Drowning to Breathe (2 page)

Shea’s room was just as dark as it’d been ten minutes before, the covers still rumpled, and the room smelling like sex. As if we were still back in that moment when I was confessing things I didn’t think I’d ever get to feel.

Love for a woman I never thought I’d deserve.

Love for a child who’d caught me up in a whirlwind of tinkling laughter, unending smiles, and a precious, perfect world filled with butterflies.

Fuck. I wanted it.

I wanted it so bad but now I didn’t know up from down. Didn’t know who was who or where I belonged.

Carefully, I set a drenched, shivering Shea on the edge of her bed. Hunched over, she wrapped her arms across her chest as if looking for a way to hold herself together.

“Don’t move.” I went into the adjoining bathroom and grabbed a couple dry towels from the cabinet. Striding right back out, I wrapped one around her shoulders then began to work the other through the length of her hair.

Slowly, carefully, I looked down at her as she looked up at me. Her face was wet from the rain, but there was no mistaking the ceaseless tears streaming down her cheeks.

Caramel eyes latched onto mine, a molten stir of remorse and shame and outright fear. She reached up and wrapped her delicate hand around my wrist. An electric current streaked down my spine. A rush of light and heat and agony. The threads of that unfound tether that tied her to me pulled softly and steadily and somehow urgently.

I stilled my movements, strung up by her silent charge.

Didn’t matter I didn’t have the first clue who she really was. She still had the power to command all my senses.

Her bottom lip trembled. “I didn’t want you to find out this way.”

I took two steps back and let the towel drop to the floor.

The words wavered between severe and hurt. “Or you didn’t want me to find out at all.”

Wasn’t really a question. Just another accusation that made me sound like a first-class dick, because there was no question in my mind she was hurting.

But shit…who could blame me?

I gave a harsh shake of my head, pissed at myself.

How many times had I wanted to go rooting around in her dark? Fucking drawn to it like it might be my saving breath.

Now here I was, drowning in it.

As if she accepted my anger, expected it, she dropped her gaze to her fingers twisting like blanched bows on her lap. “I didn’t want you to find out this way,” she murmured like an oath. “This is what I was trying to tell you when the social worker rang the doorbell.”

I swallowed hard, feeling my eyes narrowing as I pinned her to the spot with the heat of my glare, with the demand. Because even though I already knew it was the truth, I needed to hear her admit it aloud. “Martin Jennings is Kallie’s father.”

Shea flinched like she’d been struck, lines of horror striking bold across her face.

Terror.

Hurt.

Regret.

All those emotions made my head spin almost as dramatically as it felt like my heart ached.

Sorrow squeezed my chest.

Fuck, I hated him. Had hated him since the second I saw him coming off the tour bus the night I’d gone in to find Austin sprawled face down on the floor. OD’ing on whatever the bastard had fed him.

Left him there to die.

Wasn’t like I’d thought all that highly of him before then. Asshole had screamed nothing but seedy pretention and greedy arrogance. Like the snake he was, every strategic move he’d made had been to bring him one step closer to whatever devious goal he’d set his sight on.

Money.

Power.

Insatiable gluttony.

But that night was the first time the name Martin Jennings became synonymous with destruction. With the highest kind of threat.

Rocking, she hugged herself tightly. She breathed the admission toward her lap. “Biologically, yes, but in every other way, no.”

Rapidly I blinked and began to pace, raking my hands through my sopping wet hair as I tried to process the fuckery that had spun my life out of control. One disaster after another.

Trouble.

Knew it the first time I saw her. There was just something about her that wouldn’t let me go. Something deep and unfathomable. Funny, I’d still felt like I needed to protect her from the depravity that seemed to make up the definition of who
I
was.

And here she was, pouring on another layer.

Guess I was right. That shit found me anywhere I went.

Swinging back toward her, I stared her down, unable to contain some of the anger pushing its way free. “You lied to me? After all this time…after everything we’ve been through, you let me go on believing Kallie didn’t have a father?”

