Truth or Dare (14 page)

There was no way.

Not again.

Not with Tyler.

“Maggie, let me explain.”

“No.” Only that single word barely took voice as she fumbled the buttons at the front of her dress. She turned her head and shut her eyes. How could she have done this
again
?

He had secrets. She’d known it from the start. But still, had she been deliberately blind…because something about the familiarity, something about the destructive pattern, felt right to her? Because she was broken and—

“Maggie, this isn’t what you think. Just
stop
a second and listen!” His hands were firm on her shoulders and he’d gotten right up in her face. “Yes, there’s someone else. But the only person I’m betraying here is myself. And the only way I can explain it is if you come upstairs and let me.”

Goddammit.

He couldn’t have screwed up worse. Tyler stalked into his apartment, fists clenched at his sides and that tragic, confused look on Maggie’s face etched across his mind.

She didn’t understand. And how could she, when he hadn’t given her so much as a clue as to what the situation was?

Not too surprising that instead of taking him up on his offer to explain, she hadn’t even bothered to flip him off before she found her keys and then put a solid door and deadbolt between them. Smart girl, not to give a lying bastard another shot at snowing her.

Except he hadn’t actually lied to her, and he couldn’t stand to let her think he had. Not after everything else he’d blown to hell tonight.

Pacing back to the living room, he stopped at the coffee table and opened the recessed drawer beneath.

There was only one thing inside. The simple leather-bound photo album his mother had given him when Charlie was born.

He ran a thumb across the top cover. Then, flipping it open to the first page, he got out his phone.

Maggie was sitting slumped at her kitchen table, a bottle of tequila in front of her and not enough will to pour it. It wouldn’t make her forget. And without Ava around, it wouldn’t even be fun. Pushing the bottle aside, she figured she’d already done enough self-destructing for one night.

From the corner of her eye she saw her phone light up. Needing it to be Ava, she swept it off the table and thumbed the screen to life—before she’d registered who the message was from.

Tyler. Not Ava.

And to think she’d believed her night couldn’t get any worse. But that was before she saw the attached photo of a wrinkled baby, carefully bundled in a silky blue blanket.

Tyler:
This is why I had to stop.

Her stomach lurched.

Oh God, not again.

Knowing she shouldn’t engage, but physically unable to stop her thumbs from flying over the screen, she demanded confirmation.

Maggie:
Your son?

Of course this was his son. Why else would he be sending her his picture?

Tyler:
I thought he was.

Maggie closed the apartment door behind Tyler and waved him into the kitchen, where he sat at the table, raising an eye at the tequila.

Still not sure what he was going to say, but too curious not to give him a chance, she sat across from him and folded her arms. “Disinfectant.”

The corner of his mouth twitched and she hated herself for the way her belly reacted, then hated herself more for the surge of pity she felt at the emptiness she saw in his eyes.

“Fair enough,” he answered, raking a hand through his hair. He met her eyes. “I’m not seeing anyone, Maggie. I’m not married. And technically, I’m not even involved. I’m sorry I didn’t clarify it before. But after what happened, I wasn’t thinking straight. And that question—it caught me off guard.”

She wanted to be relieved, to take comfort in his words, but she remembered all too well the need to accept half-answers when she hadn’t wanted to see an ugly truth for what it was. And that refusal had been her downfall with Kyle, leaving her blindsided by the news that the man she was engaged to marry in three weeks’ time already had a wife and two children, with a third on the way.

Oh, he’d
planned
to divorce. Just like he’d planned to tell Maggie before her parents had sunk a fortune into a wedding Kyle had known he wasn’t going to go through with. And before his pregnant wife had shown up at her parents’ church and, in front of half the town, branded her a home wrecker.

No more half-truths.

“Technically?” she asked dryly.

“It’ll make more sense once I’ve explained. Or maybe it won’t. But either way, you deserve to know.”

Tyler carefully positioned the album between them, opened to the first page. To a five-by-seven glossy of a wrinkled little newborn, with a shock of dark hair standing on end and big, bright, curious eyes. He was beautiful. But he wasn’t Tyler’s child. And suddenly Maggie regretted the way she’d lashed out, shoved at him, and refused to let him explain.

