I just know if I press charges, Trent will hunt me down as soon as he is able to, even if he has to wait until he gets out of prison. It’s a gamble I can’t convince myself to take. It could mean my life, and that scares the hell out of me.
-Daphne
DAPHNE
THERE’S A KNOCK ON MY door. It opens slightly and Kemper sticks his head in first. “It’s not eight yet. How’d you get in?”
The second he walks through the door, I see how. He’s draped from head to toe in a blue uniform, holding his hat at his side. Holy hell. Have I died and gone to heaven? “I batted my lashes at a couple of nurses,” he says, his lips twisted into a cute smirk.
“I don’t think you’d even need to do that much,” I said, feeling warmth rush through me. I’ve seen the men in their dress blues before, but seeing Kemper in his sucks the wind out of me. This tall, tan, and strikingly handsome man is here for me. What did I do to deserve this?
“Why are you in uniform?” I ask, sounding like a mouse looking up at a beastly lion.
“I didn’t get to you fast enough yesterday, and I was hoping that if I showed up in uniform, I could kind of at least look like your hero. You know, like in those fairy tales you speak of?” With a wink, he takes my hand in between his and brings my knuckles to his lips.
“Well then,” the doctor interrupts, walking into the room. “Looks like you’re doing better this morning.” He looks down at his watch. “Not quite visiting hours yet, Marine.” He smirks, squinting one eye half shut as he looks between us and shakes his head. “How are you feeling, Miss Daphne?”
“I’m feeling much better this morning. I have a bit of dizziness, but I’m sure it’s to be expected. Right?”
“Do me a favor and lie down for me,” he says, inspecting the bruises on my neck and the bump on the back of my head.
“Got any deployments coming up?” The doctor asks Kemper.
“Not in the near future, sir,” Kemper responds. Hearing this relaxes me, even though I know his deployments are out of his control.
“Are you able to stay with her for the next day or so?” Thankfully, it’s Friday, and Kemper doesn’t work weekends.
“Yes, sir. I won’t let her out of my sight. I understand the cautions involved with concussion recovery,” Kemper says, completely straight-faced, as if I just became his next mission.
The doctor leans over the keyboard of the computer and types a few things in. “You are all set to go, Miss Daphne. Please take care of that head of yours, and if you feel like something isn’t right, I want to you to contact us immediately.”
***
Kemper escorts me into his new apartment, which I hadn’t seen yet. It looks like he just moved in since everything is still in boxes. “When did you get this place?”
“Last week. It’s been a slow move with my schedule this week.”
“Its nice,” I say, looking around.
He takes my arm and leads me over to the couch, easing me down onto the cushions. “You don’t have to treat me like a baby,” I laugh softly. “I’m really okay.” Regardless of what I’m saying to him, he places a pillow behind my neck. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been through something like this.”
His jaw stiffens and he sits down beside me. “That asshole has done this to you before?”
“Yes, although this is the worst Trent has acted. But—” I begin. “When I was around twelve Mom and Dad were having another one of their raging fights in the living room. It was late at night and they thought I was sleeping. They’re both very physical people and can’t exactly control their anger.” I slouch down into the couch a little more. “I walked down the hall to see what they were arguing about and I got a vase to the head. Dad was trying to throw it at the wall, but his accuracy was a bit off with beer goggles on, and it hit me square in the face. I was knocked out and had a concussion then, too.”
“Shit, Daphne. It’s no wonder you think this is all normal.” Kemper’s hand rests over my knee and it sends a charged spark through my body.
“It’s fine. The violence diminished a bit after that since social services showed up at our door, questioning the two of them.”
“Your family sounds a bit like mine,” he says. “Different, but the same.”
“I thought you just lived with your mom?”
