Because it had pissed me off when I thought he didn’t care enough to reply, but the possibility he hadn’t listened or read a single fucking thing I’d sent him over nearly nine months, might have honestly been worse.

I wasn’t going to overanalyze it and figure out what won because it didn’t matter.

I didn’t look at him, and because I didn’t look at him, I didn’t see his reactions.

The only thing of his that I did catch was probably the hoarse curse word he spit out. “Fuck.”

He could say that again.

Why was he making it seem like he didn’t know? I’d left him so many voice mails, emails, and texts. So many. And he wanted me to believe he had either not gotten them or ignored every single one?

Motherfucker.

Piece of shit.

Asshole.

Of course this would happen to me. The one time I picked out a guy who I felt comfortable with, who I was unbelievably attracted to, who I liked so much, who seemed like a decent human being… who wore a condom and everything… knocked me up during the two months of almost nightly sex we’d had. Then his life had gone to hell, and he’d disappeared.

Like some of the assholes in my life did. They just left me for other people to be there for me. Or for me to be there for myself.

And that was where my sad sob story ended.

So what, I had asked myself back then, once I’d made my decision to have Mo? So what if the baby’s dad wasn’t going to be in the picture? So what if I was going to raise this kid without him?

I was thirty, not sixteen, I had told myself. I had a grandpa, a Peter, a Luna, a sister of a Luna, a Ripley, a Cooper couple. I had friends.

I had been raised by a village, and my daughter was and would be too.

Everything had been going fine too, not counting that nonstop worrying and the fuckups.

Yet none of that made me feel any less pissed off toward this asshole having the nerve to look like he’d seen a ghost. Like he had any right to be mad or upset. Like I hadn’t fucking tried telling him a hundred times he was going to be a dad.

He’d known.

He had to have known.

And on the tiniest, tiniest chance that maybe he’d been an extra prick and had ignored everything I had tried to tell him…

Well, I still couldn’t believe that was possible. He was an athlete. He’d told me about having endorsements. He was a human being with family. There was no way he’d ignored all forms of communication. It was stupid for him to even try and pull that lie on me.

It had just been me he’d ignored.

Goddamn it, I hated his guts.

“You… you…,” the mountain of a man stuttered, quietly, forcing me to take in his pale face. But at the same time, making me notice the way those huge shoulders had started to hunch too.

I stared steadily at him, leaning forward just enough to take another whiff of Mo’s clean baby smell because I needed it for fuel to get through this ridiculous-ass conversation. “You what?”

Jonah reared up to that height that had been one of the first things I’d noticed about him, and he breathed out with wide honey-colored eyes that were bouncing back and forth between Mo’s spine and myself. “I listened to the first two months of voice mails….”

Did he want a gold star or something?

I glared at him as Mo gave a wiggle warning me she was going to want to be put down soon. She was already rolling from her stomach to her back. I had a feeling it was going to be no time before she was crawling… or even fucking walking.

And really, what the hell was wrong with this asshole?

One of those big, hard hands went up to the top of his head, and I couldn’t miss how it shook in the process. Fucking faker. “I broke my phone, but I didn’t… I didn’t….” He kept going, looking worse and worse with every word out of his mouth. Paler and paler, sick….

This was what he was trying to say? That he conveniently hadn’t read any of my texts either? Just the ones at the beginning, and then he’d given up on the rest of them because he’d broken his little phone? That’s where this was going?

Yeah, fucking right. I rolled my eyes. “Okay,” I told him, sarcastic as hell. How fucking convenient was that?

His shoulders dropped, and his fingers curved over his nearly buzz-cut head.

And then he pissed me off even more when he peered over at me through his eyelashes, those honey-colored irises flashing. “You didn’t say anything about being pregnant!” he suddenly exploded quietly on an exhale, color literally flooding his face. His tanned cheeks with faint honey freckles over the bridge of his nose and across his cheekbones went pink.

I didn’t tell him I was pregnant? Was this bitch for real? Was he trying to turn this around on me? No. No, he couldn’t be.

He was shaking, I could see he was shaking, but what-the-fuck ever.

“I’m sorry, Jonah, that you chose not to call me back or read my emails. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I first started calling you and you were still listening to my messages, supposedly. I’m sorry that I was just contacting you because I was worried about you. I’m sorry that I didn’t think to plan that you would only listen to my messages for the first… what? Two months or so, you said? Or that I waited until the last few months of my pregnancy to straight-up tell you over email.” I rolled my eyes. “Dipshit.”

Fury backed up my throat as I won the hardest match of my life and somehow managed to keep my tone cheerful even though I was literally ready to go to jail for the remainder of my life if I could beat him with a bat. Fuck it. “Are you going to pretend like I didn’t blow you up for months? That you broke your phone and that’s why I never heard back from you? Do you really want to make it seem like I’m the one who forced you to ignore me for so long?” I asked him, hoping that didn’t come out as borderline hysterical as it felt in my chest and in my brain and in every goddamn part of my body.

But I wasn’t done. Oh no. “I don’t know about you, Jonah, but if someone were to leave me a ton of voice mails and text messages and notes on my apartment door, I would actually call them back. I wouldn’t be a coward—”

“I haven’t checked my email since then, Lenny,” he said roughly, his accent coming out thicker, his voice cracking at the end even as the pink across his cheeks became deeper, stretching up to the tips of his ears. “Since I broke my phone. I swear!”

Did I look like an idiot?

I smiled at him again, and I knew he could see the smart-ass there. “If you want to play this I had no idea game, go for it, but I’m not an idiot. No smart, reasonable person would suddenly just disappear from the world and kill their career. You would have been communicating with someone. You just weren’t communicating with me.”

I was not mad. I was not.

The hand that wasn’t already on his head went up to meet the other one, where he cupped the expanse of his scalp, breathing harder than I had ever, ever seen before, and that was saying something because I had seen him right after finishing a rugby game when he’d been exhausted and riled up and sweaty. I’d been in the stands and he’d come over and kissed me on the cheek—

God, I hated his guts.

“Lenny,” he said, luckily ripping me out of that memory with the jagged quality of his voice, like it hurt him to speak. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know about… about….”

It was the strangest thing, seeing a human body imitate a balloon that had been pricked by a needle just small enough to make its ultimate death slow.

But that was what I saw.

And I wasn’t sure what to think of it other than be suspicious.

This enormous asshole who weighed more than any other person in the building slowly sank to his knees behind the chair he’d been gripping onto for dear life minutes ago. If I hadn’t been watching him so closely, I would have figured he fainted, but no, he’d just… dissolved. Both of his hands were all of a sudden gripping the back of the chair again, his body curled so that his forehead was pressed into the material in between his hands. And he was gasping for breath.

Was this a joke? Was he acting? I didn’t see what he would get out of any of this but…

He was faking it. He had to be.

Jackass.

After a moment, his face lifted and his eyes moved back to Mo like… I wasn’t sure how, honestly. Shocked, mostly. A little anger resided somewhere in there, but mostly… mostly it was surprise hidden in his eyes as he looked at the dark-haired baby on my lap…. with the same honey-colored eyes he saw in the mirror every day even though he didn’t know it.

He was faking it.

“You…,” he stuttered, those big hands still clinging to the chair with white knuckles. “The messages….”

In my lap, Mo started to fuss, and I knew I only had a few moments before I had to set her down.

“You’re serious?”

I didn’t even bother responding to that stupid-ass question.

“She’s… she’s my daughter?” Jonah Collins asked with all the speed of a damn turtle, each word basically whispered and gasped at the same time, making it really easy for a moment to reconcile him with the man I had known who had been sweeter and more easygoing than any other man I had ever known before.