“His name is Charlie.”

“You thought he was yours?” she asked tentatively.

He opened his mouth, closed it, and then finally, eyes locked on the image of this little boy, ran his thumb across the protective plastic as he answered. “When this was taken, yeah. I thought so. It’s what his mother told me when she came to me pregnant a month after we’d broken up. What I believed when he was born and for almost a year after that.”

Slowly, he flipped through the album. Each page picturing this dark-haired little boy, in the arms of various smiling people of assorted ages she could only assume were Tyler’s friends and family. People she’d never seen here. Not even once. There were photos with droolly, toothless smiles and photos documenting new skills. One capturing that stunned look as this little boy held a chubby seized foot in front of his face. Another taken at floor level, that tiny body arched up, neck craning in anticipation of getting to the person behind the lens. More documenting baths, feedings, peaceful naps, and wild grins.

But the pictures that made her heart tighten and ache were those that included Tyler. Looking exhausted, his jaw covered in thick stubble and a huge smile as he proudly displayed this newborn boy. Looking perplexed as he wrestled tiny arms into a onesie. Cradling the sleeping baby in his arms. Against his bare chest. Holding him perched in the crook of his arm.

The boy looked delighted. But it was Tyler’s face she couldn’t tear her eyes from. His expressions ranging from thunderstruck joy and awe to unbridled adoration. All shades of the same deep emotion…love.

“What happened?” she whispered, dreading the answer, because the very fact that they were sitting there meant this was a story without a happy ending.

“A week before Charlie’s first birthday, I learned that, biologically, he wasn’t mine. I came home from work and Gina, his mother, was waiting for me with the DNA tests that confirmed another man was my son’s father. And she was leaving to be with him.”

“My God, Tyler.”
The betrayal. The pain.

“How— What—?” She shook her head, not knowing what to say.

But it seemed he’d been there before.

“I couldn’t believe it at first. I mean, she was standing there with the lab results and the words kept coming. The apologies and accusations and justifications and blame…and at some point it was just noise. I walked past her and asked where Charlie was. I wanted to get the fuck away from her crazy talk and spend the night watching my son push Cheerios around his high chair. If Gina wanted to leave, she could go. But Charlie…” Tyler closed his eyes. “Blood didn’t matter; he was
mine.
And if she thought otherwise, she was nuts. I was the guy who went to every prenatal appointment. The one who had his ultrasound on my phone for months. I was the first one to hold him. The one who walked him nights and knew which bottle was the best for feeding him. I changed his diapers and won his first smiles and saw his first steps. I was the one who loved him from before he was even born, and no piece of paper was going to change that. Nothing could. He’s my son, blood or not.”

He cleared his throat, pushing back from the table to look down at the floor between his feet. “Only Charlie wasn’t there. And none of those things mattered. Because Gina had taken him. She was sorry, but he was with his
father
—this jackass whose crap band she’d followed out to New York, and then when Charlie was six months old, decided to follow back here. Not that I knew that at the time. I thought she wanted to be closer to her mother when I agreed to move. And now Gina had taken my son to this guy who hadn’t been ready to be a father when she got pregnant. Who’d
chosen
not to be around for anything. And
they
were going to be a family.”

Maggie wanted to throw up. She’d known betrayal. But nothing like this. “What did you do?”

“I went to the police. To a lawyer. And then another lawyer and another. Only they all said the same thing. I didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, because Charlie”—he stopped, taking a breath like the words were still too hard to say—“wasn’t mine.”

Shifting his focus back to the album between them, he turned to the last page. To the boy with huge eyes and an open-mouthed smile, caught mid-baby-Godzilla stride. “This is from before his first birthday, but he’s two now.”

There weren’t any more pictures.

Heart heavy, she asked, “Have you seen him since?”

“Gina let me see him once after she left. To say goodbye. There was a police officer, and Charlie didn’t understand when I had to give him back. He was screaming and kicking—” The muscles of his throat moved up and down as he revisited what had to be a grueling memory. For her. So she could understand.

Though she still wasn’t certain she fully did.