“That was only for a year before I left for the Marines. Before that, I had a shitty stepdad and a shittier stepbrother. ”
“Oh,” I say. “Well, all I know is, if I have a baby some day, that child will be my world and I’d never put him or her through what I’ve lived through. So, for that, I’m thankful. I know what I don’t want to be when the time comes.” I offer him a slight smile, trying to ease the anger growing behind his eyes.
“A baby, huh?”
Dammit. I take one step forward and four hundred steps back. I shouldn’t be talking about babies. We haven’t even discussed this whole not being friends thing, and I’m probably scaring the crap out of him right now. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
“No, it’s not that,” he says. His forehead crinkles like I said something to make him worry.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s nothing.” He stands up and walks into the kitchen. “Can I get you something? You lived off of hospital food for eighteen hours, you must be starved.”
“Kemper?”
He pokes his head out of the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
“Did I say something to upset you? The whole not being friends thing from last nigh—we can pretend it was said in a moment of distress. It’s okay. Really.” It’s not okay at all. I’ve completely fallen for him, even after not seeing him for the last couple of weeks, but I don’t want to push, not with the shit he’s going through—went through—whatever it is. It’s not like I’m in a better place, but I’ve closed that door behind me and I want nothing more than to walk through a new door and move forward with my life.
That makes him stop what he’s doing and walk back out to me. “You think I don’t want to be with you?” he asks.
I stand up from the couch, feeling the room wobble around me. I steady myself and walk toward him. “I’m kind of getting that feeling. If it’s going to complicate things, I understand.” Everything I’ve said to him in the past five minutes has affected him like some big nasty storm where I don’t know if it’s going to rain, hail or just blow us both away.
“I must be giving you the wrong idea,” he says, moving toward me with aggression and heat in his eyes. Before I can understand what this storm is bringing next, his hands are pressed against my cheeks and his lips are pressed against mine. His whole body is covering me and I can feel every inch of him. Every. Single. Inch. The room is still spinning, but it’s not because of my head. His hands sweep up the back of my shirt and the warmth of his fingers scorch the skin over my lower spine, making me want to feel his warmth everywhere.
His mouth trails from my lips to my cheek, to my neck, and everything starts to ache within me. I want more. I need it. As if he can hear my thoughts, his hands slip out from under my shirt and reach down around my butt, lifting me, and allowing my legs to tangle around his waist.
He walks us into the bedroom and lays me down on the bed carefully. My breaths become erratic while I try to read his thoughts. I want to know everything he’s thinking and feeling.
“You need to rest,” he says, placing a kiss on my forehead.
I press myself up on my elbows, feeling a tad angered. Maybe stupid. “But I’m fine. Don’t—“
The corner of his lip lifts slightly, suggestively. “Don’t what, Daphne?”
“Don’t tease me like that,” I say, breathlessly.
“You need to take it easy.” He pulls the sheets down from under me and holds them so I can get comfortable. “Is a grilled cheese okay?”
I nod my head, narrowing my eyes at him. “I’m not hungry for food; it won’t satisfy my appetite right now.” For a person who’s been afr
aid of sex and has downright hated it for the past three years, it’s all I can think about right now.
Kemper sits down at the edge of the bed and sweeps a lock of stray hair off of my face. “We can be patient for a little longer.” The look on his face, the one he had just a bit ago is back. He looks like he needs to tell me something, but can’t seem to spit it out. “Close your eyes and imagine what you think it’ll be like. And I can tell you this—“
“What?” I expel a quiet breath.
“It’ll be way better than anything you can imagine.”
The tingling between my thighs is going to make this night incredibly hard to get through. It’s clear he knows what he’s capable of. And I want to know too.
Lost in my own hot and bothered thoughts, I look over at him, watching as he holds his head between his hands. The storm is evidently still brewing over here. “What’s going on with you? Is everything okay?” I ask.
“Not really, but I’ll figure it out. I don’t want you to worry about it.”
Yeah, because saying that isn’t going to make me worry at all. Geez. “What aren’t you telling me, Kemp?” His hands drop to his sides and he looks down, staring through me briefly. “Well, what is it?”
