7. Seven
7
SEVEN
F or the first time in forever, I didn’t want to go out.
When you live in Las Vegas, especially on the Strip, the night life is just as important—maybe more important—than anything else. I’d cultivated a sophisticated list of bars I liked to frequent. When I’d started the day, I expected to go to one of them. Heck, maybe even three of them.
Instead, I found myself hiding in my room. And, yes, I was hiding. I was nothing if not a brutally honest man, especially with myself. So, yeah, I was hiding … and it wasn’t helping in the least.
The sound of a pounding fist on my door drew my attention away from the television I’d been staring at blankly for the last hour. Like everybody else, I lived in the casino. My suite wasn’t as nice as the one Zach and Livvie shared, but it was nothing to sneeze at.
“I’m not in the mood,” I called to the door, figuring it was one of my men wanting to head out to a club. We often went together. Zach and I used to go out together five nights a week. Then he fell in love with my sister, and that ended. I’d been spending more time with my coworkers ever since.
More pounding came from the door.
“What the hell?” I was irritated when I got up from the couch and stomped over to answer. I didn’t look through the hole to see who it was before I threw it open. I was looking for a fight. Perhaps I’d found one.
I pulled up short when I recognized the diminutive figure facing me down as being my sister. My mouth went suddenly dry. “Livvie.” Her name was barely a squeak on my lips.
That’s not suspicious or anything, I chided myself. I decided to try again.
“Livvie.” This time when I said her name, it wasn’t raspy. “I’m not in the mood,” I repeated for her benefit.
“What, exactly, aren’t you in the mood for?” she challenged. The fire kindling in her eyes told me she was mad. Why was she mad, though?
I could think of one very big reason for her to be angry. Would Ruby have told her the truth, though? She said she wasn’t going to tell anybody about me being the … well, me being involved in her current predicament. I had no reason to distrust Ruby. Sometimes she was blunt to the point of no return. She almost never lied.
“I don’t feel well.” The second the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Livvie could always see right through me. She was the one person in this world—even more than Zach—who knew when I was full of it. Would she call me on that today?
“You don’t feel well?” The way Livvie cocked her head told me that I was in trouble. Big, big trouble. “Maybe you caught something from Ruby,” she suggested.
I grabbed her arm and dragged her into my suite. I wasn’t interested in hurting her, but I wasn’t as gentle with her as I would’ve been with somebody else. Siblings didn’t play games nicely no matter how old they grew. “Can you watch what you say?” I hissed.
Livvie’s eyes were narrow slits of disgust. “So, it is true.”
I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” Anger I didn’t know I could feel coursed through me. “Were you fishing?”
“No. I had confirmation from Ruby. I thought, maybe, I was still wrong or something.” Her intensity petered out. “It’s not like Ruby lies, so I knew it was you.” She slapped my arm. It was no love tap either. It was a deep, hard slap. “You’re really irritating the crap right out of me,” she complained.
“Well, right back at you.” My eyes fired. “Why are you here?”
“Why do you think?” Livvie prowled through my living area. It wasn’t overly large, but it was neat. “You do realize a baby can’t spend any time here, right? It will die. This place is all sharp edges and open electrical sockets.”
My heart plummeted to my stomach. “She told you.” It wasn’t a question.
She didn’t say anything, which only served to infuriate me more.
“She told you and she promised she wouldn’t.” I was irrationally angry. Sure, deep down, I recognized I had no right to be angry. That wasn’t stopping me, though. No, I was angry at the world, and Ruby made a convenient scapegoat. “What is wrong with her?”
The look on Livvie’s face had me taking an inadvertent step back. “What?”
“If you didn’t weigh a hundred pounds more than me, I would totally beat the crap out of you right now,” she hissed. “How can you sit there and blame Ruby when you knocked her up and abandoned her?”
I didn’t like the way she was phrasing it. Not one little bit. “I am not abandoning her.”
She folded her arms over her chest and gave me a “yeah, right” look. She said nothing, though.
“I’m not,” I insisted. “She doesn’t want me involved.” Something twisted in my stomach when I said it. I pushed forward anyway. “She wants to do this herself.”
“Oh, is that what she told you?” The icy turn to Livvie’s demeanor suggested I’d said the exact wrong thing.
Uh-oh. My sister was often indulgent with me—as I was with her—but when she got mad, there was no holding back Hurricane Olivia. She looked positively pissed off.
“Livvie—”
She cut me off with brutal efficiency. “I didn’t realize that Ruby had all the choices in this relationship,” she growled. “How did she manage that magical feat?”
“That’s just it. We don’t have a relationship. We had one night together—one drunken night that was a very bad idea—and now she’s having a baby.”
