Chapter 25 Lara #2
He moved his hands to my shoulders like he was trying to let go of me but couldn’t. Water shivered off the scruff of his beard as his jaw tensed and then finally unlocked for the truth.
“A few days after we broke up, she called me . . . very upset. Panicked.” For Calder to describe her that way, I knew exactly the state my sister had been in. “The things she was saying, I thought she might be in trouble, so I picked her up and brought her here. Somewhere safe.”
“Please, tell me he didn’t . . .” I couldn’t even finish the statement, feeling the entirety of my Hippocratic oath start to unravel at the thought of someone hurting my sister.
“No. He didn’t hurt her,” he said quickly, and his expression blanched. “She told me they’d been hooking up for several weeks, and she was pregnant.”
Oh, Rachel . . .
Guilt sat like a stone in my throat, but before I could chip away at it with an apology, he continued. “She told him about the baby, and he didn’t take it well. He wanted her to get rid of it, and after that, he started denying it was his.”
The expression on my face must’ve belied the question in the back of my mind, because Calder answered it. “Rachel and I hadn’t slept together in over a month, so we both knew the baby wasn’t mine.”
And all I could think was Why? But I swallowed it down. It didn’t matter now.
“After she argued with Allen and he told her he wanted nothing to do with her, she panicked and called me. I brought her to the ranch and she told me everything.”
Sure, it had been over a decade, but the way he said it, it was like hearing his girlfriend had been cheating on him hadn’t had much of an effect back then, either.
Who was I kidding? Calder had been raised a tracker. A man to seek answers obscured by surroundings. To eliminate emotion in favor of only the essential senses. I would be a fool to think he hadn’t at the very least suspected Rachel wasn’t faithful.
There were many things in life I’d resigned myself to not understanding, but how my sister could cheat on a man like Calder would forever remain at the top of my list.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whispered, not really expecting him to have an answer but not surprised when he did.
“Sometimes we love people too much to be able to bear the thought of letting them down.”
I felt the words weigh like lead in the marrow of my bones. I wouldn’t have judged her or been angry with her, but I knew that didn’t matter in the same way that Calder’s innocence in his mom’s death didn’t change the way he viewed his role or how it had affected his relationship with Cassius.
Rachel hadn’t come to me because she thought I would’ve judged her. For cheating on Calder. For getting pregnant with a complete asshole like Allen. And that was my fault.
How many times had I told her I wished Mom hadn’t been so desperate for love? That I wished she’d would’ve been more conscious of her worth rather than settling for guys who didn’t deserve her?
How many things had I said to Rachel in the fugue of hormonal teenage years that I’d never considered what kind of effect they would’ve had when my sister ended up in the same position?
“I guess the way Allen spoke, she thought he wanted to be with her.”
I bit into the side of my cheek hard enough to taste blood.
No wonder she hadn’t told me. I would’ve quickly disabused her of that notion.
Allen Hendricks had wanted sex. Mostly with women who were considered off limits.
In fact, I was pretty sure I’d heard a rumor that he’d been involved with one of his married professors on campus not that long after all this must’ve happened.
“At the very least, she thought he’d be there because of the baby.”
The baby.
“What happened to the baby?”
“There was no baby,” he replied before I even had the chance to think of anything else. “I went with her to the doctor the following week, and they did blood work; the at-home tests she took were both false positives. She was never pregnant.”
I sucked in a breath, inhaling the cool rain onto the tip of my tongue. No baby.
Whatever fractures were present on my heart split fully open.
For deep, gasping moments, all I could think about was the pain Rachel would’ve been in.
To think she was pregnant . . . She’d always talked about becoming a mom.
And for Allen to shut her out . . . I knew my sister.
Her whole world would’ve revolved around that baby the moment she knew she was going to have one.
There was nothing she would’ve clung to more than the unconditional love from the person growing inside her. To find out it was a faulty test . . .
Calder cleared his throat, his eyes falling for a moment before he offered, “In some ways, I think hearing that was worse than when Allen abandoned her.”
The last piece of what happened sank into my brain, painting a whole new picture of what I’d thought had happened—what Rachel told me happened.
She’d told me about her breakup with Calder after she knew there was no baby, and the more I tried to remember that decade-old conversation, the more my sister’s cries and harsh words had come in generalities, ones I’d filled in the specifics of with Calder’s name when it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” My head swayed, disbelief setting it adrift. “Why did you let me think this whole time that it was your fault—”
“Because it was a long time ago and she wasn’t the only guilty one in our relationship. And because it wouldn’t make a difference to dredge it up with Rachel missing.”
I grabbed his shirt, now completely wet from the storm.
My fingers curled into the cold fabric—and into the heat of his chest. But it was a different storm that caught us in its wrath.
A different storm that split molecules in the air and made the earth feel like clouds and the sky as heavy as stone.
That made lightning rock the ground and thunder brighten the skies.
A storm born of the tension gathering between Calder and me with nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to hide.
“And after?” We both knew what after meant.
After we realized this attraction between us. After we kissed. After I told him about Phoenix and Ian. After we’d almost torn each other apart in our tent.
Calder’s nostrils flared, like I was Eve standing in front of him and offering him the apple.
“After . . .” His voice was serrated with the same ache burning in his lust-filled stare. “After, it was easier if you hated me.”
“What was easier?”
His palms framed my face. “To stop myself from doing this.”
And then his mouth sealed over mine.