Royce (7 page)

“Please tell me you’re on the pill. Or at least some sort of birth control.”

She finished rolling over before she answered. Royce was as far away from her and the bed as he could be and still be in the same room. He had even moved her chair from her desk to accomplish it. She shook her head and then realized he couldn’t see her well. “No. I’ve never…there was never any reason to be and I couldn’t afford them.” He swore harshly. “I didn’t plan this.”

“So now I suppose you’re going to claim that I forced you? I didn’t. You were just as much a part of this as I was. Unprotected sex wasn’t why I came here.”

That got her. “Then why the fuck did you come here? I certainly didn’t invite you. In fact, I told you to leave several times. As a matter of fact, why don’t you just get out? That’s what you want anyway.”

“What about the child? What if in our stupidity we created a child? Then what? I won’t marry you. I have no intentions of marrying anyone.”

She couldn’t believe how badly he was tearing her up on the inside. But before she’d let him know what he was doing to her, she’d die first. She turned her head away and tried to regain some control over her emotions. “If there’s a child, I’m quite capable of seeing to it myself. I don’t want you either.” Tears fell and she knew it was seconds before she was going to break down. “I’d like for you to go away. Just go away and leave me alone.”

She heard him stand up before he answered her. “You’ll tell me if there’s…if we…”

“Yes.” It was all she could manage.

She heard him shuffle around; a shoe hit the floor and she thought he was undressing and her heart began to pound in her chest, but then he was near the door. He seemed to hesitate then he spoke again, softer this time.

“I left a check on your dresser. It’s for—”

“I don’t want your money. What kind of person do you think I am? You lousy fucking bastard. Ge—”

“It’s your wages,” he hurriedly told her. “Back wages. You should have been taken on as a full…I meant to give it to you yesterday. Before this, before we… It’s the bonuses that you should have received. I hadn’t…I didn’t know you’d not been receiving them.”

