Watching the way his fingers worked the hook in and out of the stitches was pornographic, and I had to do a self-check to make sure I wasn’t drooling.
“I was engaged.”
The desire to stare at him and see the subtle changes in his face was almost debilitating, but I knew how difficult it was to discuss the past while someone studied you.
Forcing myself to pick up my own project, I said, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“I want to.” His voice was gruff and firm, but he continued working on that squishy blanket with intense focus. “We’d only been together half a year when I proposed. I’d fallen quick and hard and was about to deploy. My desire to have someone miss me deluded me into thinking she could fill that role.”
I knew the story, or at least ones very similar. Living on a military base, I’d seen several guys marry girls they barely knew just because they were deploying. Seldom had those scenarios worked out long term.
“What happened?”
He breathed deep, tightening the yarn tail until I was sure his stitches would be two times too small. “A few weeks into my eighteen-month deployment, during one of our phone calls, she told me she was three months pregnant.”
I swallowed, a wave of nauseating anxiety hitting me with where this story was headed. Given Garrett was alone and had never mentioned a kid, it couldn’t be anything good. But I listened quietly as he continued.
“I was upset. Not because she was pregnant, but because neither of us had noticed before I left, and I was going to miss out on all of it. I’ve always wanted to be a dad, wanted to see a woman I loved swollen with my child.”
He cleared his throat. “I checked in as often as I could, asking her about appointments and updates, making sure she got plenty of money to buy anything she needed.
“Being deployed is something you have to experience in order to understand. It’s miserable. But I couldn’t imagine how hard it was for her to live alone, carrying the baby of a man who wasn’t around and could rarely call. I felt guilty the entire time. Every month, every week, every fucking day.”
He dropped the blanket onto his lap, clenching his fists over the top of it, and my heart paused its beating. I wanted to take his hands or lean over and rest my head on his shoulder. Something. Anything.
“I got back home expecting to find my fiancé with an almost one-year-old son. Devin.” He stopped, glaring down at his hands.
“Had she never been pregnant?” I asked.
He laughed, and it was a dry, ugly sound. “Oh no, she’d been pregnant. Turned out, he just hadn’t been mine.”
That nauseating feeling increased, pressing up into my throat. I set my project to the side, turning my body to face him. I couldn’t not look at him anymore, not with that torn expression distorting his face. “I’m so sorry, Garrett.”
“She’d already been pregnant with someone else’s child when I proposed.” He scoffed, “Which made more sense since I’d never fucked her raw, but I’d been too blind to see it before. Worst part was she admitted it freely. She wasn’t even ashamed.”
My nails dug into my pajama pants, and with all my wicked heart, I wished it was this unknown tramp’s face I was clawing at. “Why the hell would she say yes, if she was with someone else?”
“Money.”
That one word clanged through the room, hitting every wall, splattering across the ceiling and floor, coating every inch in a nasty film.
“What was her name?” I demanded.
He twisted to look down into my eyes, and I knew he could see every bit of the fury I didn’t bother hiding. “Why?”