Eden had nothing to say to that.
“I connected the dots,” he concluded.
Yep. Jasper was no dummy. She remembered that well.
She slowly leveled her head up and stared at him. She caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror up in the corner of the store: pale, eyes big and hunted. She herself looked like a shoplifter who’d just gotten caught.
Annelise not only had the chin dent. Annelise had his eyebrows, the way they sort of winged up at the end. And probably a thousand other subtle little things.
She said nothing, as the full import of all of this washed over her. As if she’d gone down in a dunking booth.
“So, I’m just going to come right out and ask. Eden... am I that kid’s father?”
She was pretty sure her expression already answered that question.
“Yes.”
Absolute and total silence reigned for a few seconds.
Then he pushed his hands back through his hair and sucked in a long, long breath.
She was surprised things didn’t fall out. A dime, or a gum wrapper. The kinds of things one found in sofa cushions. Because he still looked like a guy who’d partied hard the night before and fell asleep on the couch.
“Huh. Wow. Well.”
A long silence ensued while Jasper looked off into the middle distance pensively. He swallowed. Then he pressed his lips together.
“Do you need to sit down?” she asked solicitously. With her foot, she nudged a chair over toward him.
He shook his head.
“Do you need a... drink? I only have water,” she added hurriedly.
When she’d learned she was pregnant, it was also about the time Jasper was in the news for dating a British supermodel with whom he subsequently loudly, publicly, and drunkenly argued in an airport lounge, about, bystanders said, the fact that she preferred John Mayer’s last record to his.
“THATPRAT?” he’d shouted, waving his arms in an outraged inebriated fashion, like those inflatable men outside car dealerships.
It had become a meme.
He’d in fact been girlfriend-free for all of about five minutes after he left Hellcat Canyon.
Shortly after that he’d gone to rehab for some unspecified “dependency.”
His unspecified dependencies were something else she ought to learn about. For Annelise’s sake.
He shook his head again.
“Jasper...” she said carefully. “I still have to get these flowers in the van or they’ll wilt. This is my livelihood.”
“Eden... it’s just... why didn’t youtell...” he began. His volume escalated a little.
He caught himself.
“I did tell you,” she said instantly, evenly, with as little emotion as she could muster. “Or at least I did try to tell you. Multiple times. I managed to get through to your agent. Or one of them. You seem to have a slew of agents and managers of various kinds running interference for you. I was told very kindly that approximately twenty-five women a day claimed to be pregnant with your child. I left a message for you. When I didn’t hear back, I figured you just didn’t want to know. Which was actually fine with me. I was only fulfilling what I thought was my moral obligation. I couldn’t imagine the news would thrill you at that point in your career.”
Jasper was white about the mouth now. He didn’t dispute that last part.
“I swear to you I never got any of your messages. I did have a phalanx of people protecting me from other people back then. I guess I still do.”