Chapter Eleven
Landry
Last night sucked, hard. I’d alternated between throwing up and crying myself to sleep. I kept hoping there would be a knock at my door, or my phone would ring. But nothing. Brody never called, he never came back. Why would he? He was forced out.
Eventually my pity party slowed enough for my brain to come back on line, and I started to get a little worried since he’d passed out earlier in the evening. I’d texted Talon, wanting to make sure Brody had made it home, that he was doing okay.
Landry: Hey. Brody mentioned he fainted earlier this evening and I wanted to make sure he made it home okay.
Talon: He’s here. He’s down at the beach drinking alone.
Landry: Glad he’s safe. Can you keep an eye on him for me?
Talon: Sure.
Talon: How are you doing? Brody was pretty upset when he got back to the house.
Landry: I’m fine. Been a long day.
Talon: You need anything?
Landry: No, thank you though. I’m tired, I’m about to go to bed.
Landry: Thank you for the pizza, you didn’t have to do that.
Talon: I’m here for you Landry, please don’t hesitate to ask when you need help. Or food. Brody will come around. You mean everything to him.
Landry: You’re a good friend.
Talon Roberts was one of the good ones, genuinely kind and gorgeous to boot. He and Brody looked like they could be brothers. Same wild blond hair, same sun-kissed skin. But Talon was a few inches taller, lanky with eyes as dark as night.
I closed my phone. This was the fifth time I re-read my texts with Talon from last night. Maybe I wanted a reminder that I did have a friend. Or maybe I wanted to believe what he’d said, that I mean everything to Brody. I’d eaten the whole pizza then thrown most of it back up. Served me right. Maybe the constant puking was because of all the secrets I’d been holding inside, and the lies I’d been spewing.
I kept telling myself that keeping the pregnancy a secret was the right thing for everyone. But it wasn’t, and I was an asshole. The truth was, I was scared. If the baby was Travis’s, I risked Brody walking away and a lifetime of having to deal with my ex. Who would make a loathsome father, demeaning and stuck up.
If Brody was the father, I risked having my heart broken. Never for one minute had I actually believed that he’d walk away from his child. I used it as an excuse, protecting my baby when in reality I was protecting myself.
Somehow, over the last month, I’d started to fall for the crazy drummer. And eighteen years of watching him love our child but not me would be hard to endure. But I knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, that I’d do it. I’d suffer every day for the rest of my life if it meant that my child grew up with a kind and loving father.
“Landry?” Crap. Caught in my reveries while leaning against the wall near the scrubs cabinet. “Are you ill? You look terrible.”
I closed my eyes, sighing heavily before addressing my ex, the man who was the opposite of kind and loving. “What do you want?”
“I’m still your boss, you should treat me with more respect.” His hands were on his hips, his short brown hair styled neatly. Nothing about him was appealing anymore, nothing in the slightest.
“What do you want, Dr. French?” Technically he was right, he was my boss, but I thought him getting caught with his dick in another woman should supersede hospital hierarchy. From the look on their faces every time he walked by, the nurses agreed with me.
“I wanted to check in on Mr. Weston, see how his surgery went yesterday. Did you get his post-op labs yet?”
“Surgery went great. Post-op labs have been ordered. I left his room not ten minutes ago and he was feeling okay. Pain is being well managed, and I made sure to bring in an extra full-sized bed for Minka.” I was charting on my tablet while I talked. I didn’t want to see his smug face. I was disgusted with myself for ever having sex with him in the first place, and the thought of it was making me nauseous.
“We call our patients and their family ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ Seems you have a problem with respect all the way around, Dr. Cole.”
At that, I did look up. “Mrs. Weston asked me to please call her Minka, and Mr. Weston demanded I call him Wes. So if you have a problem with me doing as our VIP patient asked me to, I’m sure we can take it up with the chief. Is that what you’d like to do?” He didn’t get a chance to answer, because I bent over and puked on his stupid squeaky-clean shoes.
***
I was home in bed, where I’d been since I’d thrown up on my asshole ex and he’d sent me home. Apparently, according to Dr. Know-It-All, there was a terrible stomach bug going around and I didn’t need to infect the whole hospital. I’d felt fine as soon as I’d defiled his shoes, but I couldn’t tell him that. So I’d taken the sick day. I was tired and emotional, and a day in bed would probably do me some good.
Not counting missing work, I was doing two things I never did: drowning my sorrows in a tub of ice cream and watching crap TV. I was on the fourth episode of my current binge when my cell started vibrating somewhere in the pile of blankets strewn across the bottom of the bed. I had to dig for a while to actually locate the phone.
I hit accept on the FaceTime call and did my best to appear like I hadn’t been having a terrible horrible no good very bad day. Well, two days. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, Buttercup.” She squinted and then pulled the phone farther away from her face. “Are you sitting in the dark? Wait. Are you at your apartment? Is everything okay?”
