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  He’d never done anything like that before. He was the one who said they were going to go out. He was the one who decided they would be exclusive. He pushed for the relationship that created this baby. And now he started pulling away?

  Her brain twisted around that fact. Tried to find a way for it to be okay that he didn’t want to touch her.

  Maybe he was overwhelmed. Maybe his brain was working too fast, trying to figure out how this happened, and how things were going to happen from here on out. He’d never pulled away from her before, but then again, she’d never told him she was pregnant before. Maybe no one ever had.

  She tried desperately to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if the way he was looking at her cut like a knife, how he jerked away like she was the plague. “Brandon, maybe you should go. We both need some time to think about this, to figure out what we each want.”

  He opened his mouth, but she couldn’t take any more of his pulling away, any more of his hurtful looks. So this time it was her turn, and she talked right over him. “It’s okay if you don’t want anything to do with this, with us. I’ll understand. But I won’t keep you away from your child either.” She watched his face flinch at the words ‘your child’ and wondered what was going on in his head. Still she kept railroading him. “You call me when you’re ready to talk about it.”

  He opened his mouth, once, twice, but no sound came.

  Clearly, he needed time to digest. Her heart burned. His reaction was so strong. And she’d only gotten through a third of the things she needed to say. She was going to have to do this twice more. Even if Brandon could live with all of it, even if he could adjust to everything she was laying at his feet, she wouldn’t ever know. Because he was going to just die from the shock of it all, if today was any indication.

  With only a brief nod of his head, he turned and let himself out her door.

  As soon as the door clicked into place, the dam holding back her tears burst. Her chest wracked with great sobs. Slowly, she slid to the kitchen floor, her hands covering her face. Her body and her mind let go of the tight hold she’d managed to maintain.

  She was going to be a single parent.

  Which was nothing she’d ever aimed for. Look at her past: she’d been willing to take a cheating David back when she found out she was pregnant. The irony here wasn’t lost on her. Brandon was a good guy. He wouldn’t cheat like David. Not even if Juliet came on to him. Somehow she knew that in her heart. But Brandon still wouldn’t be here for her and her baby—simply because he didn’t want to be.

  She sniffed and managed to haul herself up far enough to reach the tissues on the counter. Then she sank back down to the floor, wiping her face even though she was nowhere near done crying.

  Blinking a few times, she at least managed to get her pep talk started. If Brandon didn’t want to be with her then she would deal with it. It was her fault, and she could own up to it. But if he didn’t want to be with his child, then he wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be. Even though she’d been so convinced he was. She started crying in earnest again. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  As she sat there huddled on her kitchen floor, Delilah entertained the very real possibility that she’d never hear from Brandon again.

  Chapter 28

  Brandon was still in a shocked daze when he pulled into his garage.

  Delilah. Pregnant.

  Well, he hadn’t seen that coming in a million years.

  He wasn’t even sure how he got home. His brain was going a mile a minute, but none of his thoughts were about driving. He’d simply gone on autopilot.

  For some reason, putting the key in his front door and unlocking both the deadbolts brought him out of it. With his brain working ahead of his feet, he didn’t finish unlocking the door but turned around and went out into the front yard and looked up and down the street.

  It was a good neighborhood. Right on the border of Hollywood and West Hollywood. West Hollywood was incredibly gay friendly, also there were a lot of Russian families that had been here since long before the tide had turned. People had their thoughts about the lifestyle in this section of town, but the fact was that it was open and friendly. Not as rich as Beverly Hills but not full of rundown apartment buildings like so many areas. It was as safe as you could get in LA. And he had great neighbors.

  The yard wasn’t big, but it would do. He’d want to put a fence around it. You couldn’t have a small kid running out into the street, no matter how nice you thought your neighborhood was. There was a good green park at the end of the block, something he hadn’t considered at all when he bought the place. Now he could envision a chubby blond toddler running in the grass there.

  Just as quickly, he turned away from the scene playing out in his mind and finished unlocking the front door. He stepped over the threshold onto the hardwood floor and tried to think logically.

  The fact was he was having a baby with a woman who had completely manipulated him. Who still was.

  So many times Brandon found himself reaching out to her, putting his arms around her to console her, wanting nothing but to make everything okay. He’d thought about asking her to run off to Vegas, get married. Then she’d know how he felt, because he never really said it. Now, logically, he was glad he’d never said it.

  Of course, there was every possibility he’d never really said it because he didn’t really feel it. Well, he did. But since it was all conjured at Delilah’s will, it wasn’t real. Every time he remembered that, he stepped away from her and tried to put his hands back at his sides.

  But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. What he wanted was to tear his own hair out.

  To top the whole thing off, this pregnancy came right when he was starting to fight back against everything she’d done to him. Poorly, mind you, but fight back nonetheless.