She didn’t move, didn’t speak. She was afraid of what she’d say, what she’d do. When she heard the door open and close softly she waited. She wanted to make sure he’d left, he was out of her life, before she gave in. When she heard the soft crunch of gravel in the drive and saw the small skim of lights go over her window, she knew he’d left her. And Kasey did something she’d not done since she’d found out about her mom’s tumor; she cried. Cried so hard she heard her uncle come to her door.

~~~

Royce was sitting at the stop light a few blocks from his apartment when his phone rang. His breath caught thinking that Kasey was calling him back when he realized it was his brother. He answered with a sharp hello and a demand of why he was calling him at five in the morning.

“You asked me to meet you at the gym, asswipe. I’m so going to knock the shit out of you if you bail on me when I got up to work out with you.”

“No, I’m…I’m on my way now. I had…I overslept. I’m ten minutes away.” Royce closed his phone, made a right at the next street, and went to the club house. He didn’t want to meet with his brother; he didn’t want to meet with anyone. He wanted to go home and think about the woman’s bed he’d just left and what he’d said to her.

He’d been sitting there thinking about what they’d done for over an hour before she woke up. Her soft mew when she rolled over nearly made him want to strip down and crawl back into the warm bed with her again and see what other ways they could make love and not hurt her. Even as quick and short as their first time together had been, it had been more satisfying than any other time in his life. He wasn’t sure if that made him happy or pissed him off more.

They’d had unprotected sex. Great sex, but still unprotected. He’d been alternating between excited about seeing her swollen with his child to being pissed that she might be pregnant. Then he thought about the complications of being married. Not to her, just in general.

He didn’t want to be married, plain and simple. Being married meant loss of freedom, not being able to just come and go as he pleased. Of course, she’d be in his bed every night. But that too was something he wasn’t sure he could handle. Not that they didn’t have great sex this one time, but every night? No, he didn’t think…no, he knew he couldn’t be faithful to just one woman. He’d done right in making sure right up front that he wasn’t going to marry. And hell, she seemed all right with it too.

It did sting a little that she’d said she didn’t want him. He didn’t think he was all that bad of a person. He just didn’t want to shackle himself down. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t get together sometimes and have some fun. But to say…he realized he was going about this all wrong.

They’d agreed. If there was a kid, she’d tell him. If not, then he was off the hook. He pulled up in front of the gym and turned off the engine. He knew the odds of her getting pregnant were fifty-fifty, but he didn’t think the odds were going to be that good.

He just knew that she was going to be calling him up in a few weeks and demanding that he marry her. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. He was going to be prepared for such an event. He pulled his bag from the truck and went inside feeling like he’d figured her out. Yes, this was going to be a piece of cake.

Chapter 7

Kasey knew her uncle was mad at her, but she didn’t care. Well, she did, but he loved her. It had been two weeks since Royce had left her and she knew it was time for her to move out. She still had her bandages on, but she was hobbling around pretty well and she didn’t have to have someone feed her at every meal.

“I still think you should wait until you get at least your arm out of the sling. It’s not hurting me having you here.”

Kasey took a deep breath before answering. “I can’t stay here forever. I have to have my own place, my own things again.”

“You could, you know,” he told her softly. “You could stay here forever. I love having you here. And Suzy has been so happy since you moved in. She’ll miss you.”

“I’ll miss her too. And I’ll miss you, but Uncle Jay, I have to leave. I can’t…I don’t…”

“I know, baby.” He hugged her to him before he finished. “I’m so sorry, honey. I wish I would have told him to go home. He shouldn’t have treated you that way.”

She’d told him that Royce and she had had a fight. He’d wanted her to go back to the hospital and she’d thrown him out once and for all. She’d not told them about the sex, and she’d not mentioned that while he wanted to know if they’d stupidly created a baby, he wouldn’t do anything about it. But she did tell them about the check.

The check had been for nearly thirty grand. Ten years of bonuses and back wages. She’d taken the money and paid her mother’s hospital bills and doctor bills and put the rest of it in her mom’s account. She smiled when she thought of her mom’s anger when she’d told her what she’d done with the eight thousand left over.

“You’ll do no such thing. You take that money and spend it on something extravagant for yourself. You’ve worked far too hard to put that money to no good use in a bank.”

“I’m going to get a job that I can work during the day and come home at night. I’m going to work one job, just one, and at the end of the day, be finished with it. When my vacation comes around, I’ll take one, go somewhere fun, and not worry about the other three jobs I have. But best of all, I’ll know that you’ll be taken care of. That you’ll be secure, safe, and have money to fall back on when you don’t feel like going to work.” Kasey held her mom’s hand. “Please let me do this for you. Please. I need to know that you won’t be treated as a subhuman without insurance the next time you get sick. Let me do this for you.” She nodded. Kasey knew she didn’t like it, but she would do it. For her, for them.

The apartment where she’d been living until just over six weeks ago was rented again. Calling it an apartment was like calling Kennedy National Airport a small stopover, but it had been hers. She was grateful to her uncle for getting her things packed up for her and putting them in the garage. She’d been looking for something suitable for several days now and thought she’d found someplace. The work she’d been doing for the college was helping make that dream a reality.

Kasey had been doing some typing when she’d had time before she’d gotten hurt. At three bucks a page to correct term papers and redo them, it had been an easy source of income. Now it took her a little longer, but the typing was helping to exercise her fingers after being broken and she had been able to put some money aside. She had almost enough to put a deposit on the place and pay some of the utilities. Her uncle was lending her the rest.

The apartment was on the ground floor of an older house. She had a bedroom, small kitchen that spilled out into the dining area, and living room. The bath was large by most standards, but it was clean. There was plenty of hot water, Mr. Rhodes told her, and she’d have a parking place right out front. He reminded her of her uncle and after a few minutes of walking around the place, she decided to take it. It would be her first real place since she’d come back home.

Three days later, she was moving in. Her uncle had asked a bunch of the guards from work to help him set her up and she had more help than she needed. But it was great seeing the gang and she sprung for pizzas and beers when everything was set up and things were put away. Her mom brought her an old kitchen table and chairs and her uncle gave her the couch from his basement. She was smiling happily when they all left. But as soon as the door closed, her face crumbled.

Nights where the hardest. She was lonely even when she’d been staying with her uncle and he would sit and talk to her after he’d come home. He never mentioned work other than to talk about one of the guys and she never asked about the one person she wanted to. Royce and his hurtful words still haunted her.

Two weeks. It had seemed forever ago when he’d told her they’d been stupid. She supposed they had been, but that didn’t make it any less hurtful. She wondered if there would ever be a time when she didn’t feel the ripping pain when she thought of what had been said. Crawling into her bed, she let the tears fall. She had no reason to hide them now, no reason to bury her face in the pillow to hide the hurt. But she did anyway. As she had been doing every night since that night, she cried herself to sleep.

