Page 17 of Cold Foot King
“Can I come in there?” King asked.
“No.”
He muttered a curse, and she didn’t understand. Why on earth would he want to be in here?
“Look,” she said, opening the door. “If it’s positive, you’re off the hook. I don’t need you. Besides, I have a Pride, and I have a mate. I’m a Queen. I’ll be taken care of.”
“Most of what you said was a lie or a half-truth. You want to try that again?” he asked from where he was still sitting on the bed.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you or anyone else here.”
He inhaled deep. “I had a family group.”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “Where are they?”
“Scattered. It was breaking up before I went to prison. It’s decimated now. I couldn’t ever get it working smoothly.”
“You had a mate?”
He just stared at her and didn’t answer. “Right. None of my business.”
She crossed her arms over her chest defensively and stared into the bathroom at the pregnancy test. “It’s probably ready now. It’s supposed to just take a few minutes.”
“Katrina?” he said, his tone rich as he said her name for the first time she’d ever heard. “It’s okay either way.”
She didn’t know why, but his kindness meant something to her in this intimidating moment.
It would be okay?
For her, it felt like nothing would be okay ever again. He wasn’t the only one with a decimated past.
She made her way to the counter, looked at herself in the mirror, took a deep breath, and flipped the test over.
She just stared at it, not knowing how she was supposed to feel in this moment.
“What’s it say?” King asked, drawing up behind her. God, he was enormous. He took up the entire bathroom.
She showed it to him, still utterly confused. There was this tiny voice inside of her that said she should be disappointed, but that was insane.
“It’s negative,” he rumbled.
“Yeah.” She didn’t know what else to say.
King froze, and she could feel him watching her, but her eyes were glued to the pattern of the laminate floor of the bathroom.
Slowly, King set the test onto the counter with a softclick, then he slid his hand behind her head, pulled her in, and hugged her against his chest.
She could feel his heartbeat drumming against her scarred cheek, and she closed her eyes. She should be pushing him away right now. Her arms should be shoving him into the bathroom wall, but instead, they slid around his waist and hugged him back.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she whispered. “I don’t want others to talk about it either.”
“I won’t let them.” There was an oath in his voice.
She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and gripped the back of his shirt. And then she fell apart. She could with him, because he’d seen her vulnerable before. She hated that he already knew her in that way. No one had ever seen her cry, but King had seen it at the prison a few weeks ago, he’d seen it outside when she’d seen Silver, and he was seeing it now.
Tomorrow she would overthink this and be full of regret, but here, in the quiet of the bathroom, flooded with a mass of confusing feelings—relief and disappointment—she was okay to let out all the emotions she’d kept inside of her all those months in that awful prison.
He let her cry. He didn’t get tense, or find a way to back out of the bathroom. He just held her, gripping the back of her hair gently and swaying from side to side.