“Daphne, I—please.”
“No.” My face scrunches with confusion. “What aren’t you tellin’ me?”
He groans with annoyance, and I’m not sure if it’s toward me, or whatever’s bugging him, but he looks over at me again. This isn’t good. I can see it in his eyes.
“Fine. You know how Tara’s been calling me constantly?”
Now I really don’t like where this is going. Hearing her name puts a knot into my stomach. All I can think about is that the whole time he was in Afghanistan he was thinking about her and hoping to have a girl to come home to. It was her who he focused on the whole time, her pictures he was daydreaming over. She has to own some part of his heart, while me—I’m nothing more than a girl who’s straddling the line between the friend-zone and maybe something more. I don’t know what it’ll take for the sparks he had for this girl to come flying back, and while I appreciate how persistent he’s been with ignoring her barrage of phone calls, I knew something was going to have to give eventually. Plus, Kemper’s too good of a person to make someone else give. “Yeah,” I say.
He studies me for a minute before he opens his mouth to speak. “I picked up her call last night. I was going to tell her to quit calling.”
“But?” I ask, feeling my heart drop into my gut.
“But, she told me she had a baby while I was gone.”
I replay his words in my head over and over again in the shortest span of time, trying to see if I can translate what he’s saying into something different. “What are you saying?”
“She’s saying the baby’s mine, Daph.”
And that’s that. Everything I thought might be, most definitely will never happen now. My heart aches even though we didn’t make it to the point of being in a relationship yet. I have no stake in this relationship, not like she does now. Knowing Kemper, he’ll want to do the right thing and be there for Tara and their baby. I can’t get in the way of that. How could I? The baby doesn’t deserve that kind of life…the kind of life I said I’d never give my child. Ironic.
“Wow,” is all I can say. What else is there to say?
“I don’t think the kid’s mine, though,” he says. “She wouldn’t be the first one to pull this type of thing. There’s an actual name for it—Tara is what is called a dependapotamus.”
I laugh, only because I have no idea what he just said or what it means. “Elaborate, please.”
“In other words, making me the father of her child would gain her military benefits.”
“How do you know for sure?” I ask, hoping he has some form of logic or proof—something other than just a good, old-fashioned guess.
“I don’t,” he says. Which means there’s a chance it is his.
“So, now what?”
“DNA test, I guess.” He stands up and runs his fingers through his hair. “Look, you have nothing to worry about. This doesn’t change how I feel about you, but I can understand if this changes how you feel about me, even though, selfishly, I don’t want it to.”
Doesn’t it? “What if you find out the child is yours?”
“Joint custody, I guess. It doesn’t mean I’m getting back with her, Daph. I’m not, so you can get that right out of your head.”
“This is a lot to take in,” I tell him. I just got out of a horrible relationship, and I’m not sure how I feel about being the woman on the side while he works out his life with his ex-girlfriend and their love child.
“I understand,” he says, getting up quickly and walking out of the room, leaving me winded and short of breath. I feel like I did or said something wrong, but he can’t blame me.
With reluctance, I follow him out and find him slouched on the couch with his phone up to his ear, so I stay behind the wall, waiting to hear who he’s talking to.
“I want a DNA test.” He pauses for a minute, listening to whatever she’s saying. “No, I don’t want to just talk. I’m with someone else.” No he’s not. A couple of kisses don’t define us as anything. “Yeah, well, it happened.” What happened? This is why eavesdropping is never a good idea. “Please stop crying, Tara.” His voice lowers to almost a whisper and it makes my chest ache. “Fine, but I’m bringing her with me.” Wait, what? Bringing me where? I don’t want to meet this crazy chick or any kind of dependa-whatever.
He presses a button on his phone and throws it across the room. I walk out from behind the wall and head towards the kitchen, acting as if I didn’t hear any part of his conversation. “Hey,” he says.
