by York, Zoe
But given that Evie was still a stranger, he couldn’t pick jewelry for her. They’d go together. Not as romantic as getting down on one knee, but given the circumstances…
“Hey, you coming in?” Evie called out as she strolled toward his SUV on a path from the backyard. She was still wearing the green dress, but she’d ditched the pretty sandals and her bare feet grabbed his attention for a moment. High arches, delicate bone structure. Feet. What was wrong with him? Then they disappeared as she stepped alongside the vehicle. “Having second thoughts?”
Was that even an option? “No.” He steeled himself against all the reasons to feel nervous and unsure and pushed the door open. “You have a nice house.”
She offered a polite smile that told him she didn’t believe the compliment. “I have a house. That’s more than I could say six months ago and I’m proud of that fact.”
“Evie…” But she was gone with a twist of her slight body, bounding ahead of him like a gazelle. Shouldn’t she be full of fatigue right now? The books had promised fatigue. That would be something he could work with. She’d say yes because of a weakened state and a fear of being alone. But the gazelle didn’t look weak, or afraid. She was fearless and swift, and far too proud to accept a proposal sprung from a thoroughly unromantic sense of responsibility.
This was a terrible idea, and he was doing it anyway. Because he’d hate himself if he didn’t.
Inside, the small living room was empty. A collection of running shoes and flip flops overflowed a black rubber mat next to the entrance. They were all much smaller than his size twelves, and he was reminded again of the different worlds from which he and Evie were coming at this situation.
Her kids were all over the comfortable space—an Xbox sat next to the TV, games piled next to it. A sports bag lay open beside the couch, baseball bats and a glove sticking out. A black hoodie was tossed over the arm of the oversized armchair in the corner.
Liam took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. For all that his life was going to change, he was ready for it. This wasn’t the ideal circumstance, maybe, but building a family was the next step for a lot of his friends and colleagues, so why not him? But Evie and the boys…this wasn’t their next step. Their lives in this warm little cottage were about to be tossed upside down. He squared his shoulders and followed the sound of clinking dishes and splashing water to the kitchen.
“Evie.” She was doing the dishes in a way he’d always imagined mothers would when they were pissed off. He’d never seen his own mother do any dishes, not even at the cottage; that’s what housekeeping staff and, if necessary, dishwashers were for. “Hey. Are you mad at me?”
She paused, then finished rinsing the plate in her hand before turning to face him. Her hands were dripping wet, and he looked around for a tea towel. One was draped over the handle on the oven, so he snagged it and stepped close enough to take her wet hands in his, patting them dry with the towel.
Her hands, like the rest of her, were small, but stayed just shy of being delicate. Long, tapered fingers with blunt fingernails, free from polish. Soft, translucent skin, firm and tight. Strong, capable hands.
“I can do it myself,” she whispered, pulling away. The loss of her touch was a cold whisper of sadness, and he almost reached for her again.
“Maybe I wanted to do it for you.” His voice caught on a gruff note mid-sentence, and he cleared his throat before continuing. It wasn’t just his sense of responsibility speaking. “I’m going to want to do a lot for you, Evie. It’s just who I am.”
She laughed, and again he noticed that she used false humour to hide. “We’ll see how that goes.”
There was a lot of history weighing down her doubtful words. They needed to back up, get to know each other. But there wasn’t really time for that.
“Can we sit down?” She nodded and brushed past him, her hip glancing against his thigh. Goddamn, he wanted her to stop running away from him. Frustration stirred in his gut. He followed her to the couch, where she was sitting stiffly, knees front. He opted for a more inviting pose, casually canting his upper body sidewise against the couch cushions as he folded one leg up onto the couch seat between them. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
She took a deep breath. “This is going to come out the wrong way, I’m sure, but…how old are you?”
He grinned. “How old you think I am?”
“Liam—” Her brows knitted together, her voice plaintive. It was hard to leave her on the hook, waiting for an answer. Hard, but not impossible.
“Are you worried that you’ve robbed the cradle in a big way? Made me into a man before my time?”
“Something like that? Jeez, you just graduated.” She pressed her lips together. “You’re being really good about all of this, but if you aren’t ready—”
“I’m almost twenty-nine.”
“Oh, thank god.” Relief visibly washed over her, but then she squinted at him suspiciously. Damn, she was good. “How close to twenty-nine?”
“Ten more months.” He offered a sheepish smile that he hoped drifted toward cute. “Okay, I’m twenty-eight. I went back to school, but I’m no kid.”
“We’re still not in the same…generation.” She chose the word carefully and he looked at her anew. She was gorgeous. Hands down, the most beautiful woman he’d ever been with. Was she worried about their age difference?
“That doesn’t matter.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t.” She offered a small, sad smile that told him they meant the same words in two different ways.
He tried again. “I mean, your age, my age…they weren’t an issue when we…” Trailing off seemed like a better option than naming what they’d done. Not for him, but for Evie, who’d stiffened next to him.
“I don’t have one-night stands, you should know that.”
“Okay. Okay if you did, too, as long as you were safe.”
