15
15
FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME
I was wooed as calculatedly and methodically as the first time. But it being Ranger this time, of course, it was more cold-blooded. Me being gifted didn’t factor into the equation at all. Maybe even less than before, and I was well-practiced now. I’m ashamed to say I fell for it—again. My fiancé was a master manipulator; I could see that now. Pete was right.
Pete. All kinds of pangs webbed from my sternum to the outer regions of my limbs. I felt numb and dumb and had to sit down. What have I done? What have I allowed to be done? I was a fool. The worst kind. The kind who looked the other way while machinations were going on right under my nose.
I’d seen the look on Lizzie’s face as she coasted along, on another golf cart, toward the place I’d just come from. Smug and one-upmanship, that’s what I’d read in the split second we passed each other. I’d discounted it. Gone against my intuition, so I could only see the prettier picture of a blossoming romance as it was laid out before me by my fiancé and commanding officer. All this staging so I could believe in a fantasy instead of believing I was selling out. I was aligning myself on the wrong side for the right reasons: for Mikey, for the option of opting out of Missions.
How stupid of me. Of course, Ranger James Nealson II wanted a gifted child. It all made sense now. The only thing missing from his resume. I could see it so clearly now. What he’d done. How he’d done it. Why he’d done it. Operation Pull-One-Over-On-Clueless-Connelly. It read like an alcoholics anonymous list:
Step 1: Make a searching moral inventory of yourself. I remembered him declaring himself to me: “I’m an asshole.”
Step 2: Admit wrongdoings. He confessed that he’d hated on me because my mother used his father, even though I was innocent.
Step 3: Make amends to those you’ve wronged. He said he’d marry me to make up for what he’d done, to protect me from Missions.
Step 4: Continue to lie and manipulate those you’ve wronged in the past for personal gain. Whoops! That was a Ranger addendum.
The day after tomorrow was the wedding. I couldn’t call it off. He’d kill me. Perhaps l iterally. Maybe I should just toss the ring at his head and shout: “The jig is up, asshole!” Tell him I knew all about his master plan. How he’d seduced me into falling in . . . The word love crossed my mind, but I instantly dismissed it. A watered-down love. Falling for . . . let’s just leave it at that. He’d seduced me into falling for him, so he could acquire a gifted child. Tit-for-tat. My mother killed his father before he could get ahold of his gifted kid, so now he’s just finishing where his father left off. I shuttered at the thought. And that’s the guy I was marrying in less than forty-eight hours.
My gut clenched. I had to go through with it. It was still my best option here, loathe as I was to admit it. He would never forgive me if I embarrassed him by calling off the wedding. And I was surer than sure I wasn’t allowed to anyway. And that thought alone was enough to elicit despair. But there was nothing in the contract that said I had to go through with mothering his child.
Birth control. I hadn’t even so much as thought about it during our whirlwind courtship. How could I have been so naive? And stupid? Without a second’s hesitation, I picked up the remote and punched in a code I thought might work. Nope. Midol was not something I needed. I just finished period. My honeymoon was planned around that.
The honeymoon. I gasped. It fell like a cannonball fired into my gut. How could I go through with it, knowing a spy had coerced a mark into marriage to produce a genetically enhanced child . . . to further his career. Ugh!
I picked up the landline and dialed the hospital wing. A short convo with the nurse practitioner, and I was instructed to come by anytime to pick up my pills. They were ready. As simple as that.
Gotta love The Academy.