Embracing Her Ever After: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Book 5)

by Brenna Jacobs

  She only broke for lunch, when his mom would meet them in the lobby so Tessa could give Calvin his lunch bottle, then after the baby was fully fed, burped, and changed, he and Tessa would return to the lab, where she only stopped again in the late afternoon for a FaceTime check-in on her nephew.

  After work, they spent far more time at Tessa’s place than his own, with his mom tutoring Tessa on how to navigate the CPS system when she was ready and helping her prep for the CPS home visits once she’d decided to make things legal.

  As sexy as he found Tessa’s total command of the lab and the project at work, it was her awkwardness with Calvin that really got to him. She was so clearly out of her depth but so willing to learn and try, determined even when she looked overwhelmed, like the night his mom had shown Tessa how to trim Calvin’s fingernails. Tessa had done it, hands trembling, lips pressed tight, until his scratchy baby nails were safely clipped, and Tessa swooped him up to drop kisses of relief all over his fuzzy head.

  Ethan had wanted to do the exact same thing to her. Except kiss her soft, full lips . . .

  Oh, man. He was both more resentful and thankful every day for their invisible line, and every time he was sure this was the time he couldn’t resist reaching out and hauling her in to taste and explore her just one more time, he’d glance at her coffee table and then think hard about invisible lines and computational geometry proofs instead.

  Sometimes he caught his mom watching him watch Tessa, a small smile playing around her mouth. “You thinking of staying?” she asked him one night after Calvin had fallen asleep and Tessa had looked ready to topple after him.

  They were walking back to his place, and he glanced at her in surprise. “No. The demo is in five days, and then I fly out that Friday. For my dream job.” He said it so forcefully that he wondered who he was trying to convince.

  “And then what?” his mom countered. “You marry some Swiss woman and I get boxes full of Ricola every Christmas but never see my grandbabies?”

  “You’re being dramatic.”

  “I don’t like Ricola.”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Swiss cough drops.”

  “You think I’m going to get married and send you boxes of cough drops every year?”

  “Not if you stay here.”

  “Mom.”

  “My intuition says you should.”

  Normally this would be where he laughed at her, but this time he paused for a second to consider this. “It does?”

  His mom sighed. “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s hard to say because I hate the idea of you being so far away.”

  “I’m never going to get another opportunity like this. I can’t turn my back on it.”

  “You’re right about that,” she muttered.

  “Why do I think we’re not talking about the same thing?”

  “That’s probably your intuition talking.”

  “Mom.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Look, I signed a contract. What do you want me to do?”

  Her face softened. “The right thing. For you. Whatever that is, honey. You know I’m always on your side.” She stopped and pulled him into a long hug. “Go to Klieber. They’re going to be so lucky to have you.”

  Lucky. He mulled the word as he hugged her back. He’d felt pretty lucky when he got the job.

  Why didn’t he feel that way anymore?

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Are you nervous?” Mary asked, as they eyed the desert landscape outside of Barstow.

  “No.” It wasn’t bravado on Tessa’s part, either. She felt ready. The tests had gone great in the lab, and they’d built a quarter-mile short track on site at BBMJ the previous week and run over a hundred tests on the systems. The panels looked as good as new, and Ethan’s relay had worked perfectly every time.

  Tessa had driven out the night before so she could walk the full one mile track that Mary had supervised construction of for three days. She hated leaving Calvin behind, but Lezlie had shooed her out. “The desert isn’t fit for any human, but definitely not for babies. He’ll be fine for one night, and so will I. Go take your victory lap.”

  Lezlie didn’t know what they were working on because she didn’t have security clearance or a non-disclosure agreement, so the aptness of her “victory lap” metaphor startled Tessa. Ethan might think his mom’s intuition was unscientific coincidence, but Tessa was learning not to doubt it.

  “Your inverter is about the prettiest piece of engineering I’ve seen in years,” she said to Ethan. Sanjay cleared his throat on her other side. “Or more like tied for first with Sanjay’s motherboard.” Darius cleared his throat next and she added, “And Darius’s cell conversions.”

  “You all did great,” Mary said, her voice flat. “But you can quit handing each other trophies until corporate gets here and signs off, because otherwise, this is the world’s most expensive science fair project, and we’ll all be in our old divisions by next week.”

  “Except Ethan,” Darius added, unhelpfully. “He’s off to Zurich on Friday either way.”

  Tessa didn’t want to think about it, and at the moment, there was so much else to worry about that she could afford not to. It was a relief since Ethan’s impending departure had preoccupied more and more of her thoughts lately.

  Right now, though, she could only think about Helios as she climbed into Alpha Car, the one they’d been testing at the lab, pushed the ignition button, and turned on Bluetooth.

  “Ready?” Mary asked when she answered.

  “Ready.” Tessa had already walked the entire track at dawn, checking all the seams and joints on the solar road, but now she drove it and watched her display, the levels on the battery charge rising instead of depleting like they did on her Prius. The car was storing energy instead of spending it as she drove. When it was full, she returned to the command station and parked, then waited as Darius came out with his voltmeter and got the precise read.

