NICE GIRL TO LOVE (THE COMPLETE THREE-BOOK COLLECTION)(111)

She jerked her gaze up to his, jaw agape in shock. “That’s impossible. Besides my parents, no one knows. How could you—” Her eyes narrowed in anger. “It was that investigator of yours again wasn’t it? He got a hold of my medical records?”

“Jay is very good at what he does.”

She cursed under her breath.

The annoyance helped. It gave her the tiny burst of strength she didn’t think she possessed to say the words aloud. “I told you my parents and I moved out of our home all those years ago after they found me that night, but really, we didn’t move until later…nineteen weeks later, to be exact,” she whispered brokenly, as she thought of the one word that still held the power to bring her to her knees in helpless anger, jagged pain.

Fetus.

The only term the hospital would use to refer to the life that had died in her womb that May.

In their eyes, she’d ‘lost a fetus.’ Not a baby, not even a stillborn.

And every question they’d asked her regarding the group hospital funeral plans were phrased in terms of what she’d like to do for ‘it’ and never ‘him.’ Even though she’d lain on that hospital bed and pushed, watched this perfect, beautiful little boy come into this world with ten fingers and ten toes.

But not a single breath in his lungs.

He was so small she’d been able to cradle him in her two hands while they kept telling her they needed to take the ‘fetus’ away.

“They never once called him my son.”

The icy daggers of those memories speared through her heart over and over again, drowning her, filling her with the same hollow pain she’d spent years thrashing her way through only to just barely survive it.

“It was a different time then.” Connor’s voice was shredded with sympathy. Grief for a baby he never got to meet. “We didn’t have the laws we do now.”

Abby had actually already been here in Arizona when they’d passed the MISSing Angels bill. And she’d cried through the news as the first set of birth certificates for stillborn babies were issued. “The bill wouldn’t have helped my son. He missed the twenty-week mark by two days.”

“I’ve heard of some states making exceptions,” he began quickly, resolutely. “I’ll draw the paperwork up right now, Abby. We’ll get you that birth certificate with his name—”

“No.” She put a hand on the side of his face and smoothed away the pain etched in his features. “I admit that it was all I’d been able to think about at one time. It took me years to find peace with all of it, but I did. I don’t need to petition any state organization to classify the child I’d had to bury as a baby. And though a part of me will always ache for the injustice it is to him not to have it, I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me that he’d had a life worth remembering.”

“Sweetheart, I am so sorry you went through that.”

The exact phrasing of his words brought the next fresh wave of heartache pummeling through her. “It’s not just something I ‘went’ through, or something I’ve laid to rest in my past,” she revealed quietly, raising her gaze up to meet his. “It’s an inevitable part of my future, too. I have uterine abnormalities that would put every baby I tried to carry to term at risk.”

Breaking her gaze away, she whispered softly, “I’d understand if you…” She squeezed her fists and forced herself to say it. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted someone who could give you a child. Because you’d be such an amazing father, Connor. You talk about always wanting me to have everything for my happiness. I feel the same way for you. You deserve to be with a woman who you’re able to have a family with.”

He cradled her face in his hands and kissed away the stray tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not going anywhere, Abby. All of this just proves to me how strong you are, makes me know you’re an even more amazing woman than I already thought you were.”

“But don’t you want kids? A family you could come home to and have all those classic American meals with?” Though he never said it aloud, she knew that was a part of why he gravitated toward those meals as his favorites—because it was the furthest thing from what he’d had growing up, all of it.

“Honey, you and I both know that parenthood isn’t dictated by birth, or sometimes even by family. A child doesn’t have to bear my gene for me to want to be his or her father.” He slid a hand over hers. “I’ll do everything in my power to be even half as strong as you. We can try for a child as many times as you’re willing. But if it’s not in the cards, or even if it is, there are a lot of great kids out there who need parents that will love them. No matter what, you’re going to make an incredible mom to some very lucky kids in the future.” Twining their fingers together, he added in a voice rough with emotion, “And if you choose me to be the one right there beside you throughout it all, I’ll consider myself among the lucky ones as well.”

She fell back into his arms again. “It all sounds so perfect,” she said softly.

“You bitch!”

Gasping, Abby spun around and saw Skylar standing not ten feet away, confused and hurt, eyes red with angry tears.

Connor shot off the couch and went over to her. “Skylar, did you walk over here from Becky’s? Does your father even know you’re here?”