by Kendall Ryan
He was a catch and a romantic all rolled up into one, and there was no way it could work out. At least, not with someone that had walled off her heart years ago. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to if I could.
The whole idea of what might happen had my stomach tied in knots and before I knew it, we were wrapping the rest of my salad to go and heading through the restaurant’s wide glass doors and into the sunset-lit parking lot. He followed me to my car, the orange and pink of the sky bouncing off the white sedan, and when I reached the driver’s side, he stopped to face me.
“So, what’s the verdict, Bren? Are you feeling okay?”
I knew he wasn’t referring to the queasiness I’d mentioned, which came and went. He was talking about our real first date—he was asking how I felt about us. The truth was, I really didn’t know. He was handsome, intelligent, kind—and amazing in bed. But I didn’t really know him, and this baby would speed things up to an unnatural pace, and that terrified me.
“It was a nice dinner. Thank you for that.”
“Right. Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and take that as an invitation to call you again.”
He leaned down and my body froze. I knew I ought to back away—not get sucked in by his sweetened spicy smell, but his eyes were locked with mine and I found myself moving closer, letting my mouth close over his soft bottom lip.
His tongue didn’t sweep out to greet me. Instead the kiss was soft and sweet, but the feel of his skin on mine sent a wave of white-hot energy through me, along with a surge of memories of everything that mouth of his could do—everything he’d already done. Everything I wanted it to do again. And again.
But even as I started to melt into him, he pulled away.
“Good night,” he said, his voice all grit as he backed away and opened my car door for me, waiting as I climbed inside.
I watched him climb into his own car in a daze, my mind reeling.
Jesus, he was like a drug. One taste and I wanted to mainline him straight to the vein.
I had to get a grip. Clutching the leather steering wheel, I closed my eyes. The kiss had been a mistake. This whole date had been a mistake. Jesus, why did the best night of my life have to turn into my biggest regret?
But I would be okay. I was walking away knowing one thing I hadn’t been sure of before—this guy, whatever his romantic intentions toward me, would be a great father. That was more than I could have hoped for after a one-night stand. This baby—if there really was one—would be lucky to have him. That was what I needed to focus on. This wasn’t just about me anymore.
I drove on autopilot, playing the date in my mind over and over until at last I arrived home and put myself to bed. Tomorrow would be a new day and I made a mental vow it would be free from any lingering thoughts about Mason Bentley.
We wanted different things in life. Until I found out if I was pregnant, it only made sense to continue to talk. But I’d spend the time between now and the next time I heard from him shoring up my emotional and physical defenses.
Something told me I was going to need them.
Badly.
Chapter Nine
Mason
“How is it I always find myself standing in front of you, asking the same question?” Trent walked into my office unannounced, almost catching his lab coat as he snapped the door shut behind him.
I set down my sandwich on my desk and glanced at him. “And which question is that?”
“What the actual fuck, man?” Trent raised the clipboard in his hand then dropped it down in front of me.
“What?”
I glanced at the chart.
“Mrs. Ramirez. You filed her paperwork all wrong. In fact, everything you’ve touched this morning has been fucked in one way or another and the nurses are blaming your assistant and your assistant is blaming the nurses. Before all hell breaks loose with every employee of the female persuasion, tell me what’s going on?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Shit. Okay. I’ll look at the files and fix everything. I’m sorry. I’m just a little distracted today, that’s all.”
“No kidding. You’ve asked Jean seven times if the hematologist reports are back. Do you think someone has leukemia or something?”
“No, not that.” I blew out a sigh, then pushed my sandwich away from me before motioning to the chair in front of my desk.
“You remember the girl I was looking for? Bren? The one who—”
“Snuck out of your apartment like you’d been holding her hostage? Yeah, I remember. You about to tell me you tracked her down and don’t know what to say?”
“Oh, I talked to her. Yesterday when she came in to see if she was pregnant.”
Trent’s jaw slackened. “You’re shitting me?”
“Oh, how I wish that were the case, because it was awkward as fuck, but nope. It definitely happened.”
“And you’re just telling me this now?” Trent demanded, spearing me with that betrayed and pissed off look like I’d just violated the man-code.
“There’s nothing to tell for sure, yet. I didn’t want to be an alarmist,” I reasoned, kicking back and stretching my legs out in front of me.
“When you couldn’t find her after your night together, you deemed it a dire emergency, holing up in your apartment like a pussy-whipped fool. Now she might be pregnant and you decided it wasn’t worth mentioning?” His voice had hopped up an octave as he stared at me, incredulous.
“When you say it out loud it sounds stupid,” I admitted with a half-smile.
“So, you’re waiting to see…” Trent started.
I nodded, finishing his sentence for him. “…to see, when her blood results come back to find out if she’s pregnant.”
“So, what are you going to do?” Trent leaned back in the chair and folded his hands in his lap. “You seem pretty chill about the whole thing, weirdly enough.”