She gave him a curious look, one that he couldn’t figure out. Not judgment, but maybe disbelief. Their night together had been fantastically uninhibited—he had trouble reconciling that Evie with the one giving him the wary side-eye right now. A part of him wanted to crow that he wasn’t just another notch in her belt, but a bigger part clamped down hard on the celebration. It was likely that he was a notch. The first one. He pushed that thought away, and turned the conversation back to the most important topic at hand.
“Tell me whatever you think I need to know about…” He swallowed hard. “Our baby.”
Over the next thirty minutes, Liam probed and prodded until she relaxed, and they managed to get some important pieces of information out in the open. Evie wanted him to get some testing done—not a problem—and reiterated that she wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret until the end of the summer. Liam was secretly pleased when Evie appeared startled that he’d read up on pregnancy as much as he had.
“You really aren’t freaked out about this, are you?” She’d turned now, mirroring his posture, and the last rays of the summer sun were slanting in the window behind her. She literally glowed, and in that moment, he knew he had to take a chance.
He reached between them and laced his fingers into hers. “I’m only worried about how much this is going to impact your life. Maybe that’s naïve of me, I don’t know, but over this week, I’ve never once been freaked out about you having my baby. Having a baby, yes, that…threw me for a loop. But I’m willing to do whatever is needed to make this work, because…”
Her face, mostly in shadows now, tipped up and her eyes searched his face. “Because?”
It’s the right thing to do seemed like the wrong thing to say. It felt wrong, too. It wasn’t what he’d rehearsed, but the truth surged up from his core and he let it out as he leaned closer and brushed her cheek with his free hand. “Because I think we could be really good together. Better than good. Awesome, in fact.”
She caught her next breath and held it for a moment before carefully asking, “What are you doing?”
“Asking you
to marry me, Evie. I know it’s slightly out of order, but I’ll make it work.”
“Oh, Liam.” She slid toward him on the couch, letting his hand drift back into her hair. The silky slide of the blond strands over and around his fingers stirred a physical response that he couldn’t wait to act on. At least they wouldn’t have to worry about chemistry. That was as good a foundation as any to build a relationship on.
She stopped a few inches away and slid her hands over his shoulders and up his neck to cup his face. Her eyes moved up and down, searching his face before she parted her lips with a sigh.
“Are you insane?”
Uh…his brain actually stuttered for a moment, then blanked completely, like a systems reset. He blinked twice, and when he refocused on her face, the romantic diffuse lighting had faded to a somber dimness. Shit.
“You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We’ve had one good chat, one night of good sex, and a bunch of awkwardness in between. That you think we should get married just underlines that you are living in a fantasy world of lunacy.” Evie pursed her lips together and took a deep breath. He thought for a moment that she might snap his neck, just to be done with him, but then her grip on his face eased and she dropped her hands back to his shoulders. Her gaze remained firmly on his face, though, a reminder she was in charge of the conversation. “Listen to me carefully, Liam. There is nothing romantic about what’s going on. I got knocked up. I’m going to get fat. I’m going to have a baby, your baby, and that’s going to be difficult and awkward, and eventually expensive and awkward, and one day you’ll marry someone else and have other babies of your own, and I’m going to hate you at that point, because you’ll start skipping weekends with our kid, and I’ll be left explaining why. Between now and then, we’ll have some good moments, too, because we’re going to share a unique bond, you and I. But don’t think for a minute that I’m going to let myself imagine that bond to be anything other than biological.”
He was with her until she took a leap into the future and turned him into an asshole. Okay, so proposing had been the wrong idea. He’d known that, and done it anyway. And he noted for the future that romance wasn’t the way to win Evie over—check. But he wasn’t that guy she already hated a little bit, never mind whatever would come later. “No.”
“I’m sorry?”
He reached between them and placed his hand vertically over her lower belly. Hard to imagine a baby growing in such a small space. The heel of his palm rested just above her pelvis, and the flare of anger in her eyes told him he was on thin ice touching her there, or anywhere. His fingertips rested on her sternum, and he pressed gently, a reminder that he wasn’t trying to cop a feel. “Our bond isn’t just biological. You don’t know what it is, yet. Neither do I. I know that every time I’ve seen you since I arrived in town, I’ve wanted to throttle you one minute, then press you up against the wall and kiss you senseless the next. It’s an uncommon feeling for me, and I think I like it. And Evie?” She raised her eyebrow in skeptical, silent response, but her shaky intake of breath gave her away. He leaned closer, sandwiching his hand between their bodies. “I think you like it, too.”
He dropped his mouth over hers, mostly because he’d wanted to kiss her for days, but also to ensure she didn’t snap back a witty response right away. He didn’t normally care about being overtly in control of situations, but with Evie, his inner caveman came roaring to life.
He meant it to be a simple kiss, a promise of future opportunity, and that’s how it started. He brushed his lips over hers, then back again, before settling right in the middle, enjoying the plump fullness of her bottom lip between his, then below. The soft cleft that hid secret, warm pleasure. He swelled at the memory of her eager kisses that first night, but tonight wouldn’t be a repeat, so he moved to ease away, only Evie’s hands tightened around his neck, holding him next to her face.
