Chapter 7
SEVEN
ARCHER
Nothing good has ever come from someone looking for me.
Historically speaking, it usually meant I was getting fired, I owed someone money, or I was about to get my ass beaten.
Granted, none of those things had happened in a long time, but I also hadn’t had anyone looking for me in a long time either.
I knew for a fact that I didn’t owe Darcy Adler money, and while I had no doubt she’d do a hell of a job trying to beat the crap out of me, nothing about her body language seemed aggressive.
She seemed nervous, though from the way her chest had puffed up slightly since addressing me, she definitely didn’t want me to notice that.
Her lithe body leaned back into her bar stool in an attempt at nonchalance, but she was too rigid.
It’d been a little over two months since I’d seen her last, and something about her seemed different.
I let my eyes roam over her long, toffee-brown hair that spilled over her shoulder.
Her hazel eyes reflected the warm, yellow light of the bar, giving them a honey-ish hue, and the little hollows in her cheeks where her dimples appeared when she smiled were shadowed, even though she wasn’t smiling.
When she stood to take the seat directly next to mine, I was reminded of how tall she was. She still had to be seven or eight inches shorter than me—being six foot five usually meant I was the tallest person in the room—but for a woman, she was tall.
What she really was, was a knockout.
She could’ve been a model if she wanted, but nothing about Darcy made it seem like that was a circle she had any desire to be in.
“You’ve been looking for me?”
The bartender returned with my beer and I passed him my card. He’d leave it open for me like always, and like always, I’d close it after three.
“I have. I need to talk to you. Privately.”
I scanned the near empty bar, then glanced back to her, an eyebrow arched. It was a weekday night at six o’clock—there was no one here.
She rolled her eyes, sending a pointed glance toward the bartender before storming off toward a table at the back of the bar.
With every step, her hair brushed the top of her high-waisted jeans, drawing my eyes to her perfectly-sculpted ass.
An ass I can still picture perfectly in my mind, the way it felt in my hands while those legs of hers snaked their way around my hips, pulling me closer to her center.
Blinking away the memory, I followed behind her, redirecting my gaze as she turned to slide into a booth.
Sitting opposite her, I raised the bottle to my lips and took a large pull of the sweet, hoppy liquid.
Seconds ticked by as I waited for her to say whatever it was she needed to say, but she simply stared at me, and as beautiful as she was, the silence had me growing agitated.
I wanted to be alone. At least . . . until Harrison got here.
Going to the liquor store and buying a case for my house would’ve been a smarter move, given the sour mood I was in, but I also needed dinner. The Crooked Quill killed two birds with one stone.
“Were you looking for me just to stare, or was there a point—” I started, wanting to get whatever this was over with so that I could drink my beers in peace, but she cut me off.
“I’m pregnant.” Darcy’s voice was quiet, but her words ricocheted through me, tearing their way from my ears to my brain like shrapnel from a bomb. Because what she’d dropped on me was a bomb. “And it might be yours.”
If Ralph thought I was quiet earlier this morning, it had nothing on the stillness emanating from me now.
Pregnant.
Ice replaced the blood in my veins, freezing everything in me until I was numb with pain.
I couldn’t move—couldn’t breathe. My heart raced at a thunderous pace in my ears, every beat more deafening than the last. My hand tightened around the beer bottle as panic flooded through me, and part of me expected it to shatter in my grip.
I was typically calm in stressful situations, my fight-or-flight response always firmly locked in the fight mode—it’s part of what made me a good firefighter—but in this instant, the urge to flee was more than tempting.
No. There was no way she was pregnant with my kid. It wasn’t possible. We’d had sex one time. The odds of that resulting in a pregnancy had to be infinitesimal.
But not impossible, a voice in my head reminded me and I quickly silenced it.
She raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Hello? Did you hear me? I said I’m—”
I held up my hand and tried very hard to keep all the feelings raging through my body out of my next words. “I heard you.”
She sat back in her seat. “Well?”
I glared at her. “I thought you had an IUD.”
Offense morphed her features, and I couldn’t blame her. There was no gentleness to my tone, and the statement was dripping with accusation, even though if what she said was true, I was just as much to blame.
“It expired. I didn’t know and my doctor’s office had the wrong phone number, so they couldn’t reach me.”
Of course it did.
But wait . . . Her words replayed in my head.
“What do you mean it might be mine? There were others?”
Darcy’s gaze narrowed and her expression turned murderous. “I know you’re not about to slut shame me right now considering we are both well aware of your extracurricular activities.”
“I don’t give two shits about how many people you slept with. That’s not what I was asking.”
Some of the poised tension left her muscles, but her expression remained irate and she hesitated a moment before speaking. “There was one other around the time frame my OB gave me.”
Something in my gut hardened and twisted at her confession, but the rest of me was relieved, if only marginally.
“It’s not mine.”
Her mouth turned up in a sarcastic half-smile. “Funny. He said the same thing, and I’m not all that religious, so it’s got to be one of yours.”
I leaned forward slightly, my voice low. “It’s. Not. Mine.”
Darcy met me in the middle, her forearms pressed against the table mirroring my own position.
“Saying it slower doesn’t make it anymore true. You just sound like a jackass.” She sat back in the booth and took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t want anything from you—”
“Good because I’ve got nothing to give.” I chugged the rest of my beer, grabbed my helmet, and exited the booth so fast I moved the bench backwards.
The slamming of my beer bottle on the bartop had the bartender rushing over with my tab, confusion and concern etched across his features.
He glanced over my shoulder to Darcy and then back to me, apparently reading the situation as fine enough not to need his involvement.
I haphazardly scrawled my signature at the bottom, and went to storm out of the building, but Darcy’s voice cut through the dangerous brew of emotions bubbling beneath the surface.
“You’re seriously not even going to talk to me about this?” Darcy called from where I left her in the booth.
“No,” I rumbled loudly back, still making my way to the door.
“Wow! You know what? You’re a coward, Archer! A fucking coward!”
For a handful of seconds, I froze, my back still to her, with what would no doubt be a vicious retort on the tip of my tongue.
I was a lot of things, but a coward wasn’t one of them.
I let the door to the bar slam shut behind me without so much as a backwards glance in her direction, not caring if the act solidified my position in her mind.
I fired off a quick text to Harrison, letting him know that I was cancelling, and was barely seated on my bike before I started it, and gassed it out of the parking lot.
The trees were dark blurs, and street lamps whizzed by without ever truly coming into focus, as I raced down back roads going far too fast, but not caring enough to slow down. I needed the rush to drown out my thoughts.
The baby wasn’t mine. It couldn’t be. I wasn’t denying it because I couldn’t handle the responsibility; I’d been responsible for more than my fair share of crap since I was a kid.
I was denying it because I was the last person on Earth who should be a dad.
Well, second to last, and I wasn’t about to be responsible for screwing up some poor kid’s life before they’d had a chance to live it. And I would too.
For the sake of that baby, and for the sake of Darcy too, she needed it to not be mine.