“You’re having a baby.”
“No, she is. She doesn’t want me involved.”
Livvie stared at me for what felt like a really long time. “Is that really the way you’re going to play it?” she asked finally. “Are you going to stand there and pretend you have no say in how any of this works out?”
Rather than lose my temper—which I wanted to do—helplessness clawed up and grabbed me by the throat. “She acts as if I’m last year’s accessory and she can’t decide if she should throw me away or donate me to charity.” I sank down on the couch and buried my head in my hands. “I don’t know what to do here, Livvie. I just … don’t know what to do.” I thought I might cry, which was aberrant behavior in my world. There was nothing wrong with crying. I simply didn’t do it.
My sister was calm as she sat next to me. “What do you want to do?”
I wasn’t expecting the question. Nobody had asked it of me up until this point. I wished for a better answer. “I don’t know.”
Livvie didn’t let it go. “You must have some inkling.”
I made a growling sound deep in my throat. “You’re just not going to let it go, are you?”
“Nope. I’m really not.” She managed a smile, although it was wan. “I need to know where your head is at, Rex.”
“I don’t have an answer for you. I just … this whole thing came as a surprise. I thought that we were going to be able to put it behind us.”
“Is that what you wanted to do? Put it behind you I mean.”
The question confused me on multiple levels. “That was pretty much the only option.”
The fact that Livvie looked dubious threw me.
“It was,” I argued. “I mean … I’ve known Ruby since I was a kid.”
She didn’t say anything. She just stared.
“She’s Zach’s sister,” I insisted. “You can’t have a relationship with your best friend’s sister. It’s against the law.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Ruby is older than me,” I continued.
That finally had her reacting. Sure, it was to laugh at me. That was better than the alternative, however. “She’s a year and a half older than you. She’s hardly shopping for walkers and complaining about her arthritis.” She shook her head. “I happen to remember a time when you had a crush on Ruby.”
That was a diabolical lie. “That never happened.”
“You were thirteen and I was eleven. You came home from having dinner at Zach’s house and went on and on about Ruby. I heard you talking to Dad.”
A memory niggled at the back of my brain. “Was it the end of summer?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, Ruby went away to camp and came back that night. Her boobs went from not being there to being able to serve as flotation devices during a storm at sea. That was a very confusing time for me.”
Livvie’s mouth dropped open. “You did not just say that.”
I laughed because I couldn’t help myself. “Sorry, but it’s true. I never saw Zach’s sisters as anything other than annoying before that day.”
“And it was Ruby who caught your attention,” she reminded me.
“So?” If she was going where I thought she was going, I wasn’t going to like it. “If you’re about to pretend that I’ve been carrying a torch for Ruby for the bulk of my life, I have some bad news for you. That is not true.”
“I think maybe it is true.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” Her assuredness bothered me. A lot. “She’s Zach’s sister.”
“I’m your sister and Zach still fell in love with me.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Because Zach spent time with you when we were growing up. He was protective of you from a young age. He … it’s just different.”
Livvie crossed her arms and glared. It was obvious she wasn’t going anywhere.
It was time to take a different tack. “Ruby is not you, and I am not Zach. You always had a crush on him. She has never had a crush on me.”
“I don’t actually think that’s true. I’ve seen the way you two interact. It’s playful and flirty.”
“Okay, maybe it is, but it’s still not the same thing. We do it just because we do it. On top of that, Zach was already looking to make a change when you guys got married. He wasn’t interested in partying the way we used to. He wanted something more.
“Now, I don’t think he realized what that something more was,” I continued. “In fact, when he started having real feelings for you, I’m convinced it was as much of a surprise to him as it was to everybody else. That doesn’t change the fact that he was in a different place right from the start.”
Livvie’s expression was hard to read. “So, you’re basically saying that you don’t want a change in your life.”
“It’s not something I’ve been considering.”
“So, you don’t want to be a father?”
“I do. I just thought…well, I thought it would happen about the time I hit forty. I figured I would meet a woman then—she would have to be younger of course—and we would settle down and have a kid. That’s still years away.”
She didn’t laugh or commiserate. Instead, she rolled her eyes. “Basically what you’re saying is that your dream is to hit forty, find some twenty-something working in the casino, make her fall in love with you, and then settle down with a trophy wife.”
I was suddenly uncomfortable. “Did you have to phrase it like that?”
“Am I wrong?”
“I don’t know.” Frustration reared up and grabbed me by the throat. “I want someone to love like Zach loves you, but I thought I would have more time. Never once did it occur to me that it should be Ruby.”
I hopped to my feet so I could restlessly pace. “Let’s be reasonable here, Livvie, Ruby is not the type to settle down either. I’m surprised she even wants to be a mother.”
