Chapter 18
Violet
I stared at all the green decorations hanging from the rafters of the bar where I was supposed to meet my family and friends. I was seven months along and my mother decided that my baby shower should be in a bar on St. Patrick’s Day because it would be fun.
Sure, it would be fun for everyone else who could drink their day away. As for me, I was eating for two but imbibing of green spirits was strictly forbidden this holiday for me.
“What was she thinking?” I asked Gabby who turned to watch as her son was passed between Moreland’s parents and Ridge’s.
It hurt my heart to have them at the party because it made it glaringly obvious who was missing from this celebration. To my complete surprise, no one had mentioned to Ridge that I was pregnant. I thought for sure they wouldn’t honor my request.
As it turned out, they completely understood my concerns about Fiona being close to him, and how I worried for the safety of my baby. Who wouldn’t? She was a sexual predator. Ridge may have forgotten that, but the rest of us hadn’t.
There were rumors that Fiona was no longer in Australia with him, but they hadn’t been confirmed to anyone, so none of us knew the status of their relationship any more than we did all those months ago when he left the country with her.
To no one else’s shock, I still hadn’t heard from my ex-husband. I turned as Gabby left me to go collect her precious little boy and ran straight into my best friend.
“Hey stranger,” I said to DD.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like my ankles are bigger than my ass today, and that’s a bit of an understatement.” DD leaned to the side and perused my ass for a minute before she nodded.
“I see. Your ass is stacked, my friend, but you do not have anything akin to cankles going on.”
“Yeah, well, when you have to carry these puppies around with you everywhere, you can tell me how normal they look,” I muttered. “Where’s the cake?”
Duri threw her head back and laughed. “Are you kidding me? You just pointed out your fat ass and ankles - your words, sort of, not mine - and the next thing you do is ask for cake?”
“I don’t want cake.” I pointed to my own ass. “Obviously, I don’t need cake.”
“Could have fooled me,” DD chuckled as she said that.
“It’s the baby!”
“Sure, it is. The baby wants cake.”
“I swear to you, it may not have teeth yet, but it loves sweets.”
“I really wish you would stop calling your baby, ‘it,’ Vi. It’s creepy.”
“I still don’t know if the baby is a girl or boy. What the hell else am I supposed to say?”
“Pretty much anything else?” my friend suggested in what sounded more like a question to me. She then shrugged and tittered out a little laugh. “Honestly, it’s your kid. I don’t know why I’m getting miffed on your baby’s behalf.”
“As long as I feed it sweets, it doesn’t care what I call it.”
“You’re not right,” DD mentioned.
“I blame the hormones, and sometimes the broken heart.”
“Shit,” she whispered and pulled me into a hug. It was awkward at best since my belly had long since popped and it seemed to create a barrier between us. “Oh!” My friend yelped the word in surprise. “The baby moved.”
“Yeah, I think it can sense when another human encroaches on its territory, and it tries to kick them away from any food that may be in the area,” I teased.
“It’s good to see you laughing again.”
It hadn’t really been a full laugh, but I supposed my half smiles must have seemed like an improvement to everyone in my circle.
“Hey, you two,” Moreland called as he walked over to greet us.
Not surprisingly, he had his son in his arms. “You want to say hello to Auntie Vi?” he asked the baby.
My heart tugged, swelled, and deflated all at once and I didn’t even know how that was possible.
I was supposed to be Auntie Vi all along, but I was no longer related by marriage to Moreland the way I was when Ridge was my husband.
It was true that the baby would be more of a second cousin if I had remained married to my husband, but the men were like brothers, so it had been determined when Gabby found out she was pregnant that Ridge would be an uncle, and I would be the aunt. A lot had changed since then.
“Stop that,” More insisted as he held his son out to me. “You will always be family.”
“Thank you,” I whispered as I took the boy in my arms. He gurgled and grinned at me as those dark, soulful eyes stared into my own. Then he giggled, as if he knew that the baby in my belly just kicked him.
“I think…” I was about to say ‘your cousin likes you’ but thought better of it.
“No fucking way,” Moreland said as he stared at the window near the front door. I turned in time to see a blonde-haired woman run away. “Keep my son safe,” More called out over his shoulder as he ran off to chase after whoever the woman was in the window.
“What was that about?” DD asked.
“No clue.”
“Where did my husband go?” Gabby asked as she came up to us.
They had gotten married the day after his ship pulled back into port.
After everything that happened between Ridge and I, they decided not to wait any longer.
Then again, More also missed the birth of his son while on deployment, and that had a huge impact on their decision.
“He chased after some woman,” I mentioned. Gabby’s jaw dropped and then she got ready to go after her husband when we all watched him come back through the front door.
When he got to us, he announced that he had just seen Fiona and she didn’t look pregnant at all.
I gasped. “Pregnant? Fiona’s pregnant?”