I reached to the side, turning on the lamp next to my bed. The one Brody had glued back together after he’d knocked it to the floor trying to silence my alarm one morning. “There. That better?” I plastered a smile on my face—but not too big, I still had to sell it. “I’m at home, I took a sick day.”
“You? Took a sick day?” She shook her head, her eyes slightly narrowed. “You never take sick days. What’s wrong? Is it the baby? Do I need to come over there? I can leave right now. I’ll take the private jet. I can be there in two hours. Maybe less.”
“I’m fine, I promise.” I shrugged, picking at invisible lint on my oversized t-shirt before quickly pulling the covers up further. In my pitiful woe-is-me state, I’d put on one of Brody’s Clashing Swell shirts. “I’ve been throwing up a lot, which is normal, but I think it’s finally taken its toll.” I laughed lightly, like I found the whole situation amusing instead of exhausting. “First trimester morning sickness mixed with fifth-year residency is not something I’d ever recommend.”
“Is there anything you need, sweet girl? If you don’t want me to come, how about Halen? Or your brother? You need help. You need to have family around you.” Her eyes looked misty and her face was sad. I was stressing her out.
“You have work, Halen has school, and Beau is trying to build a home in world record time.”
“Landry Hope Cole, you have more family than I can even name right now that would drop everything to come help you. We all want to be there for you, Buttercup, let us.”
I took a deep breath and sent her my most encouraging expression. “I’m doing great. The baby is doing great. There is no reason for anyone to come stay with me. I’m rarely home, and after this one small day of rest, I’ll be good as new.” And I can’t handle anyone else being mixed up in my crazy life. Not right now. Silently, I prayed that she’d let it go.
“What about the baby’s father?”
“We’ve been over this. The baby’s father isn’t in the picture. Please stop bringing it up, it’s not easy for me to keep repeating.” And at that current moment, any baby daddy talk was likely to make me start bawling again. I put my hand to my stomach. “I got this, okay? I make good money. I have more in savings then I’ll ever need. I’ll get a bigger place, a safe SUV, and a world-class nanny. I can do this.”
“Of course you can do this, Landry. Never for one second had I thought this was something you couldn’t handle.” Her shoulders fell, like she was suddenly as tired as I was. “I am your mother, it’s my job to worry about you. It’s my job to help, to want to make your world as perfect as I possibly can.”
She was my mother, in every sense of the word. She had dropped everything the day her best friend called and told her he was a dad. She got on a plane, she flew to Florida and she fell in love. With me, and my father. And every day since, she’d been there for every goodnight kiss and every giggle over breakfast. Jacks and Bryan Cole hadn’t only given me parents; they’d given me a childhood. They’d given me a family. Bryan and I didn’t share DNA, but that was the only thing we didn’t share.
“I love you, Mom, so much.” Tears started to roll down my cheeks, so I smiled, to let her know they were happy ones. “You’ve taught me everything I need to know about how to be a great mother. And now, it’s time that I put it all too good use.”
She smiled, wiping at her own tears. “You’re going to be spectacular, sweet girl.”
“Is that my daughter?” My mom looked to her right, nodding as my dad’s face came on the screen. “Hey, Buttercup, how’s that fetus—or is it an embryo—treating you?” He wrinkled his nose. “You look exhausted.”
Like father, like son. My dad and Beau were the only two men on the planet that could get away with telling me I looked like shit. “Thanks, Dad.”
He grinned. “You are always beautiful, but right now it’s beautiful mixed with two seconds from passing out. You feeling okay?”
I nodded. “Yep. Just a hard first trimester, nothing I can’t handle.”
“Of course it’s not, you can handle anything.” He sat down next to my mom, throwing his arm around her shoulder like they were young kids in love. “The label’s lawyer knows a great PI. If you want, we can hire him to find the baby’s—”
“Stop.” I held my hand out, shaking my head slowly back and forth. “Do not finish that sentence, and do not hire a private investigator. Please. That will only make things more complicated.” Because the high-priced detective would tell my parents there were two possible fathers. One was a degrading dickhead and one was a stage-diving drummer working under my family’s label.
My dad leaned his head back, sighing at the ceiling. “You’re killin’ me, kid.”
“I love you guys.”
“We love you too, Buttercup. Get some rest. We’ll call you tomorrow.” My mom blew me a kiss and my dad waved like a dork.
I ended the call and stared at my phone. My wallpaper was a picture of Brody and me. We were at the beach, lying in the sand, our shades on and our skin tanned. He’d put it on my cell the day Talon had taken the snap. I’d made fun of Brody. I’d told him flings weren’t to be immortalized in photographs.
But I’d never taken it off my phone.