Chapter 11
ELEVEN
RAWLING
I brushed off Phelan’s concerns about my sleepwalking, not because I wasn’t worried about who and what I was, but because I had no memory of the incident. No, that wasn’t completely true. I had snippets, but it seemed no different than a dream.
“Gotta go. Love ya.” I kissed his cheek and brushed my belly against him. It was our thing. He smiled, but there was no light in his eyes. Not for the first time, I wondered how his life would have looked if I hadn’t turned up at Sombertooth last semester.
But I adored that wolf shifter who, despite our wobbly beginnings when we were just fuck buddies, had my back, and I returned to our quarters and threw my arms around him.
“I love you with my whole heart.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Oh yeah?” He squeezed my butt and whispered in my ear that he’d like to fuck me. I almost melted in his arms, but I wanted to catch Professor Shaw before class.
“Raincheck?” I scooted toward the door as best I could with the bump leading the way and blew a kiss over my shoulder.
I was on a mission to find out who Charlie or Charlotte Dempsey was. The professor’s door was closed when I arrived, and I knocked rapidly because I had so many details floating around in my head and he could probably help me with this one.
There was no answer from inside, and I turned away, thinking I’d try during my break, but the door opened and I spun myself around.
Not a smart move because my belly tipped me forward, and I teetered toward him.
He didn’t position himself to break my fall or grab me, which his shifter reflexes could have accomplished easily.
I put out an arm and grabbed the door frame and hurt my wrist when I put my weight on it.
His face didn't flicker with emotion, and if I had to guess, his expression registered distaste when he glanced at my belly.
“Blakesley.” He looked left and right. “Your mate not with you?”
But I wasn’t to be put off because he was in a bad mood.
“I’d like a moment of your time, Professor.”
He hesitated before opening the door wider and ushering me in.
I sat, though he hadn’t invited me to, but I was carrying extra weight and took any chance I had to ease the burden on my legs.
My wrist ached a little, and I rubbed it.
The professor didn’t offer me tea or cake, but perhaps that was only when a student scheduled a meeting.
“Can you tell me about the woman that the soccer scholarship is named after?”
He stiffened and grabbed a pen, and perhaps it was my imagination but the air became a tad more frigid.
“Her name was Charlotte Dempsey, but she went by Charlie. She’s obviously related to Rawlins and yet he never mentioned her.”
He cleared his throat, but before he could reply, there was a knock at the door.
“Come.”
Holden bowled in, but he was hefting a small box and didn’t look at me. If my interaction with the professor wasn’t awkward enough, now I had to confront my ex.
“I have the recordings you wanted, Professor.”
Professor Shaw jerked his head toward me, and Holden’s cheeks flamed.
“Oh, I didn’t see you… and your…” His face became even redder so he resembled a beetroot. “Sorry, ummm, congratulations on mating and the baby.” Despite his blush, his words carried a genuine amount of warmth. It was a distinct contrast to the professor’s coolness and apparent disapproval.
“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Professor Shaw was putting a full stop on our interaction. He may not have wanted to speak in front of Holden, but it was hardly a state secret when Charlie Dempsey had been a student here.
I pushed the chair back over the wooden floor, and the professor’s mouth twisted at the grating sound.
My mind was on Charlie Dempsey throughout the morning, and during the break, I heaved myself up the stairs, intending to have Phelan ask his father if he knew Charlie at school. But I ran into Mrs. Ardilla in the hall.
She’d always been so stern, but she was the college’s resident nurse, and whenever we met, she was babbling about birthing positions and labor. I wanted to yell, “La, la, la, la, I can’t hear you.”
Phelan and I had watched videos, and we’d said we’d practice breathing techniques, but neither of us did anything about it. I was in denial about the pain of labor.
Knowing she’d been a pupil here, I asked her about Charlie.
She gave me a look. “She was Rawlins’s sister, but surely you knew that.”
Now it was my turn not to provide an answer, but Mrs. Ardilla added that Charlie was still sponsoring the soccer scholarship that Jack received. I was aware of my bestie’s scholarship but hadn’t realized Charlotte had set it up.
Now I had more questions than answers, with the first being where was Charlie?
After class, when my mate walked into our quarters after a shift, he was sweating and he had that look in his eye that said he remembered I’d asked for a rain check.
He came up behind me and smooched my neck.
It would have been easy to drop my pants and fall into bed, but I was looking through the boxes of papers I’d brought from the house.
I held up the deed of sale. “Rawlins’s sister and Arnie Guthrie owned that house we visited.”
“Sister? Makes sense, I guess, though it’s weird he never mentioned her. Maybe they didn’t get along and he cut her out of his life.”
