by Melissa Blue
His mother? Porter didn’t know. He’d never asked because the details hadn’t mattered. On some intuitive level his mother had known her perfect life was about to shatter. She didn’t want to be the one to test the weakness in the facade.
Porter wasn’t bringing his son into something like that. He said the words that had been so hard to say an hour earlier, “Iris, I'm sorry.”
Her brows shot up. “You’re sorry? Why?”
Where to fucking start?
“I’ll apologize for having a moment where I wanted to get a small taste of payback. The thought was fleeting, but it lingered long enough I noticed you.” His mouth lifted. “Then I noticed other parts of you.”
Iris blushed. She blushed. “Porter—”
“I won't apologize for a single second that I spent with you in your hotel room. I won't. I'm not sorry about making our son. I give less than a single fuck what anyone thinks about that. I am sorry I didn't have the balls to go into the bathroom and make sure for myself you were okay.”
Her breath hitched then her mouth thinned. “And the single word text? Being late to the appointment?”
“I told you I would come. I didn't think I needed to say more, or that you wanted to hear more from me.”
“Where were you?” She shook her head. “I don’t get to that ask that. Never mind.”
“I was flying from New York until about twenty minutes before the appointment. I had to run to my car in the airport’s parking lot and break the speed limit to get here.”
“Oh.” She pushed out a breath. “Work?”
“Yeah. I freelance and that means a lot of travel, often.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Then I accept the apology. I'll forgive you because being shitty to you makes me feel like a shitty person.” She glanced away for a second. “But I won't forget who you are when you get controlling. I have to remind myself you can be that guy.”
Controlling. Could he say she was wrong? No matter how much his heart felt like it belonged to their little guy now, could he say one day he wouldn’t make another dickhead rule just so his world could seem all right, manageable? Porter couldn’t. She had every right to remain guarded.
So he nodded, hating himself and the situation a little more. “That's fair.”
Her phone rang. Her sigh was full of exasperation as she dug around in her purse. A scowl formed when she checked the screen. “Hello?”
Five seconds later she glared at him. “Uh...I don't—Okay. Sure.” She put a hand on her hip and shook her head. “He's standing right here if you would like to talk to him.”
At that, he frowned. She pushed the phone at him. “Hello?”
A familiar, almost militant voice rang out. “I don't know why you didn't just give me her number.”
He glared at the heavens. “Mom, how did you get it? Ashley?”
“No, and it's the fact you didn't give it to me. That's beside the point. We're meeting at your house on Saturday.”
Wait. What? His brain tried to catch up to the chastisement and whatever plan his mother had cooked up. “My house? For what?”
His mother replied in a reasonable tone, “I couldn't invite myself over to hers, now could I?”
His mother’s idea of reasonable and anyone else’s rarely matched. “Mom...”
“Do you know what she's having yet?”
He couldn't fight the grin. “A boy.”
Porter pulled the phone away at his mother’s jubilant scream, followed by happy mother gibberish that sounded like I’mhavingagrandbaby. He chuckled. “See you on Saturday, Mom.”
“I have to go buy everything in blue. Does she—never mind. I’m just going to get everything.”
He ended the call, and before Iris could ask, Porter said, “I didn't give her your number. I doubt Ashley did, because she knows our mother well. I think she’s still trying to recover from letting her plan part of the wedding.”
“Then who did? A ghost?”
She should have known better, being around his mother for five minutes, but he understood. It took him quite a few years to see just how his mother worked. “My mother is on every church committee, and she's a real estate agent. She knows everybody and can talk anyone out of what they know. I'm her child so I'm immune to all her tactics by now. I decide when to fight her and when to just go with it.”
“And you’re just going to go with it?”
“In this case, only if you don’t mind meeting her as the woman giving birth to her first grandchild. If not, I can hold her off until the baby is born. After that, only an act of God would keep her away.”
She bit her bottom lip then looked at him. Whatever she read on his face made her shoulders lower. “It's fine. Had to happen at some point. I'll call my father so he can meet you at the same time. Get it over with in one go.”
So she’d finally told her dad? Since she was inviting him over, Porter brushed aside the curiosity. “This is like a wedding, without all the booze. Or sex.”
“Tell me about it,” she murmured.
He also hadn't thought about that. His gaze dropped down to her stomach. She looked pregnant because he knew she was. Pants and a looser shirt no one would be the wiser. His mind latched onto the memory of her bare stomach, but even then he had a comparison. Her belly button had curved in when she was flat on her back. Now it had a small, rounded swell.
The memory of her taste came next, and that had nothing to do with pregnancy. He almost groaned, tasting her by thought alone.
He shook off the last memory because that wasn’t the point. Porter could go off and fuck someone without questions. Any decent man would ask Iris a question or steer clear of her until she gave birth. That meant a nine-month-long dry spell.
Porter tried to imagine nine months without sex. He'd done...four and half months at his longest stretch, and he was getting twitchy as fuck.
She licked her top lip and blinked. “I should go.”
He relaxed against the car again. “Why?”