“She
doesn’t
have a father. He has
neve
r been her father.”

My laughter was bitter, and I began to storm around the room, my feet eating up the floor while vile images of that sick bastard Jennings touching my girl ran through my brain on an unbearable loop.

I flew back around, my head bent down and cocked to the side as I approached her. Like maybe if I looked close enough, I could see everything she’d been hiding. “I thought we were finished with all the bullshit and lies. I thought I
knew
you.”

My face suddenly pinched up with the hurt she’d inflicted. Because it was the truth. She’d gutted me. I’d trusted her, and here I was, uncertain if I’d been the pawn in some twisted game.

Everyone wanted a piece of Sebastian Stone.

Now I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d been played.

My eyes locked on her. Soft and frail and glimpses of that light fighting for a comeback.

God, how could I even think for a second this wasn’t
real
?

I fisted my hand at my chest, giving her raw honesty. “I gave you my fucking heart, Shea. All of it. Wanted to claim Kallie as my own. Wanted everything with you, and now it turns out I know
nothing
.”

Tears distorted her voice, and her own truth bled free. “Do you really think you don’t know me, Sebastian? Do you really think you don’t know every single thing that counts? This room…this house…me being a mother to Kallie…
loving
you.” She emphasized the last, and it struck me deep.

Tonight was the first time I’d truly accepted she could love me. Accepted maybe I deserved to love her back.

Creases deepened at the corners of her eyes. “Those are the only things in my life that count.”

Fear welled up as frustration, and I fisted my hands at my sides. “You think it doesn’t count that prick Jennings had the power to just roll in here and steal Kallie away from us?”

I took a step forward and lowered my voice. “You think that doesn’t matter? And you want to know the sick part, Shea? The only fucking thing I want right now is to comfort you. Make it better.
Fix it
. And I don’t even know what the fuck I’m fixin’. You lied to me…for months. I’m not sure I even know who you are.”

“You know me,” she pled. More tears fell, and she sniffled and inhaled. She brought those eyes up to mine. Something fierce billowed out from within them.

Her voice was a whisper, but there was no mistaking the strength behind it. “Yes, I lied to you. But it’s a lie I’ve told everyone, including myself. It’s the only way I knew how to survive. It was the only way Kallie and I could live a normal life. You don’t know what that man is capable of, and if lying about his existence kept my daughter safe, then I would do it a million times over.”

I swallowed hard. I’d be nothing but a hypocrite if I said I didn’t understand. How many secrets had I kept locked up tight, refusing to show them to protect my family? My brother? The band?

I mean, fuck, Shea’s and my entire relationship had been built on a foundation of lies. I was the one who’d kept my identity hidden in the first place. Now I knew what that shit felt like.

But her being Delaney Rhoads and wanting to leave behind a life she didn’t want was one thing. Martin Jennings being Kallie’s father was a whole different story.

Did she have any clue how tangled I was in Jennings’s life-sucking web?

My words were strained. “That’s where you’re wrong. I know exactly what that asshole is capable of. That’s what scares me most.”

Another rush of chills trembled through her, and she nodded as if she were attempting to make sense of her own questions. “I can’t believe you know him.”

Biting laughter escaped me before I could stop it as I was struck with another rush of doubt. “But didn’t you already know that, Shea?”

God, I was so back and forth. Swinging from sympathy and care to wondering if she was some kind of mole planted in my life with the sole purpose of ripping it apart.

Her chin quivered. “I would
never
have kept this from you as long as I did if I’d known.”

“Then how?”

Helpless, she lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. Why were you in Savannah, Sebastian? You’re the one who came into my life. I had no idea Martin was a part of yours.” She squeezed her eyes closed, like maybe she didn’t want to ask the question, before she opened to me. “I need to know how you know him.”

More bitter laughter, and I paced again, wiping the back of a hand over my mouth like I could wipe away the sour taste.

