I shuddered and forced my tear-clogged vision to focus. First on his chest. His dark gray suit jacket. Then the buttons on his shirt.He’d forgotten the top one,I vaguely noticed as my gaze moved higher, finally settling on Max’s handsome face.
“Did you know?” I demanded again in a harsh whisper.
How could he not know? He always knew.
“I know a lot about the things I care about.”
I’d never forgotten those first minutes when I’d known Max Hamilton before I’d learned who he was to Todd. I’d never forgotten the things he’d said or the way he’d looked at me, no matter how hard I tried.
“Sit. Please.” Max’s firm hands didn’t give me much of a choice, guiding me onto the edge of the bed before letting me go.
My head swayed, the whirring starting up again. Max cared about both of us. Todd and me. He’d just left Todd—spoke to him not even thirty minutes ago.How could he not know? Not sense something was wrong?
“I have to call him,” I blurted out, frantically feeling over the bed for my phone. “I have to talk to Todd. I can’t—he can’t?—”
“It’s already ringing.” Max held up his phone, Todd’s name lit on the screen.
“Let me—” I reached for it.
“Daze—” Max pursed his lips, a growl-like sound caged inside his chest as I wrenched his phone from him.
No wonder he was trying to hang on to it. I shook so badly, it took two hands to hold it with only marginal success to my ear.
As it rang and rang, Max’s stare bored into mine. Burrowed straight down to where I was sure he could see how all the caution tape wrapped around my heart was starting to fray and tear with every unanswered second. I tried to look away, but the room was too small or he was too big—there was nonotlooking at him.
Tall and broad. Strong but not overly muscular. Thick hair that looked like warmed whiskey and green eyes like grass after a fresh rain. Even frustrated, Max Hamilton was gorgeous.
The thought wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Max had been frustrated a lot over the last five months, and always with Todd. In four years, I’d never seen Max angry. I’d never heard him raise his voice or lose his cool. While Todd was easily irritable,especially if he’d had a drink…or a few…Max was always his steadying hand.
And now, he was having to be mine.
“Daze,” Max pleaded with me for his phone, but I couldn’t. It felt like a lifeline—a life raft I held to my face. If I could just talk to Todd, it would be okay. He would be okay. We would be okay.
The line rang and rang, each chime sounding less like a pleasant tone and more like the sequential firing of a machine gun straight to the center of my chest.
How could this be happening? How had I not seen this coming?
“Hi, you’ve reached Todd McCormick. I’m unavailable at the moment…”
The phone slid from my hands, thudding onto the carpeted floor as my arms collapsed around my middle. “I don’t understand.”
I knew Todd was struggling. He had been struggling before the pregnancy. His parents’ expectations of him—and of the woman he was dating—created a giant wedge in our relationship. And then we’d found out about the baby.
It wasn’t planned—she wasn’t planned. But I was determined to give my baby girl the kind of family I never had, and I thought Todd would feel the same. Maybe for her, he’d start caring less about his parents, who only saw their son as one more piece to fit into their ever-growing political puzzle.
My hope never gained any steam.
The baby…the wedding…it made his parents more demanding and drove Todd in the opposite direction, no matter what I did or said. No matter what Max did or said.
Hate was a strong word, but after four years of watching how Todd and Mary McCormick emotionally manipulated their son, I lost my qualms when saying I hated them. Todd was a good person. He had a good heart. But he was raised with a silverspoon—a silver spoon that dug him into a hole, into a lifestyle that he didn’t know how to climb out of.
“I’m going to go back over there. God, I was just there. How—” Max caught himself. “I’m going to find him, Daze. I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
I stared out the window, frozen in place like if I didn’t move, the nightmare couldn’t continue. Everything inside me was held hostage. Tortured by the knowledge that I’d just become my worst fear:dependent.
“You see what your asshole father left us with? You never depend on a man, ever. They’re all rotten at the core. You hear me, Daisy?”My mother was a broken record, a heartbroken record that repeated the same song every day for the span of my childhood. When she died, I swore I wouldn’t end up like her—bitter because she’d trusted the wrong man and resentful of her own daughter because I reminded her of her mistake.
“Daisy.” Again, that unfamiliar deep tenor bled into his voice, drawing my gaze back to his.
