Author: Bella Andre

She still couldn’t believe she’d actually told him she loved him. Always.

Forever.

God, she wanted to curl up into a ball on the bathroom floor and never come out again. Stupid Sophie Sullivan with stars in her eyes blinding her to reality. And now look what had happened.

She was pregnant.

With Jake’s baby.

A knock sounded on the door. “You okay in there?”

It was Lori. Sophie quickly splashed some water on her face and flushed the toilet to make it seem like she’d actually used the bathroom.

She opened the door and faked a smile. “Isn’t it exciting about Gabe and Megan?”

“Of course it is.” But Lori wasn’t smiling back. “I need to talk to you after everyone leaves, so stick around, okay?”

Sophie immediately worried that something was wrong with her twin. Had she been too preoccupied with her own shocking news that she hadn’t paid close enough attention to whether Lori needed her support?

* * *

The door had barely closed behind the other women when Lori turned on Sophie. “Spill it, sis.”

The wine glass Sophie had been washing in the kitchen sink slipped from her fingers and shattered on the white porcelain. In the past, Sophie had always been the voice of reason, the shoulder for her twin to cry on.

This time, everything was turned around.

She braced herself on the rim of the sink. She wasn’t going to cry.

Not. Going. To. Cry.

But when Lori moved behind her and wrapped her arms around her shoulders, tears started streaming down Sophie’s cheeks as fast and thick as the water still pouring from the faucet.

Everything she’d been trying to hold in, to deal with by herself, burst apart inside of her. She felt like she was breaking apart from the inside out, as though she were about to shatter into as many pieces as the glass in the bottom of the sink.

Her sobs wracked her body so hard that if Lori hadn’t been holding her up, she couldn’t have stayed upright. Somehow, Lori turned off the water and got them both over to the couch, where Sophie held onto her twin for dear life. Their endless fights over the past year receded to nothing.

All that mattered was knowing she wasn’t completely alone.

When Sophie had finally stopped crying, her body feeling completely wrung out, Lori said, “Hold on a sec,” and came back a few seconds later with a roll of toilet paper. “Sorry, this is the best I’ve got.”

It was more than good enough for Sophie to blow her nose on and wipe her face dry.

“Wow.” Lori looked at her. “You’re really a mess.”

Her twin pointing out the horribly obvious shouldn’t have made Sophie laugh, but she couldn’t hold back a choked giggle. “You think?”

Lori reached for her hand. “It’s just that you’ve never been like this. You’re freaking me out.”

“You’re not the only one.” Although the truth was that freaking out was a pathetic, ridiculous understatement of what she was feeling.

“What did Jake do to you?”

Of course Lori would immediately figure out what—who—was at the heart of her sorrow. Only Sophie couldn’t exactly say, Oh, you know, not much besides making the sweetest, most sinful love imaginable to me and then leaving me in the middle of the night, knocked up...and completely lost without him.

She opened her mouth to give her sister an answer, but nothing came out.

“You were with him, weren’t you? That night, after the wedding.”

Sophie nodded. She could at least do that.

“How was it? No, wait.” Lori held up her hand. “Forget I asked. It would be too much like hearing about one of our brothers’ sex lives.”

Only, Jake wasn’t their brother. Just because he’d practically grown up in their house didn’t change the fact that he wasn’t actually one of them.

“I’m just going to assume it was awesome,” Lori said.

Sophie knew what was expected of her here, so she managed another nod.

“Super awesome?”

Sophie sighed, finally responding verbally with, “Yes.” But those thrilling details of their few stolen hours together, while still important, had faded into the background as soon as she’d found out—

“I’m pregnant.”

There. She’d said it. And, oh, if Lori could see her own face right now.

“Hold on.” Lori looked as shocked as Sophie had ever seen her in twenty-five years. “I thought you just said you were p—” She shook her head. “I can’t even say the word, Soph.”

“I haven’t gotten my period since before the wedding.”

“Have you been seeing him in secret all this time?”

Sophie snorted. “Are you kidding me? We did it once—” One spectacular time. “—and then he snuck away in the middle of the night.” Leaving her alone in that big bed in that big house in the Napa Valley hills with nothing to hold but a pillow.

“I’m going to kill him.” Lori leapt off the couch and grabbed her cell phone off the kitchen counter. “I’m going to rip his heart out through his throat. Better yet, I’m going to make sure he can never get anyone else pregnant ever again.”

Sophie grabbed her sister a millisecond before Lori was able to find Jake’s number on her phone’s contact list. “Stop! You can’t call him! He doesn’t know yet.”

Lori’s finger stilled over her phone. “You haven’t told him?”

“No. We haven’t even spoken since that night. I only took the tests this morning.” Sophie forcefully pried the phone out of her sister’s hand. “I love you for having my back. But I’ve got to deal with this myself.”

She didn’t feel great by any means, but after the long cry—and confessing the news to her sister—she felt better. Stronger.

Like she might actually be able to face Jake without crumbling.