  He looked around the house, taking stock. His bachelor pad days were over. It didn’t matter if Delilah had offered him an easy way out, that he could just leave her be and never think about her or the child again, he wasn’t that kind of man. His father hadn’t been, and he hadn’t been raised that way. He’d also been the child who had a parent just disappear. It didn’t matter if it was your mother or your father, it wasn’t easy. And he would not be the cause of that pain in some other child’s life—his child.

  Besides, he always figured he’d have his own kids someday. Brandon smiled wryly at the empty room, it had been like this forever it seemed. He never decorated or tried to make his space anything other than a place to sleep or to watch TV. Until he’d put a patio table and chairs out on the deck for Delilah that was. Still, it was time to make a clean sweep of all of it. Welcome to ‘someday.’

  It was his child. The heat settled somewhere deep inside him, warming him in a way he’d never felt before. At least he could be satisfied those feelings were his own.

  Now about the mother of his child . . .

  He needed to tell her what he knew. Had to convince her to lay off the spells. So maybe they stood a chance at forming something real. Or at least that he wouldn’t feel—be—so manipulated.

  He felt the need to give it a shot with her. Not to doom his child to a lifetime of getting shuttled back and forth between parents who really didn’t speak. Who held radically different beliefs. From his own childhood, he remembered his own father’s unflinching honesty. And how it had soothed him in what little way it could over the loss of his own mother. His father had made sure he knew it wasn’t his or Bethy’s fault. His father tried to keep the marriage together. Brandon knew the question would come up someday, why aren’t you and Mommy together? and he didn’t want to respond with, I just didn’t pursue it. It didn’t seem fair, because it wasn’t. So, for his own conscience, he had to do his best to patch things up with Delilah. So that, at the very worst he could say he’d failed, but he’d done his best.

  First, though, he had to ditch his own witchcraft stuff. It wouldn’t do to tell Delilah to lay off the spells when lately he’d
been just as bad. He grabbed the burnt halves of the birch bark sticks, the candles and the dishes, and hastily threw them all into the trash. He dismantled the wooden altar and hauled the pieces out to the garage, putting them in separate places as though they might be tempted to reform when he wasn’t watching. Grabbing the hefty Almanac, he figured he should throw it out, too, but hesitated as he held the large volume poised over the trash can. For some reason his fingers wouldn’t seem to let go of it.

  The thought passed through his head that he should keep it. It wasn’t like the book would cast spells on its own. As long as he didn’t do any work out of it, it should be fine. Besides, he was having a baby with a witch, and the book said that mothers passed the religion on to their kids.

  He put it on the bottom shelf of his bedside table. He’d been skipping the chapters on the religion of Wicca, only wanting to get to the magick. Now, he committed to reading the whole thing front to back. He’d learn the daily ins and outs of the practitioners. He’d research online, too, and ask Yasmin what was right and what was mixed up from the uneducated. He wouldn’t be one of them any longer. It was the only way he’d ever begin to be able to keep up with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed witch who likely didn’t need spells to keep him enchanted.

  With the house cleared of his forays into the craft, Brandon picked up the phone to call Delilah. She’d told him to call when he made up his mind. But he’d barely been home long enough to throw out his herbs and to renounce his revenge. She was likely still in shock herself.

  Carefully setting the phone back in the cradle, he changed his mind. He wanted her here. Away from her apartment, away from her supplies. He wanted her with him. For a moment he was able to look around his place and see it populated with Delilah’s furniture, see her pots and pans lining the walls of his kitchen. That was taking it a bit far. His brain knew that, but even the logical assessment did nothing to ease the comfort the vision brought him.

  Brandon admitted what he was feeling must be generated by Lilah’s spells. But that was too bad for her, she was just going to have to play out the cards she’d snuck him off the bottom of the deck. If she wanted to cheat, she’d have to live with the consequences.

  He wanted her here. He wanted to influence her decisions about this baby. He didn’t want her to be able to dump him and dash away as she had before. Besides, he reasoned, she wasn’t likely in any shape to drive.

  So he pulled out his keys and headed back the way he’d just come.

  He used the same trick he had the first night he’d snuck into her building, randomly dialing numbers until someone buzzed him in. Only this time, as he climbed the stairs, he frowned, upset at just how easy it was to sneak his way into Delilah’s building. He didn’t want his kid growing up in a place that wasn’t more secure. It was as good an excuse as any for the rest of what was rolling around inside his head.

  For three flights, he harbored his small fantasies of Delilah living in his house, playing with their child in his yard. When the first child in his imagination was grown to several years older and there was a second blonde toddler in the imaginary yard, he shook his head, trying to clear it. It was like the spells got stronger and stronger the closer he got to her place. If only they wore off when he was at his house. But they didn’t.

  He stared at the door to her unit for a few seconds. He almost knocked, but he didn’t know if she would answer. He’d stormed out in such a huff, with her words telling him in essence she would understand if she never heard from him again. There was every possibility she would check the peephole and never open the door. How long would he be able to camp outside her door and wait her out? Probably not as long as she could stay in there. So he reached out to first try the knob, just on the off chance . . . it opened.

