by Zoe York
He raised his hands. “I know, not my place. I just don’t like to see you like this.”
She picked up her tea and paced towards the couch. What a night of rocky feelings.
He followed, not sure what else to say.
“He’s always had a way of running roughshod over boundaries,” she said. “And I let him get into my head when I knew better. He’s not going to ghost completely, I don’t think, but I need to be more cautious about trusting him to commit to a schedule. And I shouldn’t make plans based on that promise. Lesson learned.”
“This was next weekend?”
“Yeah. And I agreed to cover three shifts at Bailey’s, which would have gone a long way to pay for the tiling of the bathroom.”
“I’m sorry.” Matt scrubbed his hand over his face. “Can I help?”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing to be done. I’ll call Malcolm and apologize. I should never have agreed to take the work.”
But he knew she needed the money, and not just for renos. She didn’t make much at the lumber yard, and paying for childcare out of her earnings had to be making a big dent. Working when David had Emily would have helped her out a lot. “I could take care of her.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I’m offering. You’re not asking. You just need to say yes—if you’re comfortable with it. And if you aren’t, that’s okay, too.”
Her mouth flapped open, then shut. “You aren’t working that weekend?”
“I don’t think so, and I can probably trade the shifts if I am.” He grinned. “It may mean I need to show up the night before and fall exhausted into your bed.”
She gave him a weak laugh. “Right.”
“But I can sleep on the couch. I’ll make a big production of it.” So far, Emily hadn’t noticed that he was there each night, and he was gone before she woke up in the morning.
Natasha frowned as she searched his face. “She might need cuddles at night.”
“I can cuddle. I can also make secret midnight hot chocolate—with teeth brushing afterward, of course—and read endless stories.”
“This is a huge favour.”
It didn’t feel that way to him. “It’s not. You need help. I love you. I’m here in whatever capacity you need me. It’s the same thing any friend or your sister would offer.”
She cut him off with a kiss, first a gentle brush of her lips against his, then when he tugged on her hands, she climbed into his lap. More kisses, always more. Never enough.
“You can trust me with her,” he whispered against her mouth.
“I know.”
“We’ll have fun.”
“It’ll just be this once.”
“It doesn’t need to be.” He wanted to be a part of their lives. He wanted to be someone she could lean on, could depend on to help her out. And if she needed to work more to get her dreams done, he wanted to be the guy she could trust to always be there to read stories to her daughter.
She leaned into him, giving him her weight. It felt like a gift.
Let me be your rock, he thought, and not for the first time. But it was the first time he’d felt like that when out-of-sorts himself, and it grounded him. “I’m yours,” he said gruffly. “To lean on and ask favours of and share Timbits with.”
“They’re all the way over there.” She nodded toward the front door.
“I’ll get them for you.” He shifted out from beneath her and fetched the treats. “Chocolate?”
She shook her head. “Honey dip.”
He found one and fed it to her. She offered him a chocolate one and he gobbled it up, licking the icing off her fingertips, too.
“It’s hard for me to lean on anyone, you know,” she whispered softly.
“I do know.” He stretched his arm out across the back of the sofa. “Same for me. We’re going to have to figure this out together, because I want to be there for you.”
“Same,” she murmured.
He ate another donut hole. “I love you,” he said quietly as she picked another Timbit for herself. “I don’t know what I thought love would look like if I ever stumbled into it, but it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t tea and donuts and confessing frustration at the end of a long day. And that makes me a total idiot, because this is actually amazing.”
“Stress eating is amazing?”
“Reward eating,” he corrected. “Because you’re handling stress like a rockstar, and I came here instead of driving home tonight, where I’d have felt like a caged bear and had no idea why. But you saw something—”
“You were white as a ghost,” she said softly.
“See? I didn’t know.”
“It’s nice to have someone to catch you,” she breathed as she nestled in tight. “I’d written that off as an option for myself.”
“I’d never even put it on the options list.”
“We are quite the dysfunctional pair, then.” She laughed and nudged him. “Shall we go to bed?”
Yeah, this was love. And it was actually amazing.
At the end of the following week, Matt arrived at the Kingsley residence at eight in the morning, following his shift. He had breakfast with Emily, who thought it was hilarious that was actually his dinner. Then he crawled into Natasha’s bed—alone—and passed out for seven hours.
It was the longest stretch of daytime sleep he’d had in a year.
It felt glorious.
When he woke up, the room was pitch black. He fumbled for his phone and checked the time, but he still had an hour before Natasha had to leave for her Friday night shift at Bailey’s.
He ground the heel of his hand into his eye as he woke the rest of the way up.
She’d bought blackout curtains. That’s what was different. He hadn’t noticed when he’d fallen asleep, so maybe she came in and closed them after he was out.
His mouth tasted like an animal had died in it, so he got up and used the washroom. His overnight bag was downstairs, but he didn’t need it—he had the purple toothbrush she’d given him that first time. She’d put it in a cup in the medicine cabinet, and he’d been using it for weeks now. Heading into months, really. And he liked that.
