by Katee Robert
A lot had changed.
Daniel backed out of the room and closed the door behind him, deciding that he needed to figure out what the fuck his plan was, because blundering through this was just going to ensure that Hope would drive back to Dallas at the first available opportunity and take his baby with her.
And this time she might not be back.
Chapter Six
Hope slept horribly, unable to get the look on Daniel’s face out of her head. The one that showed up when he caught sight of her leg. It was all guilt and pity and something almost like disgust. She shuddered and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. She hadn’t been celibate for the last thirteen years, but she’d been very selective over who she’d let get close enough to actually see her 100 percent naked. She might be mostly at peace with her body, but she didn’t need the kick in the teeth that came when a potential lover made their excuses to leave as soon as her pants came off.
It hadn’t happened yet, but the fear never quite went away.
A five a.m. she sat up, her full bladder making it impossible to procrastinate any longer. Her leg still hurt like nobody’s business, but she’d be damned before she limped her way to the bathroom. She’d powered through worse pain before, and no doubt she’d do it again, but she wasn’t going to give Daniel an excuse to offer to carry her again.
It’s not forever. I might have panicked in a big way and come back here, but that doesn’t mean I’m staying. Once this is over…
That was the problem. If she was pregnant, this wasn’t something she could just smile and keep on keeping. They were talking about a baby. With Daniel. Hope pushed to her feet. She’d thought it was intense enough having her past tied to him in more ways than she cared to count. To have her future tied to him as well was just… She didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t make her comfortable in the least.
She opened the door—and screamed. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?”
Daniel held up one of the pregnancy test boxes. “I know you, and now that you’ve had some time to calm down, you’d have no problem sneaking into the bathroom and taking this test without letting me know.” He held the box just out of reach, still blocking the doorway. “If this is positive, that changes things, Hope.”
She wasn’t an idiot. It would change everything. Her mind couldn’t quite encompass the possibilities, couldn’t take a single step past taking the test. “Give me the test.”
“I’ve made my point.” He handed it over.
“Bully for you.” Having this box in her hand meant there was no more opportunity for stalling. It was happening. She was going to walk into the bathroom, and when she walked back out again, there would be no more room for maybe. She turned to look at the single window in the guest bedroom. The sun hadn’t even begun to creep past the horizon. If she was back in Dallas, she’d be on her way to morning yoga and thinking about the odds and ends she wanted to accomplish this weekend.
“Running won’t help anything.”
She turned back and glared, hating that he was standing there, appearing to be calm and collected while she was falling apart. “Get out of my way before I piddle on your floor like your damn puppy.”
“Don’t bite my head off.” He moved out of the way, waiting until she was to the bathroom door before he responded, “And Ollie’s house-trained, so you following her example wouldn’t be so bad.”
She resisted chucking the box at his face, but only barely. Instead, she very carefully shut the door and made a point of engaging the lock. The very last thing she needed was Daniel barging in to watch her pee on a stick, and if the stubborn look on his face was any indication, he was actually considering it.
Hope double-checked the instructions—as if they would have changed from the half a dozen times she’d read them in the grocery aisle—and took a deep breath.
It was now or never.
It took entirely too little time to finish and set the stick aside. She washed her hands, brushed her teeth using his toothpaste and her finger, and then went ahead and used his mouthwash for good measure. She was stalling and knowing she was stalling. Banging on the door made her jump half out of her skin. She swore under her breath and jerked the door open. “What?”
Daniel searched her face. “Well?”
She didn’t have to turn around to know exactly where the test sat—on the back of the toilet. Taunting her. All she had to do was walk those three steps to it and see if that idiotproof thing read Pregnant or Not Pregnant. Simple.
Except she couldn’t take that first step.
Hope looked up at Daniel and had the sudden urge to just break down. If she did, he’d be there for her. He always had been.
Except that wasn’t the truth. When she’d needed him the most, he hadn’t been there for her. Leaning on him now was just setting herself up for disappointment and heartache. She’d had enough of both to last her a lifetime.
Hope took a careful step back, and then another. Using every ounce of willpower she had, she turned and picked up the test. Her breath left her lungs in an audible whoosh. “Shit.”
Pregnant.
Maybe that whole idea of building a time machine to go back to before she thought it was a brilliant idea to have sex with Daniel was a legitimate idea after all.
A big, tanned hand appeared in her line of vision and took the stick from her. “Well, hell.”
She looked up, the shock on Daniel’s face startling a laugh out of her. It was that or start sobbing and never stop. She’d always been a damn fool when it came to this man, but this was so above and beyond as to be laughable. She clutched her stomach, her giggle turning into a string of them, each one more hysterical than the one before. “Oh my God. I can’t. This is… Oh my God.”
“Darling? Damn, girl, breathe.”
She slumped against the wall. “This is so dumb. This kind of thing is supposed to happen to teenagers, not to adults who should know better. We’re fifteen years too late.” At least if they’d done it when they were teenagers, they would have had love on their side.
Love. And where did that get us?
She scrubbed her hands over her face, trying to get a hold of her emotional free fall. The wondering about what would have happened was pointless. It had happened. End of story. Now it was time to figure out a plan for moving forward.
A baby. What am I supposed to do with a baby?
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.”