“Only one thing to do. If she’s pregnant, I take care of the baby and figure out how to be a good dad.”
“Obviously. But what about her?” Trent pressed.
I leaned my head back, staring at the tiled ceiling for a long moment before answering. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? I like her—”
“I remember that much.”
“But I mean, I really like her. We went on a sort of impromptu date last night, and I like who she is as a person. I want to get to know her more, but with this baby thing between us and not being sure how she actually feels about me, it makes things way more complicated.”
“Well, seems like it would make her want to make it work, right?” Trent shrugged.
“Exactly why I want to get to know her better before we find out about the pregnancy. There’s no way to know our real feelings. Once those test results come in, we’ll never know if a natural relationship could have developed between us. We’d always wonder if we were just trying to make things work for the baby.”
“I don’t get what’s so wrong with that,” Trent said. “We’ve seen plenty of couples who are trying to make it work because they got pregnant.”
“I know that. It’s just that don’t want either one of us to settle, you know? If we didn’t know the results—if there was some way of keeping the possibility of a baby out of the equation—we could date like normal people and see if there was a chance. If not, no hard feelings. And if so…”
“Then you know it’s the real thing with or without a baby.” Trent nodded. “Sounds good to me. So just don’t look at the results, then. Seems simple enough.”
“Are you kidding?” I said with a harsh laugh.
“No. What do you have to lose? She wants to keep the baby regardless, right? So what’s the harm in waiting a little longer?”
I thought back to the stack of custody papers she’d handed me on Friday night. “Yeah, she does.”
“What difference does it make, then? She gives up drinking for a month. You put the resu
lts in an envelope and date until it’s time to open the thing.”
“But if the pregnancy is ectopic or something—”
“Then I’ll know the results and run things smoothly as they normally would go,” Trent said. “Now, I came in here to tell you the hematologist just dropped off this week’s tests. What do you want me to do?”
My stomach clenched into a tight knot. Could I live with not knowing about the baby for an entire month? If it meant I got a shot at developing a real relationship, naturally, with Bren, then the choice was easy. For me, at least. I just hoped she’d let me lead in this situation.
“I guess pitching her the idea couldn’t hurt.”
“It can’t. I’ll go take care of everything.” He pushed himself from his seat and strolled from the office, and I stared down at my half-eaten sandwich, suddenly no longer hungry.
Could I really do this? As badly as I wanted to rip into that envelope, I knew that Bren deserved to be the first person to know.
More for something to do than anything else, I picked up the sandwich on my desk and took a bite, barely tasting the food before swallowing it. In a matter of minutes, Trent returned, a sealed, unmarked envelope in his hand.
He sat it on my desk on top of the clipboard holding my litany of mistakes. I wondered if he’d done that on purpose.
“Here you go,” he said, his tone totally flat.
I searched his face, but he looked impassive as ever.
“What?” I asked.
Trent shook his head. “I told them not to tell me unless there was a pregnancy and a potential problem. Only one person in this office knows the truth and I’m not telling you who it is.”
“Right.” I nodded. “Smart,” I muttered, impressed in spite of myself.
“Now, you should probably call your girl. I imagine you’ve got some talking to do.”
Trent slipped from the room again, and I glanced at my phone before pulling out Bren’s intake form and dialing the number there. The phone barely had a chance to ring before her clear, crisp voice sounded on the other end.
“Hello?” she said, her voice washing over me like honey.
“Hey,” I started, “it’s Mason.”
“Oh, hey.” The nervous spark in her voice heightened. “Do you have the test results?”
“I do, and everything is fine, but I think we should talk about it in person. Is there any chance you could meet me in my office this afternoon when you get out of work?”
“It’s my day off,” she said. “Is there a time you had in mind?”
I glanced at the clock. It was nearly one—not time to go home. But then, Trent did owe me a favor or two…
“I’ll have my partner cover my appointments for this afternoon. Could you come in now?”
“Um, sure. You said you’re sure everything is okay?”
“I’m sure. I just think it’d be better to talk in person.”
She agreed and hung up, and then I forced myself to take a deep breath and focus on the work in front of me. With a quick note to my assistant, I asked her to work my schedule around. Then I stared at the intake and patient records I’d ruined earlier that day.
With any luck, not knowing for the next month might get easier. But right now?
Right now I kept staring at the clock every few minutes, waiting for the buzzer to sound and let me know that Bren had finally arrived. After ten torturous minutes, though, it finally did.
“Let her in,” I told my assistant, then sat up straighter in my chair as I waited for the door to creak open and Bren’s pretty, heart-shaped face to peek around the corner. When it did, I had to bite my tongue to keep from breaking into a huge grin at the sight of her.
It felt like all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. In washed-out shorts and a faded blue blouse, she was knockout. Her hair was long and wavy today, and her wide-set gray eyes stood in stark contrast to her pale skin.
