by Katee Robert
Being a single mother had never been part of the vision she had for the future.
All at once, her determination to keep moving abandoned her, leaving her staring at the bathroom cabinet. It was like thousands of other bathroom cabinets out there, a light cedar color in a generic style. It was just so wrong—just like everything else about this situation. “How did this happen?”
“I’m sorry, darling. It’s my fault.” He crouched in front of her. “The condom…the sex…it was all me.”
That was just like Daniel to try to take all the responsibility—and the guilt—onto his shoulders alone. “You know, that determination to play the martyr and absolve me from guilt is really annoying.” She leaned her head against the wall. “Pretty sure I was there. Equally sure that I’d just switched birth controls and neither that nor the fact that you pulled a condom out of your wallet was enough to make me stop and use my common sense.”
“All the same—”
“No, Daniel. Not all the same. It took the two of us to get into this mess. I’m an adult, same as you, and I knew what the possible consequences were.” She just hadn’t cared, because being kissed by Daniel after all those years had been too good to stop. It had seemed like it was worth the risk at the time.
Now?
Now, she just didn’t know.
He offered her a hand. “We need to talk about this. Really talk.”
That’s what she was afraid of. She allowed him to pull her to her feet and shoved her hair out of her eyes. “We don’t need to talk. I already know how this conversation goes.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes.” She charged on, talking so fast her words spilled over each other. “I’m keeping the baby.”
He jerked back. “No shit. If anything else came out of your mouth, you were about to have a fight on your hands.”
She kept going, ignoring him. “You’re going to act all crazy and—”
“Here’s some crazy for you, darling.” He closed the distance between them, backing her against the wall. “That baby you’re carrying is mine.” He dropped his hand to her stomach, sliding beneath her shirt and splaying his fingers across her skin. “Mine. You made your choice when you came up here to take that test instead of doing it on your own in Dallas. You included me in this, so don’t go crying about how unfair it is that I have a fucking opinion. You’re having our baby, and you’re staying here in Devil’s Falls to do it.”
What the hell? “Staying—”
He kissed her, stealing her words and taking possession of her mouth as if every part of her really was his. It’s not. The token protest withered against the onslaught of sensation, the way his tongue stroked hers, igniting a need in her that she would have thought impossible considering the circumstances. He stroked her stomach, his thumb dipping beneath the waistband of her yoga pants to trail down her hip bone. She shivered, a moan slipping free.
Daniel twisted his wrist so he could slide his entire hand into her pants. He pushed a finger into her. The sensation made her moan again, and he ate the sound and then kissed around to her jaw. “You’re so fucking wet for me. You always were.” He pumped his finger in and out of her as much as he could. “Stay, darling. I’ll have you coming more times than you can count. On my hand. On my mouth. On my cock.”
Her entire body clenched at his words. It sounded so good, the temptation to let him make her feel good almost too much to resist. But if she let him win this one, she’d spend the next nine months—the next eighteen years—losing arguments. Not to mention her job—her life—was in Dallas. She’d been willing to make her plans around Daniel once before, and he’d dropped her like a bad habit the first time things went truly bad.
She couldn’t go through that again.
It was hard to reach down and grab his wrist, harder than she could have imagined. “No.”
Instantly, he pulled his hand out of her pants, though he didn’t back up. “The offer stands.”
She’d just bet it did. Hope put her hands on his chest and gently pushed him back a step. “You can’t sex me up to get your way. That’s not how this works.”
“Is that what you think I was doing?”
Damn, but he could play innocent entirely too well—that was, if she was inclined to forget what he’d just been whispering in her ear. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes, Daniel, that’s exactly what you were doing. It’s a dirty negotiation tactic if I ever saw one.”
He grinned, the expression so unexpected, she was half amazed that her panties didn’t hit the ground. “Can’t blame me for trying.” He raised his finger to his lips—the same finger that’d been inside her—and sucked it into his mouth, his gaze never leaving her face. He released it so suddenly, her knees actually went weak. “You’ll change your mind.”
“No, I won’t.” I might. Hope shook her head. No, I won’t. Sex with Daniel was world ending, which was the damn point—she liked her world exactly the way it was. It would change now, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that, but she could at least try to maintain control in the midst of all the insanity.
Which meant she couldn’t let him have the upper hand. Not now. Not ever again.
She edged past him, well aware that he let her walk out of the room when all he had to do was kiss her again to crumble her admittedly pathetic protestation. She made her way down the hall and into the kitchen, stopping cold at what she saw there. Last night she’d been so distracted by acting like a crazy person that she hadn’t really stopped to check out his place. Part of her had sort of just assumed that it was, she didn’t know, familiar.
It wasn’t.
She looked around the kitchen that could have been in any cookie-cutter house around the country. There was nothing wrong with it, at least until she realized it was in Daniel’s house. She moved around the breakfast bar, eyeing the empty counters, and opened a cupboard. There were two mason jar glasses in it, a stack of paper plates, and nothing else. She turned when he entered the room. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke?”