  “It looks good,” he said, showing her the numbers.

  She grinned at him. “We did it.”

  “We did it,” he agreed. “Let’s see what corporate says.”

  Ethan had rolled on a mechanic sled under the Beta Car, the one they would start with only enough charge to go five miles, so that the observation team could see its full capacity as it charged while driving. As he rolled out again and smiled up at her, she caught her breath for a second at how sexy he looked, his eyes bright, a streak of dirt across his cheek.

  Pull yourself together, she ordered. She gave herself that lecture often, a reminder not to be drawn in by his warm eyes and soft smiles. She doubted he even realized that each one of them looked like an invitation to kiss him senseless again. He was leaving. In two days. There was no point.

  “Looking good,” he said.

  “What?” Ugh. How could she still be getting distracted by his cuteness? He kept short-circuiting her systems. She wished it was a wiring issue that Sanjay could correct, but this was a problem of chemistry, not electricity. At least not the literal kind.

  “The inverter armature. It’s going to be great.”

  “Of course it is. I wasn’t going to recruit a dummy to work on it.”

  “They’re coming,” Mary said, pointing to the distance where two large black SUVs were bearing down on them. Ethan held out his hand for Tessa to pull him up, and she did, holding onto him a few seconds longer than she needed to. He gave her hand a small squeeze before letting go as they turned to study the approaching cars.

  A few minutes later, they pulled up beside the field station trailer and five men and two women climbed out. They’d been smart enough to forego suits, opting for sensible shoes and business casual slacks and collared shirts, but there was no mistaking the air of authority and privilege rising from them like heatwaves. These were decision makers, and they were there to determine nothing less than the future.

  Not even just Tessa’s future; the future of transportation, carbon reduction, and the entire
United States highway infrastructure if BBMJ backed this project.

  “You ready?” Ethan asked quietly.

  “Can you ever be ready for your dreams to hang in the balance?”

  Ethan gave her a soft smile.

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” He did that to her sometimes in the evening if she nodded off on the sofa while he played with Calvin.

  “Nothing.” He shrugged. “You don’t usually talk about dreams. Plans, blueprints, schematics. Even goals. But not dreams. What’s the dream here?”

  “Revolution.” Her reply was instant, and when he didn’t laugh or look uncomfortable, she had a sudden and deep sense of preemptive loss. She would miss his calm and steady influence in the lab.

  At home.

  With Calvin.

  It was going to hurt.

  She turned her attention back to the visitors who were conferring with Mary. “If this goes well—and it will—then BBMJ will give us the funding we need to develop this, and pitch this to the state of California. I know you know that, but I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t just want a new division devoted to this solar road concept. I want green tech to become BBMJ’s future, to watch them play at the level of current big energy, in there with the oil and auto guys and scaring them into change. I want a research and development budget that dwarfs anything we’ve seen come out of Space-X or SunTech, and then we’re going to make more and more things to change the world.”

  “You think it’ll happen?” he asked.

  It felt like total arrogance, but she looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”

  His gaze dropped to her mouth, and her cheeks warmed. He cleared his throat and met her eyes again. “I wish things were different.”

  They weren’t talking about solar roads and green futures anymore. They were talking about their future. The one that didn’t exist.

  “You’re going to do amazing things at Klieber,” she said. “You’re going to change the world on your side of the Atlantic. I bet they passed up a thousand applicants to hire you.”

  “I’m going halfway around the world for an opportunity that you’re creating for yourself here.”

  She glanced over at the corporate big shots. “Maybe.”

  “You did it, Tessa.” His voice was as sure and steady as it was when he settled Calvin down. “You’re brilliant and it’s all going to happen.”

  “It will,” she agreed, feeling it in her gut. It was a complicated feeling, not the unfettered joy she’d expected when they’d met their deadline. The last time she’d felt this kind of bittersweetness was when Rachel had run away to Nashville. She’d recognized in the same moment that while she’d failed her sister utterly, her own future had just opened up.

  No matter what happened next at BBMJ, Helios would always be the reason she’d fallen in love with Ethan. She’d known it for a while now, that her feelings for him had spiraled far beyond friendship or even attraction. Bringing him here for Helios would mean her greatest professional triumph and her greatest private pain. But she couldn’t keep Ethan from following his own dream the way she’d been able to here. As Mary waved her over, she gave Ethan one last smile. She hoped he knew that it meant, “Thank you and I love you.” And from the smile he gave back, she almost thought he did.

  Then she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and strode toward Mary and the future, even if it shone a little less brightly now that Ethan wouldn’t be in it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Three months later

  Ethan’s phone sounded with the FaceTime alert as he was leaving work for home, which could only mean Tessa at this time of day. California was nine hours behind, which meant that she’d be leaving home for work soon. They used to talk all the time in the mornings. It had started about a week after he’d landed in Zurich, when he’d come home after his first full week at Klieber and been so overcome with homesickness that he’d called her to see how she and Calvin were doing. They’d fallen into a pretty regular routine of calls, but mornings were hectic for her with the baby, so eventually they’d switched to calls during her lunch hour, and he’d quit pretending his calls were about seeing Calvin, who was nowhere in sight. But sometimes she called in the morning, and it was always Calvin related.

