Dread drops like a rock in the pit of my stomach. “What did you do, Trip?” The words drift from my lips on a whisper, something inside already well aware of what he did.
Pain slices through his expression. “She said she’d take care of you.” He swallows hard. “Told me she’d stay with you until you woke up, make sure you got home okay.”
“Oh my God.” I drop my forehead into my hand and groan.
Daphne hated me. Even after that night, she had nothing but contempt for me as if my being with Stewart robbed her of her plan to seduce and marry the asshole.
“I’m so sorry.” His voice shakes with emotion, but I feel nothing for his pain. “I really thought she’d take care of you.”
I rub my temples and search for a feeling, a memory, something that validates his story. “She didn’t.”
“Fuck, Layla.” His eyes darken in a scary way. “I never should’ve left you.”
“I can’t believe this shit. She was in on it.” Fuck! “Why you didn’t tell me this sooner? We had an entire year together, and you wouldn’t even look at me.”
“At first, I tried. When I’d pass by you in the hallway, you’d always have your eyes to the floor. After that night, you weren’t the same girl.”
“You took my virginity, Trip.” My whispered shriek sends him back in his chair as if it delivered a physical blow. “I wasn’t the same girl.”
“I’m so sorry, I know, and I deserve your anger.” His pleading gaze fixes on mine. “I broke you. I could see it. I assumed that you’d woken the next day hating me for leaving you after having unprotected sex with you. You’d have every right to. And then you were hanging out with Stewart every day. I never saw you again by yourself. You were always with him.”
I dig the heels of my palms into my forehead, pushing back the headache that’s starting to form behind my eyes. “Still, when you realized I was pregnant, you had to have wondered.”
“I didn’t wonder.” His jaw is hard. “I knew.”
He knew? My jaw falls loose on its hinges. He fucking knew!
My blood ignites with the heat of my anger. “Why didn’t you say anything? Do you have any idea what he put me through? What he put Axelle through? You had the power to save us!”
He leans in, eyebrows low. “I had nothing to offer you. Stew had his father’s fucking legacy. I had a drug-addict mom and a stepdad who knocked me around. I thought by letting you go I was doing what was best for you and our baby.”
I lean in, pinning him with a glare. “You were wrong.”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m here?”
“Now? You show up now, eighteen years later? It was you who checked Axelle’s birth records and my divorce records, wasn’t it?”
His chest puffs out. “Yes.”
“Why?” I take a deep breath through another slight cramp. Blake would kill me for allowing myself to endure this kind of stress. I need to relax, if not for me, for the baby. For Blake.
“After the news broke about what Stewart did to that fighter and the gossip back home carried its way to me, I’d realized that I fucked up. But Layla, you don’t know the life I’ve had. I wasn’t fit to be a father, a husband, or even a friend. After my mom moved me to Oregon, I lost it. I hated knowing that you were out there raising my baby and I was so far away.”
“Didn’t hate it enough to come searching for us,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I was in prison for ten years for armed robbery.” He recoils at his own words, as if they came out without his permission.
I gasp and try to slam my lips closed, but I’m too late to stop it.
“Look, I don’t know what happened with Stew and his crew of fuckheads after I left, but I do know that what happened between us meant something. Axelle was created by two people in love. Maybe not a conventional love, but Layla, I haven’t stopped thinking about you once since then.”
The power of his words, the sincerity in his eyes, all of it is sweet, but I don’t know if I felt the same even back then. I had a crush, a really intense crush, but as soon as I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t think much about Trip Miller. My baby was all I cared about, she became my world, and I relinquished all my own dreams to make sure she was taken care of.
“What are you saying?”
He licks his lips and seems to think carefully about what he’s going to say next. “I know I’m too late.” He nods to my ring finger and then to my swollen belly. “I’d hoped there could be a future for us—maybe we could get to know each other again and see what happens—but now all I ask is to know my daughter.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t give you that.” I push my tea away, suddenly repulsed by the smell or maybe just sick of all I’m hearing. “She knows everything, Trip. She was there the night Stew confessed.”
He recoils. “Fuck . . . really?”
“She wants nothing to do with her biological father. She thinks he’s a rapist.”
His mouth twists in disgust. “Do you think you could talk to her for me? Let her know that . . . tell her our story.”
“My fiancé has legally adopted Axelle.”