Zero expectations, p.12
Zero Expectations, page 12
It felt nice.
“Can I ask you something?” Roman asked, eyeing me from over his beer.
“Sure.”
“Why did you watch The Secret of NIMH?”
“What?”
“The kids told me that you watched The Secret of NIMH already. Before tonight.”
I shot him a look. “What am I, a monster?” I asked, almost clutching my pearls. “My puppies were named after the main characters. It’s the twins’ favorite movie. The movie is a beloved recommendation from your parents. How could you think that I wouldn’t watch it?”
Roman eyed me for a bit, the silence slightly unnerving me. Even though I knew that he was probably still struggling with the decision to have a relationship with me and why, that didn’t help me stop from wondering if he was going to panic and call things off.
“I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to freak out,” he said carefully.
Yep.
He was going to dump me already.
“What is it?” I asked, trying my best to sound unaffected.
“The twins aren’t biologically mine,” he announced, and I had to shake my head at what I was sure that I had to have misheard.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Zach and Zoey aren’t biologically mine,” he repeated, and I could only drop back in my seat, shocked as hell to be hearing this.
“What do you…you mean…how…how are they…not…not yours?” I stammered.
“A few years ago, I was…dating a woman named Naomi Feldman, though calling it dating is quite a stretch,” he grimaced. “We’d met at a bar, and because she had lived a few towns away, we had agreed to a sort of…I’ll-see-you-when-I-see-you kind of casual hookup.” I was on the edge of my seat, listening to every single word leaving his mouth. “It’d been…fun, easy, and we’d gotten along well enough. I had no idea that the woman was batshit crazy until she told me that she was pregnant, insisting that she was pregnant by me.”
“No possibility?”
Roman shot me a look. “You’re the only woman that I have ever had bare, Haven,” he said. “Not ready for kids, protection had always been a must.” He shrugged a bit as he leaned back in his seat. “Granted, condoms aren’t guaranteed, but I always inspected them whenever I took them off, and there was no way that Naomi could have gotten pregnant by me. Still, when she’d been adamant that I was the father, I had made her every promise under the sun on the results of a paternity test.”
I grimaced. “I can’t see how that would have gone over well.”
“Oh, it hadn’t,” he chuckled.
“So, what happened?”
“After I insisted on a paternity test, Naomi had screamed out all kinds of threats of regret and a whole host of other crazy shit,” he went on. “From swearing that I was never going to meet my children to threatening to take me for everything that I had. She had acted and sounded like someone completely off their rocker. She’d been unhinged. Insane, even.”
“And you were absolutely positive that you weren’t at fault?”
“There’s no way that she could have been pregnant by me,” he stated. “Still, a small part of me had wondered. Again, though she had claimed to be on birth control, condoms aren’t a guarantee. No matter how many times she had assured me that it was safe to go bare, I’d still known better.”
“But…she had to know that the truth would come out eventually, right?” I asked. I never understood women that lied about stuff like that. Not only was it low as hell, but the truth always came out. Men weren’t as naïve as they’d been years ago. Nowadays, they were wise enough to ask for proof, no matter whose feelings they hurt.
“I have no idea what she was thinking,” he answered. “Like I said, she’d been…unhinged. I mean, if I hadn’t been so certain that she wasn’t pregnant by me, I would have believed her with the way she had carried on with the tears and theatrics.”
“So…” I shook my head. “How did you end up with Zach and Zoey?”
“One day, out of the blue, Naomi showed up on my doorstep with the twins in their baby carriers, barely a month old.”
“Oh, God…” I whispered, my stomach tightening with the implications.
“I opened the door, and as soon as I did, she placed the babies down on the stoop, glared up at me, then told me that they were my problem now.” My stomach actually flipped with the horror of such a situation. How could a mother dump her children off like that? “It didn’t take a mathematician to figure out that there was no way in hell that the twins could be mine. Naomi and I had only been messing around for a couple of months, and by the age of the twins, she’d already been pregnant when we had started screwing around. Another reason why she’d been adamant that condoms weren’t needed.”
“So…not only were the children not yours, but she left her kids with a man that she’d only been messing around with for only a couple of months?”
Roman nodded, taking another pull from his beer. “Considering that she was sleeping with three different guys at the same time, she wasn’t exactly the moral type back then.”
My eyes almost bugged out of my head. “What?”
“She had given me an earful when she had dropped off the babies, and in her tirade of everything that was wrong with men, she had mentioned how she couldn’t find the possible father, and how the second shmuck that she’d been screwing had refused to take responsibility for the kids.”
My brain felt like it was misfiring with the incredibility of it all. What kind of person did something this…this Lifetime-Movie-Network-crazy? Who in the hell got pregnant, then tried to pin it on anyone that would take the bait? What kind of horrid creature abandoned their children with a virtual stranger?
“So, I was the last guy on her list, and she said that I deserved to suffer for casting her aside,” Roman went on, making me hate Naomi Feldman with all my heart. “When I pointed out that the kids weren’t even mine, she said I still deserved to suffer for not helping her out during her time of need.”
