Page 93 of Waste of Worth

Karen still wouldn’t look at him, but she nodded. “Fair enough.”

“I wanted to see you; I haven’t been able to have a minute with you since we got back from the cabin two weeks ago. Something else came up today and it made sense for me to come over while I had the chance.”

“Something else came up?”

Dino took a deep breath—now or never. He wanted to keep Karen blind and deaf to his business as much as possible, but sometimes, he knew he wasn’t going to have a choice, especially if she might somehow be dragged into it by affiliation. This was one of those times.

“Police might be sniffing around,” he said, choosing what he told her carefully.

‘Agents’ would have been honest, but it would have needed a better explanation. He chose to go with telling her it was police simply to make the situation seem less bad.

“Oh?” Karen asked, glancing up at him with genuine concern in her eyes.

“Don’t worry about it—it’s nothing. But if someone does come around asking questions, follow everyone else’s lead and say you know nothing.”

“I can do that.”

Dino smiled, thankful. “Good. Now what are you hiding?”

Karen’s hands tightened around the mug, and she dropped his stare again. “I …”

He didn’t like that she seemed scared to speak—scared of him, maybe.

That cut him to the core.

“Whatever it is, just tell me,” Dino urged.

Short of her saying she had given information to the officials, Dino could handle it.

Surely.

Karen finally looked back at him the fear still coloring her eyes with a vibrancy. Yet when she spoke, she did so with strength, as though she was ready for anything. “I’m pregnant, Dino. Eleven weeks, almost three months. I’ve been busy and overlooked the fact I’d missed a couple cycles. We’re not always safe—this morning, for example, not that we needed to be, but you didn’t know. I found out shortly after we got back from the cabin.”

He could handle it.

That’s what he had said.

That’s what he had thought.

Pregnant.

Except that, he knew.

Dino wasn’t sure he could handle that.

He should be excited. He was not a young man—he was capable of caring and providing for a child of his. He loved Karen, and she was right, he could have taken precautions to prevent this very thing from happening.

It should not have been a surprise.

It still was.

He was not ready for this.

Fear kept him silent, and instinctively, to protect Karen from unknowns that would love to hurt her and his unborn child simply because they were his, Dino took a step away, moving back from her.

Karen’s features fell, hurt coloring her eyes. “Dino.”

He took another step back even knowing he was hurting her because he didn’t know what else to do to protect her. The only way he could do that was by removing himself from the equation.