Inevitably (RiffRaff Records Book 8)

by L. P. Maxa

  “Emmie?” My dad sounded a little shocked and a little apprehensive. When the two of them rounded the corner, Kase came over and stood beside me. My dad narrowed his eyes, glancing between us. “What the hell for?”

  “Dad.” I gulped past the emotion that had formed in my throat, trying to sound as calm as possible. “Can you sit down?”

  He didn’t take his eyes off us as he sat next to my mother. She grabbed his hand, her gaze switching between my father and myself. “What’s going on, Emmie? You’re scaring us, sweetheart.”

  For months, I knew this moment would come. The moment I had to tell them I was pregnant. I wasn’t my cousins. I wasn’t about to let the whole family find out over the dinner table in some oddly dramatic fashion. Brody had been right. It was unnecessary. And my parents weren’t like my aunts and uncles. They wouldn’t be able to find humor in any of this. It would take them time to find the silver lining, to find the good in the pile of heartache I was about to lay at their feet.

  I blinked rapidly, trying to keep my tears at bay. “I stopped training because it was too hard on my body, and on the baby.” I took a small step closer to Kase, liking the way I could feel his warmth against my arm. He was here, right next to us, like he’d promised he would be.

  “What baby? There’s no baby. Tell me there’s no baby and this is some weird joke that little fucker convinced you to play.” My dad jabbed a finger in Kase’s direction, making sure we all knew he was the little fucker he was referring to.

  Kasen glanced at me, and then focused on my parents. “I assure you, sir, I don’t find pregnancy scares funny.” I backhanded his thigh. Like I said, my parents weren’t ones to find humor in tense situations. “But, um, no joke. Ems is pregnant.”

  “No she’s not.” My dad shook his head.

  “I am.”

  “Emmie doesn’t date, she doesn’t have sex. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He put his free hand, the one my mother wasn’t clutching on to for dear life, over his mouth, like he couldn’t believe he’d had to say those words out loud.

  “She is, and she did.” Kase nodded, lips pursed. “And I know because I put it in there myself.”

  Oh for shit’s sake.

  Chapter Thirty

  Kasen

  I’m not saying it’d never happened, but it had been a real long time since I’d been punched in the face. And Smith James? He moved fast for a retired rocker, and he had a mean right hook. He didn’t knock me on my ass, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to move my jaw tomorrow.

  “Dad,” Emmie yelled in disbelief as her mom grabbed her father by the back of the shirt and pulled him back to sitting.

  “You deserved that, you little fucker, and you know it.” He was still steaming, his face red and his chest heaving. He wanted to hit me some more. A lot. I could see it in his eyes.

  I held my hands up, even though all I wanted to do was make sure my lower jaw was still attached. “I did.” And I always assumed he’d try to shoot me when he found out, so a quick jab to the face wasn’t all that bad.

  Her mom shook her head, like she still couldn’t believe any of this was happening in her living room. “Emmie, baby, tell us how this happened. Kase doesn’t even live in this country half the…Cash’s wedding? You went to bed early, said you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I did, but—”

  “You lied to us.” Her mom cut her off, like her dad had earlier. Every time her family spoke over her, it grated on my nerves. “You lied to sneak up to your room with Kasen.”

  “Sneak?” I didn’t like that. It made it seem like we’d done something wrong. And we hadn’t. “She’s eighteen. She made an excuse and then we went, consensually, to her room.”

  Smith pointed at me again, like he wished he was holding a knife and stabbing me instead. “Why are you even here for this discussion? Why are you talking for her?”

  “Because this family has a bad habit of talking over her.” I put my hand on Ems’s stomach, not even really thinking about how intimate my actions must look to her parents. “And I’m here because I’m the baby’s father. Where the hell else would I be?”

  Where the hell else would I be? I liked that, I liked how true and right it made me feel. I was an idiot to ever think that I would be able to walk away from my child. It needed me. Emmie needed me. And I was glad that I was here, even though its grandfather had jacked me in the fucking face.

  “Emmie, dammit, sweetheart.” Smith ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up all over the place. “How are we going to deal with this? What are we going to do with you?”