Moreland winced as did just about everyone else in the room. The only people who seemed to be in the dark about my husband’s affair partner’s pregnancy was my best friend, my parents, brother, and me.
“We didn’t want to tell you because she wouldn’t prove if it was his. That was the whole reason he let her go to Australia with him that day. She had told him she was pregnant,” Moreland tried to explain, but he made me feel worse instead of better.
“How pregnant?” DD had the wherewithal to ask when I couldn’t form words much less sentences.
“He swore he hadn’t touched her, so it had to be from the night of the party.”
“Still, that’s pretty shitty that you all knew and never said a fucking word.” my best friend shouted at Ridge’s family.
“We also know about Violet’s pregnancy and haven’t spilled the beans to Ridge, despite the fact that he should know,” Moreland’s mother snapped at DD.
“The difference is that Violet is protecting her unborn child from a horrible woman Ridge chooses to associate with. Ridge is just worried about keeping more secrets hidden.”
“He didn’t want to hurt Violet needlessly if it turned out that Fiona wasn’t really pregnant with his child.
And from the looks of things, she was never even pregnant,” Moreland tacked on.
“I’m sure he would have told you as soon as he knew for sure, but the bitch left Australia two months ago and disappeared. ”
“That’s all well and good, Moreland, but why in the hell would you think that Ridge would inform me of anything? I’m nothing to him but his ex-wife.”
Shocked gasps rang out from the Westover family, as if I spoke against some sacred bond. I wanted to roll my eyes, cry, rage, throw things, and fucking eat cake. Damnit.
“He would have called,” Moreland tried to assure me.
I laughed then, though there wasn’t a trace of humor in the sound.
“What in the hell are you talking about? I haven’t spoken to Ridge since the night of his surprise party when he came home from that scene with his assistant so fucking out of it that I don’t think he even remembered speaking to me. ”
More shocked gasps rang out and I watched as Moreland’s jaw seemed to come unhinged. “No,” he disagreed while shaking his head. “That can’t be right. You mean to say you haven’t spoken to my cousin since that night? Before you divorced. Not a single damn word?”
“That’s what ‘I haven’t spoken to him’ means, Moreland. Not a single fucking word. Not a text. No emails. No smoke signals. No sign language. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.”
“That’s impossible,” Ridge’s dad murmured. “He loves you.”
“He has a funny way of showing it,” I countered.
“You have to tell him about the baby, it will change everything,” Gayle told me. Her eyes were wide and she looked pale, as if my admission shocked her somehow.
“No, I don’t. You all know why I won’t do that. As long as Fiona is in his circle, he can’t know about this baby.”
“Well, she already knows about your pregnancy now. She saw you,” Moreland countered.
“And?” I questioned. “Do you really think she’s going to tell him something that might drive him away from her?”
“That’s just it. He is not with her. If she thinks he doesn’t know about your baby, she might use it against him. She could do something crazy, like…”
I had already thought about what a desperate woman might try to do if she claimed to be pregnant when she really wasn’t and she found someone who was pregnant with his child.
I shivered at the thought. It was why I had been so protective of my pregnancy to begin with - not that I realized then that she might concoct a plan to off me and steal my kid.
Now that it had surfaced and seemed like a potential outcome, I couldn’t face the people who had kept crucial information from me.
And I was done.
“I need to go,” I whispered to DD. She heard me and held everyone else off while I took off out of the bar. All my presents remained behind, unopened because we hadn’t gotten to them any more than we got to the cake.
“Wait up!” I turned to see Drake. My little brother had run after me, obviously making it past my best friend somehow. “I want to come with you.”
“I thought you hated me?”
“I never hated you. I was angry at the whole situation - at both of you - for a while, but mostly, I’m just sorry that I wasn’t there for you.
I know this has been awful. I can’t believe he never came back, never tried to convince you to stay.
And now, what More just said in there. That woman might be having his baby. ”
“Apparently not, since she doesn’t look pregnant,” I reminded Drake.
“Yeah, well, whatever. It’s still not fair. You are actually pregnant, and he doesn’t know because the asshole didn’t care to know.” Well, that was blunt. True, though. “Besides, I’m worried that bitch might come after you, so I’m going to stick to you like glue from now on.”
“You have school in the morning,” I reminded Drake.
“Whatever,” he blew that off. “Someone can trade off with me then. Better make it DD or Dad. Not sure anyone else can be trusted.”
“What about Mom?” I asked.
“Hate to break it to you, Vi, but she wasn’t shocked in there the way Dad was when Moreland dropped the crazy bitch baby bomb on you.”
“You think she knew?”
“I think she’s way more involved in your marriage and divorce than anyone thinks.”
“That’s not ominous,” I mentioned as I drove us toward my apartment.
“The whole damn thing is pretty fucked, Sis.”
I couldn’t argue with that.