Everyone sat in stunned silence at my outburst.
Cole reached for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze at the exact same time Simon lifted his glass of water in a toast to me. “Thank you. A voice of reason in the madness.”
Tony shot him a hurt look. “I don’t think it’s an accessory. I want a child.”
“And I’m not ready. I also don’t want to discuss this shit in front of our friends.”
Squirming uncomfortably, I held Cole’s hand tighter as the tension mounted around the dining table.
“Is everyone ready to order?” A waiter suddenly appeared beside us.
Rae snapped open her menu. “Unfortunately we’ve been too busy participating in really f**king awkward dinner table conversation, so we’re not quite ready yet. Give us a couple of minutes.”
The waiter scurried off as quickly as possible.
I shot Cole a look of concern. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Cole’s lips twitched. “Would you?”
I looked down at my menu, avoiding eye contact with the warring couple opposite us. “Absolutely not.”
Tony sighed wearily. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable. I got excited about the idea.” He leaned in closer, trying to smile away the troubled look in his eyes. “So, tell me, how you find Lago di Como?”
Before I could answer, Cole’s ringtone sounded from his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced down at the caller ID. He frowned apologetically. “Sorry. I have to take this.” He tapped the screen and held the phone to his ear. “Marco?” Cole tensed.
So did I.
“Shannon and I are on our way.”
We were? Where?
Cole shoved his phone in his pocket and pushed back from the table. “To make this more awkward than it already is, Shannon and I have to leave.” He winced. “Hannah just went into labor.”
* * *
“I would never have guessed any of that. Hannah seemed so cool and together about the pregnancy.”
I was snuggled up next to Cole in the hospital waiting room and he’d just finished telling me a little bit about Hannah’s history. Everyone had turned up at the hospital when she went into labor, but five hours later most of the family had to leave to get sleepy children home to their beds. Marco was with Hannah, who’d finally dilated enough centimeters to be sent to the delivery room. The clock on the wall told me Cole and I had been there for over ten hours. As for Clark and a much-recovered Elodie, they were looking after Sophia, and Dylan was with his mum.
That left an exhausted Cole and me. To stay awake we’d been drinking coffee and chatting until we were hoarse. I discovered why Cole wanted to stay after he told me about his best friend’s history.
Apparently when Hannah was seventeen she’d been on a day out with Cole and Jo when she suddenly collapsed.
“It was awful,” he said, eyes bleak with the memories. “There was all this blood and I didn’t know what it meant. I had my suspicions because what else could it be? But this was Hannah . . . Anyway, she was unconscious, deathly pale, and still as Jo and I waited for the ambulance to come. When they lifted her into the ambulance, I just knew . . .” His eyes were suddenly bright. “She was dying. I felt it in my gut.”
“Oh my God, Cole.” I gripped his arm, shocked.
“They rushed her into surgery. Her heart stopped on the table, but they brought her back. By this point her whole family was at the hospital and they kept asking us questions. I was numb with shock. Hannah and I weren’t really close, but I thought she seemed like a cool girl, a quiet girl who wouldn’t get into trouble, and all I kept thinking was if she came out of it I’d be a better friend. A friend who would have known something was going on with her in the first place. Thankfully she came out of it. She’d been pregnant and didn’t know it. There was a complication and one of her tubes burst, so she was bleeding internally. They performed surgery, she made it through, and they told her that she could still have children. However, the whole thing marked her.” His expression hardened a little. “The kid had been Marco’s. I didn’t discover that little nugget of information until just after he and Hannah rekindled things. She wouldn’t tell anyone in her attempt to protect him. After it happened, things were bad for her at school, she was depressed . . . and I wanted her to have someone. So we grew close. I became her best friend. She still didn’t tell me the truth. I put two and two together much, much later.”
“Did Marco know?”
Cole shook his head. “Nah. I confronted him, violently,” he admitted ruefully. “Until Hannah arrived to break it up, and she explained that Marco didn’t know about it. That’s why he’s still living.”
I burrowed a little closer to my wonderfully overprotective boyfriend. “So Hannah has issues about being pregnant?”
“Yeah. She was terrified to have kids. She even thought about walking away from Marco because she was convinced she wouldn’t be able to get past it.” He sighed, playing with the hem of my T-shirt. “Sophia was an accident. Hannah was petrified but she stayed strong. This time around she’s been okay, but she’s had her moments. Knowing she’s anxious makes me anxious, so I just want to be here until that kid comes popping out.”
I kissed him, a soft brush of my lips against his. “You are such a good friend.”
He slipped his hand under my shirt, running his knuckles over the flat of my stomach. “It really doesn’t bother you, does it? My friendship with Hannah.”
“No.” I tilted my head, trying to think how I could explain it so he’d really believe me. And then it hit me. My gaze dropped from the stark white ceiling to his eyes. “There are moments when you’re talking or laughing together that I see this look on both your faces . . . this really familiar look.” My throat was suddenly thick with emotion. “It’s familiar because it’s the same look Logan always gave me.”
Cole’s expression softened. “Shortcake, you need to go to him.”
The door to the waiting room suddenly blew open and Marco was standing there, exhausted but beyond happy. “It’s a boy.” He grinned.
Laughing, Cole got up off the hard, uncomfortable chair and walked over to shake hands with Marco. “Congrats, man. Mum and baby are all okay?”
He nodded, rubbing a hand over his close-shaven hair. “They’re perfect, Cole. I mean my wife just told me we’re never ha**ng s*x again, but other than that we’re perfect.”
* * *
It wasn’t long before the whole tribe descended on the hospital in the wee hours of the early morning to come and meet the newest member. I’d never met a group of people so closely tied, and as I stood on the fringes of their lives, watching them take turns to hold baby boy Jarrod D’Alessandro and kiss his mother’s cheek, I felt a pain in my heart so sharp I couldn’t breathe.
