This Man Confessed by Jodi Ellen Malpas Page B

“What’s going on, Kate?”
    She flops back irritably. “Nothing.”
    “Oh, you make me mad,” I spit out. “Start talking, Matthews.”
    She bursts into tears. I’m so relieved. I was on the cusp of slapping her for being so tenacious, but now my arm is around her and she’s sobbing into my chest. I don’t know about Kate, but I feel so much better for this. She does care.
    I try to soothe her. “Let’s start with Sam.”
    “I told you, it was only meant to be fun.” Her words jerk with her fitful breathing.
    “Was?” I ask. “So it’s more than fun?”
    “Yes…no…I don’t know!” She sounds so confused, just like me.
    “I knew this would happen with Dan arriving.” I sigh. If I was talking to my brother, I’d be shouting down the phone at him. “Kate, you need to remember every reason why you and Dan called it quits.”
    “I know. We’re so bad for each other, but we connect, Ava. When we’re together, we connect so well.”
    “You mean the sex.” I wince and screw my face up a little. I can’t think of my brother like that.
    “Yes, but everything else fails so horribly.”
    “It does,” I agree. I’ve witnessed the violent rows, the incessant need to rile each other, and the unhealthy flow of their doomed relationship. They had no respect for each other—not mentally or physically. It was all just about the sex. At the time, I ignored it all, simply because the thought of my best friend and my brother being in love was so ideal. That was the problem, though. They weren’t in love. It was just lust.
    She shifts in my embrace and sits up, taking a few calming breaths. “I hate men,” she declares.
    “You shouldn’t, especially when there’s one who obviously thinks the world of you.”
    She looks at me curiously. “Sam?”
    I almost slap her for her blindness. “Yes, Sam.”
    “Ava.” She laughs. “Sam doesn’t think the world of me. I make the world move for him, that’s all—in the bedroom.”
    “You mean you connect so well?” I raise my eyebrows at her. “Except with Sam, you also get the mental connection.”
    She scowls at me. She knows I’m right. “It was just fun.”
    It’s me who flops back on the couch in irritation this time. “You’re unbelievable.”
    “No, I’m a realist,” she argues. “It was sex.”
    “So why the hell were you blubbering like a baby?”
    “I don’t know.” She stands up. “I feel like shit. It gets the emotions going. You want tea?”
    “Yes,” I huff, standing to join her before following her into the kitchen.
    She reaches up to the cupboard and grabs a couple of mugs. “Why are you here, anyway?”
    The question makes me falter midlowering of my butt to the chair. Should I tell her? A brush-off here is not going to suffice, but she openly admits to her fondness of Jesse, and this could change her opinion dramatically. Even though I’m seething with anger at him, I hate divulging any information that’ll have my loved ones questioning him. And questioning me, for that matter. Questioning my sanity.
    I decide that I do need my best friend on this. I bite the bullet. “You know my pills that mysteriously kept disappearing?”
    She turns and frowns before stuffing a teabag in each of the mugs. “Yes, you and your ridiculously unorganized life.”
    “Hmm, that’s what I thought.” I stare at her back, waiting for her to click, but she’s happily topping up the mugs with water, and then milk. “At first, anyway.”
    She stirs the tea and brings it over to the table, plunking herself down into one of the mismatching chairs. “At first?” Her confused face tells me that she really isn’t copping on. Maybe it’s the hangover.
    “Jesse has been taking them.” I blurt it out quickly, before I can change my mind.
    Now her confused face is frowning heavily over the rim of her mug. “He what?”
    “He’s been taking my pills. He wants me pregnant.”
    Eyes wide and with a slightly gaped jaw, she puts her mug down