“I think Ruby has been questioning what to do with her life since before everything went down with Ryder. She was like Zach, at loose ends and not sure what she wanted. Seeing how her parents’ marriage was playing out had to give her pause.”
I waited for her to continue. There was no way she was done.
“Ryder made it so Pearl, Opal, and Ruby didn’t want to get married,” she explained. “He was trying to foist them off on other Vegas families as part of business deals. Of course they were cynical about relationships. They all dug their heels in and refused to play the game. That’s how they rebelled. Now that Ryder is out of the picture, though…” She trailed off.
“I wasn’t expecting to be a father at this point in my life,” I gritted out. “I’m not ready.”
“Sometimes you can’t be ready for that stuff. You have to learn on the job. Are you telling me that you’re going to see Ruby with your child in a year and not feel anything?”
“No, I’m not saying that.” Just picturing that made me itchy. I didn’t know how to explain it. “I’m saying that Ruby doesn’t want me flitting in and out of the baby’s life … and I get that. She told me to take some time and make my decision because I was only getting one shot at it.”
Confusion had Livvie’s eyebrows knitting together. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“She said that she doesn’t want me deciding to be a father and then changing my mind when the kid is two or three,” I started.
“You would never do that.”
“I know. She also doesn’t want me deciding I want nothing to do with the kid and trying to insert myself into the picture years down the line. She wants a firm decision from me.”
“Okay.” Livvie dragged out the one word. “I think that’s more than reasonable.”
“I do too. I just … shouldn’t we be married? I mean, we’re having a kid together. Shouldn’t we be married when that happens? That’s normally how it works.”
“I don’t think you should get married simply because there’s a child involved.” She looked to be choosing her words carefully. “I also don’t think that decision needs to be made right now. Is there any reason you two can’t coparent together? You don’t have to be a couple. At least not to start.”
It was her mischievous smile that gave me pause. “Oh, this isn’t some romance book, Livvie,” I chided. “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
She was the picture of innocence. “And what’s that?”
“You believe if we spend time together, go to ultrasound appointments together, and paint the baby’s room together that we’re going to fall in love. This isn’t a romcom.”
She snorted. “I didn’t say any of that was going to happen.”
I didn’t believe her.
“It could happen, though,” she said. “It doesn’t have to happen. It just could.”
“And what if Ruby and I aren’t destined for one another like you and Zach? What if we fight and break up or turn into Ryder and Cora? What then?”
“You could never be Ryder Stone.” She delivered the simple statement with vehemence. “Why would you even think that?”
“I don’t think that. I just … I want to take time and make the right decision. Ruby told me to think, so that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t want to make a knee jerk reaction and then regret it for the rest of my life.”
“Do you really think you would regret being a father?”
“No, but … I want to be sure.”
“Well, then you should be sure.” There was a chilliness in the way Livvie carried herself as she stood. “If you think there’s a possibility that you’re not going to love this kid, then you should totally take yourself out of the equation.” It was disappointment clouding her features now, and I hated that. I’d always been her hero growing up.
“I’m not saying I’m going to walk away,” I gritted out. “I just?—”
“Need to think,” she finished for me. “You should think.” She stomped toward the door, pausing before opening it. “I’m not going to say anything to anybody. Ruby didn’t want to tell me. I guessed. I saw you guys leaving together the night of the party and I had an inkling.”
“I didn’t realize.” I was sheepish. “We were too drunk to make smart decisions that night.”
“Yes, well, I married my husband with a Batman officiant to get dental work. It’s not about the decision. It’s what you do after the decision that counts.”
“I just need a little time, Livvie.”
“Fine. Take your time.” She grabbed the handle and opened it.
“Please don’t hate me,” I pleaded. “I can’t handle it if you hate me.”
“I would never be able to hate you, Rex.” She was solemn. “I just … there are things happening here I never thought you were capable of. It’s thrown me.”
“Everything about this day has thrown me.”
“I get that.” She managed a smile, but it was wan. “At least I got to see Ruby puke all over Ryder. That was kind of fun.”
I chuckled. “I’m actually sorry I missed it.”
“Yes, well, you might be missing a lot of things.” She was prim and proper as she said her goodbyes. “I’ll keep my mouth shut because it’s what Ruby wants. Just … make sure you do what she asks and really think things out, because if you don’t want to be involved, you shouldn’t be involved.”
“I’m going to figure it out, Livvie. You have my word.”
“Okay. I guess that will have to be enough for tonight.”
With that, she was gone, leaving me alone with my never-ending parade of thoughts. What the hell was I going to do here? I’d never been more frightened in my life.