“Just getting some water,” I say, continuing on into the kitchen.
“Come with me to do this DNA testing tomorrow?”
“As a friend?” I turn around to gauge the look on his face, wondering what he’s thinking before he responds. He looks up at me with this glossy, wide-eyed look. Why did I have to go and fall for him?
“If that’s the only way I can have you, then yes.”
He’s making this so damn hard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CURRENT DAY
KEMPER
DRIVING THROUGH TOWN with tunnel vision, I keep trying to wrap my head around this—the fact that I could find out life-changing information. I wonder what Rex would say about all this. He’d probably thwack me in the back and call me a “fuckturd” for not using a rubber. Honestly, if I find out I am this kid’s dad, things are going to change. I refuse to leave this baby fatherless like I was forced to be. “With my dad dying when I was two, I can’t even remember a thing about him,” I say, breaking through the uncomfortable silence.
She looks over at me with her big doleful eyes and places her hand over my forearm. Pain shoots through me and there’s an ache in my chest. “Kemper, I’m so sorry. How did he die?”
I turn my focus back to the road—I can’t take the sympathetic look she has on her face any longer. From the little amount of time I’ve known Daphne, I know that she has a big heart and feels for everyone and everything. She’s got hope placed on all odds against her, but I like that about her. “He was a Marine too, and from what I was told, he came home from the first Gulf War unharmed—not a scratch on his body, then two weeks later he got into a car accident and died. I never knew him.” No kid deserves that kind of shit.
“Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. Your poor mom.”
“Yeah, her life pretty much went downhill from there.” Downhill is putting it mildly. When I was four, she met Sloan and his asshole son. Mom got remarried and pretended to have this cute little dysfunctional family. Sloan beat the shit out of her and then focused his anger on me when I went after him for hurting her. She told me we had to stay because we had no money, but things got so bad when I was seventeen that I made her leave. Mom listened to me—she told me I was just like Dad and she knew I’d always have
the right answer.
“Gosh,” Daphne sighs. “The grass is never greener on the other side, huh?”
“That’s for damn sure.” I’m thankful for pulling into the lot of the clinic. This conversation is getting too thick to handle before walking into another shitty situation.
I throw the gear in park, hop out and walk towards the passenger side to help Daphne. When I open the door, her eyes are closed. This must be hell for her. “I’m sorry, do you want to wait here? I shouldn’t have—“
“I’ll come with you,” she says softly, as a look of hopelessness covers her face. “But, am I selfish for saying I don’t want this to be true?”
“Not one bit.” I can’t say the same thing because if this child is mine, I’ll feel nothing but guilt later, knowing I hoped she wasn’t. She. I might be the dad to a baby girl. I heard Tara say the word “girl” a few times, but it’s just sinking in as I walk toward the front door of this place.
I see Tara sitting in the waiting area when I pull the glass door open. She’s holding her––my potential daughter––and I feel nothing…no pull to either one of them. Maybe that’s just my subconscious protecting me from whatever the outcome will be.
The baby is only a few months old. She’s draped in a little pink blanket, and there’s Tara, who has somehow managed to lose all of whatever baby weight she gained. God, this is awkward.
I feel Daphne on my heels and I take her by the hand, forgetting about all this friend bullshit and hold her next to me. I need her here for me, and not for show, which might be what she’s thinking right now. “Let’s get this over with,” I say, avoiding the “hellos” and “it’s been so longs” and “how are yous” because I just don’t give a shit.
Tara stands up, looking between Daphne and me, and back at Daphne—definitely sizing her up. With the great big balls Tara has, she moves in to give me a hug, but I pull away. “Do you want to see our daughter?” she asks, accenting the word “our”. If this little girl really were mine, why wouldn’t Tara have been at the homecoming with the rest of the families? Why wouldn’t she want me to meet my supposed daughter the second I got back? Why wouldn’t she have told me anything over the past year? It makes absolutely no sense.
Ravel Page 15