“This.” She motioned at everything. “This isn’t your kitchen. It can’t be.” It was just too soulless.
“It’s mine.” He opened the fridge and winced, a reaction she shared when she saw how empty it was.
“But…how do you cook here with none of your old stuff?” Even right out of high school, he’d spent a good portion of his checks on fancy knives and food they’d had to drive into Pecos to get because the market in Devil’s Falls didn’t carry specialty items. Her favorite nights had been when they’d holed up in the little house he’d shared with his friends and he’d cooked for all of them. With his current setup, she doubted he could put together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let alone anything like the complicated dishes he’d loved.
He shut the fridge door. “I don’t cook anymore.”
That shocked her almost more than anything else that had happened since she woke up. Daniel didn’t cook? It struck her that as well as she used to know the boy she’d dated, she didn’t know a damn thing about the man standing in front of her.
And she was going to have his baby.
Chapter Seven
Daniel didn’t like the way Hope was looking at him—as if he was broken. As if she saw through all the walls he’d built up around himself since that night thirteen years ago, and she knew that he wasn’t anywhere near as okay as he liked everyone to think.
It set his teeth on edge. He didn’t want pity from anyone—least of all from her.
To get away from the knowledge in her dark eyes, he’d do damn near anything. So he turned the tables. “We need to talk about the next nine months.” And the next eighteen years. But he knew her well enough—or at least he used to—to know that coming at her with the rest of their lives on the table was a surefire way to get her to dig in her heels and shoot him down flat.
He had no intention of rolling over and playing dead for her, but he’d let her think he was willing to settle for her sticking around for pregnancy and ease her into the idea of staying here for the long term.
Yeah, she had her job, and a life in Dallas that didn’t include him or Devil’s Falls, but he didn’t much like the idea of her raising their kid hours away. The best he could hope for in that situation was every other weekend. Fuck that. Hope would stay here. He just had to figure out how the hell he was going to convince her of that.
He was reaching, and he damn well knew it. Daniel grabbed the carton of milk out of the fridge and mentally cursed. It had expired over a month ago. If she’d been freaking out in Dallas as much as she was last night and this morning, she hadn’t been eating or taking care of herself. In order to convince her to stay, he had to prove he still knew how to do that.
So far, he was batting a thousand.
He dumped the milk into the sink and rinsed the carton out. As long as he wasn’t looking directly at her, he could keep his cool. In theory. “How do you see this working?”
There, that was as nonthreatening as it could get.
Hope crossed her arms over her chest and raised her chin like she was stepping into the ring. “I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. Devil’s Falls is my past, and I’m keeping it that way. I have a life in Dallas, Daniel. A good one. This wasn’t part of the plan, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to drop everything to run back here and play little wife to you so that you can feel like you’re fulfilling your duties. I’m not a duty, and neither is this baby. We both deserve better than that.”
He couldn’t argue that logic, but the truth was that it was his duty to do right by both of them. Daniel considered her. There had to be something he could say to get her to stop arguing long enough to see that this was the only way. “Where are your parents living these days?”
“San Antonio.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
That’s it. That’s the pressure point to push.
He had her, she just didn’t know it yet. “It sounds like you have shit for a support system in Dallas.”
“I have friends.” From the defensive tone, she knew exactly where he was going with this.
“None of them that were good enough friends to be there for you when you took that test.” Not that he was complaining on that note. She very well could have taken the test and moved on with her life in Dallas, and he never would have known the difference. The thought left him cold. He braced his hands on the breakfast bar and leaned forward. “Instead, you drove seven hours across the fucking state to my house to take it. Because you had no one else.”
Hope sucked in a breath. “That’s not fair. Unlike you, I wasn’t going to hide from something that scared me. Yes, I came back here—back to you—to take the test, but it’s only for the weekend. I’m going home tomorrow.”
He ignored that, ignored the clock that instantly sprang into being, counting down until she walked out of his life again. If he thought too hard about it, he’d drive himself batshit crazy. “My point is that Devil’s Falls has a built-in support system. Your parents are within easy drivable distance. I’m five minutes from my parents’ place, and don’t even get me started on my cousins.” Every single one of them would lose their minds when they found out Hope was pregnant. She’d be so damn taken care of, she wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
A part of him didn’t want to tell anyone, solely so he could be the one seeing to her every need.
Rein it in.
Easier said than done. There was nothing but stubbornness on Hope’s face, so he pressed his point. “What happens if you fall? Or there are complications with the baby? Are you going to call a fucking cab to come get you and then sit in Dallas traffic on the way to the hospital? If you’re here, Doc Jenkins has no problem making house calls, and he’s the same fucking doctor who delivered you, so don’t tell me that some fancy city doctor is going to be better. They won’t. They don’t know you. Devil’s Falls does.”
