blood dies with me. End of story.”

Once upon a time, my dad had been an amazing man. Or at least I’d thought he was. I remembered playing with him at the park and throwing a football in the backyard while he grilled burgers.

But then my mom got sick and everything changed.

And when I say everything, I mean, my entire life. Past, present, and future.

At first, he started numbing the pain with booze, but that only made him angry. Trent took the brunt of his abuse, but there was always more than enough left over for me. When the alcohol wasn’t cutting it anymore, he moved on to pills. I’d never forget listening to my mother throwing up in the bathroom because she was in so much pain. Meanwhile, my father was passed out on the couch, high as a kite after raiding her stash of medications.

After that, she started hiding them. This enraged him more than anything else. According to several of his rampages, she was going to die regardless of if she had the medicine or not. He was the one being left behind to raise two worthless boys. Those pills belonged to him.

The woman was so frail that she could barely walk, but my father had no problems choking her unconscious until she told him where she’d hidden his next fix.

Honestly, I was relieved when he started disappearing for days at a time. Those were some of my favorite memories: sitting at my mother’s bedside, talking about everything under the sun.

But the abuse didn’t stop after she died. If anything, it got worse. Actually, it didn’t stop until one day, seven years later, when he died.

But he’d made sure to drop me and my brother in Hell before he left.

I’d sworn to myself I’d never have a child. No shred of that man should ever be passed on to future generations. It was bad enough that I had to carry a piece of him like a boulder strapped around my neck. If I thought about it, I could feel the burn of his DNA inside me. At least I didn’t look like him. Trent wasn’t so lucky. But, thankfully for both of us, the apple had fallen pretty far from the tree.

If that child turned out to be mine, there wouldn’t be a day that passed where I wouldn’t worry that I’d put her at risk of being part of that rotten and decayed tree as well.

I laced my fingers together to hide the shake of my hands and rested them on the top of my head. “I can’t do this.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” Ian said, plucking invisible lint off the leg of his slacks.

God, why hadn’t this happened to him? He was the responsible one. Hell, knowing him, he’d have set up a nursery in his spare bedroom the minute he’d woken up and realized he hadn’t worn a condom. Just in case.

Not me. The extent of my reaction had been to hit the doctor for an STD panel. A baby had never even been on my radar.

I shot him a glare. “We’re currently panicking about what happens if it is my baby. Could you please keep up?”

He sighed. “Relax and let’s be rational here for a second.”

“Nothing about this situation is rational!” I shouted, my voice echoing off the paneled walls. “If the baby is mine, why didn’t she say something over the last nine months? She knew where I lived. My apartment doesn’t look like much, but she knew about Kaleidoscope. She knew I had money.”

“She robbed you the last time she saw you. My guess is she thought you’d call the cops if she showed back up.”

“Oh, I absolutely would have. But a simple, ‘I’m pregnant and the baby is yours,’ while she was being hauled away in cuffs would have gone a long fucking way in me not having a nervous breakdown right now.”

He barked a laugh, but I found not the first thing funny.

“You fucking suck at this.”

“We can both be flipping our shit over the possibility of you being a father.” My stomach rolled at the F-word—not the four-letter kind. “Relax, Caven. Take a deep breath. No one is dead or dying. It’s a baby. Not ideal. But not exactly cause for you to give yourself a heart attack.”

I sucked in a deep breath and willed my heart to slow. “You’re right. We don’t even know if it’s mine.”