She drew a circle in the air, indicating his face. “I've seen that expression before.”
He hadn’t tried to hide how he felt so it was no surprise she’d seen his primitive longing. But he was Porter. He echoed her movements, drawing an imaginary circle around her face. “Me, too.”
“I...” She pushed back her shoulders. “I have an excuse. Watching a commercial of Mr. Clean made me hot and bothered this week. You're wearing a suit. It's pussy-nip.”
He did his best to keep a straight face, but this was fucking Iris. She’d probably say something to top her ridiculous one-liner. “A suit is what?”
She glared at him. “You heard me.”
He had and finally laughed. She refused to join him but he could see the light in her eyes. She wanted him and didn’t want to. This was familiar ground. He dug into his charm reserves and smiled. “So...Iris...”
“No.” She took a step back like she didn’t trust herself to not close the distance between them.
He lowered his voice. “Iris—”
“I’m not using you as a remedy for a temporary, fleeting urge,” she said that but her breathing had deepened.
He’d remembered that.
His stare dropped to her nipples. They pressed against the soft material. Zero to sixty. Seemed like he was suffering from sympathy symptoms. He inhaled, slow and let it back out in a rush. Just letting the thought of fucking her again brush his mind made him hard.
“No,” she said again but this time the rejection was softer.
He held her stare. She bit her bottom lip then looked away. He said, “Iris, if you need anything from me—anything at all, just ask.”
“I’m walking away now. Bye, Porter. See you Saturday.” The words were said so fast they tripped over each other.
“Bye, Ms. Bellamy.” Porter kept his voice low, enticing.
She stalked past him. He tried not to laugh. He did anyway. He was also trying to be a better man. He was. Still he turned with her, and
tilted his head as she stomped to the car door and walked away from his offer.
Pregnancy made everything softer, bigger.
Dragging his mind out of the gutter, he moved to his car on the other side of the parking lot. Her engine gunned low, much too loud for a car that new. He waited until she was out of the lot before he climbed into his Audi.
He stuck the ultrasound between the narrow slate of the dashboard and speedometer. A grin split his face. His son. His boy. “I'm calling you Junior. Don't tell your mama. We've got to talk her into that first.”
He had a lot to do to get ready for Saturday. Second on the list was to drive to Grady's and brag. Not that Grady regretted having Izzie or that she wasn’t a boy. But it was a thing. No different than Eva and Ashley showboating the women were increasing in incremental numbers.
Once that was done he needed to shop for food. His mother would tell Ashley about the get-together and that meant the Goon Squad would know. His friends could eat a person homeless. And he needed to clean everything in his house.
Once that was done, he’d continue to try and fix his life because it remained broken, off track. He was a father. He needed to be a better man for Iris so she would never know what his mother felt like.
But first he just sat there, grinning at the picture of his baby boy.
River + Doctor
Saturday morning Iris rose early, got dressed, packed a bag and went straight to Porter's house. They needed a game plan on how to show a united front because in just a few hours they would be under siege.
Iris had prepared to wake him, face down grumpiness—any and every emotion in between. And that could just be her. Her emotions had started to bounce on every flat surface and sometimes in the ether.
What greeted her after stepping out of her car was Porter’s house, for one. She hadn’t paid much mind to it when she’d first came. The house sat right on the corner, on at least two acres of land. The faded, sky-blue paint held navy blue trimming. The front yard was a deep green and lush. With no sprinklers in sight, she could guess the current rainy season had done the work for him.
The man himself stood in his garage, his wide shoulders bare in a ribbed tank top. Black basketball shorts hung recklessly along his hips.
The full picture was a man with an exquisite physique, working in his garage with tools, being every bit of the stereotypical man her current hormones begged for her to indulge in.
She leaned against her car door and considered sliding back in. If, by some miracle he hadn’t seen her pull up, her car started much too loudly to slip away unnoticed. Then there would be questions with only lies for answers.
But really, Iris couldn’t take the chance Porter’s house would not be ready for her father. After her mother’s death her father took to running the house like he ran his computer repair business—everything had a place and everyone had a schedule. She didn’t have a moment in her adolescence where she had the time to be wild. She couldn’t say her father had failed at parenting. His standards were just immovable, and she could never shake the need to meet them.
Hence, why it was barely seven in the morning and she was at Porter’s house.
Her fate decided, Iris trudged over to Porter and tapped his shoulder. He whipped his head around and then smiled. Tugging the earphones out one at a time, he said, “Hey.”
So she could have gotten back in her car. Good to know after the fact. “Hey.”
She glanced at the bits of metal and rubber on the table. “What are you doing?”
“Building a battle bot.”
She swallowed the need to call him an uber-nerd, but it was so hard. The man kept ticking off the obvious boxes. “This is for work?”
He snorted. “Far from it. I don’t often get to be hands on anymore. I troubleshoot and use CAD or CAM to fix problematic designs. Lately I've been working on...” He squinted at her. “You’re not interested in all that.”