Family dynamics were complicated, but the Rawlins I knew valued family, and I’d always thought I was his only relative, though we weren’t related by blood.
I rifled through the boxes again, wishing I’d had time to organize the paperwork. I picked up a bunch of pics, and Phelan, having apparently given up on sexy times, sighed and sat beside me.
“What are we looking for?”
“That house pic with the guy, remember? Or did I put it in the notebook?” I couldn’t recall.
“This one?”
I ran my finger over the brickwork over the door. “It’s the same as the house we went to, so maybe he’s Arnie.”
Phelan shrugged. “Okay, so Rawlins had a pic of his brother-in-law outside the house he bought with Charlie. Not a surprise.”
I shuffled through more photos and paused at another one.
“Now what?”
I didn’t answer him as I brushed over the old faded photo.
“Rawling?” Phelan removed the photo from my hand.
He held it up to the light and then aligned the photo with my head. “Is this you? The baby in the photo?”
“Yeah.” Rawlins had a similar one of just me on his dresser.
“So it’s you with Rawlins’s sister and her husband. Nice.”
Something inside me stirred. That yellow door in the original pic had been familiar, but I’d dismissed it. But I’d obviously visited the house because I was there in the photo.
“They’re looking at you adoringly. Do you remember anything about them?”
“No.” I tried, but the yellow door was all I could conjure up.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were your folks.”
My last name wasn’t Dempsey or Guthrie, and I had a few photos of my parents, though none with me had survived.
Phelan
Rawling had fallen asleep after completing his history essay, but I was wide awake. Everything my mate had said about his godfather suggested he was a compassionate man, and yet he’d never spoken to Rawling about his sister.
I climbed out of bed and tiptoed into the other room.
“Father,” I said into the phone when he answered.
“Is everything all right with our son-in-law and our grandchild?”
I chuckled. “Yes, and your son is well too.”
“Sorry, but a phone call at this time of night is often bad news.”
I asked him if he’d known Charlie Dempsey at Sombertooth.
“Oh, yes. She was lovely, very bubbly, smart academically, and a gifted soccer player.”
“Did she mate someone from school?”
He said no, but while everyone at school liked her, Alphonse Shaw thought she was his mate. But after she finished her degree and left Sombertooth, he heard she’d mated a human.
“And where is she now? Because she still sponsors a soccer scholarship.”
“I heard they’d moved overseas.”
I puzzled over that detail. This was the twenty-first century, with emails and apps. Rawling’s folks had died when he was very young, so he’d lived with his godfather for sixteen or seventeen years. Why was there no contact between Rawlins and his sister?
I rifled through the photos and found the one of baby Rawling with Charlie and Arnie. I was beginning to think they weren’t someone my mate had visited once or twice before they left the country. Their faces as they held my mate were full of love.
I had two choices: not mention this to my mate or voice my idea and possibly shatter his sense of self by questioning who he really was? He'd already convinced himself he was a hunter.
But if I was right, this wasn’t my secret to keep, though Rawlins had taken it to his grave.
Rawling was already up when I woke up the next morning, and I found him tapping at the computer in the living area.
“Astronomy.” He didn’t look up as I kissed him.
He knew I could do his astronomy homework for him but insisted on struggling through it himself.
“Hey, babe, I don’t suppose you have anything of Rawlins’s, like a hairbrush.”
That stopped his typing. He frowned, and that little eleven appeared between his brows.
“Why?”
I had to come clean, and it was only a possibility. I definitely couldn’t go ahead without his permission. But perhaps the photo could convey my thoughts better than I could.
“What do you see other than the obvious?”
He took the photo from me, and like he’d before, he brushed his fingers over it, almost reverently.
“They cared about me.”
“Ummm.” I didn’t say anything else, hoping he’d elaborate.
“They loved me, and I appear to be very comfortable with them, so they must have been in my life.” He gulped.
“Do you think there’s any chance they could have been your parents?”
He opened his mouth and closed it, his gaze still on the photo. He got up and unzipped a small pocket in his backpack. “This is my mother.”
“Okay, but just hear me out. If we had something with Rawlins’s DNA and yours, we’d find out if Charlie was your mom.” This was crunch time, because if he said no, I couldn’t go behind his back.
Rawling looked at the photo of him with Charlie and Arnie and the one of his mother.
“I don’t suppose there’s any harm in doing DNA, though I’ve read so many social media posts where those tests reveal huge secrets and sometimes tear families apart.”
I refused to take part in anything he wasn’t sure about. He and the baby were my priority.
“I have my godfather’s scarf.”
He retreated into the bedroom and brought out the scarf and hairs from his own brush that he put into separate zippered bags.
“Hope we’re not making a mistake.”
I hoped not either, because I didn’t want to lie about the results.