  “Do with me?” Emmie took a deep breath, then met my eyes.

  I tried real fucking hard to give her all my strength, all my snark and sarcasm. I winked at her, hoping she got the message that if she wanted to tell her parents off, I was here for it.

  She stood up straighter, her chin lifting and her eyes narrowing as she ticked points off on her elegant fingers. “Evie had a drug addiction, and a whole secret life in Dallas. Halen hid a miscarriage. For years. Marley and Jett hid an entire corporation. Cash and Crue? You wouldn’t even be able to wrap your mind around the messed-up stuff they got into in high school. Yet you’ve stood by every single one of them. But me? I’m a problem that needs to be dealt with?”

  “Baby girl, you have to understand, we’re shocked.” Her dad put his arm around his wife.

  I snorted. “Yeah, she doesn’t let shocked count as an excuse for bad behavior, trust me.”

  Smith jerked his attention back to me. “Can you fucking leave? I can’t even stand to look at you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” I used my thumb to gesture to Emmie’s stomach. “I promised my kid.”

  Her mom wagged a finger between Ems and me, her voice taking on a hopeful note. “Are you two together? Are you dating? In love and having a baby?”

  “No.” Emmie spoke up, choosing to be the one to rain on her mom’s parade. “We’re friends. And we’ll co-parent the baby together.”

  “Friends.” Her dad nodded, a disgusted look on his face. “You make a habit of having sex with your friends?”

  “Dad.” Emmie rolled her eyes to the ceiling like she was exasperated. Not that I could blame her. Mr. and Mrs. James were proving to be quite the pieces of work. We weren’t high school freshmen experimenting after school. And to be fair we weren’t really friends before we fucked. But I doubted that would be a helpful add-on, so I kept my mouth shut. “I don’t have sex, I had sex. The once.”

  I whispered out the side of my mouth, “Three times. Don’t belittle my skills, Ems.”

  She hit me again, still not appreciating my humor.

  “You took my daughter’s virginity? And got her pregnant?” Smith lunged off the couch only to be jerked back by his shockingly strong wife. “I want to kill him, Dylan. I want to actually harm him. There are images in my head of all the ways I could finish him.”

  “Were you careful, Emmie?” Mrs. James ignored her husband, making me think speaking over each other was a family-wide bad habit. “And, Kasen, were you? She was so inexperienced. She didn’t know what to do, how could you let this happen?”

  “Let this happen?” My eyebrows rose and I couldn’t help but chuckle at their absurdity. “You think I threw caution to the wind? Like, hey I’ve avoided fucking up lives so far, but this girl, yeah, I’ll put a baby in this one.”

  “Don’t say put a baby in her.” Emmie’s dad shook his head, his face going pale. “I think I might be sick.”

  “We were careful,” Ems said.

  I nodded. “Extremely careful.”

  “And this isn’t Kasen’s fault. This isn’t something he did to me. We did this together. And I know I’m the baby of this family, but I’m not a child. I’m not stupid. I’m not naïve.” Emmie threw her hands in the air. “Hell, sex comes up at every damn family dinner we have.” Her voice got a little softer, like she was losing the energy to deal with this discussion. “An
d yeah, I planned on learning from everyone else’s mistakes. But somewhere along the way, I grew up. I wanted to experience everything life had to offer.”

  Her dad scoffed. “Well. You got your wish.”

  “Don’t be a dick to her.” I knew I shouldn’t push him right now, but he was being unnecessarily mean to his daughter and it was pissing me the fuck off.

  “Excuse me?” He went to get off the couch again, but this time he stopped himself. “Don’t you come into my house and talk to me like that, you little shit.”

  Little shit, little fucker. Emmie said nicknames meant something in her family and I was really loving all my new ones.

  “Kase, do your parents know?” Her mom was at least trying to be calm.

  “No.”

  “I bet your sister does though.” Smith glared at me, no doubt trying to make my head explode with some laser beam in his mind. “And the rest of the crew? They know, don’t they?” He switched his attention and glare over to Emmie. I wanted to step in front of her, shield her from his bullshit. “They’ve known since the beginning. You told them, and hid it from us. Because that’s the way this family works, isn’t it? Sneak around, hide your dirty deeds, hide it all.”

