by Katee Robert
“What the fuck are you doing?”
He winced and held his phone a little farther from his ear. He surveyed the food lining the shelf in front of him. Cereal. He could do better than cereal. She would need vitamins and shit to help the baby grow healthy. Oatmeal is better. He frowned at the selection and finally grabbed one of the high-fiber ones. Babies need fiber, right? “I’m doing right by her, Adam. It’s time.”
“There’s nothing wrong with doing right by her, but this is a fucked-up situation, and if you don’t see that, you’re even more fucked in the head than I thought.”
Daniel narrowed his eyes, moving to the next aisle. “Tell me how you really feel.” He realized he was staring at a vat of olive oil and kept going, heading for the produce section. Devil’s Falls wasn’t exactly a hub of all things grocery related, but surely he could find something that would sound good to Hope.
Adam seemed to realize he was being a jackass, because he took a harsh breath. “I’m sorry. But what the hell are you two going to do?”
That was the question of the hour. He knew what the ideal situation would be, but he also knew that there was no way Hope would agree to marry him just because a baby came along. Convincing her that it wasn’t just about the baby was going to be harder than hell…but maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. As she’d pointed out time and time again, what happened thirteen years ago wasn’t a good enough reason to make a decision about things happening right now. Maybe it was time he finally started listening.
He picked up an apple, frowned, and set it down again. Maybe I should make a run in to Pecos. “She’s mine, Adam. She always has been.”
“If that’s the case, you’ve done a shitty job of taking care of what’s yours.”
It was the truth, and that only made it sting all the more. He glared at the oranges. None of them were good enough. “I’m looking to change that now.” He grabbed a cluster of bananas and set them in his basket, balancing the phone against his ear. It was time to get to the point of this call and hang up so he could focus on what food would be the best bet for Hope. “We’re putting together a dinner this weekend to tell the family—both families—and I’d like you and Jules to be there.”
Adam sighed. “It’s going to be a train wreck.”
“Probably.” Most definitely. There wasn’t an outcome where the Moores were happy about this, and he didn’t think his parents would be too keen, either. They loved Hope, and he’d broken his mother’s heart when he and Hope broke up, but he figured this wasn’t how they dreamed they’d end up with grandchildren.
“I’ll be there—for this and for whatever either one of you need down the road.” He hesitated. “Don’t fuck this up, Daniel. Hope’s a good girl—always has been—but she’s been through a lot. It hasn’t broken her yet, but it’s just plain cruel to pursue this if it isn’t what you really want.”
“I want it.” He’d had a hell of a time convincing her to let him have this much. He wasn’t about to jeopardize his chance to make amends by pushing her too hard, too fast.
Maybe you should have thought of that before you fucked with her car.
Daniel didn’t know if he believed in karma, but if it existed, it was practically waving a flashing neon sign in his face telling him that he couldn’t ignore Hope and their baby. “I’ll let you know about dinner once we have the day and time finalized.”
“Sounds good. And Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“Congrats.”
He hung up, a slow smile spreading across his face. That had gone better than he’d anticipated. He knew Adam wasn’t happy with how shit had played out recently. Hell, Quinn wasn’t happy, either, but Quinn was less likely to corner him and confront him about it. They’d worked together too long for him to rock the boat unless he thought the situation was dire. Adam didn’t have that problem and, combined with Daniel’s meddling cousin rubbing off on her now husband, he could be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
But all that was going to change.
Everything was going to change.
He headed for the refrigerated section, determined not to forget yogurt after he’d come here specifically for it. He laughed softly at the pile of food in his basket. Should have gotten a cart. Daniel stopped in front of the yogurt section. Where the store was sparse in selection in other places, someone who stocked it really liked yogurt. There were at least twenty different varieties. Once he found the Greek version, that narrowed his choices down to six. He frowned. Short of calling Hope, there was no telling which flavor she wanted—or if that would be the same flavor she’d want tomorrow.
Better get them all.
He grabbed as many as could fit into the basket and then had a moment of considering if he should go back and get an actual cart so he could buy more. There had to be some kind of limit on how much yogurt one woman could eat, right? He studied the basket. “Well, hell. If she wants more, I’ll just come buy out the rest of the selection.” Simple.
Daniel couldn’t stop the stupid grin from spreading across his face at the incredulous expression Jessica gave him as she rang him up. Let her wonder what he was up to. Let the whole damn town wonder. Hope Moore was in his house and in his bed, and she was staying—without a fight—for at least a few days more.
Things are finally starting to look up.
…
Hope stood in the kitchen, looking at the neat rows of Greek yogurt in the fridge. She’d laughed when Daniel came back with bags upon bags of it yesterday, but it was all she wanted to eat right now. He was trying so hard and, despite her, he was starting to win her over. They hadn’t really solved anything with their fight, but maybe it was better to just focus on the future instead of the injuries they’d dealt each other in the past.
She was so damn tired of fighting.
She’d delegated the two projects she’d just taken on, and she was trying very hard not to look into the fact that the two ladies who worked with her were so freaking surprised that she’d taken vacation. It was the first time in years, but still.