  “Hey,” he said, answering when she smiled at him from the screen. “What’s up?”

  “You have to see this,” she said, her eyes crinkling in a happy smile. “Look!” She turned the camera around so he could see Calvin sitting on her bedroom floor. “He’s doing it by himself! He tried for a few days and would sort of slump over, but he’s totally doing it by himself!”

  “Good job, Calvin,” he cheered. “The kid is so smart.”

  “Well,” Tessa said, dropping her voice. “To be honest, every baby should be sitting up by seven months and a lot of them do it before that. But I’m really proud of him.”

  “Is he still eating like a champ?”

  “Yeah. I added sweet potatoes yesterday. He loves them. Bananas are going to blow his mind.”

  Ethan listened as she chatted some more about the baby and everything he was up to. He kept his smile in place, but each new development felt like a tiny pinprick in his heart. He kept expecting this part to get better, listening to everything that was happening in Tessa’s life and being happy for her.

  Instead, every new thing made it worse. He’d hated not being able to help her prep for the first home visit with the social worker. He’d wanted to be there to lend a hand with the baby-proofing and nursery-painting. He hated not being there for her first court appearance when she was so nervous about what to say, or to celebrate with her when the judge granted her legal guardianship.

  So far, they could only connect in the margins of their day, like now, before she left for work, or on her breaks now and then. He’d started getting up an hour-and-a-half early in the mornings so he could talk to her at night before she went to sleep, lying and saying he was a morning person so he didn’t mind the early call even when he yawned his way through work until his second cup of coffee kicked in.

  “Pretty great, right?” she asked, and he realized he’d lost the thread of the conversation. It looked like she’d perched the phone on Calvin’s changing table while she bustled around his nursery getting his diaper bag ready for the daycare center.

  “Sorry, the connection glitched for a minute. What was that?”

  “Corporate greenlit Darius’s new project.”

  “The whole house solar battery?” he asked.

  “He’s really excited.”

  “Does he get a team for it? Is lab space going to get tight?”

  “No. That’s the best part. They’re giving him a new lab, so he’s growing his team out the way we’re growing this one. I’ll miss working with him directly, but he’ll just be one floor up.”

  She’d kept him up to date on the new hires and inter-company transfers as each one joined Helios. He hated it, though. Hearing about the new people digging into the project to scale it up felt exactly like it had when his parents had driven him past the home they’d lived in until he was in sixth grade and they’d found it repainted with a new garage built onto it. It was changing a fundamental memory for him, and it made him itchy.

  “Marcus has really run with it,” Tessa was saying. “He gets the sparkies whipped into shape so that Mary can stay on top of us gearheads.”

  She’d mentioned this Marcus guy a few times now, and there was a different note in her voice each time she said his name that Ethan didn’t hear when she said any of the others. There was an extra level of . . . admiration? He hoped it was only admiration, but he’d been growing increasingly nervous that it might be interest. That nervousness had been gnawing on his guts lately, and he wasn’t sure he could stand it anymore.

  “This Marcus guy sounds like he’s been a real asset.”

  “Totally,” she agreed. “I can’t tell you how much easier it makes life to have someone like him walk in and take charge of
the electrical engineers.”

  Someone like him. What did that even mean? Handsome? Capable? Both? He decided to ask. “Do you like him?”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure about getting an intercompany transfer for his position, but he’s been great.”

  He cleared his throat. “I mean do you like him?”

  He had her full attention now. She stopped packing long enough to stare at him directly. “What kind of question is that?”

  A really, really stupid one. But he didn’t care. It was almost killing him not to know. “The kind of question friends ask each other?”

  She picked up the phone and sat in the glider he’d had delivered to her when she’d moved into a bigger condo and begun creating Calvin’s nursery. “You want to know who I’m dating?”

  “Sure.” No. Definitely not. But also yes. He didn’t understand his own masochistic mind.

  A look of hurt crossed her face, and he wasn’t sure why. It’s not what he’d meant to do, but as he assessed the possible reasons it had bothered her, he could only come up with one. One that gave him a weird sense of hope.

  “Should I not ask that?” he pressed.

  She chewed on her bottom lip for a few seconds as she studied him, like she was trying to pick apart his brain with her gaze. He wondered how she would feel if she knew that every synapse in it was on full-alert every time they talked. Or if he even just thought of her. He had it so, so bad. This was not homesickness. This was—

  “I wouldn’t want to know.” Her statement interrupted his train of thought.

  “Know what?”

  “I wouldn’t want to know if you were dating someone else.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “No. So never tell me.”

  “Okay.”

  She chewed on her lip again. “No, you should tell me. But not details. Just let me know. I’ll need to know.”

  “Why would you need to know?”

  “So I could fix my brain.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means . . . it means it needs some rewiring.”