  Surprised, he pushed his way in to the apartment, only to find Delilah was more surprised by his move than he was. He was opening his mouth to chide her for leaving the door unlocked, when his brain put together the red eyes, disheveled hair and the fact that she was sitting on the floor of her kitchen. Her arms were wrapped around her knees. And though she was startled by his presence, she seemed too tangled, or maybe too shocked, to get herself up off the floor.

  Brandon didn’t know what to say, so he offered up, “Give me a minute.”

  Mutely, she nodded, biting on her lower lip and stopping her desperate attempt to get herself up and put together. Brandon walked off into her bedroom. He opened her closet to find that she had a horrible case of organization. He thought maybe she was just that anal retentive in the kitchen because she cooked. Now he wondered if she had her medicine cabinet alphabetized.

  Still, that made it easy to find the duffle bag on the top shelf. He pulled a soft t-shirt off a hanger and a pair of jeans from one of the racks. He opened several drawers looking for underwear, stumbling across socks and bras first. Which was probably a good thing since he hadn’t thought of either. He stuffed one of each thing into the duffle bag then tried not to get distracted by the drawer of frothy underwear. He decided to pull something out randomly, but came up with a red lace thong.

  They needed to talk about her pregnancy, make decisions about their future. He didn’t want to give her the wrong idea. Not that the red lace thong was a bad idea . . . He forced himself to put it back and try again. This time he came up with a sedate shade of purple, in cotton. Still a little skimpy on the cut, but he wasn’t in a place to be choosy. He smiled a little, then headed into the bathroom, only to find it was just as organized as everything else. She could work wonders on his place.

  He grabbed her toothbrush and toothpaste before scrounging around for her hairbrush and whatever else she might need. After a few moments he realized he was out of his league in here and gave up. Slinging the duffle over his shoulder, he headed back out into the main area where he found Delilah still curled in a tight ball on the kitchen floor.

  Her voice was as wet as her face. “I thought you were going to call.”

  “You’re in no shape to drive.”

  He didn’t know why he’d said that. It didn’t really answer her question. But he knelt down next to her, and he could tell he startled her when he scooped her up. Then again, what did she expect? She’d cast love spells on him. And probably—certainly—other spells, too. Something to placate him, so he wouldn’t be angry when he found out. Like now. Again he went back to his mental argument about her needing to stay in the bed she’d made.

  She protested, though only marginally, when he headed to the door with her in his arms. When he asked, she provided keys and he carefully locked the door behind them before heading down the hall to the elevator, Delilah’s head resting against his shoulder. Maybe it meant she’d seen the inevitable and given in to him.

  He could only hope.

  Chapter 29

  Delilah stared out the window on the short ride to Brandon’s, but she refused when he offered to carry her inside. She needed to walk on her own.

  That seemed to be what this was all about. All the things she’d neglected for the last year. Like taking a good hard look at herself. Like taking stock and being sure she was doing what she needed to do—not just putting up a good front and getting to work on time.

  Since she was being honest with herself—finally—no matter how painful that was, she had to admit that she’d been neglecting a lot since long before David and Juliet had died. She’d been perfect on the outside. Had the perfect plot of land to build the perfect home on with the perfect man. But none of it had been perfect or even right. It just looked that way.

  Maybe because she could manipulate things to suit herself so well, she’d been able to make things seem close enough, even when they weren’t. The fact of the matter was she’d been able to achieve what she thought was perfection, but now she needed to admit she didn’t even know what that was.

  Still, she couldn’t let Brandon carry her around and completely take care of her. That would be like going back to David. David who earned all the money and didn’
t want his pretty wife to work. But he sure liked the fact that she threw the best parties. She’d taken good care of him. They’d had great vacations. It had been fun being David’s wife. If not very fulfilling.

  Delilah figured today on the floor of her kitchen was the first time she ever admitted to that.

  She’d been crying when Brandon had showed up, just getting all of it out. Apparently there was a lot to get over when you killed your husband and mistakenly took your sister out with him. So while Brandon may be enjoying playing white knight and spiriting her away, she needed to get onto her own two feet, literally and figuratively.

  She followed him into the house, only then realizing he had her duffle bag over his shoulder. He must have packed it himself, must have intended for her to stay the night. Taking a deep breath for fortification, Delilah prepared to walk home. Once she told him the truth, he wouldn’t drive her. If he was very generous he’d call her a cab, and allow her to pay for it.

  Still, she mutely followed him inside, vowing to herself to come completely clean. It was way past time. Still, it was much harder to do it than to think it. She found herself saying yes, she would like a Sprite if he had it, when he asked if he could get her a drink. Then Delilah was on his couch, glass in hand, before she could even think about saying some really illuminating words. Then she chickened out—again—thinking that she shouldn’t tell everything with a drink in her hand while she sat on his couch. What if it spilled?

  She managed to berate herself mentally, but not to say anything.