Five days. That was it. After the party, she’d go back to Dallas and that would be that.
Strawberry sounded particularly delicious this morning, so she grabbed that container and sat down on the single bar stool to eat. Three days in Devil’s Falls, and she was getting twitchy. She needed a good, long workout. Hope twisted to rub her leg. Running had been her outlet once upon a time, but that stopped being an option when she was eighteen. Now she used specific exercises and yoga to keep her knee from giving her too much grief—two things she hadn’t been doing since she showed up on Daniel’s doorstep.
She was pushing herself too hard, and she knew it—she’d had more than enough experience over the last decade to know her limits, and she was toeing the line. If she wasn’t careful, she’d have a whole lot in the way of sleepless nights in the future. The pain pills she kept as a last resort weren’t an option now that she was pregnant.
God, she hated those pills. They were like the physical representation of her weakness, a constant reminder that she wasn’t normal and never would be. Normal people didn’t have to worry about a body part inside her skin that didn’t originate with her, or about nerves that sometimes felt like they were on fire.
The problem was that Daniel had been working really hard not to pay too much attention to her leg, and she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable…
Hope straightened. “What the hell is wrong with me?” She was not doing this again. She’d put other people first for far too long, and he was the one who kept telling her he wanted to do right by her. Her scars were part of her, and if he couldn’t handle that, he had no business trying to elbow his way into her life.
She finished off her yogurt, dropped the container in the trash, and put the spoon in the sink. She’d deal with whatever work things had popped up overnight and then she’d take a relaxing bath. After that, she’d settle in with some tea and a few movies and see if a day off her feet helped. She
kind of suspected it wouldn’t, but she had to try.
Things were going great right up until she leveraged herself into the bath filled to the brim with bubbles…and heard the front door open. Hope shot a panicked glance at the unlocked bathroom door, but if the heavy footfalls heading in her direction were any indication, she didn’t have enough time to fight her way to her feet and hope that she managed to get to the lock before the person in the hallway got to the door.
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, the door opened and Daniel poked his head in. “Hope? I’m just…” He trailed off, his gaze raking over her. “Well, fuck.”
She wasn’t sure what she should be trying to cover, so she didn’t cover anything. Her mangled knee clearly showed over the top of the bubbles, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it without curling into a ball. He has to deal with it eventually. “Did you need something?”
“Yeah, darling. I’m starting to think I do.” He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. “You usually take baths in the middle of the day?”
The question seemed innocent enough, though there was nothing innocent about the way he was looking at her. She lifted her chin. “Only when my knee is giving me grief.” It wasn’t strictly true. Normally, she listened to her body and avoided pushing it far enough that it knocked her on her ass. It was a rookie mistake, and she was paying the price now.
His attention focused there, his eyebrows coming together. “It’s giving you grief?”
Talking about it was strange. The only person she felt comfortable being completely frank with was her doctor. Her parents did their best to be supportive, but it was easier for them to ignore her injury and pretend it didn’t exist, which she was more than happy to play along with. Better for them to look at her like she’d never changed than for them to pity her. The guilt was even worse. She loathed guilt.
Hope braced herself for Daniel’s reaction. “It does more often than not, but it’s been worse than normal lately.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, but honesty had to be the name of the game when it came to her interactions with him. To do anything else was to cheat them both. “Because I’ve been kind of sucking at self-care lately—though, to be fair, it’s totally possible that hormones have something to do with it, too.” That’s going to make things more complicated, she realized. Pregnancy meant a big weight change, and even completely able-bodied women got clumsy. She was going to be doubly so because of her bum knee.
Hope sank into the water up to her chin, battling the overwhelming stress trying to take over. The whole reason she’d wanted this bath to begin with was to destress, and now it was looking like the opposite was going to be true. It was her own fault. She should have put the brakes on things until she considered all that was going to change. She hadn’t. Taking it out on Daniel might make her feel better in the short term, but it wouldn’t last.
And it wasn’t fair to him.
“You haven’t been taking care of yourself because of me,” he said. She half expected him to launch in to some self-recrimination—to, God forbid, to start blaming himself for that in addition to everything else again. Hope took a deep breath, ready to tell him—again—that this wasn’t any more his fault than her brother’s death was. That he wasn’t a modern-day Atlas who could balance the entire world on his shoulders indefinitely.
But he surprised her and sank onto the closed toilet. “What can I do?”
She blinked, having prepared her response to how she thought he was going to react. It took her a second to catch up to reality. “Uh, what?”
“There’s got to be something I can do. This is partly because you’ve been dancing around my emotions, and that’s not fair to you.” He gave her a look like he was fully aware of what she’d expected. “So what can I do to help?”
What she really needed was a massage and some of the dreaded pain pills, but neither was on the menu. “It’s okay.” He’d had his hands and mouth all over her body, but there was something about him touching that part of her that made her balk. It was too much, even more personal than having sex. She couldn’t ask that of him. “I’m really okay.”
He opened his mouth like he wanted to argue with her but finally nodded. “If you change your mind, I’m here. If you don’t, that’s okay, too.” He pushed to his feet. “Do you need anything right now?”