And I couldn’t stand to watch anymore.
Retreating from the room, I hugged myself as I blew down the corridor, desperate to find somewhere I could take a minute to find that momentary peace I was always seeking these days.
I wasn’t even halfway down the corridor before I found myself stopped and yanked back around by a concerned Cole.
He took one look at me and he didn’t even have to ask. He pulled me against his hard chest for a hug. “I mean it, Shannon. You need to speak with your brother. He’s a big part of you. You have to face what he has to say to you, no matter what that might be.”
I wrapped my arms around him, holding on tight. I knew he was right. “This is my third favorite thing about you.”
I heard the amusement in his voice. “And what’s that?”
“You give the best hugs in the world.”
He squeezed me tighter and chuckled. “What’s number one and two?”
“Two is your ability to bring me to orgasm every single time we do it.”
Cole laughed outright at that, and I heard the masculine pleasure in his voice. “And one?”
I shook my head. “One is too cheesy. Just know it’s a good one.” I pulled out of his embrace and sighed. “I’ll visit my brother this Thursday.” I pressed my hand to my stomach and blew air out between my lips on a shaky exhale. “Oh hell, I feel like upchucking just at the thought of it.”
Cole took my hand and began leading me back to Hannah’s room. “Upchuck if you need to. Just give me some warning first.”
We were about to enter the room when Cole halted me with a look. I lifted a hand to stop him from saying what I knew he was about to say. “I’ll tell you number one when I’m drunk. I’m mushy when I’m drunk.”
He grinned and nudged me inside. “Good to know.”
* * *
Cole and I were lying in bed. He’d just made love to me in that slow, tender way of his that melted all my insides. Afterward he’d curled me into his side, my head resting on his chest, our legs tangled together. Cole didn’t like to sleep without some part of me touching him.
I knew he was close to drifting off, because the rhythm of his breathing had changed, but I didn’t think I could hold it in until morning.
Butterflies flurried in my stomach. “I contacted my brother.”
Just like that, Cole was instantly alert, his body tensing against mine. “And?”
“He’s only allowed four visits a month. He was supposed to be catching up with a friend, but he said I can come instead.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Not him directly. It’s all arranged. Visiting hours on Thursday at quarter to three.”
He caressed my arm gently, making soothing circles on my skin with his fingertips. “How do you feel?”
“Like I want to cry every five seconds.”
“Then cry, Shortcake.”
Instead of letting go of the tears, I whispered, “I’ve decided I don’t need to be drunk to tell you what number one is.”
He waited silently.
“It’s your ability to make me a better me. I want to be the person you see in me.”
“Shortcake,” he breathed, pulling me closer.
“You should also know I’ll never be able to look at shortcake the same way again.”
I felt his body shake with laughter—and for a little while the anxiety over seeing my brother was diminished.
* * *
I stared at the redbrick visitor center.
I was close to losing my breakfast.
Cole had made me shove down some toast and eggs this morning, but I’d refused to eat lunch. Good thing too or I think I’d definitely be losing it outside the prison.
My supportive and anxious boyfriend had really wanted to join me in Glasgow. He was going to wait outside in the car park while I visited with Logan, but I’d declined his offer. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him there, but I needed to do this myself.
There was a huge possibility I was going to walk into that visitor room and have the only other person on the whole planet that I adored tell me he hated me and he’d never forgive me. I’d been running from that fear, that consequence, since the judge passed down his sentence. It was time to be brave and face it, even if it meant losing my big brother forever.
However, it was much, much harder than even I’d anticipated.
I knew I had Cole waiting back in Edinburgh for me and with him the promise of this beautiful family who were there for one another like families should be. Yet that promise, no matter how much it wanted to offer itself to me as a balm against the possibility of losing Logan, was never going to do that. Gaining them didn’t mean losing Logan wouldn’t break my heart.
I had so many cracks in my heart . . . I wasn’t sure it would handle another without shattering into a million unglueable pieces.
A child’s laughter jerked me out of my maudlin thoughts, and I watched as a young mother carried her happy child inside the building.
It was time to suck it up.
“And you have no more than ten pounds in cash on you?” the prison officer asked me at security check-in.
I pulled out my purse, my hands shaking. “Uh, yes.”
“I’ll need to take your purse along with your phone.” He took it and gave me a ticket to retrieve my things when I was leaving.
Before I stepped into the visitor room, I had to pause. The chaotic fluttering in my stomach swarmed into a panic in my chest and I felt a rush of breathless dizziness. I braced my hands on my knees and bowed my head, taking in air through my nose and releasing it slowly through my mouth.
“Miss, are you okay?”
I glanced up through my hair at the prison officer standing at the entrance of the room. I straightened and smoothed trembling fingers over my dry lips. I let out another puff of air. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
His look of concern told me he wasn’t convinced, so I threw back my shoulders with more determination and assurance than I felt and took those first steps into the large room.
There were about forty tables and a small play area near the entrance where kids were supervised. Three seats were placed in front of each table, and only one opposite them for the prisoner.
My eyes swept the room, coming to a stop along with my heart at the sight of my brother. He stared across the room, his expression hard.
Somehow my jellified limbs took me over to him and I slipped into the seat opposite him, just staring at him, drinking everything in.
He looked different.
His dark hair, which had always been wavy like mine, was shorn close to his head, accentuating the sharp cheekbones and cut jawline he’d inherited from Dad. Once clean-shaven, he now looked rugged and older with the short beard he’d grown. Violet eyes, just like mine, pierced into me beneath his dark lashes. Although he’d always been fit, I could see in the breadth of his shoulders and chest that he’d packed on quite a bit of muscle since he went inside.