Until You Loved Me (Silver Springs #3)(37)

Hudson seemed to be gone. The motel manager was just walking back from having seen him off. Since he was coming to her door, probably to follow up and make sure she was okay, she stepped out and rolled her suitcase to her rental car.

“You’re leaving?” he asked as he watched.

“As soon as possible,” she responded.

“But I have you down for two nights.”

She wasn’t about to let that stop her. “Credit me what you can. Keep the rest.” If she couldn’t change her plane reservations, she might have to pay for a motel in Los Angeles, but she didn’t care if she ended up paying twice. Anything was preferable to staying here.

He frowned and shoved his hands in his pockets as she went back inside the room to get her computer, her purse and the rest of her food. “For what it’s worth, I’m really surprised by Hudson’s behavior,” he said when she came out with the rest of her things. “I’ve never heard of him being violent with anyone—least of all a woman or a child. Most everyone around here sings his praises, especially Aiyana out at New Horizons.”

“Of course Aiyana loves him. He gives her a lot of money for the school.”

“Yeah, but he also spends a lot of time out there, helping the boys.”

“That’s nice of him,” she said, but there was no true admiration in her voice or her heart. All she could think about was the cold, hard look on his face when he’d advanced on her, and how decisively he’d talked about driving her to LA to get an abortion. This baby had already become real to her. Just last week she’d felt the first butterfly-like movement in her womb—proof of life—and had been contemplating names. Heck, she’d even started preparing the extra bedroom in her home as a nursery. What had ever possessed her to make this trip?

She’d been delusional, she decided, too honest for her own good and far too optimistic about the type of man she’d gotten involved with.

The manager told her he could credit her for one night. She thanked him, and that was it. As she pulled out of the parking lot, she said a silent good riddance to Hudson and the upsetting encounter they’d had. She was going back to her peaceful, steady life. Maybe it wasn’t exciting, but at least she wasn’t subjected to the whims of a pompous, overbearing professional football player. Once he understood that she didn’t expect anything from him—even support for their child—he’d forget about her.

She hoped.

*

Hudson felt terrible.

He felt terrible about bringing a child into a less-than-ideal situation, and that the child might feel the repercussions.

He felt terrible that he’d blamed Ellie for lying, if she wasn’t. (He still wasn’t quite sure about that; their encounter in September had been so unusual.)

He felt terrible for acting like a belligerent bully in front of her and the motel manager of The Mission Inn. They had to think he was some kind of monster.

Bottom line, he hadn’t felt worse in a long, long time.

“Shit,” he muttered as he prowled around his house. He needed to go back to the motel, needed to talk to Ellie again. She wouldn’t be happy to see him, but he’d behave much better this time, be more diplomatic. To begin with, he’d set his doubts aside in favor of trying to solve the problem at hand. And that was...what to do about the baby? He’d have a paternity test conducted once the child was born—to be absolutely sure—but Ellie was so certain he was the father that he suspected she was right. They hadn’t made love only once. They’d made love three times, which raised the chances, and each encounter had been gloriously messy and primal and uninhibited. He hadn’t noticed a leaking or broken condom, but that would be easy to miss. It wasn’t as though he’d ever turned on the lights to examine what they’d used. He’d just gone into the bathroom and gotten rid of it.

So...he needed to look at this situation as if he hadn’t been duped. He needed to take a deep breath and wrap his head around a different future than the one he’d envisioned for himself. He’d be a father before he became a husband. He couldn’t escape that now, so he had to figure out a way to accept it. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, his child would arrive in four months. He had very little time to prepare mentally or emotionally and, even worse, he or she would live clear across the country.

How could he be a decent father if he saw the kid only every couple of months?

He had no answer for that.

“Shit,” he said again. He’d been cursing ever since he’d met up with Ellie today. If something like this had to happen, why couldn’t he have gotten some local girl pregnant?

After everything he’d done to avoid getting anyone pregnant! All the nights he’d spent in his hotel room when his teammates were entertaining prostitutes down the hall. All the craziness he’d avoided when various friends had invited him to Vegas—and he’d called it a night when the groupies showed up. This wasn’t fair, he thought, then stopped himself. He couldn’t go back down that road. That would only rile him up again.

Once he was calm enough to stop pacing, he was tempted to go to bed, pull the pillow over his head and not wake up for several days. But Ellie was in town only for tomorrow. He had to deal with this problem while she was still here.

Remembering something about her that he wanted to check out, he went into his office, where he’d left his laptop. When they’d met, she’d said she was a scientist specializing in immunology. And when they’d talked later, she’d made that seem believable, with everything she knew about the moon and the stars, even the tides. She was educated, and someone as educated as she was would be unlikely to try to trap him with a pregnancy. Someone like Ellie could earn her own living. Besides, how would she have known he was going to be at Envy in the first place?