‘I wasn’t calling to get you back. I was calling to tell you that you were going to be a dad.’
‘Holy fuck.’ He closed his eyes and reached for the railing. His Adam’s apple jerked in his throat and his jaw was perfectly angular. ‘I… Sienna. I didn’t… you could have… you should have texted me, for Christ’s sake.’
She felt her eyes go buggy. ‘Please don’t tell me what Ishouldhave done. I was sixteen, alone, scared out of my brain and my boyfriend – who I was still very, very much in love with – had left town, and told me he never wanted to see me again. Told me to move on, just like he had. So… forgive me if I didn’t explore absolutely every possible avenue here. I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.’
He dipped his head once, his face screwing up in silent apology. ‘Fuck.’
‘You said that already.’
‘I don’t understand. Can we just – I need to sit down,’ he admitted, looking inside before stalking back through the doors and grabbing the single seat and positioning it so he could swing his big legs across the pad and brace his elbows on the back.
She moved inside gingerly, as if wary now of the can of worms she’d opened into their shared past. A shared past she’d lived and breathed all on her own.
‘What happened?’
She hesitated. Her heart hurt. Her stomach twisted. Her breath caught in her throat. Her whole body trembled in a visceral reaction to remembering that awful night. ‘I lost the baby.’ Somehow, the words emerged stiff. As if her voice box had 100 per cent got the memo on what would happen if she gave into even a hint of weakness and grief.
His curse tore through the room, a violent eruption. An apology. Pain and grief. ‘Our baby.’
Our baby.
Tears scratched the back of her throat. She pressed her teeth together, trying not to let that possessive, partnershippy phrase land with a thud in her heart.
‘Yeah.’
His skin was so pale beneath his tan she actually thought he might pass out, and out of nowhere, she had the strangest image of a huge, old tree in a forest being felled. Men like Aiden didn’t faint as though they were some Regency romance heroine. But his hand shook as he lifted it to his thick dark hair and dragged it through, like he could somehow brush some comprehension into his brain that way.
‘I should have known,’ he said, after a beat, frowning. ‘I should have been there for you.’
More words she didn’t want to hear because of how much they had the capacity to bend and fold parts of her heart she’d long ago hardened, especially to Aiden.
‘It’s okay,’ she said with a practised, dismissive shrug. ‘It wasn’t meant to be. I was okay. I mean, not at the time. But I met Cory and Melanie, and bit by bit, I started getting my life back on track.’
‘Without me,’ he said, his voice giving nothing away.
‘Well, yeah. You were… what’s the phrase I’m looking for again?Ad Meliora. Onto a brighter future.’ She swallowed to clear the acid in her throat. ‘I googled it.’
He stared at her and then stood. Again, she thought of the tree being felled and grimaced.
‘You should stay sitting down.’
He ignored her. ‘Sienna.’ He caught her hands and lifted them between their chests. Such a simple act, but somehow, it had the power to totally erase the past – just for a moment – and form a little bubble outside of time. They were just Sienna and Aiden, as incontrovertible and whole, as if they were their own shared being, as they’d ever been. Then, now, him, her, they were just a confluence of cells living outside normal space and time. ‘If I had known, I would have come home to you. I would have been there.’
‘But you didn’t know,’ she said, keeping her heart hard as a matter of urgency. ‘You wouldn’t even speak to me. You’d moved on, I remember.’
His Adam’s apple jerked again.
‘And Ashbury Falls stopped being your home the moment you left.’ Her smile was wistful, dredged right up from inside her heart. ‘We both know that.’
A muscle throbbed low in his jaw.
‘You were always destined for this. Your bright future. Fame. Riches. You know, global superstar.’
He flinched as though she’d just called him the worst name under the sun. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Yeah? Well, I do.’
‘Sienna… you must have felt… I wish?—’