~~~

“If you snap at me one more time I’m going to knock the shit out of you. I’m fucking sick to death of having you bite my head off every time I open my mouth.”

Royce looked at Curtis and counted to ten. He knew he’d been snappy, but if one more person asked him what his problem was he was going to scream. He was fine, damn it. Fucking wonderful. “I’m not snapping at you,” he said between clenched teeth. “I’m trying to make a point. If we don’t get this contract signed then the rest of the projects in that area will fall apart. It’s because of this one building that we can’t move on the others.”

“I know that. But short of going into Klingner’s office and demanding that he sign off on it, there isn’t a hell of a lot I can do. The man is giving up his entire business, one his father’s father started. He can’t just let it go without some thought.”

“Then he fucking should have been a better businessman.” Royce took another deep breath before continuing. “Look, I’m having a bad morning and I—”

“You’ve been having a lot of bad mornings and at the risk of getting my head bit off again, what the hell is wrong with you?” Curtis closed the file, apparently finished discussing it. “Does this have anything to do with that little officer?”

Why did he have to mention Kasey? It wasn’t as if he didn’t think of her on his own several hundred times a day. He wanted to snarl at his brother to leave it alone, but he knew that if he didn’t talk to someone soon he was going to have a breakdown or one or all of his family was going to hire a hit man and take him out.

“If I tell you something, can you keep it to yourself? I mean not even tell Mom? I’m serious.”

Curtis got up and opened the door to his office. Royce heard him tell Bobbie to hold his calls and not to disturb them until they said. She agreed. Royce knew he’d been snapping at her too and wondered why she hadn’t poisoned his coffee yet.

“All right,” he said when he sat back down. “Tell me what has you so bitchy that you’d take it out on all of us. Does it have to do with Miss York?”

“Yes.” Royce got up to pace. “She and I had sex.” He didn’t say more because frankly, he wasn’t sure how to proceed.

“And that’s bad how? She’s a pretty little thing. She seems to have more than the normal brain cells in her head that you normally date. And the prettiest gray eyes I’ve ever seen. Was the sex that good or that bad? Don’t tell me you couldn’t get it up around her. Oh, Royce…no wonder you’re pissy.”

“That’s not it, you fucking asshole. I didn’t use protection. And she isn’t on the pill.” Royce might have laughed at his brother’s expression at his announcement if he’d been in the mood to find anything funny.

“When? Is she pregnant? Has she, Christ, Royce, is she demanding that you marry her? I can certainly help you out with any kind of arrangements you want to make. I would suggest a pre-nup before you marry—”

“I’m not marrying her. And I don’t know if she’s pregnant or not. She said she’d let me know. But I already told her I wasn’t going to marry her.” That sounded just as bad now as it had when he’d told Kasey. “Marrying for the sake of a kid is no way I want to go through the rest of my life. She understands that.”

“I see.” Royce looked at Curtis when he spoke. “Actually, no, I don’t. You play you pay, buddy. Unless, of course, she tricked you. Did she? If so, I can see where you’d not want to attach yourself to her, but you know what Mom is going to say. Once she beats the shit out of you anyway. She’s been preaching safe sex to us since before we knew what sex even was.”

“She didn’t trick me. I… Damn it, Curtis, I fucking don’t want a kid. I don’t want a wife, and I certainly don’t like this waiting. I want to call her up and demand that she tell me. I’ve been making myself and everyone around me nuts and for two weeks. I can’t take it anymore.”