Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(9)

“There you go. What’s your gut telling you?”

“Mexico. Start a new life, buy a tequila distillery, and never look back.”

He chuckled.

If only he knew how serious I was.

There was a knock at the door, then a plain-clothed officer with a round face and a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing his badge on his hip, came in followed by my attorney, Doug Snell.

I rushed toward them. “What’s going on? Have they found Hadley?”

Doug shook his head.

I turned to the cop. “But you’re looking, right?”

Ian’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Cav, stop. Let the man talk.”

But I couldn’t stop. I needed them to find Hadley. And I needed her to come back and tell everyone that this was some kind of joke and the baby wasn’t mine.

More, I needed that baby to truly not be mine.

Everyone settled in chairs around a small conference table.

Everyone but me.

My heart was beating at a marathon pace and my mind was sprinting in circles; there would be no relaxing.

“We’re looking, okay?” the officer, who identified himself as Detective Wright, said as he flipped a file folder open. “According to the doctor at the hospital, the baby appears to be in good health, but given her age, they want to keep her for a few days. So this gives us a little time to get things figured out.”

Her.

It was a girl.

Dear God. I really couldn’t handle this.

“Her age?” I questioned. “How old is she?”

“Doc estimated she was born sometime earlier today.”

Ian cursed under his breath, but I couldn’t do anything but grit my teeth and shake my head. I didn’t want to acknowledge the way my stomach churned at that revelation. Anger was an easier emotion for me to process. But for fuck’s sake, who abandoned a newborn? The poor kid could have died in that chilly hallway or been stepped on by any number of people leaving my apartment.

Fucking Hadley. Such a waste of a beautiful woman.

“We’ve been searching the hospitals and birthing centers in the area, but judging by the hack job on the umbilical cord, I’m not expecting to find any answers.”

“What does that mean?”

He shared a knowing look with Doug. “It means you need to accept the possibility that we may never find her. Without a picture or a last name, we have so little to go on.”

“What about the prints you lifted from my apartment after she stole my stuff?”

He sighed. “We got thirteen prints excluding yours. You’d just moved into that apartment. For all we know, those belong to the previous tenants and their family.”

“Or they could match fucking Hadley,” I rumbled, my already waning patience vanishing.

Doug interrupted my meltdown. “Finding her is not going to solve the problem. You need a DNA test. End this before it even gets started. I’ve got a lab lined up. They’ve agreed to rush it, so it will take about thirty-six hours to get the results.”

I swallowed hard and prepared myself to ask the one question I didn’t want the answer to. “And what then?”

“Well,” he drawled, shifting in his chair. “If it comes back that she’s not yours, we walk away. The child will be turned over to social services and the police will handle it from that point on.”

“And if I am…you know…the father?” Christ, I could barely get the word out.

“As long as we have proof of paternity before the child is discharged from the hospital, it will be a breeze to have the child released to you. Because we don’t even have a name to list on the birth certificate, sole custody will be yours. I can’t imagine there will be any issues.”

It was at that moment that I knew Ian had been wrong. With the words sole custody, a vise cranked down so hard on my chest that I was pretty positive I was going to die—or, at the very least, be broken in two.

Having a baby with a woman you didn’t know was bad.

Having a baby with a woman who had robbed you before sneaking out of your apartment was even worse.

But having a baby with a woman who had dumped the child at your door before taking off, thus leaving you—a man who had no idea how to even hold a baby—to care for said child alone for the foreseeable future was by far the worst-case scenario.

And thanks to Hadley fucking no-last-name, I was only one DNA test away from living it all.





CAVEN


My eyes were bloodshot and my body exhausted when I heard the knock on the door.

I knew.

I didn’t even need to answer it.

I’d spent the last thirty-some hours counting cracks in the ceiling while considering every possible ending to this nightmare.

My favorite was the one where Doug called announcing like he was Maury Povich that I was not the father. I had big plans for this scenario. I was going to get a vasectomy and then buy a yacht and sail down the coast, where I’d celebrate every child-free sunrise by standing on the bow naked and yelling “Freedom!” Mel Gibson–style. Not that he was naked in that movie. But in the middle of stress-induced insomnia, I’d thought there was no better way to celebrate my eternal childless status than to be naked.

In the scenarios where I was the father, I spent my time mentally listing all the ways I would absolutely screw up a child in the next eighteen years. It started with your average run-of-the-mill fears. Things like maybe she would become a serial killer because I worked all the time and she was raised by evil, child-hating nannies. I’d Googled nanny agencies shortly after this and left a few sleep-deprived messages on answering machines, asking for the stats on how many of their past clients were now in jail or on the run from the law. Not surprisingly, I didn’t receive any call-backs.