He did.
He waited while she worked it out, her dark eyes unreadable. Finally, Hope turned away. “I understand what you’re saying, but you’re wrong. Even if you weren’t—which you are—you’re still doing this for the wrong reasons, Daniel. You know it, and I know it.”
Wanting to fix things wasn’t the wrong reason. She might not agree with him, but that was just the way it was. All he knew was that she had to be here, to be where he could keep an eye on her and keep her safe as she got farther along in her pregnancy. “Stay.” He didn’t care if he had to move heaven and hell and everything in between, he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight any more than necessary. His theoretical comments weren’t all that theoretical. She might be trying to cover it up, but he could see that she favored her injured leg, and that meant her chances of falling were higher than average, especially once she started getting big.
Daniel went still, the image of Hope with a large stomach filling his head. Seeing her big with his baby.
Fuck, I like that picture.
Right now, the most important thing was getting her to agree to stay in town at all. From there, he’d work on getting her into his home. He looked around. He didn’t even know if he could call this house a home. It had never bothered him before—it was a place that kept the heat out in the summer and the cold out in the winter and the critters out while he slept. It had never felt lacking until now, with the woman he’d always thought he’d end up with standing there, looking as out of place as an angel in a dive bar.
It might not be the house he’d always promised that he’d build her, but he could spiff this place up into something better than it currently was.
He just needed her to agree to stay. “Give us a chance to iron this out—a couple days. Stay through the week, and then we’ll talk.”
Her mouth dropped open. “What are you going to do, lock me up in the basement until I agree with you?”
That didn’t sound like too terrible a plan, but he had a better idea. Daniel stalked toward her, knowing he was out of control and not caring. “I might do that. Or I might go over the list of perks again.” He braced his hands on the counter on either side of her.
Her gaze rested on his mouth. “Your perks sound a whole lot like strings attached.”
“Aw, darling, they might be exactly that.” He leaned in, not quite touching her, but close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body and the way her breath shook. “But I can guarantee that you won’t be worried about anything but the way my cock feels inside you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “When did you get so damn pushy?”
He knew she was constantly doing a before and after comparison of him. Hell, he didn’t even blame her. He was doing the same damn thing. When he was twenty-one, he’d been happy and carefree and so full of life it actually hurt to look back on that time. Now? Now he was half the man he used to be, and he wasn’t about to start changing. He didn’t deserve happiness, and he sure as fuck didn’t deserve Hope, but if the universe was stupid enough to give him another shot with her, he wasn’t a good enough man to walk away.
Deserving her or not, Hope was his. She just had to come to terms with it.
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, letting his fingers linger there. Everything else had changed, but he still knew exactly how to touch her to elicit a response. “When I find something worth fighting for.”
“That’s your problem.” She turned and looked him directly in the eye. “I was always worth fighting for.”
He went still, the truth of her statement like a kick to the chest. “It wasn’t right back then.”
“Or maybe you were just too focused on sinking yourself into misery as fast as you could to realize the good you still had in your life.” She saw too much. She always had. Back when she’d been a teenager, she’d been kind enough to back off
before she revealed the fault line inside a person and forced them to face it. Apparently she wasn’t too kind anymore. Hope pressed her lips into an unforgiving line—as unforgiving as the look in her eye. “John died in that car crash—not me. Except you didn’t seem to understand that, because you were mourning my freaking leg as if that was all I was worth to you. A whole body.” She pushed against his chest, not hard enough to move him, but hard enough to prove her point. “I hated you for a really long time.”
“I deserved your hate.” It was the simple truth. He’d taken everything from her. He’d hated himself for that, so it only made sense that she’d feel the same way.
Hope shook her head. “You’re as much an idiot now as you were then.”
And then she kissed him.
It caught him a little off guard—he hadn’t expected her to be the one to make the first move, especially after the way the scene in the bathroom had gone down—but Daniel wasted no time taking control. He kissed down her neck, sliding his hands beneath her shirt and skating them up her body to cup her breasts. They filled his palms, familiar and yet not, all at the same time. He cursed. “Darling, the things you do to me.” He nipped her collarbone. “I’m going to taste you, so if you’re going to change your mind, now’s the time to do it.”
Her only response was to shove her yoga pants down to her knees.
He lifted her onto the counter and disentangled her right leg from the pants so he could spread her fully. He stroked her thighs, pausing when his fingers met the scar. It brought up so many conflicting feelings in him. It was his fault that she had the damn thing, but that didn’t mean he thought of her as less, the way she seemed to think. She was as beautiful now as she’d been at eighteen, and more confident despite her injury. Or maybe because of it. He had no idea.
All he knew was that at some point he was going to have to get up close and personal with her healed injury, and he was going to have to tread very, very carefully to avoid burning what was left of the bridge between him and Hope.