I cut my attention to her. “Told you I might still be going to jail, Shea. Told you I wasn’t any good for you because every time I turn around I’m doing something to threaten my freedom. And my freedom is threatened because of him…because he fed my baby brother pills, then walked away and left him for dead.”

A shocked sob wracked through her and she covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God. No.”

She blinked what seemed a million times, seeming to withdraw, like she wanted to shrink back into her bed and disappear.

Awareness slammed me hard and fast, and I reached for her, framing her face in my hands as my own terror barreled through me. I saw it, Shea’s truth. “What did he do to you?”

She squeezed her eyes closed, withdrawing further.

I tightened my grip, and the demand scraped up my throat. “Tell me.”

She shook her head against my hold. “I can’t.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“Can’t.”

It felt like she burned me.

She gasped when I suddenly released her. Eyes narrowed with regret, I studied her. She looked so small sitting at the edge of her bed. Fucking broken, still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. All her colors striking bold. All that black and white, the deepest red and the darkest dark, trust and light. An outright fear distorted it all.

Like maybe she was begging me to see inside at the same time as she was shutting me out.

My phone rang from my jeans pocket, and my attention went back to what was most important—the tiny girl who’d been ripped from her home.

“It’s Anthony,” I said when I saw his name lighting the screen.

Hope swept her features.

I put the phone to my ear. “Anthony, tell me you have news.”

His heavy sigh traveled across the line. Foreboding. I sucked in a breath.

“I do. I’m just sorry it isn’t the kind of news you want to hear, Baz. I got word Martin Jennings made a public statement an hour ago. He’s playing the concerned father card. He says he knew he had to step in when he discovered you and Shea were dating. He’s using the assault against him and your past possession and theft convictions as his ammo. He’s claiming you’re only with Shea to get back at him and using his daughter as a pawn.”

The bastard was saying I was dangerous.

Which when it came to Martin Jennings, I was. A fucking loose cannon. I knew in my gut that asshole’s involvement with Mark and my baby brother went far deeper than any of us fathomed.

And now it involved Shea and Kallie.

I turned away from the terror blanketing Shea’s expression when she saw mine drop, unable to look at her as Anthony confirmed what I’d worried about most.

The shit going down in my life would be responsible for taking Shea down.

Knew it the second I saw him step from that car—Jennings was here because of me.

You were warned you’d regret fucking with me.

Point-blank, that’s what he’d said with a devious smirk on his face. Same thing he’d warned at that doomed mediation.

Running a hand down the tense muscles at the back of my neck, I studied my feet as I paced the floor.

All along I’d known I was bad for her.
All. Along.
There wasn’t anything right in my life, so how could I be
right
for her? But I’d pretended for so long I could possibly be that guy, I’d begun to believe it. Believed it when Shea had accepted me back after she’d found out who I was, because she recognized the man hidden underneath. Reached in far enough to touch him. To bring him to life through her beauty and light.

The one who wanted something more. To be something better.

I wanted it so fucking bad I’d gone and forgotten all the garbage still eating at my heels.

Forgot about the fact I was either going back to jail or back on the road. Instead, I carried on with Shea like I was always gonna be here, wanting her and Kallie as my own when the shit in
my life
owned me.

Now with Kallie and Shea being tied to Jennings?

I had no idea how to make any of this
right.

He cleared his throat. “I know you’re already well aware of this, but there is no question he’s out for blood, and you’ve become his target. I won’t pretend to know Shea or her little girl, but the fact he’s willing to use his own child as bait shows how ruthless he is.”

“She’s not his child.” I spat it out faster than I could think better of it, like I had the fucking right to claim it.

“No? That’s not what the paperwork says.” Exasperation laced his words, before they slowed with caution. “I’ve always been on your side, Baz, and I’m always going to be. You deserve happiness, more than just about anyone I know. But you’re going to have to ask yourself if this is worth getting your hands dirtier than they already are.”

Worth it?

Anthony had no clue Shea and Kallie were worth
everything
.

I’d give up anything and everything to protect them.