Chapter 21

"That went well," I said sarcastically. I crossed my arms over my chest and lifted my chin in Oliver"s direction. "I"ve seen clusterfucks in my day, but that takes the cake."

Oliver rolled his eyes. "She"ll be fine. Once she calms down, she"ll realise we were right. She"ll be excited for that baby."

"Are you sure about that?" Cole asked. "She seemed pretty upset. I can"t blame her. What we did was—" He shook his head slowly.

"The right thing to do," Oliver said. "Like I told her, we did nothing more than give her what she wanted. Now she has that, she just needs to realise it. Give her a day or two, she"ll be fine."

Cole didn"t look reassured. If anything, he looked more unsettled. He massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers, a deep frown etched on his forehead.

"What if she isn"t?" I had to voice what Cole and I were both thinking. "She seemed pretty certain when she said she didn"t want to see any of us ever again. What happens then? She"s going to disappear forever and we won"t get to see our baby?"

As far as I was concerned, the baby was mine. Biologically or otherwise. I was going to be a part of their life. Whatever it took for that to happen, I"d do it. Marley and I would raise this baby together. There was no question of me taking them from her. Unless Marley wanted nothing to do with the kid, then they"d have at least two parents.

For the first time, a flicker of uncertainty crossed Oliver"s face. "That won"t happen."

The set of his jaw suggested he wouldn"t allow it to happen. Would he try to take the baby away from her? He"d have one hell of a fight on his hands if he did. From Marley and from me. He clearly liked to be in control, but he didn"t get whatever he wanted just because he said so. Fuck that.

"You don"t know that." I shook my head. "You have no real way of telling whether that was the last time any of us will see her. We should go after her."

I should have done that immediately. Oliver told us to let her go and I shouldn"t have listened. Shouldn"t have let her get in her car and drive away. Even if I had to hold her down, I should have found a way to keep her here. In the mood she was in right now, she could do herself some real and permanent damage. Hopefully she was in her right mind enough to drive carefully.

"Where would she go?" Cole asked. He seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She shouldn"t be there on her own.

"Under other circumstances, she would have come to me," Oliver said. "Now, I wouldn"t hazard a guess." He squeezed his eyes shut for a few moments before opening them again. From the expression on his face, he was considering a bunch of alternatives and concluding that he had no clear answers. Apparently he didn"t know her as well as he thought he did.

"Then we call her." Without waiting for them to respond, I pulled out my phone and pressed on her number. To the surprise of absolutely no one, she didn"t answer. I left a message, but all I could think to say was, "Hey, call me back. Please."

I shoved my phone back into the pocket of my jeans, knowing it was unlikely she"d call me back anytime soon. That didn"t mean I wouldn"t keep trying. I"d call her back again in half an hour or so. And I would keep calling until I spoke to her. I didn"t like to be ignored and I wasn"t going to start now. No matter how hurt she was.

"What do we do now?" Cole looked like a lost boy.

I draped an arm over his shoulders and gave him a squeeze. I was tempted to say we kick Oliver"s ass, and then do just that, but it was unlikely to help rectify the situation. It would, however, make me feel a fuck ton better.

"This was a stupid idea," I said. "We never should have agreed to go behind her back. Even if everything ends well, she"s never gonna forget today. She doesn"t deserve to feel the way she"s feeling right now. She should be happy and excited, and here with us so we can spoil her rotten. She shouldn"t be out there by herself dealing with all those big feelings."

I was struggling hard enough with those emotions. I wanted to be excited about the baby, but instead I was worried I"d ruined the best thing that ever happened to me.

"You"re right, it was a bad idea," Cole said. "It was all kinds of fucked up."

"What does it say about you that you agreed to it?" Oliver asked us both. "Don"t deny that you wanted this as much as I did. It wasn"t just about giving her what she wanted, it was about being in control. Showing her we own her. Both of you wanted to be the one to get her pregnant. I"m willing to bet almost anything both of you wanted to beat out the other. To be the one to knock her up." He raised an eyebrow in challenge.

I glanced at Cole, then back to Oliver.

"Fine," I said. "You"re right. I did want to be the one to put a baby in her belly. That doesn"t make any of this right. Doesn"t make it any less fucked up. We should have waited until she was good and fucking ready."

"Who knows how long that would have taken?" Oliver said. "Not to mention the fact birth control fails all the time. She could have become pregnant anyway. We have no way of predicting any of that."