“I can’t believe this,” Lori said. “Here you’ve been all over me for a year to break this thing off with you-know-who because he’s ‘bad for me’ and one night is all it takes for you to get in big trouble.”

It could have sounded like gloating in another context, but Sophie knew it wasn’t. It was simply Lori stating the crazy irony of their situation.

“I never thought something like this would happen to me,” Sophie said.

And still a voice in the back of her head was saying, Even if you knew how this was going to end up, you would have done it anyway. You would have given up everything, anything at all, for the chance to be with him.

“It could work, you know,” Lori said, halfheartedly. “Maybe he’ll step up to the plate. Maybe the two of you can actually make this work.” She looked down at Sophie’s stomach. “Well, the three of you, I guess.”

Sophie knew better than that. “I don’t want him to be with me only out of duty.” She took a deep breath, letting oxygen fill her lungs and help rebuild her strength. “I want love.”

She could see in Lori’s eyes confirmation of what all her siblings had known: Jake didn’t believe in love. Sophie could try the rest of her life to convince him, but it would just be a waste.

“Oh, Soph.” She scowled. “I’m still going to kill him. Just as soon as you give him the news.”

It would have been so much easier if Sophie could blame Jake for everything. But even now, she had to be fair. “It wasn’t all his fault. I tricked him into sleeping with me. I made it impossible for him to walk away.”

“Are you kidding me?” Lori let go of her hands and stomped on the wooden floor in her fury. “How could you possibly have trapped a guy like Jake into sleeping with you? Did you cement his feet to the ground and hop up on him while he begged you to stop?”

Sophie was beyond glad for the way her sister always made her laugh. Even in the worst of times. “You said you didn’t want details,” she reminded her twin.

“Right. Okay. No details. But you don’t have the kind of experience he does with the opposite sex. Seducing you would have been like taking candy from a baby.”

The word baby brought them both back to the most important issue at hand.

“You’re going to have a baby, Soph.” Lori’s eyes were wide with wonder.

Sophie put her hands over her stomach, even though she knew there had to be something barely the size of a pea inside her. That was when it finally hit her.

A baby.

Even though she was terrified, she suddenly couldn’t help but be thrilled. She was going to have a little boy or girl with Jake’s eyes, a child that would run her ragged, if Jake’s energy was anything to go by.

“I’m going to love it so much.”

Lori actually looked like she was going to cry. “All of us will.”

Oh God. Her family. Her mother. Her brothers. She didn’t want to think about how badly they’d lose it over this.

“Don’t you dare tell a soul.”

“But—”

“No one, Lori. Swear to God, you’d better let me deal with this—with Jake—the way I need to.”

Lori frowned. “Okay,” she said, very reluctantly. “But don’t forget, you’ve got at least seven people backing you up on this. Six with really big fists.”

Sophie smiled at her. “Thanks, Lori.”

“Hey,” her sister said with a smirk, “I’m just glad it’s you and not me.”

Now, there was the evil Lori she knew and loved. “You almost cried there for a second,” Sophie said.

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

The familiar patter of their bickering helped center Sophie a little more. Enough that by the time she headed back outside, she decided she was strong enough to go and do what needed to be done.

It was time to tell Jake he was going to be a father.

Chapter Ten

The numbers on the spreadsheets covering the desk in Jake’s home office blurred before his eyes. As difficult as words were for him to process, numbers had always been easy.

He shoved away from his desk, knowing any work he tried to do now he’d have to re-do in the morning. The only reason he’d stayed home tonight was to power through some work. If he wasn’t going to be able to get any of it done, he might as well be at one of the pubs working the taps.

He grabbed his cell phone off the kitchen counter and saw a missed call from Zach Sullivan. For ten weeks he’d gone out of his way to avoid the Sullivans. He couldn’t face Zach or Marcus or Chase or Gabe, not knowing what he’d done to their sister. It was the lowest he’d ever stooped, so low he still couldn’t believe what he’d done. He kept hoping he’d wake up and it would all be a crazy dream...but any time he managed to sleep, all he could see was Sophie and the look in her eyes when she’d told him she loved him.

Forever.

He knew better, knew she couldn’t actually love him. She loved a fantasy version of Jake McCann that she’d probably been writing in one of her childhood journals since she was a little girl in pink dresses and pigtails.

She’d never forgive him for what he’d done and Jake knew he didn’t deserve her forgiveness, just as he knew it was for the best that she steer clear of him from now on. Because now that he knew the taste of her, the feel of her...

He needed to get to the pub, where the noise and activity would distract him from thinking about her. He shoved his phone in his pocket, grabbed his car keys, and yanked open the front door.

Sophie Sullivan stood on his front steps. “Oh, hi. I was just about to knock.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

It was exactly what he’d asked her when she’d showed up at his rental house in Napa. He knew coming at her so aggressively wasn’t doing a damn thing to make up for the way he’d treated her, but it was the best he could do given that even looking at Sophie had his brain cells scrambling.