Defending My Mobster (BWWM Romance) (26 page)

“A family, now that’s something I hadn’t been asked about in a while.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and crumpled it, dropping it in his messy plate. One of the kitchen hands appeared and took it away for him.

“This pub here’s my life. I get to see more than enough people walking in and out. This is my home.”

I nodded. I didn’t think there was a Mrs. Jake. He was too happy to have had his heart broken. Only people that chased after something as stupid as love ended up miserable. A business, now there was a reliable thing.

“That Davis girl gettin’ at you?” Jake asked me, and looked me square in the eye. “She came in here with the pretty boy and they had lunch a couple days ago. Was strange seeing her with someone else. Tamika means Noah, in my book.”

I sighed.

“And Noah normally means trouble,” Jake added and chuckled. I gave him a half-hearted grin. It was true. I had caused enough trouble in my day. And it felt that no matter what I did, it was set on catching up with me.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked when he stood up. “I got me some glasses to polish before the evening rush.”

“A glass of Jack and keep ‘em coming,” I said, staring out the smoggy window.

Jake looked at me for a moment longer but when I refused to return his stare he shrugged and walked away from the table. A moment later a tumbler with Jack Daniels ended up in front of me. I sipped the amber liquid and felt it burn down my throat. It was the feeling of pain. The feeling of abandonment, broken ribs and a broken heart.

I took another sip, and my veins felt like they were warming up. I felt like I’d been frozen over for almost a decade, and finally something was going to defrost me.

The glass never seemed to empty, and I liked it that way. I saw the orange glow of the sunset fight its way through the dirty window. More and more people filtered in through the door, and the golden light was replaced by dim light bulbs and a haze of smoke that always hung in the pub. I took one sip after the other. It was accompanied by cheerful country music and conversation that floated around in the atmosphere.

The alcohol made my head feel light and everything that bothered me was just beyond my reach. I felt immune, sufficiently numb and finally able to relax, push it all away. Vanessa was somewhere, crying her eyes out about a relationship that had never been real. I felt sorry for her – knew I’d messed up somehow – but at that moment I didn’t care.

I glanced up at the door where more people filtered in. A group of girls here to meet some date, probably. Or pick up men. I’d never been part of those crowds. I’d always had her, and no reason to look for anyone else. She’d rocked my world.

It hadn’t taken very long after she’d come back for me to realize that she still did.

That night… I’d had about as much whiskey as I figured I’d had now. She’d been beautiful, soft and glowing, and a pillar of strength when my whole world had been falling apart. My dad had drank so much he’d gone on a rampage. He’d broken almost everything in the house, and my face would have been next if Tamika hadn’t arrived and saved me from him. I could never get away from him, never make myself run, unless she was the one to urge me on.

We’d come to O’Malley’s because that had been the one place that wouldn’t allow him anymore. Jake didn’t do tabs and accounts like some other places, and when my dad hadn’t been able to pay, he’d been kicked out for good.

We’d hidden out, and the alcohol had wiped everything away as it did now. She’d been so close to me, her hands on my face, her lips on mine, and there had been a world of possibility in her eyes. A future.

Jake had nodded when we’d headed for the door. I looked at it, finding it hidden among the other panels in the wall. Only the truckers that stayed overnight and a handful of regulars knew about that door. And we’d fallen through it, all over each other, barely making the fifth door that had been the room Jake had let us use. She’d been a whirlwind that night, blowing over me with a force that left me breathless.

In all our time together it had never felt like it had then, and I’d known I’d wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. My life had reached its peak then. I’d promised her we would run away together, far away from my dad, and we would make a new life. She’d said her parents would help, they’d loved me so much, and they’d been willing to offer money for me to better my life.

Until three weeks later when Tamika had rocked up on my doorstep and told me she was pregnant. My baby. Something had gone wrong, we hadn’t been careful enough. I’d cursed the whiskey. I’d cursed the stars. I’d cursed everything that I could for the mess we’d ended up in. I hadn’t wanted to be a father. I’d barely been able to be a man, with no example to follow, how the hell would I have been a dad?

But she’d taken it wrong. She’d been convinced I didn’t love her. The baby had just been inconvenient for me, she’d said. And then she’d left.

That night when my dad had come home drunk out of his brackets, he’d taken a swing at me and I’d lost it. I beat him up. I would never forget his face, hurt and pain in his eyes as they swelled shut, the tears on my own cheeks, and no Tamika to make anything better. Ever again.

That was the last time I’d seen my father. I’d found a job on the ranch I now owned and moved into a cottage there. I’d ignored my father, turned the other way when I saw him in town. And when he’d died, I’d drunk myself into a stupor, hating myself for doing what I’d done. And then hating myself for being just like him.

Tamika had been the one that had been able to save me, and she was gone. And now it was all happening again. I was drinking, she was gone, and there just wasn’t a light at the end of my tunnel. I put my head down on the table in front of me, and tried to slow the spinning room. It turned my stomach when it spun around like that. Jake’s big frame appeared somewhere in the spinning mess, coming round and round again. I tried to look up at him. This was where he was going to kick me out and tell me I was just like my old man. I was a failure and a loser.

“Come on, son, let’s get you to bed,” he said. The words didn’t make sense. Strong hands gripped me under my arms and I looked for the door. At this point I doubted the gravel against my face would hurt very much.