"If it was a genuine accident, we wouldn"t have lied to her and gone behind her back," Cole said softly. He glanced down at the floor. "Maybe we should have told her that was what this was. Just an accident." His sigh was heavy and laced with regret and anger at himself.

"You wanted to lie to her some more?" I asked.

He had a point though, we could have kept the truth from her. You know what they say, what you don"t know can"t hurt you. If none of us ever told her, she"d be none the wiser, but keeping a secret like that would eat away at me. I wasn"t the kind of guy who liked to have shit like that hanging over my head. Not telling her what we were up to was difficult enough. I"d almost blurted it out a handful of times, especially when I was telling her I was about to cum inside her. I wanted to tell her I was trying to get her pregnant. But I hadn"t and now here we were.

He looked over at me. "No, but things would have gone differently if we did that. We would have said we"re happy and we"ll stick by her no matter what. She"d been here right now. With us. She"d never have to know what we did."

"She"d never have to know if we hadn"t done it," I pointed out. "We could have skipped right to asking her to stop taking birth control. Who knows, maybe she would have done it."

I doubted it. She seemed adamant that the time wasn"t right yet. Fuck only knows what it would have taken to be the right time. That was something we"d never know now. It was also something I wasn"t going to dwell on. Life hadn"t gone in that direction, there was no point wondering what might have been.

"All of this speculation is getting us nowhere," Oliver snapped. "We did what we did and now we have to wait for her to calm down and deal with it. And she will. She knows the full truth. She"ll realise we did it because we love her. Because she belongs to us and we couldn"t wait for the future we all want."

"That"s ironic coming from the guy who"s holding back on the future she wants," I said. "Keeping her a dirty little secret from the world. How do you think that makes her feel?"

"I know how it makes her feel," he growled. "You think I want that for us?"

"Frankly, yes," I said. "I think you love being in control. If you want to hold every single one of the cards in your fist. You decide when the world knows you have a relationship. You decide when she has babies. What else do you decide? What she wears? Who she talks to? What she eats?"

Oliver"s expression was steely. "I never wanted to keep her a secret. By the time we were ready to tell everyone, Cat was pregnant. She was still emotionally fragile. It was a risk I couldn"t take. It had nothing to do with Marley."

"It had everything to do with Marley," I said. "It"s been tearing her apart, having to sneak around. That"s not who she is. It"s not who she wants to be. You think you can put a bridle on her and tame her, but you can"t. Not completely. She"s independent. She"s not gonna let you put her in a cage and throw away the key. You"re her boss at work, but not in life. In life, she"s the one who"s in charge. And we, all three of us, took a big chunk away from her." I gestured around to all of us.

Oliver snorted. "You were quick enough to agree to this plan. You know why? Because your ego wanted this. Look past the bullshit and see the reality. You"re happy she"s pregnant. You"re happy she didn"t get to decide; we did that for her. That we had so much control over her body that she"s now carrying a baby that one of us put there."

He lifted his chin and stared me down. "Admit you get off on that. I know I do."

I wanted to deny it, but I couldn"t. As fucked up as it was, my cock throbbed. Yeah, I liked having that power over her. But I hated that she was hurting.

"We need to make this right," I said finally. "I"m not going to lose her because of what we did."

"What if we deserve to lose her?" Cole asked. "Maybe she"s better off without us."

"You really think that?" I glanced over at him.

He hadn"t stopped looking uncertain, but he looked more so now. "I don"t know. I feel like… I wanted this, but doesn"t that make me as bad as my father? What he did was because he wanted control over my family. Is this any different?"

"We didn"t lay a hand on her in a way she didn"t like," I said. But still, she said she felt violated. Maybe on some level we were as bad as Cole"s father.

"The difference is, we didn"t do it to hurt her," Oliver said. "The opposite. In the end, she"s going to have a beautiful baby to love. All of this will be completely worthwhile."

"It better be," I said. "If it isn"t, we"re going to be totally fucked. I"m not sure we aren"t already."

"We"re not," Oliver said. "Let me ask you a question. If we could do all of this over again, would you? I think both of you would. Because both of you thoroughly enjoyed fucking her and hoping she"d conceive. At least admit that to yourselves."

"I"ll never not want to fuck Marley," I said.

He was right though. This was exactly what I wanted. I hoped like hell she"d forgive us. I suspected it wouldn"t be that easy. It was going to take something fucking spectacular to make it up to her. Something that was going to take time and a butt load of effort.