“That’s not fair, baby.”
“Stop. Calling. Me. Fucking. Nicknames,” she seethed between breaths. “Staying here may not be an option for you Mr. Bigshot Billionaire, but it is an option for me and for my baby.”
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have let her statement derail me, but it did. Whether it was shock, adrenaline, fear, sleep deprivation, stress, or something else, I didn’t know, but I snapped right back at her.
There was a reason I’d needed her to balance me out sometimes when I dealt with clients, and this was it. “It’s not only your baby, Adaline. Unless you’ve cheated on me or achieved immaculate conception, it’s just as much mine as it is yours.”
“But it has to live in my body for the next nine months, so sorry. You can’t take it with you back to a country where your mother will forever ridicule it for its origins.”
“Leave my mother out of it. Are you never going to let that go?”
“Excuse me?” She hiccupped. “Did you really just ask me that? After what she did to me, you expect me to just let it go when she hasn’t even apologized?”
“It’s not like you’ve given her thousands of chances to.” Which, granted, wasn’t Addy’s fault. “Just leave her out of it. This is about you and me. We found out you were pregnant less than an hour ago, and now you want to take the child away from me?”
“Like you care.” She snorted. “You don’t even want this baby. You’ve been an absent father since you found out it existed. At least I’ve been here.”
I couldn’t hold back an incredulous laugh. “You have got to be shitting me right now. This is a joke, right? I’m an absentee father because I needed a fucking minute after that bombshell was dropped on our heads?”
She shrugged. “If the shoes fits, wear it.”
My heart raced so fast I felt my blood pumping through my body. Specks of red blurred my vision as my chest heaved. “You’ve lost it. You have totally fucking lost it. What do you want from me here, Addy? Do you want me to drop to my knees and beg your forgiveness? Because I will. Do you want me to—”
“I want you to leave,” she said flatly, abruptly sliding her gaze away from mine. It landed on the window, and she kept it there. “Leave and don’t come back. Go get on that fancy plane of yours and go home. If you ever felt anything for me at all, you’ll leave right now.”
I couldn’t believe what I heard, but I nodded slowly. “That’s how this is going to be?”
“That’s how this is going to be.”
I looked at the woman in the bed and wondered if she’d been body-snatched. She wore the face of the girl I loved, but my Adaline had checked out of the building.
Clenching my fingers into fists, I waited for her to say something else. Anything else. After several minutes had passed without her so much as looking at me, I blew out a breath and did what Aldo had suggested in the first place.
I got the fuck out of Dodge.
Chapter 34
Addy
A profound sadness had taken root in my soul after Marco had stormed out. There was a part of me that was waiting for him to come back, but he’d left over twenty-four hours ago, and there was no sign of him yet.
So no, I didn’t think he would come back any longer. The sooner I accepted that, the better.
By now, he was probably at home. It had only taken us a little over twelve hours to get here. He could have made the trip twice in the time since he’d left.
I could almost picture him sitting in that hot tub on the roof with a glass of brandy or Grappa in hand, celebrating how he’d dodged this bullet. It nearly killed me to think about it like that, but it wasn’t a massive leap to have taken. Not after the way he’d reacted to the news.
And, okay, I knew I wasn’t totally innocent, either. I’d gone off on him like a broken fire hydrant when he’d come back into my room, but it was like this rage from somewhere outside of myself had just consumed me.
A soft knock at my door made my head jerk up. Hope blossomed in my heart until Kyle made his way inside. “Hey.”
“Hi.” I tried to smile, but it fell flat.
He frowned at me, looking around the otherwise empty room. “Where’s Marco?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?” Crossing the floor to join me on the bed, he tilted his head to the side. “What do you mean gone?”
“I mean he left yesterday before the ultrasound and he hasn’t come back since.” It felt like I’d ripped a chunk of my heart off when I said the words out loud. “I don’t think he’s going to come back.”
“But the ultrasound was scheduled for less than an hour after you left my room. What happened?”
I sighed, hanging my head to hide the tears forming in my eyes. “We got into a huge argument.”
“What about?” He curled his fingers over mine. “I’m sure you could fix it if you wanted to.”
My head shook, my dirty, stringy hair that hadn’t been washed since his plane barely shifting when I moved. I was disgusting. “I can’t fix this. I told him I was thinking about staying here. Let’s just say he disagreed.”
“He disagreed?” Strange darkness filled Kyle’s eyes. It looked a lot like guilt, but I didn’t know what he had to feel that way about.
I’d find out later, though. For now, I just lifted my shoulders. “Disagreed is putting it mildly. He vehemently disagreed and told me it
