Page 44 of Doctor Daddies

“Don’t you say his name,” he growls. “He—that boy has been fine without all of you for so long, and if you think I’m just going to stand aside and let you become part of his life, when you haven’t done a damn thing to earn it?—”

“You don’t get to make that call,” I tell him sharply. “That’s on Millie. I know you care about the kid, but that doesn’t mean you get to decide who can be in his life. Especially since we’re going to be fathering his siblings soon enough.”

That, at least, seems to silence Matt for a moment. It’s out there now, any plausible deniability we might have been clinging to entirely forgotten, but that’s how it has to be. We have hidden so much from him, and he’s right—we owe it to him to at least be honest after all these years.

“We’re going to be family, Matt,” I continue, softening my tone slightly in the hopes of getting through to him. “And I can tell how much you care about Lewis. You don’t want him to feel like he’s stuck in the middle of us, do you? You don’t want him?—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I want,” he snarls, his gaze locking onto mine with such brutal harshness it quiets me once more. “You lied to me. You left her to raise her child alone. And now, you’re using her body to get something you want, just throwing money at her like that will make all of this go away.”

He snorts, drawing his gaze to the door once more. “I don’t even know why the fuck I came down here,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t have given you a chance. I know who you are now. All of you.”

He looks between us again, and there’s such contempt in his gaze that I almost don’t recognize him. The entire time I’ve known Matt, he has been laid-back, happy-go-lucky, always the first one to crack a joke when he can sense one of us is feeling down and out. But the man who stands before me now is one who feels betrayal on a level deeper than anything I can wrap my head around. I can’t even imagine how much he hates us in this moment, and fuck, who could blame him?

He turns to the door and heads to the street outside. James makes a move to go after him, but I catch his arm before he can.

“Leave him,” I mutter, and James comes to a halt. For a moment, all of us just stand there, an eerie silence in the wake of all that chaos. Nobody knows what to say, what to do. Do we call Millie? Go after him? Try to fix this? Or will it just make him even more furious if we don’t let him walk away now that he’s done with us?

I don’t have a clue.

I look around the waiting room, remembering, all of a sudden, that there are other people in here.

“Sorry about the commotion,” I tell the two patients, lowering my head in apology. Looking over to Isla, I make my way over to the counter. “Could you tell security to get someone else on the door?” I ask her. “And make sure they review the CCTV footage. Don’t let that man in here again, alright?”

She nods, clearly too shocked to speak. Cole and James are still standing in the reception area, looking as though they have been flash-banged, eyes wide as they try to take it in.

“Cole, call Millie,” I instruct him, figuring that someone has to take control of this. “Make sure she knows what happened, he might try and confront her next. James…”

James looks up at me, his gaze distant.

“Cancel appointments for the rest of the day.” I sigh. “We need some time to calm this place down again.”

And with that, I head back to my office. Not like I’m going to be able to focus on work for the rest of the day, but I need to be alone right now.

Even if I know that Matt’s words will be ringing through my head all day long.

21

MILLIE

As soon asCole steps through the door, I sink into his arms, clinging to him for what feels like dear life.

“I’m so sorry,” I blurt out. “If I had known that he was going to go to you and make a scene, I would never have?—”

“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” he replies gruffly, squeezing me tight as he stands there in the doorway. For a moment, I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out the reality of everything that has happened, but I know, sure as hell, that it doesn’t work like that these days.

I got the call an hour or so ago, when Cole rang me up to let me know that Matt had turned up at the clinic. Drunk, he had berated all of them, revealed that I had told him who Lewis’s fathers were, and now it seems like I’ve shattered what little trust might have still existed between them.

“Yes, I do,” I breathe, as I pull back, closing the door behind him, thanking God that Lewis is at school for another couple of hours. “I just…I shouldn’t have spoken to him about that, not without running it by all of you first.”

“You couldn’t have known that was how he was going to react.”

“Yeah, but I should have been able to guess that he wouldn’t exactly take it well,” I point out. “I just thought…when he asked me about it outright, I didn’t have it in me to lie to him. I felt like, if I kept this from him and he found out sometime down the line, I would never be able to forgive myself.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Cole murmurs, rubbing the small of my back and leading me through to the kitchen to get me a glass of water. “You’re okay, Millie. He made the choice to come there and do that, not you.”

“Were there any patients there?”

He pauses for a moment as he fills up the glass. “A couple.”