Page 43 of Well Aware

One that might come out one day, and he needed to be prepared.

“Iris isn’t mine.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Iris was my sister’s child. Rose.” I ran my hands up and down my arms, trying to heat a chill that would never dissipate.

“Rose and I were best friends as well as sisters. One year apart. She and I were both adopted by our aunt and uncle after our parents died in a drunk driving accident,” I blurted. “When she met her fiancé, he seemed like a great guy at first. Did all the right things. Was so nice and loving. Then he asked her to marry him. She said yes.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“He started to drink. He was abusive. And Rose and I…we were lost. Our aunt and uncle had just died in their own drunk driving accident. It’d been their fault, and we were trying to reconcile ourselves with being alone in this world. Rose started to lean heavily on Cain while I focused solely on soccer. We were both lost in our own grief, and we just…”

He caught my hand and brought it up to his lips. “Keep going.”

“I don’t know when we both realized that her situation was dire. She’d been hurt so many times, and we just ignored it. I pretended like it wasn’t happening, meanwhile she kept the worst of it from me. Until the day she found out that she was pregnant with Iris.”

“Fuck, honey,” he rasped. “What happened?”

“She tried to run. And he wouldn’t let her.”

He inhaled sharply. “What did he do to her?”

“Beat her so badly that she couldn’t walk. That was when she pressed charges against him. This happened on the base, and things were swept under the rug. But one thing that happened that was great for her was within a week of that incident, Cain was slotted for a deployment. Nine whole months without him.”

“Just enough time to hide her pregnancy,” he guessed.

“That’s right,” I said. “But we both knew that it wasn’t going to be enough to keep him away. And now there was a little girl in the picture.”

“So what happened?” he asked, his eyes intense.

“She moved to Texas with me. When she was born, Rose asked me to keep Iris,” I explained. “She told me that Iris was my daughter now. We could never tell anyone anything about the switch, either. Because if Cain found out that he had a child, he would kill her.”

“Who is this Cain person?” Beau sounded irate.

For me.

“He’s some super special tech billionaire that thinks he owns the world,” I explained. “Used to letting money solve his problems. But this time, Rose outsmarted him. She left Iris with me then…”

I didn’t say it.

I didn’t have to.

His eyes filled with understanding, and then he pulled me into his arms. “She hurt herself. To save her daughter.”

“I guess I’m just naïve and didn’t realize what she would be doing,” I admitted. “I thought that she would just go back to him. But after she killed herself, I got a letter in the mail. She explained it all. Why she said she had to do it. She said that he would never stop. It was either die now where she could control it or die when he deemed it done. When he could make it hurt.” I felt sick to my stomach. “Plus, she was so scared that he would see the changes in her body after giving birth to Iris. She had her in secret. Hid the pregnancy for the whole nine months.”

He sat there, leaning against the counter, staring at me in stunned silence.

Then he asked, “How did you just pass off a kid as your own?”

“Off-season and lies. Lots and lots of lies,” I admitted. “It worked out. No one questioned anything. They just commented on my genetics and hiding my pregnancy. Which was totally understandable by my teammates. They’d traded several other women over the years that had found themselves pregnant. It was understandable that I would keep it quiet so it didn’t happen to me.”

“You said you told your boyfriend at the time.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“I did,” I confirmed. “Well, he doesn’t know where the baby came from, but honestly, it wouldn’t take much to guess whose child it actually was. I trust him enough not to tell anyone my secret, though. If anything else, he wouldn’t betray me in that way. And I know that he loved me. He just seriously didn’t want kids.”

Beau grunted, surprising me with his next words. “Any man that’s a man at all would fight to keep you.”