by Parker, Ali
I had no idea what I was going to do about it. It didn’t feel like there was much I could do. Reality was both simple and very complicated—all rolled up into one potentially explosive package.
Aston had to stay in New York for another week at least. I had to get back to Florida before tonight, tomorrow at the very latest. But I’d promised her I would be there for her. I didn’t want what we had to blow up because the first time she really needed me, I had to leave her.
I also couldn’t be in two places at once, which meant I had a tough decision to make. Take a week off during my first official week in charge of a company responsible for the livelihoods of thousands, hoping the backlash was manageable, or leave Aston in New York by herself when she’d only just been discharged from the hospital.
Aston would tell me to go if I spoke to her about it. I knew her. She would tell me she was fine and insist the company needed me more than she did. It wasn’t that I thought she wasn’t capable of staying behind in New York by herself.
It was that I didn’t want to leave her, to leave them. I promised her I would be there for them. If I broke that promise this early—it didn’t bode well for the kind of dad I wanted to be.
Plus, if something happened and she had to be rushed to the hospital again I would never forgive myself if she didn’t get there fast enough. There wasn’t even anyone in this damn city I knew well enough to trust them to help me out.
I was torn. Stuck between a rock and a very fucking hard place.
Stressing Aston out over what decision to make wasn’t an option, so I had no intention of bringing it up to her before I knew what to do. The only other person in the world I talked to about these kinds of things was going through recovery himself.
Dropping this in his lap wasn’t fair, and yet I knew it had to be done. Well, not dropping it in his lap, but talking to him about it. I hadn’t spoken to him since I sent Danny back to Florida. I had to call him about that anyway.
Once I heard what he sounded like, I would gauge whether or not to tell him the rest. At a snail’s pace, I moved away from Aston and rolled off the bed. I paused when I was up, turning to make sure I hadn’t woken her.
She was still sleeping deeply, so I released a quiet sound of relief and grabbed my phone before making my way out onto the balcony. The skies were gray, but the air muggy. It was the kind of day where the rain would be constant, but soft enough to walk in without getting drenched.
Breathing the humid air deep into my lungs, I heard horns honking and the sound of construction nearby. It was never truly quiet in New York, no matter how high up you were. Letting the energy flow into me from the city far below, I waited another minute before making the call.
Dad answered fast, just like he always did. “Blake. How are you?”
“I’m good, Dad. You?” I dragged my hand through my hair and wished I had better news for him.
“Recovering,” Dad grunted. “The doctor says I’m doing well, but he won’t keep his damn nurses at the hospital. Says they’ll keep checking up on me for another couple of days at least. It’s driving me nuts.”
“They’re only trying to help.” Only Dad would be going stir crazy in a house the size of his with people clamoring to take care of him. “It’ll all be over soon enough.”
“Yeah, well that day can’t come soon enough.” His voice was a low grumble, impatient sounding. “Where are you?”
“I’m still in New York,” I told him. “I found Danny. Fired Dustin and sent Danny back home to Florida. I’m not sure he listened.”
“He listened,” my dad said. There was a scratching noise like he was covering the phone, then the click of a door after he came back. “He’s here now. I just closed myself in the study so we can talk without being overheard.”
“He’s there, as in at your house? Or just back in town?”
“At the house,” Dad sighed. “I think he came straight here. Felt like shit for not knowing I’d been discharged. He’s taken up residence in his old room.”
“What?” That didn’t make sense. Danny had a monstrosity of a house on the beach. A towering glass structure complete with palm trees and a fully stocked bar. “Why is he there?”
“He came to talk to me. We stayed up pretty late. I told him not to drive home, he’d had a few.”
I swallowed past a constricting feeling in my throat. “What did you talk about?”
“He told me what you said to both of them in New York.”
Fuck. I wanted to talk to Dad about what went down before Danny had a chance to. The constricting feeling returned, tightened like fingers trying to cut off my airflow. A father and son talk about how I shouldn’t have treated my brother that way was coming. I could feel it in my bones.
Already preparing my counter argument, I had my reasons for doing what I had on the tip of my tongue. I was ready to roll them out, explain each one meticulously and in detail.
But it wasn’t necessary. What Dad said next surprised the hell out of me. “I’m proud of you, Blake.”
“What?” The question was out before I could stop it. I was kind of glad it was, though.
Dad chuckled. “You heard me. I’m proud of you, it took balls to stand up to your brother like that. Bigger ones to stand firm given what you were faced with. You did the right thing, Blake. It makes me proud.”
Well, shit. “Thank you.”
If he thought I did the right thing, maybe it was time to do the other right thing. Dad sounded fine, strong. It was time to tell him the truth. “Hey Dad, Aston is pregnant.”
Dad didn’t skip a beat. “That’s sooner than I expected.”
“What?” My eyebrows pushed together. “You expected this?”
I could practically hear him shrugging. “Like I said, not this soon. When I saw you with her, I knew I was looking at a woman who was going to be in your life for a long time. I hoped I was right.”
“You were.”