“Oh, my Sweet Jesus,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” Roman snorted. “There’s crazy, and then there’s Naomi Feldman.”
“So…what happened after she left?” I was completely riveted by this story.
“After Naomi stormed off, leaving the babies, her screams had woken both of them up, and they’d been bawling messes,” he went on. “Not wanting to draw any attention from my neighbors, I had quickly taken them inside, wondering what the fuck I was going to do.” Roman shook his head at the memories, and they had to be painful ones. I mean, how could they not.
“You didn’t call the police or child protective services?”
Roman straightened in his seat. “Those two things had been first on my list,” he admitted. “However, I had wanted to calm the kids down first before calling the police over. I’d been petrified that they might think I’d done something to the babies because they’d been screaming crying, not just regular crying.”
“I bet,” I muttered.
“It took me over an hour to settle them down because they’d both been crying at the same time,” he said, and there was no longer any doubt about being head-over-heels in love with this man.
Chapter 23
Roman~
Apart from my family, no one knew the truth. This was the first time that I’d ever told someone the truth about how I had adopted the twins, and though I felt safe telling Haven everything, my chest still felt tight with the experience.
“So, after finally getting the babies to settle down, I…I sort of…I don’t know,” I sighed, not sure how to explain this next part. “I just needed a moment to gather my…my scattered nerves. So, I had put off calling the police until I felt certain that I could answer their questions without sounding like a lunatic.”
“I bet,” Haven grimaced.
I leaned up, placing my beer on the table. “However, something changed in those moments of quiet solitude,” I said, hoping that I didn’t sound crazy. “While I was trying to collect myself, I kept looking between the sleeping babies, and…and all I could think about was how their mother had abandoned them with no thought to what that would mean for their lives.” I could feel my hate for Naomi threatening to make its regular appearance. “All I could think about was how they’d been discarded by the one person that should have given her life for them. I mean, what kind of evil dumped their children off with whatever person was willing to take them?”
“I have no idea,” Haven whispered, and I could hear the emotion in her voice.
I let out a heavy breath. “From there, my mind began to spiral out of control,” I confessed. “I thought about how they were going to end up in the foster system, and what if they were separated, you know. What if they were torn apart, never to know that they had another part of themselves out there in the world, always feeling…empty? Then I started thinking about the dark horrors of foster care, and the thought of handing them over to someone that might hurt them just…I’d felt sick to my stomach.”
“Oh, Roman…” Haven choked out, her eyes glistening.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t do it, Haven,” I said, my heart still hurting with what Naomi had done. “I couldn’t abandon them the same way that Naomi had. I refused to be the second person to abandon them in only their one month of life. I couldn’t be that person; I had refused to be that person.”
“So, you just kept them?”
“The one thing that Naomi had done was leave their birth certificates and medical records,” I told her. “So, since she’d left the father’s name Unknown, I’d been able to put my names on the certificates with the help of a very expensive attorney. The entire time, I had pretended to believe that they were mine, and I had hired not only that lawyer, but also a children’s advocate attorney to monitor Naomi’s abandonment through legal channels.”
“And she never came back?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t heard a word from her in all these years,” I answered. “Granted, I’ve moved, but with the internet in existence, it’s not that hard to find me if she had a mind to.”
“So, you just…kept the twins?”
“After two years, I filed to legally terminate all of Naomi’s parental rights to the twins.” I took another pull from my beer. “At that point, when I filed for full legal guardianship of the kids, paternity had to be established, and I pretended to be just as shocked as everyone else that the twins weren’t mine.”
“But your family knew, right?”
“My family knew everything right from the beginning,” I told her. “When I’d made the decision to keep the babies, I had called my mom, and she had raced right over to help me out. That first year could have been a lot tougher if not for my family, Lucius, and Phoebe. Especially, Phoebe. That woman had saved my life, though she denies it to this day.”
“So, what happened once it was found out that you weren’t the twins’ biological father?”
“Luckily, I’d had both my lawyer and child advocate on retainer, and with Naomi’s record of abandonment, the courts had allowed me to adopt the twins with no issue.”
“Oh, thank God,” she rushed out like she was completely invested in my story.
“Legally, emotionally, mentally, and every other kind of lly that you can think of, the twins are mine,” I told her. “Those are my children, and I love them as if they were my blood.”
Haven eyed me over her cup of tea. “But…?”
“The reason I’m so…irrational when it comes to them is because…one day, they’re going to learn the truth. One day, they’re going to learn what their mother did, and I just want to make sure that it doesn’t matter. I want them to be able to think about their lives and think…yeah, well, my mother might have abandoned me, but my father never did.”
“Oh, Roman…”
“I want to make sure that they never forget that I was always there when they needed me. Hell, even when they didn’t need me,” I chuckled humorlessly. “I want Naomi’s abandonment of them not to matter, though I know that it will. I know that, sooner or later, they’re going to ask about their mom, and I don’t want my answer to change them or their lives. I want to be enough. That’s why they’ve never spent the night with my parents or brother before. I didn’t want them feeling like…like they were a burden to me. I don’t ever want them feeling like I don’t want to be with them.”