Downstairs, he found Emily playing with her ponies on the couch. “Good afternoon,” he said.
She laughed. “Good morning, you mean.”
“It is my morning, yep.”
“Mommy’s making you soup for breakfast,” she said, giggling again.
“Is she?” He turned toward the kitchen, where he could see the edge of Natasha’s body swaying in front of the stove. “I’ll go help her.”
She was listening to music turned down low, and she glanced over her shoulder at him as he approached. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a baby. Did you buy blackout curtains just for me?”
She blushed. “It was the least I could do since you agreed to watch Emily this weekend.”
A purple toothbrush, a pair of curtains. It wasn’t much, but it felt like everything. “I really appreciate that. It was…unexpected. I thought I’d slept really well because I was in your bed, surrounded by your scent. But maybe it was the curtains.”
“I like the more romantic reason better,” she whispered.
He kissed her quickly. “The curtains? That’s true romance. That right there is why I love you.”
“Good, because I’m making you really cheap tomato soup for dinner, so…”
He blew a raspberry on her neck. “I love that, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
One of the givens of living in rural Ontario was how far everything was from everything else. This rarely bothered Natasha. She loved her Jeep and enjoyed cranking up the radio.
Her drive to Bailey’s had been lovely. She’d grabbed a coffee to go and watched the sun set as she’d headed southwest to Port Elgin. But now that it was the middle of the night and she was exhausted, the drive back seemed endless and horrid and good Lord she didn’t want to repeat it tomorrow night.
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This was her last weekend of picking up bartending shifts. It had to be. She needed to get her ass in gear with the apartment listing and sell the shit out of it to people from Toronto who would pay top dollar for a hipster weekend getaway on the edge of pristine wilderness.
When she finally got home, Matt was waiting for her. She’d texted when she’d left the bar, and he’d been busy since then.
“I ran you a bath,” he said as he took her coat. “Do you want anything to eat before I tuck you into bed?”
She shook her head. “But maybe check on me to make sure I don’t fall asleep in the tub.”
He laughed.
She wasn’t kidding, and maybe he picked up on that, because he followed her upstairs, collecting each piece of discarded clothing as she stripped down. He disappeared momentarily with the pile, and came back with a towel.
“Gold star service tonight,” she observed.
He sat on the closed toilet seat and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You had a long night. A bit of tender care is deserved.”
“You were on kid duty,” she protested.
“Easy peasy. We played a bit, watched some videos on my phone—I apologize in advance for her new interest in tobogganing, I may have started a thing—and then it was story time.”
“Whoa, go back to the tobogganing. What happened?”
“I showed her some videos I took of the snow mountain a couple of Army guys made in the park in Pine Harbour. We plow the snow from the parking lot into the grassy area, and then…” He grinned. “We sculpt some pretty good slide runs out of it.”
Tasha wasn’t sure how she felt about Emily swooshing down an icy slide run. “Interesting.”
“I wouldn’t suggest taking her this year. But next, maybe. We’d get her a helmet.”
And full body armour. “Okay.”
His smile turned bashful. “There weren’t any kids in the video. It was just the guys from when we did it last year.”
“Have you done it yet this year?”
“They did. I was, uh, busy.”
“Here?”
“Working, probably. And if I was hanging out here, I promise that is a thousand percent where I’d rather be. Not plowing snow into a sledding hill for other people’s kids.”
She sank under the bubbles. But she had him take care of her kid tonight. Wasn’t that kind of the same thing?
When she pushed herself back up, her head breaking through the warm water, he was looking at her.
“What?”
“This—you, Emily—is better than anything. This is what I want. I had a really good time with her tonight, and I’m glad I get to spend the entire weekend with her. With you both. Besides, I get rave reviews for my storytelling skills, which is good for the ego.”
That reminded her… “Oh yeah, apparently I read the troll’s voice wrong in her favourite book?” She flicked bubbles at him. “You set a high storytelling bar.”
“You can’t pin that on me, little girl,” he growled the exact line she was talking about, and she burst into a peal of laughter.
“That’s pretty good. I don’t do it anything like that.”
“What do you do?”
“You can’t pin that on me, little girl,” she said, deepening her voice a register.
Nope. Not even close. “That’s generic bad guy. You need to add some moss and grit. You live under a bridge, come on.”
She tried again and got through three words before dissolving into giggles.
Matt looked pleased with himself. “It’s my high school drama career finally paying off.”
“You did drama?”
“Of course. Theatre girls were easy.” He covered his head as she flicked more bubbles at him, his entire body shaking as he joined her laughing.
“I was a jock in high school. Track and field, volleyball, basketball. I kind of expected the same of you.”
“Nope.” His eyes darkened as she stood up, water sluicing over her breasts and down her legs. “I would have been if I’d have gone to the same school as you, though.”
He held up the towel and she stepped onto the mat, letting him wrap her in the terrycloth.
She yawned.
“Okay, my sexy volleyball player, it’s time for bed.”
She didn’t bother to protest.