  Dirty deeds? For fuck’s sake. I’d heard enough.

  “That’s the way this family works because you guys are as clueless as it comes. All these things your kids keep from you? They happen right in front of your face.” I was gaining speed, saying all the things someone should have said to these people years ago. “Halen and Beau? They hooked up in a tree house on this damn compound. Jett and Marley’s empire? There was a tunnel under your feet. Hell, my sister lost her virginity while Dash was sleeping two doors away. So don’t come down on Emmie, not like that.”

  Smith’s face was turning red again. “You have no fucking right to tell me how to feel, how to speak to my own daughter.”

  “Ems may be your daughter.” I reached down and took her hand in mine. “But right now, she’s carrying my baby. And I’m not going to let you treat her like this. We didn’t do anything wrong. This baby was an accident. It wasn’t a careless mistake.”

  I was mad, he was furious. Emmie was crying and so was her mom. This was no good, for any of us. “Come on, Ems, let’s get out of here for a bit.”

  “She’s not going anywhere with you.” Her dad stood, shaking his head and doing that stabby pointing thing again.

  I wrapped my arm around Emmie, almost tearing up myself when she all but collapsed against me. “You need to cool off. I need to try to calm her down.” I lifted her into my arms, the fact that she didn’t protest telling me all I needed to know. “And what’s the worst that could happen, sir? I already got her pregnant.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Kasen

  I put Ems in my car, buckling her up even though we were only driving a mile down the road back to my sister’s house. She was quietly crying, tears streaming down her pretty face. I could almost see the swell of her stomach under the loose t-shirt she was wearing. She’d only stopped training a few days ago, but already her body seemed to be responding. She didn’t look so thin, so exhausted. Her cheeks had color and the bags under her eyes had all but disappeared.

  Although, at the moment, she looked utterly heartbroken.

  “Ems, you doing okay?”

  She nodded. But otherwise didn’t say anything.

  I knew that Smith and Dylan were shocked, thrown for a loop. But their anger and harsh comments were uncalled for. Emmie was their daughter. They’d gone past disappointment, and they’d hurt her. I refused to let anyone make her feel the way they did back there in her living room.

  I parked my car, climbing out and moving around to the passenger side. Ems let me pick her up again, which was really starting to worry me. Maybe I should call Landry and have her come check her vitals and shit. Maybe all the stress of the last few months was making her sick.

  “What the hell happened to your face?” Cash’s eyes went wide when I walked into the living room with Emmie in my arms. “And what’s wrong with Em?”

  “She’s fine, exhausted though, I think.” I sat her on the couch, letting her feet rest in my brother-in-law’s lap. Then I stood, finally touching my jaw for the first time. Good. It was still there. “We told her parents about the baby tonight and it didn’t go well.”

  “Holy shit, Smith hit you?” Cash winced, standing and carefully putting a pillow under Ems’s feet before heading into the kitchen. He came back a few seconds later and passed me an ice pack. He took a seat on the smaller loveseat, letting me sit down beside Ems. “I can’t believe he hit you. I didn’t think he had it in him. He’s old, dude.”

  Emmie giggled, the sound making me smile despite all the heavy shit we’d gone through this evening. “To be fair, Kase used the term I put it in there myself when my dad asked how he knew I was pregnant.”

  Cash snorted. “You didn’t.”

  “I did.” I moved closer to Ems, tossing the pillow into an empty chair and putting her tiny feet in my lap. I needed to touch her. I needed to feel her and know that she was okay.

  Katie came into the room, braiding her wet hair over her shoulder. “Where’ve you been? Wait? Why are you icing your jaw?”

  “They told Smith and Dylan about the baby, and Smith punched him.” Cash held his arm out, kissing my sister’s forehead when she settled next to him. “But I’d hit the guy who knocked up my daughter too.”

  “Oh my god, Em? Are you okay? Is she okay?” Katie got back to her feet, kneeling beside Emmie and feeling her forehead. “You don’t have a fever.”

