Vegas Aces: The Wide Receiver Complete Series

CHAPTER 4 TESSA

“I told my parents,” he says softly.

“What did they say?” I tug the blanket up around my stomach. The weather is starting to warm up a little, but the nights are still chilly beside an open window…or maybe the chill I’m feeling comes from the fear that his parents know.

More people are finding out.

It only makes things more real…and it only presents a bigger risk of more people finding out who the real father is.

“A lot of things,” he mutters. “My mom was surprised your mom kept it from her.”

“She did it at my request. It’s not that I was lying to anybody or anything…I just wasn’t ready to talk about it.” I clear my throat as emotion seems to clog it for a beat. “I’m still not. It’s embarrassing that it happened the way it did. And it’s like…people know I have sex .” I whisper the last word.

“There’s nothing shameful about that, Tess, despite what your father tried to make you believe.” His voice is low as he says the words, but I realize how much my religion was drilled into me from a young age. I started to shed some of those beliefs as I took on my independence in Chicago—as I moved out of my father’s restrictive shadow—but knowing what he did in his free time despite what he tried to teach me has really sent my morality meter into total chaos.

Tristan was raised so differently than me. His house was sex positive, where it was a taboo subject in mine. And yet…he’s not the one who’s having a baby out of wedlock. Just because his family talked about it doesn’t mean he sleeps around, and just because mine didn’t doesn’t mean I acted out of rebellion to get to where I am.

“I know,” I mumble as I study my blanket so I don’t feel his eyes burning into me…judging me.

“Hey,” he says softly. I glance over at him, and his eyes are genuine as they stare at me. Not judgmental.

“What?”

“It’s okay. It might not be how you imagined things, but you’re not alone. Okay?”

I nod. “Okay.”

But that’s kind of the thing. Maybe I’m not alone right now, but I will be . He’s a young, very attractive, successful celebrity. He can have his pick of whoever he wants in the entire world, and somehow I doubt that’s the girl next door who’s about to become a single mother. He’ll need to go back to Vegas at some point, and then what?

He must be able to tell from my single word response that I’m not convinced.

He stands, disappears for a few seconds—presumably to grab his shoes—then opens his window. The very second he stood, I knew what he planned to do, and my hunch is correct. He climbs through his window, and just like old times, he skips the few steps across the yard separating us and opens my window wider. I move off my windowsill, and he climbs into my bedroom.

Now this …this feels like old times.

I can’t help a breathless laugh as he takes me into his arms. “You’re not alone,” he repeats. He leans his forehead to mine.

“I know.” I hear it in my own voice, so I’m sure he detects it, too. Fear.

“Then what are you scared of?” he whispers.

I pull out of his arms and move toward my bed to sit. “This is nice now, but I’m having a baby, Tristan. A baby that isn’t yours, and you’re still married to someone else. Even if you’re here for me, even if the things I didn’t even dare to dream actually come true and somehow we end up back together—which I can’t even ask of you given that I’m pregnant with somebody else’s child—eventually you’ll have to go back to Vegas. You’ll have to go back to your life, and you should go back to your life. You deserve to. You don’t deserve to be tied down to some ex-girlfriend because you feel some sense of responsibility to make up for the past.”

He presses his lips together. “Is that what you think this is?”

I shrug and hold up my hands as if to say, prove me wrong .

He shakes his head, and I think I sense a little disgust in the action.

“What?” I challenge.

He sighs as he averts his eyes over toward the window. “It’s not obligation. It’s not responsibility.”

“Then what?” I ask, a desperate, pleading quality clouding my voice.

He shakes his head before he turns back toward me. He paces a little as he speaks. “It’s love, Tessa Taylor. Pure, plain, and simple. We might’ve just been teenagers, but we had something special.”

He stops pacing and he turns to face me. “Maybe I held you up on some pedestal after you walked out of my life, but I knew it wasn’t because of you. I knew there was something else at play, something you didn’t tell me, something you couldn’t tell me, maybe, something I’m not even sure I want you to tell me at this point because it’s in the past and I don’t think it matters anymore.”

My breath catches in my throat as he refers to that time, and a sense of relief falls onto my shoulders at his words. He’s giving me permission not to tell him what happened. It feels freeing at the same time it feels…weird.

