The Pregnancy Test (NY Girlfriends #1)(48)
Author: Erin McCarthy

"I needed to take care of a few things."

He paused and she waited. The one thing she wasn’t going to do was settle for cryptic, not now, when he’d woken her up in the middle of a REM cycle. He did at least owe her some answers, about why he was there and how he felt about her.

"I needed to talk to a Realtor about selling the house I had with Jess. I saw my parents. I gave Jess’s parents some of her things." He put his hand over his forearm. "And I got my tattoo… redone."

It wasn’t smart to feel hope, but she did, a bright burst of hope that took her breath away and made her heart pound. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t there at two A.M. to deliver the break-up speech. She reached out and touched his cheek, ran her finger across his lip. "Why, Damien? Why do all those things now?"

"It’s time… I’m trying." He drew a shuddering breath. "I need to try and let it go, move forward somehow. I want… people back in my life."

Mandy watched him for a moment, wishing the light was on so she could see into his blue eyes, read in them what he was really trying to say. She stroked across his skin, felt him lean toward her into the touch, his thigh pressing against her hip as he sat on her bed.

There was so much he had shown her, given her, yet so much she still didn’t know. "Tell me how she died," she whispered. That was really what it was all about. There was something about Jessica that still held him captive, his emotions strained and contained, his heart unreachable.

Damien shuddered. He dropped his head so that her hand fell away. "She was murdered." His voice was raw and hoarse, nothing more than a whisper, but loud in the quiet room.

Mandy froze with her fingers on the sheet she was bunching about her waist. That was not what she’d expected to hear, and his words arrested her. "Oh, Damien! That’s awful. God, how did it happen?"

His head lifted and went slowly back and forth. "You don’t want to know."

Tears sprung to her eyes. "I do. I want to know what you’ve been through."

There was hesitation, but only for a second or two. Then Damien started to speak.

"Jessica and I had an argument about her spending habits." He could still hear her voice. Fuck you and your fifty bucks, she’d said, when he had complained that she’d bought another pair of shoes, pushing their credit card over its limit. "Sometimes when we fought, she’d leave and go out with her friends. Spending lots of money, getting drunk, and flirting with guys was her way of getting back at me, her way to get me jealous and piss me off. It always worked."

Damien dug his fingernails into his legs. He never said these words out loud. It hurt to do it now, it ripped and clawed and shredded at him, but if he wanted to make Mandy understand why he wasn’t lovable, he had to tell her the truth about him. "It wasn’t a healthy way to deal with her anger, I guess, but then neither were the bribes and begging that I alternately used to try and get her to see my side of things. I think we both wanted the other to be something we just weren’t. But anyway, she took off that night, and while I was mad, I wasn’t surprised. Later her friends said when they left the club they’d gone to, Jessica had refused to go with them. They went on to the next party place and left her there."

Mandy’s hand closed over his, forcing his grip on his pants to relax.

"It wasn’t the first time she’d stayed out all night, but in the morning I asked around and no one knew where she was. I called the cops right around the same time a restaurant owner was throwing his trash out in the alley and found her body. She’d been raped and strangled."

The words meant nothing, could never convey anything as horrible as the sight of his dead wife that had greeted him in the morgue. The crime scene photos had cemented the knowledge that Jessica had suffered tremendously and had sent him retreating in his head to the safety of logic. Cold, hard survival. Never emotion. He had shut all that down like a pool at the end of a summer season to protect himself.

"Oh, dear God."

Tears rolled down Mandy’s face, and her fingers jerked on his. Even in the dark, he could see the shock in her eyes, the horror. The pity.

"Damien, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’ve suffered."

"I don’t want you to know!" he said, voice shaking. Biting the inside of his cheek and hardening his hand into a fist, he tried to regain control of himself. "I don’t want you to see the dark places I’ve been, I don’t want to expose you to that. I don’t want to hurt you or your daughter. I want you safe. I want you happy."

"I want those same things for you. You deserve to be safe and happy, too." She took his face in her hands, shook him a little. "It wasn’t your fault."

He almost laughed. He’d heard those words so many fucking times, if he strung them together they’d stretch from Chicago to New York three times. He was trying to hold on to his anger, to his conviction that he couldn’t have Mandy, but it was so damn hard when she was looking at him like that.

Like she loved him.

"I love you, Damien. Please don’t dismiss that."

"You don’t even know me." He took her arms, moved them to her lap to distance her, to distract him from his pounding heart and stupid foolish hope.

"Yes, I do. I know everything that matters about you. I know you’re a wonderful man of integrity. I know that you’re complex, driven, and that you’re compassionate. I know you." She ignored the wet stains on each of her cheeks and met his gaze straight on. "And I know that you didn’t come to my apartment at two in the morning to tell me to kiss off."

He had thought he had. He had thought he was here to warn her away from him. But he wasn’t sure he could convince her when he was desperately wavering himself.

"What do you really want, Damien? If there was no past and no guilt and no fear? What do you really want?"

That was brutally easy to answer. But he wasn’t sure he could say it out loud. Wasn’t sure it would be smart to put into words feelings that couldn’t, shouldn’t, matter in the long run. Eyes closed tight, he drew in a painful breath.

Mandy kissed his forehead, her dewy lips gliding back and forth, her whispered words muffled against his skin. "It’s okay… just tell me what you feel. Tell me what you want."

He couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t keep his fingers from drawing up her back, pulling her into him. He couldn’t help the words that tumbled out of his mouth.