“Hang on a second,” she whispered. “Let me just…”
She licked her lips, their faces so close together he could feel the moist pink tip of her tongue swiping between them, and then it was her turn to close the gap. But her first effort wasn’t sweet or promising. It was hungry, and hurried. She laved her tongue across the seam of his mouth, and he opened for her with a groan. This was a terrible idea, but she tasted like heaven and he wanted more. He slid his hands around her waist, pulling her into his lap. Under his fingertips, her dress bunched up, and he knew if he skated his hand south, he’d encounter bare skin. The question of how much bare skin was burning through his mind, and between them, his cock went from alert to ready. Even as Evie ground against him, he knew they needed to stop—that she’d want them to stop, and soon.
But her mouth…
And that was as far as his mind got in the back and forth reasoning, because holy hell, her mouth was joy and angst and the very meaning of passion. So he let her take her fill, and in the process, he got Evie riding his lap, which he certainly hadn’t dared hope for. He just waited for the inevitable shove.
When it came, it wasn’t as forceful as he expected. Promising. She pulled back with a shaky breath, pressing her fingers to her mouth for a moment before speaking. “I didn’t know that you wanted to kiss me.”
“Did that remind you why I might have been thinking about it?”
She blushed. “This isn’t going to be a regular thing, me attacking you.”
“That’s a shame.” He eased her off his lap, ignoring his protesting dick, and lifted her hand to kiss her knuckles. “If you change your mind…”
“I really shouldn’t. It’ll just complicate things between us.” But the glint in her eye told him she was considering it. How long would he have to wait before the hormones kicked in? He feared it was longer than his body would find acceptable.
“Already complicated, sunshine. Might as well make the best of it.”
“No.” Evie couldn’t quite believe what she was about to do. Kissing Liam was like heaven coated in chocolate and peanut butter, and she was about to put a ban on it. “We can’t do that again. Not just not regularly. Not at all.”
“Why not?”
He was still stretched back against the couch, looking hard and sexy, and the woman in her asked the same question. But the mother in her pointed out that they would forever need to be civil, at the least, and hopefully friendly, and a doomed-from-the-start physical relationship would ruin the rest of it. The more important part of it. When he blandly shrugged at her pronouncement, she jumped up and paced to the kitchen.
He followed. Of course he did.
“Evie, what’s wrong?”
She’d opened the tea cupboard, because tea made everything better. After she grabbed the teapot and a box of chamomile, she turned slowly and laid it out, not looking at him because that made thinking difficult. “You. Sitting out there, standing in here, all calm and rational and at peace with the situation—”
“You just said three things that mean the same thing.”
“That’s…” She jerked her head up. “Is that a West Wing quote?”
He chuckled. “Look at how much we have in common.”
“What were you, like, five when it was on the air?”
He squared off his shoulders, successfully projecting a look of strength and…damn him, maturity, as if to underline the fact that while he might be a few years younger than her, he didn’t have a juvenile bone in his body.
And as he stood in her kitchen, silently chiding her for the unnecessary attack when he was being nothing but mature about this, this… She lay a protective hand over her tummy and his face softened. Damn him for being so nice. “Okay, that was uncalled for, I’m sorry.”
“I was a politics nerd in high school and university.”
“Oh.”
“I’m surprised you recognized the line, it’s pretty obscure.”
“It’s a memorable scene.” She muttered the lie under her breath, then sighed and met his unwavering gaze. “That I’ve seen half a dozen times.”
; He tilted his head and furrowed his brow.
“You don’t have to look so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised you liked it. I’m trying to figure out when you had time to watch a seven-year TV series over and over again.”
“I was on bedrest a lot during my first pregnancy and spent the first three months with both boys nursing either in bed or on the couch.” Sexy share, Evie. Although maybe it would help convince Liam to stay hands-off.
From the look on his face, he was definitely concerned at the very least.
“What do you mean, bedrest?”
Oh. Again, with the nice and understanding. “ARGH!”
“Was it something I said?”
“It was everything you said, and everything you didn’t. Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“I’m sure I’m freaking out. On the inside. Deep down, buried under years of WASPy training by my mother. But my whiplash reaction to becoming a father is secondary to actually becoming a father, right? That’s going to happen. So I’d rather not get to that point and be unprepared. Or, god forbid, get to that point before that thing—” he pointed at her stomach “——is ready to come out. So…bedrest?”
“Uhm…I had high blood pressure with my first pregnancy. It’s part of what lead me to a healthier lifestyle, and I didn’t have any problems with my second pregnancy.”
He was nodding, but his attention had shifted to his iPhone. He was alternating between tapping and scrolling with his thumb, and after a minute he glanced up. “Pre-eclampsia?”
“Yes, in the end, but just a mild case.”
“Hmmmm.”
“What?”
“Are you going to have an OB consult?”
“If my midwife thinks it necessary, yes.”
He nodded. “Right.”
Right? “Since when do you know so much about…everything?”
“Since you told me you were pregnant.” He tucked his phone away. “Evie, I’m an information junkie. There’s nothing about your pregnancy that I’m not going to want to research.”
“Wait until I start bitching to you about being horny in a few months.” The words were out of her mouth before she realized who she was speaking to.