Due to nerves or morning sickness? I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Please, sit,” I motioned to the chair Trent had occupied before and she settled in easily, though she hitched her purse a little higher on her shoulder rather than setting it on the ground. I double-checked to make sure the door was closed, then picked up the envelope containing our combined fate and handed it to her.
“What’s this?” she asked, then moved to open it, but I stopped her.
“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “I have a proposal, and you can decide whether you want to open it when I’m done, all right?”
Chapter Ten
Bren
Two minutes after he was done with his little speech, I was still blinking back at him in stunned silence.
“So, let me just get this straight,” I said, finally finding my voice. “You want to wait until I’m almost two months pregnant to find out if I’m pregnant at all?”
It sounded ridiculous—ludicrous, even. I had to be missing something.
But no, he just sat there with those clear blue eyes staring at me, as if this was the most obvious solution on the planet.
“I’ve thought a lot about it and I think this is the only way.” He nodded. “To know if there’s definitely something here that has nothing to do with this potential baby, which I think there is.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath and stared down at the envelope. “I guess…I just don’t see why it matters. Like, either we get along and everything is great or we don’t and then have seven months instead of eight to figure out how we’re going to raise a baby.”
Both of which, of course, were terrible options.
After all, I didn’t want to see where this led. Hadn’t I told him as much by sneaking out that night? And hadn’t I made that loud and clear when he’d asked me about it at dinner?
He was a nice guy, a romantic. A hot, successful doctor with a heart of gold and magic hands.
He was exactly the kind of guy a girl could fall for.
If a girl wanted to fall. Which I, most definitely, did not.
“I just don’t think either of us should settle,” he said. “If we find out that we have a baby coming, we’ll want to make it work between us for the baby’s sake.”
“Or we could never try and successfully co-parent because we never crossed that boundary to begin with,” I countered, half hoping he would agree and half hoping that he’d shut me down.
He tapped his fingers on his desk, staring long and hard at the wood before his gaze rose to mine again. “Do you really think that’s an option? We’re going to spend years co-parenting together not knowing what it’s like to be with each other again—after everything that happened that night—and we’ll both never have a moment of weakness and want to find out? Maybe you can, but I know I sure as fuck can’t.”
His gaze burned through me, and again I remembered the heat of his body against my skin, the weight of his as he moved on top of me, filling me with so much pleasure I felt like I could explode.
I swallowed hard, tamping down any lingering desire. Dismissing it as irrelevant to our future. “The attraction is not something I can deny,” I admitted.
“So this is the only way. The right way. Let’s see where it goes.”
“But if we have a baby on the way, there are things we need to discuss. Giving up a whole month just to pretend this isn’t happening—”
“Then let’s not. If it’s that important to you to get a plan together, let’s go somewhere and set one up. You and me. Once all that is laid out, we’ll be able to continue not knowing. Unless, of course, you hadn’t planned on keeping the baby?”
Automatically my hand moved to my stomach, and I considered what he’d said. The words had been free of hurt or judgment, and I knew he was allowing this to be my decision, but the choice had already been made. In truth, it had never been a question at all for me.
“I’m keeping it,” I said. “If there’s a baby.”
He nodded. “If there’s a baby
.”
He held out his hand and nodded toward the envelope, and I handed it to him. He stuffed it in his pocket, shrugged off his lab coat, then moved past me to the row of hooks behind my chair. Picking up the leather jacket hanging there, he put it on, then held out his hand to me again. “Now let’s go. Time’s a-wasting.”
I followed him, and together we walked through the office, through the atrium of the building, and finally out onto the street, where a friendly row of shops greeted us.
“You like frozen yogurt?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good. There’s a really good place over here.” He nodded toward a little shop with a pink awning. We approached it, and then he held the door open for me.
I stepped in and stared at the wall of options, momentarily overwhelmed.
“They have dividers,” he said. “You can get more than one.”
He handed me a cup with four-way divider in it and I went to town pouring pistachio, coconut, chocolate-covered pretzel, and salted caramel yogurt into my cup. When I was done, I met him at the buffet of toppings and noticed him shoveling chocolate-covered raspberry jellies onto a massive serving of chocolate yogurt.
“Chocolate lover, huh?” I asked.
He nodded, then made for the brownie bits like he’d never seen anything so decadent before in his life. “For sure.”
“I’m more of a yogurt purist.” I squirted fluffy whipped cream on top of each of the sections of my yogurt, then set it on the scale for the friendly-looking cashier.
“I’ve got it,” Mason said, “Just give me a minute.”
He stopped in front of the hot fudge canister and poured a healthy dollop on top of what had to be a two-thousand-calorie dessert.
If I’d been worried about having to be super healthy around him just because he was a doctor, his actions blew that theory out of the water. We were going to be ourselves, and that made me smile.
When I looked up, I saw the cashier eyeing him like she wanted to devour him, and a surge of jealousy coursed through me before I got hold of myself again.