She lifted her chin. “I work the HR department at my job, and our clientele is nothing but tech folks who believe jargon makes them bilingual. I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t interested.”
“For work, I’m fixing the prototype for a piece of a rocket.” He gestured to his garage. “This is my personal work space.”
“You're working on a rocket?”
“Only if I'm trying to impress someone, but like I said it’s just a piece. The part is about the size of my hand. Wears too fast under the pressure of space.” His smile was quick. “Most of my jobs are about safety. I go in to make sure no one is going to die if they use a certain kind of metal or a lug nut instead of welding everything together. Optimistic work if you can get it.”
He made a little more sense in that light. Porter searched for danger and made things safer. He would be drawn to rules and have no problems sticking to them.
But why was he so quick to anger and lashing out? He shouldn't have sought revenge in whatever little way he could and as a byproduct hurting anyone in his path. It was a red flag if she were searching for one, but she wasn’t. He was the father of her child, and that’s where things between them began and ended. Did she think he’d be a good father? Of that, she had little doubt. Nothing more needed to be hashed out in her mind.
Damn whatever her loins begged for.
“What is it?” he asked.
Iris was not going to tell him what her loins begged for. “If you’re working on rockets, that means you’re certified?”
“Yes.”
She took in his garage which looked like a graveyard for robots and other metal junk. There was just enough room to park his car without getting it scratched up. “From rockets to battle bots, though?”
The heat of his gaze brushed over her skin as he looked her up then down. “How much do you like that dress you're wearing?”
Not enough, from the way he’d just looked at it. The dress could go. He could use hands or teeth. She wasn’t picky. Iris cleared her throat that felt much too thick all of a sudden.
“Why?” she rasped.
“I'll show you how I play with my battle bots but you might get oil on your clothes.”
Oh. That was anticlimactic. But good. “I brought a change of clothes.”
She didn’t add she’d brought the clothes in case she had to clean. Porter was a bachelor, and from what Ashley had told her, he’d only bought the house two months ago. She didn’t know him well enough to predict if he just pulled utensils out of the nearest box instead of cleaning the ones he’d just used.
“It's fine if I get dirty.”
The heat in his gaze turned into a bona fide smolder. “I’m going to let that comment pass without remark.” He handed her a remote controller. “Simple set up. This moves you forward and back. This one...”
He pressed the button and one of the machine's arms lifted up and down in a chopping motion.
A surprised laugh escaped her. “What else?”
“Push the button next to it.”
The way he said that made her suspicious, but she doubted he’d put her in any real danger. She pushed the button. Fire shot out of the machine. She yelped and then laughed again. “Porter, is this thing safe?”
“Nope,” he said, sounding much too pleased by her reaction. “So don't push that button again while we're in the garage. Now hold on.”
He crossed the room and pulled down a similar looking man-bot. His was a little more sleek with a black and red paint job. He placed the small machine down on the other side of the table. “Go.”
“I’m not ready!” She jammed on the arm-hacking button with no precision, missing Porter’s man-bot with every slice.
He laughed with his head tilted back, being a sore winner as he kicked her ass. When his robot got close enough for a kill kick, she whipped hers around to get some distance to attack. Too much, much too soon and she ran the damn thing off the table. The robot hit the cement floor with a loud thunk. Seconds later a mechanical whine filled the room.
Porter tsked, visi
bly preening at his effortless win. “And that is how the war began between robots and humans.” He picked up the fallen soldier then placed it back on the work table.
“I would say you won. There were disadvantages, but I’m not a shitty loser.”
“I’ll abstain from my winner’s circle dance.”
She didn’t doubt that he had one. “Why, thanks.”
He put his controller onto the worktable. “Nervous about today?”
The question didn’t surprise her. She was learning Porter could see through bullshit and cut straight through it. There was no point to lying. “A little.”
He gestured to the door leading into the house. “I'll make you some breakfast, and you can tell me about it.”
Out of all the thing she’d imagined Porter could do, cooking wasn’t one of them. “You know how to cook?”
“Only if you never tell anyone.”
That was an interesting answer. “Why wouldn't you want anyone to know?”
“Because then I'd be head chef for every impromptu or planned event for the Goon Squad. As it stands, we either order out or take turns.”
She followed him inside and tried not to gawk. She really hadn’t paid attention the first time she walked through his home. Now she could take in how black, white and gray was everywhere. In the living room, a gray couch was decorated with white and black pillows that looked new but comfortable. It should have been cold and stark, except it made her think of sketched architectural blueprints with clean lines, and room for all the possibilities. The only splashes of color were the artwork along the walls and those were vibrant. His home was a rich dichotomy.
She didn’t get the chance to linger over everything, trying to follow him to the kitchen.
Without turning to face her, Porter asked, “What do you have a taste for?”
Porter. Cooking. Her mind couldn’t quite believe that. Yet her taste buds came to life. “So if I wanted French Toast with powdered sugar sprinkled on top you can make it?”
The smile he offered was cocky. “I went shopping for this get-together and bought everything that wasn’t nailed down.”