Had this strong man been so deeply wounded that he’d chosen never to risk hurt again? Seeing the devastation in his eyes, she couldn’t blame him if it was the case. To be betrayed so brutally. She took his hand.

He’d shared a life with this woman. A child. A home.

“Do you still love her?”

The question threw Tyler.
Still love Gina?

Shit,
it would have been laughable if the truth weren’t such a nightmare.

“No, Maggie. You’ve got it wrong. It was never like that with her.”

Not even in the beginning, when Gina had been the sexy good time, tumbling into his bed with her goofy stories about following some band out to New York and her life’s-an-adventure attitude. Not through those first weeks when she’d been all about the laughs and the sex. Before he’d figured out there was something off about her and ended the relationship less than a month in.

“But you lived together?”

“For Charlie.” Shoving his hair back from his face, Tyler shook his head. “Look, when Gina came to me six-weeks pregnant, she was crying about how much she’d missed us being together, and how she’d really thought I was ‘the one’—I didn’t feel the same way. Hell, I knew she didn’t either. She’d been pissed when I broke things off, bitter, but not what I’d call brokenhearted. Still, she was pregnant and I thought the baby was mine. She didn’t have a job or a plan, and yeah, I had the means to put her up in her own place, but I wanted my son to have the kind of stable home life I’d had as a kid. I thought if we were together—who knew—maybe there was a chance our feelings would grow.”

“But that wasn’t how it went?” Maggie asked, the concern in her eyes eating at his gut.

He’d never wanted to share this part of his life with her. He’d never wanted to see her look at him like that.

“No. I could tell something wasn’t right with Gina almost from the start. It was just little clues at first. The way she was always sizing up what someone else had. How she seemed to change who she was, depending on who she was with, like she was playing a role or something. Her fixation on getting certain things and then once she had them, suddenly wanting something else. The way she cycled through friends.”

He’d wanted to give Gina the benefit of the doubt, and told himself she was just trying to fit in. The mood swings were hormones. So she was a little mercenary, so her values didn’t exactly mesh with his…She was doing the best she could.

“But after Charlie was born, things just got worse. She was selfish, manipulative, and spoiled. And her priorities—Christ.”

“You guys were fighting?”

“No. That was the thing—Gina liked what I had to give her. She liked being taken out. She liked the lifestyle being with me afforded her. Parties, dinners, client events, nice clothes, and a housekeeper. Stuff her girlfriends made a bunch of noise over, so with me, she was always…careful, maybe. But when it came to Charlie, she either saw him as an accessory or a burden.”

There’d never been any real neglect. He’d never let it get that far, hiring in a nanny/housekeeper to help out with the less glamorous elements of Charlie’s daytime needs and being more than happy to pick up the nighttime end himself.

“You stayed with her?”

“I didn’t want to lose my son. Not even half the time. And honestly, I didn’t entirely trust Gina to take care of him the way she should. So I ignored all the stuff that would have had me walking away before a baby was a part of the picture. And it wasn’t so bad, because Gina started wanting more time to herself anyway. Going out in the evenings for ‘girls’ nights,’ and I was happy to have her doing her own thing. It was a break for me. I’d have my family over or take Charlie to visit friends, or just enjoy hanging out with the little guy for a night of man time.”

He’d been such an idiot. His ego so jacked up on itself, it never even occurred to him to be concerned about Gina’s absences. Why would it? He was getting everything he wanted.

Maggie’s eyes were on an empty spot across the kitchen when she stated what he’d been too willfully oblivious to see. “She’d been seeing someone else.”

“Yeah. I don’t really get it. There’s something about Ray, Charlie’s dad, that’s kept Gina coming back for years. She followed him out to New York, but that was before me. Got pregnant by him while we were dating. And when he wasn’t ready to be a father, or whatever bullshit excuse he had to blow off his responsibilities, she came back to me—the chump who wasn’t ready to be a father either, but understood the concept of responsibility and upturned my life to face it. The only problem is I guess she hadn’t really given Ray up. Six months after Charlie was born, she asked to move to Chicago to be closer to her family. But as it turns out, that’s when Ray headed back here.”