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.

But I forgot about him just as easily because she’s my daughter?

I wasn’t going to waste my time responding to stupid questions.

Then the man who was clinging to a chair and watching me with glassy eyes, went there, softly, but he still fucking went there. “Are you sure?”

I’d taken four different pregnancy tests when I missed my period because I hadn’t wanted to believe it was possible, that this was happening to me. I’d asked the doctor to test me twice when I had gotten around to going to a physician in France. Since I’d been fifteen, my period had been like clockwork. It was more reliable than my first car had been.

Hadn’t I told this fucker multiple times I could count the number of times I’d had sex on two hands?

“You can say I’m sure that you and I were together a lot exactly nine months before Mo was born. And I’m sure that she has the same eyes and hair as you do,” I told him coolly, but really stabbing him in the throat in my head.

He didn’t say anything. What he did do was squeeze his eyes closed. Gulp.

I felt myself sneer. “Why are you looking like you’re going to be sick?” I demanded, even though I didn’t want to, but I was pissed, and him looking like that just made me even madder. He had no right.

Jonah lowered his forehead until it was back to resting on the chair in front of him, and I could barely hear him as he mumbled, “Because it feels like I am.”

I narrowed my eyes and started to lift Mo up to wobble on feet that weren’t yet ready to walk, when her squirming got worse. She was going to need to go in the playpen sooner than later, but I was feeling real damn clingy right then.

The Fucker tipped his face back up to the ceiling, eyes closed, and took so many deep breaths in through his nose and out of his mouth that I lost count.

“She’s really…. She’s mine?” Jonah Hema Collins stammered at some point.

I glared the fuck out of him, annoyed he was asking the same damn questions again. But I saw the same things that I’d been seeing. The white-knuckled grip. The unsteady body. I could hear what might have sounded like anguish in that voice that had pulled an Ariel in The Little Mermaid on me.

And I had to fucking think about it.

If anyone else was trying to claim this bullshit to someone I knew, I would tell them they were full of it. That there was no way it was possible for someone to just disconnect like that. And I wanted to believe that, I really did. But Jonah didn’t look right.

The fact was, his hands had been shaking. His mouth and skin were pale again. Unless he’d been practicing in the mirror for the last year and a half, what were the chances he could make himself look like he’d been kicked in the balls repeatedly?

But still… if something seemed too good to be true, it’s because it was.

Like he had been.

Too nice. Too easygoing. Too humble. Too good-looking. Too perfect.

Too interested in me.

The fact was… it didn’t matter who he had seemed to be and who he hadn’t. It was this man in front of me I was going to have to deal with… potentially for the rest of my life if I didn’t kill him first. And all it took was a quiet stream of gibberish from the kid in my hands to remind me I’d do anything for her.

Even put up with and get past this asshole. Set aside all the shit and just… deal. Handle it.

“I don’t want to talk in circles around this; if you knew, if you didn’t know, it doesn’t matter anymore.” I was mostly lying, but not totally. “I thought that’s why you were here. To see her. To talk about her. The only thing that matters now is if you’re going to stay. If you’re going to be part of her life or not. Like I said, I don’t actually give a fuck about your excuses anymore, Jonah. I just want to know what you plan on doing.”

I stopped talking because he dropped his hands.

And because it almost made me feel sick that I was going to have to put up with his dumbass for who knew how long.

This massive, intimidating man who tackled men just as big as him for a living without pads, with just the sheer size and strength of himself, lifted his head and eyed the kid I was bouncing up and down on my lap… and me. And I couldn’t miss how he looked more like a popped balloon than ever. How… defeated or something. Sick.

His shoulders went up, and I’d swear he sniffed.

He fucking sniffed and my arms bubbled up with goose bumps.