“Yeah, sorry. I was just wondering what Brogan’s up to.”
“So, he’s got the whole secretive thing down to a science too, huh? Owen drives me nuts with that.”
“Brogan is more than secretive. He’s a closed book. Every time I think I’m getting close, he shuts down, closing me off from really knowing him.”
Ruby placed a hand on her arm with sympathy in her eyes. “You really care about him, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “I do.”
She was just so afraid of getting her heart broken.
“You should tell him.”
Amy gave a derisive snort. “I doubt that would go over well. We’ve been…intimate, but I’m not sure that he has real feelings.”
“I doubt that. I’ve seen the way Brogan looks at you.”
“Like he’s doing his job of keeping me safe?”
“No.” Ruby chuckled. “Like he can’t bring himself to look away.”
Amy didn’t know what to say to that, so she just sipped her wine.
“Listen,” Ruby continued. “Owen tried to keep his distance at first too. He had this whole idea that he wasn’t worthy of me. I bet that Brogan’s got a little bit of that going on as well.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
But itdidmake sense. He’d hinted at a dark past, and she was sure there was violence there. Did he think that tainted the person he was now?
She wasn’t naive. She knew that he was a part of a criminal organization, that he probably did things that most people would find horrifying. But she also knew that he’d saved her the night they met. He’d been protecting her from the beginning. And she wasn’t the only person that he looked out for. He’d been keeping an eye out for Richie for years.
The front door opened and closed, and she turned as Brogan walked into the kitchen. There was something about him that was different. There was a light in his eyes, and she could only assume that whatever he’d done tonight had gone well.
Then, he came straight to her, planting a kiss on her lips. When he pulled away, she saw that Ruby was beaming. She obviously took that kiss as a sign that she was right, but Amy couldn’t get too excited. A single kiss didn’t mean that he cared about her. She still didn’t know that things between them were as real for him as they were for her.
* * *
A few days later marked three weeks since she met Brogan. She was at school, sitting in a bathroom stall and waiting. She’d been experiencing symptoms lately that she was pretty sure were an indicator that her life was about to change.
As a med student, she knew that the fatigue and sore breasts were classic signs of pregnancy. Now, her period was two days late.
So, she managed to get her hands on a pregnancy test this morning on the way to the college by asking to stop by the pharmacy and telling Brogan that she thought she saw one of the men that abducted her outside.
It was a small lie that allowed her to buy the test while he was checking out the parking lot for threats, but she still felt a little bad about it. Now, he was waiting out in the hallway as the timer on her phone went off and she looked at the test.
Her breath left her in a rush as she saw that it was positive. It wasn’t really a surprise, considering her symptoms, but she was still overwhelmed by how big this was. The impact of this moment would ripple through every aspect of her life.
She was going to be a mom.Holy shit.
And Brogan was the dad. They’d always used condoms, but one of them must have failed.
She couldn’t imagine telling him about this. He already kept her at a distance. There was no way he would embrace this news happily.
But she couldn’t let herself focus so much on how he might feel. She was having a hard enough time figuring out how she felt. She’d been on her own for a long time, ever since her parents died, and she’d always wanted to start a family of her own.
But she imagined that she would be in a happy and long-term relationship by then. She wasn’t even sure she could call what she had with Brogan a relationship at all. The sex was amazing, and they’d been doing it almost every night lately, but she couldn’t help worrying that he was just passing time with her.
No matter what either of them wanted, things were about to get real for both of them. It wasn’t just about what they wanted anymore. There was a baby on the way.