In her room, she pulled on sweatpants and a t-shirt, then crawled into bed and collapsed against his inviting form. “Don’t let me sleep in, though,” she said softly as her eyes drifted shut. “I have a lot to do tomorrow.”
“What’s left on your list? Can I help with something?”
She mumbled something incoherent even to herself into his armpit, so she rolled onto her back and tried again. “Furniture shopping,” she said with a sigh. A mental image of her shopping list swam before her eyes. “I need a funky couch, a bookcase, and a nice set of bedroom furniture.”
“We could go out together, take Emily, make it fun.”
“The problem is I don’t even know where to go. There’s a really specific look that works for these short-term rental sites. Funky, modern, bold. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find what I need unless I take a trip into the city.” Which would take more time and probably more money than she wanted to spend.
Matt was quiet for a moment. “How modern?”
“Not cold. It has to be warm. Clean lines, wood.”
“Something like my stuff?”
She thought about that. Not his man-cave-esque couch, but his bedroom furniture was great. “Yeah. I like your bed. Where did you get it?”
“Uh…” He scooted down a bit so they were eye level to each other. “I ordered it online. But I was thinking you could…borrow it.”
“What?”
“If for no other reason than you’d have furniture in the unit tomorrow night.”
“Oh.”
“Would that help?” He searched her face, his gaze careful. “I mean, there are other reasons, too.”
Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself up. She was wide awake now. Both of them sat cross-legged on her bed, neither of them speaking.
It was not a simple offer. If Matt brought his bed over to her place, he wouldn’t have one at his place. “Borrowing” something would be tangling them together further, and de-tangling that at the end of the usage period would hurt.
Unless there wouldn’t be a de-tangling.
He scrubbed his hand over his jaw and gave her a sheepish look. “Is this the wrong time for this?”
She glanced at the clock. “Nah. All reckless relationship conversations should happen at two in the morning. What could go wrong?”
“You could tell me that you don’t want my stuff in your house.” Zing.
She wasn’t going to do that, though. “Your pants are currently on my floor,” she whispered. “I like your stuff.”
“If my furniture is in the apartment behind your house, I won’t really have a bed to sleep on at my place.”
“You sleep here a lot as it is.”
“Because I like sleeping with you. And you bought me blackout curtains, which I don’t want to be too presumptuous about the meaning of, but—”
“Presume.” She grabbed his hand. “Maybe it’s time to sleep in and not worry about crawling out at dawn before Emily wakes up. It’s not like she’s old enough to understand what you sleeping over means.”
“I want to help here. With the apartments and childcare and cooking dinner. Something that you brought up at Christmas has been on my mind. About having kids, and I want to set the record completely straight on that point.”
She sank back on her heels, her eyes widening.
He leaned in, his gaze burning. “Tell me if you don’t want me to be a permanent part of your life. That’s okay, of course it is. But if you wonder if I dream of a future with you, I can tell you all about that.”
“Tell me.” Two words on a breath. Another one. “Please.” Her heart pounded in her chest, sleep now the last thing on her m
ind.
“You want to know if I want babies?” Matt took both of her hands in his. “I want a daughter. I want bobbing curls and fierce questions. I want to be a man she can go to when she has a scraped knee, or nightmares, or a fabulous story to tell. I would happily make her a big sister as many times over as her mother wanted, or never at all if that was how it worked out. I want to be a dad so much it hurts, Natasha, and that started the day I met Emily. I want to be one of her dads. I don’t care about hypothetical babies, but I’d cut off my right arm for your daughter.”
“She loves you,” Tasha whispered. “So much.”
“I love her too,” he said gruffly. “With my whole heart. It’s layered right on top of the complicated love I have for you.”
“Complicated?”
“Do you know how hard it is to want to give you the moon, and not be able to? To have to hold back because I know you’re not ready? I want to be everything you need. I want to be a part of this. Share this burden. I want to be your best friend. I want to be your lover. I want to be your husband, someday, when you’re ready.”
“I’ll be ready soon.”
“Because I know it’ll take time—” His mouth dropped open, and his eyes went wide. “What?”
“I love you. I’m terrified, but I love you with my whole heart.”
He tumbled her backwards in a wild tackle that matched her wild heart, then kissed her fiercely. When he pulled back, his mouth was wet and his eyes so bright she thought they might catch fire. “Excellent. Stay here.”
“Matt—”
He pressed his finger to her lips. “Stay. Here. Please?”
She nodded mutely and he kissed her quickly again before dashing off the bed and out the door. His footsteps were heavy on the stairs, then silence for a minute.
More footsteps, and then he was back on top of her, his face pink with excitement. “Hi,” he said, his grin goofy and sexy at the same time.
“Hi.” She laughed.
He crowded against her, urging her arms up around his neck, and he kissed her. The familiar hunger was tinged with something new. Relief, maybe. She certainly felt that. Delight that they were finally on the same page, too.
But she tasted something else in his kiss. Not caution. Something else like that, though. Against her cheek, his hand trembled.