“You’re pregnant, and that baby you’re growing deserves to be your focus. We’re here now. We found our way back, somehow, some way, and I think it’s because it’s fate.” He sighs as he turns toward the window. “All I’ve been thinking about over the last few months is how I want to settle down. I want to get away from Savannah. Far, far, away. I want the divorce to finally go through so I can get on with my life. I always wanted a big family. I wanted to be a young father. She’s sucking years of my life that should be spent with the woman I’m supposed to do that with. I want to be free of her so I can find the person I’m meant to spend my life with, the woman I can raise children with and share everything with.” He turns back toward me, and his eyes are hot on mine, full of passion as he raises his voice a little. “And then you show up out of the blue after seven goddamn years and I’m just supposed to pretend like it isn’t you when I’ve known it was you since I was twelve years old?”

Tears heat behind my eyes at his words, but a sudden question plays in my mind. “Can I ask you a question?”

He sits on my windowsill—in the same place I sit every night to talk to him. He’s too far away, and yet he’s closer than he’s been for seven years. “Anything.”

“If you knew it was me since we were twelve, why didn’t you fight to find me when I left?” I know why I didn’t fight to find him. I couldn’t . I didn’t have a way to get in touch with him, and then the baby came. I was emotionally damaged by that point, and I just wanted to climb out of the pit I’d been forced into. I had to rebuild my life, and while I wanted to rebuild it with him, by the time I was able to find some way to track him down, he was in season. He’d moved on without me, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to pull him backward with me. Not when he was set on a path toward greatness.

He averts his gaze to the ground. “I tried. Believe me. I begged your father more than once, but he told me you didn’t want to be with me anymore, that you’d asked him to end it with me. I tried your mom, too, because I didn’t believe his story, not when I believed so strongly in us. This one time it felt like she was going to tell me something, but your dad walked in, and she had this look on her face like she’d been caught.”

A tear tips over my lashes and onto my cheek as I think about what my father actually did to me. It hurts, and maybe it makes it even worse that he’s gone now, that I can’t confront him or punish him or eventually find a way to forgive him.

“For a long time, I thought it had to be something I did—that you left on your own free will, that you really didn’t want to be with me anymore like he said,” he says, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward as he folds his hands in front of him. “But I knew what we had, and I knew that wasn’t the case. There was some reason they hated me, some reason they didn’t trust me with you. They thought I was corrupting you, I wasn’t good enough for you, or whatever. And then I had to leave for college, where I was immersed in football.”

He rubs his hands together as he narrates that time in his life. “I had a receiver coach who saw my potential to make it to the NFL, and he basically only let me out of workouts and conditioning to attend classes or do my schoolwork. Otherwise, I was studying film and learning from the greats so I could become one of the greats. And that was it. The next time I heard a word about you, you were dating some guy in the city and he was maybe going to ask you to marry him. And you know where that led me from there.”

I nod. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry my parents—my father —ever made you feel like you were anything less than the incredible person you are. I’m sorry my father made you doubt what we had for even a second.”

“Did you try to get in touch with me?” he asks.

The answer to that question is complicated, but I keep it simple. “Of course I did, but my aunt was as strict as my father, and you’re right. He didn’t want me to be with you. Not because he didn’t like you or didn’t trust you, but because he suspected we were having sex and he didn’t approve. He wanted to find a way to get me away from you, and so he forced me to leave the final quarter of senior year. I missed prom, graduation, time with you…everything that was important to me. He took it all away, and I hate him. I hate that he’s gone, that he escaped so easily, that I can’t hate him while he’s still here and that he can’t feel that hate. I hate that I have to pretend like I forgive him when I don’t. He took away everything I held precious, and I’m not the same person I was before.”

He stands and crosses the room, and he holds out his hands to me. I set mine in his, and he helps me lift to a stand. He wraps his arms around me and buries his face in my neck. After a beat of an embrace, I feel his lips on my skin, and then I hear his whispered words. “You’re still the same person you were, and together, we’re still dynamite. I still love you, Tessa. That never stopped.”

“I still love you, too,” I whisper, and his lips collide with mine.