“Excellent,” he replied brightly. “Congratulations. Tell me then, why is it that you sound like someone pissed all over your Cheerios? A child is a gift, Blake. An innocent, precious miracle. You don’t sound like someone who’s just been given such a gift.”
“Aston was hospitalized yesterday,” I started, then told him the whole story. He didn’t let me get away with only the cold, hard facts once he’d ascertained that both Aston and the baby were okay.
My father delved in, buckled down and forced me to go there with him. He asked me how I felt and what I wanted, then made me take a good, hard look at it all myself.
I crouched down on the balcony, hanging my head between my legs before I pushed back up. “It doesn’t really matter that I want to stay here, Dad. I have responsibilities there. I need to get back and figure everything out with Danny. I can’t ignore that.”
“You can,” he said firmly. “And you will.”
I remained quiet, waiting for him to carry on because I knew he wasn’t done yet. After a deep breath, his voice gentled. “I won’t let you make the same mistakes I did, Blake. Sometimes as a parent, you have to sit back and let your kid make the mistake because sometimes, you know it’s the only way they’ll learn. This isn’t one of those times, this one, you can learn from me. You don’t have to go through what I did.”
Releasing a shuddering sigh, he told me, “Work will always be here when you get back. Aston might not, and it wouldn’t be her fault. She’ll have to protect herself from you if it ever gets to that point, and Blake, knowing that the woman you love needs to protect herself from you, it’s a kind of hell you can never forget. Pain you never fully recover from. Trust me.”
“I’ll stay,” I said quietly, turning to watch Aston’s sleeping form through the window. Nothing would ever make me hurt her, the baby or myself the way my parents had hurt each other, and us. “I’ll come back when Aston’s ready to fly.”
“Good,” Dad said, relief bleeding into his tone. “You’re making the right choice, son. I’ll see you soon.”
“Yeah.” Distracted when I noticed Aston was starting to wake up, I said good bye to my father and went back inside.
Aston sat up when she saw me, smiling weakly. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I walked over to the bed, sitting down beside her. She was pale still, but less so. When I lifted my fingers to stroke her cheek, her skin was less clammy. “How are you feeling?”
She tilted her head, looking like she was making a mental check of her body before answering my question. “Starving. I think I’m finally ready to eat something.”
My heart leaped, a wide grin spreading on my lips. Getting her appetite back was a good sign. A sign that she was really going to be okay, as long as we followed the doctor’s orders.
In that moment, I agreed with Dad. I had made the right choice. I was exactly where I needed to be. “Let’s get some food in you then, shall we?”
Chapter 64
Aston
“It’s been days, Blake. Days!” I hated the tinge of whine in my voice, but there was no helping it anymore. Since the hospital, Blake and I had been cooped up in the hotel room. For four days, if he could have gone to pee for me he probably would have.
It was sweet and all, everything he was doing for me, but I couldn’t take it anymore. The first few times I asked to get out of the room, he found effective ways to distract me.
Blake could be very, very distracting when he wanted to be.
Only after he called the doctor to make sure it was alright for him to be distracting me like that.
It was mortifying that he called Doctor Steele to ask if it would be safe for us to—do stuff, in bed. I wasn’t like Tiffany, talking about sex openly and unashamed. I didn’t have nearly enough experience to be that nonchalant about it.
Maybe someday I would be able to call up a doctor as confidently as Blake had, and just come right out with it and ask her if it would be okay to have sex. Worst of all, he had her on speaker. She knew I was listening in when she told him it would be fine as long as we didn’t get too crazy.
Too crazy? Who did she think we were? Humans shouldn’t have been able to turn the color I had, but apparently I could. My cheeks still felt hot hours later, although that might’ve also been from what came after Doctor Steele gave Blake the okay.
He made it his personal mission after that to keep my mind off worrying about what had happened or being cooped up in the room, to make me forget what he was giving up to be in New York with me and everything else that existed outside of our bed.
Okay, outside of the bed, the couch, the shower and the floor.
Blake was as insatiable as I was, albeit gentle and extremely careful. I had to give it to the man, he had some serious stamina. All I had to do was look at him when I felt up to it and he would be ready to go.
I wasn’t going to allow him to distract me again, though. We were in New York City for crying out loud, and pretty much all I’d seen was the inside of the hotel room and the hospital. It was a damn travesty.
Blake ran his hands though his hair, looking up from his laptop. “We can’t take any risks, Aston. The doctor said you needed rest and no stress. It’s stressful out there.”
Fighting the urge to roll my eyes like a petulant teenager, I gave him a pointed look and let my eyes slide over to the unmade bed. “What we’ve done in here has put my body under a lot more stress than a walk will.”
“Yeah, but in here it’s the good kind of stress. The kind of tension I can take care of.” He grinned proudly. It was adorable, but I couldn’t let the smile wanting to break free come out. I wanted out of this room too bad to give in. “Out there, you could be subjected to the kind of stress I can’t do anything about.”
“Like what?” I raised my eyebrow in challenge. “I could have scaffolding fall on my head?”
“We could run into Dustin,” Blake said darkly.