It was difficult to wrap her mind around this accommodating version of Daniel. He’s trying to keep this peace going as hard as I am. She didn’t really need anything, but she’d already shut him down once and he obviously needed to feel like he was helping with something, so she said, “Maybe a glass of water?”
“Sure.” He looked relieved. Daniel disappeared, coming back a few minutes later with a tall glass of ice water. He set it carefully on the edge of the tub but didn’t immediately straighten. Instead, his gaze rested on the bubbles partially hiding her from him. “One more thing before I go.”
She barely had a second to process his intent before he slipped a hand into the bathtub, sliding down her stomach to stroke her between her legs. She went ramrod straight, but she wasn’t sure if it was in protest or because—oh, God—he pushed two fingers into her. “Danny—”
“Close your eyes, darling. Let me give you this if you won’t take anything else from me.”
She didn’t fight his order. She didn’t even try. She wanted this too much to push him away, even though distance was the only thing that would save her heart in the long run. Liar. The truth was that her heart had always been compromised when it came to Daniel Rodriguez. Hope spread her legs as much as she could in the tub, giving him access to everything. Just plain giving him everything.
He rewarded her by picking up his pace, stroking her just like she loved, already gathering an orgasm around her, her nerve endings sparking with pleasure. She’d never met a man who knew her body like Daniel did, and the years apart hadn’t damaged his memory any. She hissed out a breath, the sound closer to a moan than an exhale. “Danny, I’m close.”
“I know, darling.” His lips touched hers, a soft, sweet kiss that was completely out of sorts with what his hand was doing between her legs. The innocence of that kiss pushed her into an orgasm that locked up her muscles and drew a cry from her throat. He ate the sound, his tongue sliding against hers as he gentled his touch and brought her back to earth.
It was only when she stopped shaking that he rested his forehead against hers for a long moment and retrieved his hand from the water. His shirt was soaked, but his slow smile said it was worth it. Daniel pushed to his feet. “I’ll see you this evening.” And then he was gone, leaving her wondering what the hell just happened.
Guess he wasn’t joking about fixing everything with sex.
The problem was, as good as being with him felt right now, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were only administering a Band-Aid instead of actually fixing anything.
Chapter Twelve
By the time the dinner rolled around on Friday, Hope was a hot mess. She’d changed for the third time and was going back for a fourth when Daniel intercepted her. “You look great.”
“I feel like a…” She pulled at her sundress. Surely it hadn’t been this tight last time she’d worn it? She felt like she was walking around with a giant scarlet A on her chest, that anyone who looked at her would know that she was pregnant with Daniel’s child and that it hadn’t been planned. “I don’t know. Something huge and ungainly.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You’re seven weeks along, darling. You haven’t changed a bit.”
He might not think so, but she felt different. The nausea that everyone seemed to talk about hadn’t overwhelmed her apart from a few food aversions, but her body was just off. The food she usually loved she didn’t even want in the house, and her skin felt too tight. And that wasn’t even bringing up the fact that apparently naps were the name of the game right now. It was just so wrong.
All she wanted to do was to
wrap a blanket around herself and curl up with Ollie on the couch so she could get back her to Gilmore Girls binge session while she worked on what she could swing remotely, but she had to put on real clothes and leave the house and face what felt like half of Devil’s Falls.
No one was going to be happy about this turn of events.
She’d very carefully not thought about what her parents would think. They were shocked she was back in Devil’s Falls, but they’d accepted her excuse of needing to hammer out some last-minute details with the town board about John’s scholarship. The only thing getting them to make the drive north to town was her presence here. It had been six weeks since she saw them last, and she’d been battling the guilt of how things fell out with Daniel and their hookup. It made her sick to think about facing them now. They’re going to be so disappointed in me.
“It will be okay.” Daniel turned her around to face him and framed her face with his hands. “I promise.”
“There you go again, promising things you can’t fulfill.” And she was being depressing as all get-out. Hope took a deep breath. “I’m as ready as I’m going to be.”
He searched her face and finally nodded. “Let’s go, then.”
The trip into town took far too little time. They’d rented the back room of the Finer Diner to give them a little bit of privacy and to make sure no one had home court advantage. We planned this out like we’re going to battle. It felt a whole lot like waging a war rather than what should have been a joyful occasion. In another life, it might have been…
No use thinking that way. This is your life. Not that nice little land of what-if.
Daniel’s parents had beaten them there. His mom rose. She was a slightly overweight Hispanic woman with the kindest eyes Hope had ever seen, who always seemed to have a giant smile on her face. That was no different now, as she rushed around the corner to hug her. “As I live and breathe! Hope Moore!” She swept Hope up into a hug. Almost immediately, she gripped her shoulders and stepped back. “Let me look at you. Good lord, girl, but you’re even more beautiful now than you were at eighteen.” She registered the scar peeking out of the bottom of Hope’s sundress, but her expression didn’t so much as flicker. “I hear that you’re running your own business. I always knew you were ambitious. Makes me so proud.”