Instead I was taken to the door in the corner. Jake opened it himself and put me in a room. A different one than that night. It was almost as if he knew. He pulled the covers over me himself after pulling off my boots.

“It’s never as bad as it seems at first, boy,” he said. I wondered why he cared so much. “But I would say that you need a bit of help. Everyone has problems. The key is gettin’ round to fixin’ ‘em.”

He disappeared, and I heard the door click before the darkness wrapped around me, and I surrendered to it, relieved to finally be released from the spinning mess of pain that had become my life.

Chapter 9 - Tamika

Everything was the same when I got back to the office. And at the same time everything was different. Groups of people talking at the water cooler would fall quiet when I walked past, and then whispering would start again when they thought I couldn’t hear them anymore. Did everyone know, then? Or did I just wear my emotions like a banner?

I felt out of place. It was the life I’d made for myself when I’d left Ingram all those years ago, and I felt like I didn’t belong anymore. For two weeks I went through torture. I checked for my period every day but it never came. I tried to make conversation at work but everyone was suddenly too busy to make small talk. Even Larry was pissed with me, more than usual.

On Wednesday, week three, I decided to put myself out of my misery. I took a sick day and made a doctor’s appointment for Thursday. Larry didn’t mind my putting in leave. He wasn’t very pleased with me yet, and there seemed to be a lull in my work load. Whether that was a coincidence or not, I didn’t know.

I didn’t want to know, either. I had enough to deal with without worrying about job security.

On Thursday morning I was in the gynecologist’s office by ten. There was a long queue of women waiting. One of them was so heavily pregnant I wondered if she would give birth right there. She looked like she was going to pop.

I looked down at my own stomach, still flat and trim underneath my blouse. If this was for real I was going to look like that too in a couple of months.

The woman across from me was practically glowing, and she held onto her belly with affection. She wanted this baby. She probably had a loving husband to go home to that would push his ear against her tummy to hear the baby hiccup or move in there.

What did I have? A cold apartment and no man. The idea made my heart sink, and my throat tightened. I picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages, looking for any kind of distraction. There was only one copy of Cosmo and it was almost two years old. The rest of the magazines were all about mothers and babies and giving birth and living happily ever after.

By the time it was my turn I was miserable and a black mood followed me like a stormy cloud. I sat down in Dr. Kinsey’s office, and she smiled at me.

“What can I do for you, Tamika?” she asked. I saw her yearly for a check-up, but other than that we were strangers.

“I think I might be pregnant,” I blurted out. No use beating around the bush. That was what I was there for, wasn’t it?

“Well, let’s just have a look,” Dr. Kinsey said and pulled out sheet from one of the drawers. “Alright, when was your last period?”

“About six weeks ago, I think.”

“Anything else? Nausea, unexpected weight gain, increase in appetite…?”

I shook my head. There was nothing else. Maybe that meant that I was wrong. I hoped to God I was wrong.

“Come on through then we’ll have a peek under the hood.” She laughed at her own joke. I rolled my eyes. I’ve been compared to a lot of things, but never to a broken down car.

The KY Jelly was cold on my stomach and I gasped for breath. Why did they never keep it skin temperature? It was a transparent blue and it made the waistband of my pants wet even though I’d pushed it down really far. I was almost undressed on the table.

Dr. Kinsey ran the hand-held machine over my stomach like she was scanning a barcode. On the screen a grey mass appeared and moved and warped as she moved around. She pushed down a bit here and there, and doubled back. Finally she focused on a small round glob that looked like a pea. My ears started ringing.

“You’re definitely pregnant,” she said with a smile, not looking at me yet. “And by the looks of it, I’d say roughly three weeks.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I felt a lump rise in my throat and I couldn’t push it down. A sharp pain pierced my chest and I tried to breathe around it. Was I dying? Please, let me be dying.

“You can fix yourself up and come through to my office,” Kinsey said, snapping me out of the downward spiral I was stuck in. She handed me a tissue and I mopped up the gel on my stomach. It was still a little sticky when I pulled my pants back up, but I would get rid of that in a shower at home.

“You’re going to have to come in for checkups every two months for now, and then we’ll take it from there. I want you to get this,” she handed me a paper with prescription drugs on it, “from the pharmacy downstairs, and you need to stop with the drinking.”

I nodded, trying to decipher the handwriting on the prescription.

“Those are important. If you skip out on them, the baby is going to steal your resources and you’re the one that will end up sick. You can’t starve the child, you’ll only end up starving yourself.”

“What about complications?” I asked before I could stop myself. Dr. Kinsey stopped writing and looked up at me, frowning. She was barely older than me. I wondered if she had any children at home.

“Complications?”

I looked down at my hands. “How will we know if anything is going to go wrong?” I asked. I didn’t have the courage to put it to words.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” she said brightly. “No use seeing problems that aren’t there.”

I nodded and got up, leaving the office with the piece of paper clutched in my fingers. No use seeing problems that aren’t there. I wondered if that counted for losing a baby.

When I got home the apartment was cold and empty, and for some reason it bothered me so much more than usual.

“I’m home,” I called half-heartedly into the emptiness, and listened as nothing returned. I sank down on the couch, and buried my face in my hands, finally letting all the tears go that I’d been fighting since the pea had appeared on the sonar.

It was happening again. I was alone in a city far away from home, and I was pregnant without the father caring about me or the baby. I thought in seven years I’d have been able to get away from it. How was this happening?