  “I’m fine.” Emmie crawled down the couch, and laid her head in my lap, tucking her hands under her chin. “Just sleepy.”

  My heart melted. She needed comfort, and she was asking me for it. This was the first time she was coming to me, asking me to help her. To hold her. I brushed the hair back from her face, then rested my hand on the swell of her hip. “Katie Bug, you mind calling Landry? Let’s get Ems checked before we let her pass out.”

  “Already texted her, she’s on her way.” Cash tossed his cell on the coffee table, sending me an understanding smile.

  That was a first as well, him acting like we were family instead of enemies.

  “You going to call Mom and Dad now?” Katie was speaking softly, none of us wanting to disturb Emmie while she rested.

  I let my palm slide down, resting it on her stomach, loving that it was no longer flat. “Not a chance. I think one set of parental meltdowns is all either of us can handle in one day.”

  “They take the news that bad?”

  I nodded, my eyes still on Ems. “It was pretty bad.”

  “They hate me.” She whispered her words, the sound breaking my heart.

  I used my free hand to wipe a tear from her cheek. “Ems, they don’t hate you.”

  “Yeah, Em, you know your parents don’t take shit as well as the other ’rents.” Cash put his arm around my sister, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. “They tend to overreact, but they always come around.”

  They always come around. They had to, right? They couldn’t treat her like this forever. They were her parents. They loved her. Or at least, that was the way a parent was supposed to love their children. Wholly, unconditionally, and without fail. That was the way my parents loved me and Katie. And that was the way I’d love my kid.

  I kept my hand on Emmie’s stomach, trying to push all the love and protection I felt for that tiny growing baby through my palm. I wanted it to feel me, to feel that I was there. If it could feel Emmie’s stress, her uncertainty, I wanted to reassure it that all hope wasn’t lost and I wouldn’t let anyone hurt it. Or its mother.

  Fuck me. I was turning into a sappy badass dad.

  Landry came in a few minutes later, breaking the silence that had blanketed the room. “What happened?” She knelt beside Ems, opening this fancy-looking duffle bag she brought with her.

  “Her dad was a dick when we told them a
bout the baby.”

  She glanced up at me while she fitted a blood pressure cuff around Ems’s wrist. “He the reason your jaw is black and blue?” I nodded and she turned her attention back to Ems. “Her blood pressure is a little low, but not alarmingly or anything. I’m going to set her up with an IV for fluids. And she’ll need to eat as soon as she wakes up.”

  “She can stay with me, that way I can keep an eye on her.” I pulled her into my lap, standing with her sleeping body in my arms. I didn’t wait for anyone to agree or to protest.

  I carried her down the hall and laid her in my bed, dragging her workout pants down her body, then quickly covering her with my blankets. The last thing I needed was her family thinking I was trying to hit on her while she was unconscious. They were finally coming around and not cussing me every time I walked into a damn room. Peeking at her when she had no control would set me back, no doubt.

  I stepped back, waiting in the doorway, watching as Landry expertly started an IV drip, hanging the bag from a temporary hook she placed on the wall behind the bed.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m leaving this cuff.” She held up the device she checked Emmie’s blood pressure with. “Take her BP again in about an hour, if it’s lower than this number,” she paused to jot something down on a notepad she’d pulled out of her duffle, “call me.”

  “I will.”

  She stopped on her way out the door, resting her hand on my arm. “You’re doing a good job, Kase.” She smiled, her hold tightening for a moment. “You’re taking good care of them, and we all see it.”

  She left and I climbed in bed beside Ems, careful not to disturb her. I lay down on my side, putting my palm back on the tiny swell of her stomach. Because like I’d said earlier, where the hell else would I be?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Kasen

  I checked Emmie’s blood pressure again, and she slept through it. Luckily, it wasn’t low and we wouldn’t need to call Landry back. But now it was late, nearing midnight, and Ems had been asleep for a solid three hours. As I was sitting beside her, unhooking the IV from her arm, she started to stir. The IV bag was empty and it had started to pull blood from her arm a bit. My hands were shaking. I’d never played nurse before. Doctor plenty of times, but never nurse. I smiled at my own joke, the action feeling almost foreign after the night I’d had.