Holden's Resurrection (Gemini Group Book 6)

my daughter wasn’t. She was clean and bright and I wouldn’t let him infect her.
“Get your hands off me.” I jerked free and tromped up the stairs, resigning myself to the fact that if Holden wanted to have this particular talk, I wasn’t going to be able to stop him.
However, I could control the conversation.
When we both made it into the living room I stopped, gathered my thoughts, and turned to face him. Then I let ‘er rip. I should’ve taken more than a moment to think about what I wanted to say. I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get the better of me. I shouldn’t have done what I always did.
Unfortunately, no matter how badly I tried to forget what Holden did—tried to stop loving him, and move on—I couldn’t.
“You know, you rolled out of our bed one morning and left me without an explanation. Yet, I was still stupid enough to let you come home, have sex with me, and spend the night holding me just to have you roll out and leave again. Over and over I let this happen, hoping—no, praying—you’d tell me what was wrong. That you’d let me help you. But you never did. Then when I begged you to stay, to stop leaving, to fix us, you told me I’d never see you again. You told me to forget you. And for days, I called you and fucking begged you to talk to me. You never, not one time, picked up or called me back. You did all of that and I still loved you. God, I’m stupid. Stupid and clueless.”
“Leigh-Leigh—”
“No, Holden. Hell no. Fuck no. I’ve spent ten years loving you. You don’t get anything else from me. Nothing. I don’t care why you’re here, what you need to talk to me about. You’ve ceased to exist for me and for Faith. You don’t get her. You don’t get to talk about her. You don’t deserve to know about her.”
Holden flinched and nodded. “You’re right. I don’t deserve her. Maybe if I hadn’t been a dick when you told me, we could’ve worked things out. But I’d lost everything—”
“You lost everything?” I cut him off. “You? Are you fucking kidding, Holden? I was pregnant, scared, and you turned…me…away.”
“I saw you with him!” Holden shouted. “I fucking saw you take him back to our house. You fucked him in our bed. Ours, Leigh-Leigh.” His deep voice had taken on a hard edge—fury had taken hold, making it rumble as he finished. “I sat outside and watched that motherfucker leave my house after fucking my woman.”
Fire hit my chest and my lungs singed as I inhaled.
“Oh, no, you’re not putting that on me. I’m done feeling guilty. I’m done wearing the big, huge scarlet letter, everyone thinking I did you wrong. The day you left me, that apartment stopped being our home. When you refused to tell me what was wrong, that bed stopped being yours. I was at that stupid bar because I was heartbroken. I was lost. I was sad. And I thought you were gone forever. I had way too much to drink and did something I’m not proud of. But I got Faith out of it so you’ll never hear me apologize.”
“You got everything you wanted that night and I lost the woman I loved forever.”
My vision blurred as every cell in my body turned to ice.
“Fuck you. You threw me away long before that night.”
“She’s not mine,” Holden whispered and I froze. “I wanted her to be. I wish she was. Every fucking night I go to bed and wonder what our lives would be like if she was. I wonder if she’d have brothers and sisters. I wonder what kind of dad I would’ve been. I wonder what it would feel like to hold my child, rock her to sleep, watch you love our child. But none of that matters because she’s not mine.”
“There you go, Holden, denying she could be yours. But you’re right. The only thing that matters right now is when I tracked you down and told you I was pregnant, you rejected us and told me to go find Paul and never bother you again. Which was what I did. And you know the shittiest part about that? Paul, a man who was merely a friend, not the man I loved and spent two years living with was excited I was pregnant. Over the moon happy. He knew the truth. I never lied to him. Yet, he still, claimed my child even though there was a possibility it wasn’t his. He insisted we get married.” A foreboding wave of violence was pulsing from Holden. I felt the cold seep into my bones but I ignored it and went on. “But, the man I loved, the man I wanted to marry, have a family with, spend my life with, turned me away.”
“She can’t be mine because I can’t have fucking kids, Charleigh.”
My world tilted and my legs turned to jelly. Holden couldn’t have kids?
But before I could recover from his soul-crushing blow, he angrily continued, “I bet the asshole couldn’t wait to marry you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means from the moment he met you, he was gagging to get in there. Everyone but you saw it.”
Why were we talking about Paul when he’d just dropped a life-shattering bomb?
“Let’s talk about—"
“No, Leigh-Leigh, he wasn’t a friend. Not to me, not to you. On more than one occasion, I had to have words with him, to tell him to keep his distance.”
“What?”
Paul had been friendly. He was always hugging, wrapping his arm around someone’s shoulder. He’d been a little touchier than I normally would’ve liked and had zero sense of personal space. But that didn’t mean…
“And not just me. Jameson straight out told him if he didn’t stop touching you, he’d break his hands.”
“What?”
I didn’t want to discuss Paul, I wanted to know why he thought he couldn’t have children. But he seemed hellbent on slandering my