Haven’s eyes were glistening with emotion. “I can understand that,” she replied softly.
“Every morning, I wake up with the fear that today might be the day that Naomi shows back up in their lives,” I told honestly. “And every night, I go to bed with the profound relief that it wasn’t.” The first tear finally fell down Haven’s cheek. “I’m telling you this for two reasons, Haven. First, if we do this, then I need you to be fully committed to my kids as I am. Even if we were to break up, you can’t just never see them again. You can’t abandon them.” More tears fell. “Second, you deserve to know the truth of the situation in case Naomi ever does try to come back into their lives. I don’t want you being blindsided, and I don’t want us starting out with this huge secret or whatever between us.”
Haven cleared her throat as she wiped her cheeks. “What would happen if Naomi did come back?”
“Any judge with a soft heart would probably buy her bullshit story and give her visitation. Regardless, I’ll spend every cent I have to prevent that,” I told her truthfully. “While I know it’s wrong, and I know the decision to know their mother should be theirs, I’ll never get over how she left them the way that she did. I’ll never forgive her, even if her selfish decision gave me the best gifts of my life.”
“You have to know that I absolutely adore your kids, Roman,” she said, but that wasn’t good enough for me.
“I need you to do more than adore them, Haven,” I told her. “I need you to commit to them. I need you committed to me, us, and them. They can’t be an option for you, and before you say anything, I know what I’m asking of you. I’m essentially asking you to be their family with no choice but to love and take care of them, and if you can’t do that, I understand. I’ll be…I’ll be upset at losing you before we’ve even had a chance to do this, but I’ll understand.”
Her hazel eyes were still glistening, but she wasn’t jumping up from the table and fleeing, either. Considering all that I’d just dumped on her lap, I was considering that a win. I knew that I was asking a lot of her, but it couldn’t be helped. If I wanted a healthy relationship with this woman, then I needed to be honest with her; I needed to show her just what all she would be signing up for.
After a heartbeat of silence, I watched Haven stand up from her chair, then make her way over towards me. I scooted my chair back from the table as soon as she approached, and I almost praised The Lord when Haven straddled my lap.
““I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to freak out,” she said, repeating my words back to me, eyeing me carefully.
“Okay…” I hedged. “What is it?”
“I’m pretty sure that I’m like ninety percent in love with you, Roman Scott,” she said as her arms wound around my neck. “I’m saving the other ten percent for my pride in case you don’t feel the same.”
My eyes closed as my head dropped back. I could feel myself laughing because Haven Oslind was like no other woman that I’d ever met. Her quirky personality was intoxicating, and while I had no doubt that we were going to have some serious fights in our future, I knew that this woman was going to keep me laughing through all the hard times. I also liked how she wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable when push came to shove.
Wrapping my arms around her lower back, I said, “Good, because I’m pretty sure I fell in love with you when your friend mentioned candles, crystals, and a spell book, and you didn’t even blink an eye.”
“You’ll love Shiloh and Morgan just as much as I do,” she promised. “They’re the best kinds of people.”
“And I can’t wait to introduce you to Lucius, Phoebe, Derek, and my parents,” I returned. “You have no idea how happy they’re going to be to meet you. My mother’s been worried that I’m going to end up alone because of my crazy.”
“What about the twins?” she asked. “Are we still taking it slow for them?”
“Since you’ll be sleeping in my bed tonight, I’d say no,” I smirked.
Haven grinned. “And here I didn’t take you for the cuddling type.”
Chapter 24
Haven~
“I wasn’t,” Roman admitted. “Then you and your puppies came along, and what do you know…here we are.”
“No longer worried about me ambushing you as soon as you walk in the door with complains and some genuine nagging?” I teased.
“Baby, I never thought I’d ever say this, but I actually want to hear you complaining, bitching, nagging, and busting my ass about shit that needs to be done around the house,” he said, and my heart swooned with his unromantic declaration of love.
“Oh, really?” I grinned.
“Yeah, really,” he replied seriously. “I want to do everything that you need me to do for you, Haven. I want to be whatever it is that you need me to be for you. When your friends are bitching about what horrible partners they have, I want you to feel lucky to have me. I want you running home and screwing my brains out because you’re so damn happy to be with me.”
“I’m not bending on the dirty laundry, Roman,” I told him. “I can take a lot, but not dirty clothes next to the damn hamper.”
Roman let out a genuine laugh, and holy fucking shit, the man was breathtaking when he was happy. Used to seeing him either scowling or serious, this Roman Scott was new to me, and talk about wanting to run home and screw his brains out.
I almost started fanning myself.
When those amber-colored eyes looked at me again, he said, “I’ll make sure to get the clothes in the hamper. I’ll even talk to the kids about it.”
My fingers started dancing across the back of his neck. “Leave the kids out of this,” I told him. “While I’m all about teaching them how to clean up after themselves, you are not going to use them just so that I can go easy on you.”