I shook my head, walking over to cup his jaw in my hands. Rough stubble scraped my palms. I loved that I was getting to know him well enough to know exactly how much his stubble grew in one day. “Dustin didn’t bring on the pain, Blake. I told you. I felt it earlier that day, too. It might’ve pushed me over the edge because I worried he would do something to you, but running into him isn’t going to affect me. Besides, there are millions of people in the city. Why would we run into him?”
“Because he’s a fucking parasite,” he spat, standing up to take me into his arms. “I don’t want to risk it, Aston. Do you really want to take the chance of running into him?”
“This isn’t about Dustin, Blake.” I repeated myself firmly. “If we run into him, I’ll kick him in the shin, curse at him and run away. Promise.”
Sighing, he chuckled. “No running. Let me carry you away and you might have a deal.”
“Fine,” I conceded, practically tasting the fresh air I would soon be out in. “If we run into him, I kick him in the shin, curse at him and you carry me away. Can we go now?”
His lips kicked up into a wary grin. “Fine, but if you start feeling bad at all, you tell me immediately and we come right back. Okay?”
“Okay.” I was done arguing about this. Sitting still had never been something I was good at. I was used to being on the move, always keeping busy. If I had to spend one more minute inside, I was going to lose it.
“And we’re walking slowly!” Blake called after me as I went to get changed.
“Sure,” I yelled back, throwing on some jeans and a t-shirt before he changed his mind about going for a walk. “We can crab walk for all I care.”
As long I got out for a little while, I would be fine. Blake had spent the last few days not only telling me how much he loved and cared about me, but showing me. His reluctance to go on this walk was yet another example of how much he wanted to take care of me, but he needed to trust that I could take care of myself, too.
I knew what I needed, wanted and I wouldn’t push myself too far. A short, relaxed stroll was what I needed right now.
Out on the curb, Blake looked up and down the street. “Which way do you wanna go?”
Narrowing my eyes, I thought about which way we’d gone that night when we ran into Dustin at the restaurant and pointed in the opposite direction. “Let’s go that way.”
We started walking hand in hand at a comfortable pace, heading down the sidewalk. Blake didn’t let go of me for a second, as though nothing could happen to us while he was holding my hand. I never took him to be a guy for public displays of affection, but I was enjoying this one.
We hadn’t had many opportunities to be together out in the open. That would all change soon, but strolling down the street as an anonymous couple was fun. Refreshing.
“Penny for you thoughts?”
I looked up at him, resting my head on his shoulders as we walked. “I’m just glad we did this, you know?”
Playful humor in his eyes, he dropped an arm around my shoulders. “Was being stuck in the suite with me really that bad?”
He flinched when I poked him in the ribs. “You know it wasn’t, but we don’t often get the chance to do stuff like this.”
“That’s all going to change from now on,” he said, suddenly contemplative. “My dad knows you’re pregnant now. He’ll have told my mom and my brother by now. I think it’s time we tell the people closest to you, too.”
“Are you sure?” It still seemed too soon to me.
“I love you, Aston. I’m ready to shout it from the rooftops if you are. I get that it’s complicated, but I don’t really care.” He sounded so confidant, so sure of himself, and of us. “When we get back, will you consider it?”
I nodded. “Speaking of getting back, you haven’t really told me what you did to be able to stay behind with me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied flippantly, waving his hand like it was nothing for the brand new head of a company to take off with his baby mama for a couple of days.
But Blake wasn’t flippant, and it wasn’t nothing. It was a big, fat, hairy deal. “I would und
erstand if you had to go on ahead without me. I’ll be able to get to the airport by myself just fine in a few days.”
“No way.” He didn’t even take a second to think about it. “I’m not leaving your side, Aston. It doesn’t matter what I had to push back, it has already been done, so just forget about it. I’m right here with you. I’ll leave New York when you do. We left Florida together and we’ll be going back together. From now on, that’s how it works. Out together, back together.”
Whenever he said things like that, my heart skipped several beats. It was racing now, beyond excited that he was so candid about our future. So open about where he saw us going. There was no more uncertainty about where I stood with Blake.
He really was in this for the long haul, and so was I. “Just remember that if you need to go, I understand.”
“The only place I need to go is to the check-up at Doctor Steele’s tomorrow.” My heart started beating faster for a different reason now. Going to Doctor Steele’s meant we would be able to see our little blob again, but it also meant there was a possibility she could tell us something was wrong.
Shutting down my negative thoughts, I pushed even the slightest possibility of getting bad news out of my mind. “I’m excited for the check-up. Since we followed all of her instructions, do you think she’ll let us leave?”
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Blake shrugged, then winked and jumped far enough away that I couldn’t poke him in the ribs again. “I’m hoping she does, since it’s such a punishment for you to be stuck in a hotel suite with me.”
I stuck out my tongue at him. Of course, I hoped the doctor would give me the all clear too, but a part of me wished she wouldn’t. I was enjoying my time alone with Blake. A couple more days cooped up in the hotel room with him might not be so bad.
Chapter 65