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Knowing it had to be two in the morning, he reluctantly helped her up and scoured the beach for their things, watching with a smile as she tried to brush the sand off her body and shimmy into her underclothes.
“This is impossible,” she said, staring at the blouse. “I can’t go walking through the hotel lobby in this.”
He grabbed his T-shirt and helped her put it on. “Doesn’t match, but it’ll keep anyone from leering at you.”
A half hour later, they reached Allie’s hotel, and he walked her into the lobby. Shirtless, yes, but after what had happened to her tonight, he was taking no chances.
“You’re not going to walk all the way back to the carnival grounds, are you?” she asked.
He didn’t answer at first, waiting to see if she was suggesting she just stay with him. She didn’t, which was probably just as well. If she was on a business trip with her boss, the last thing she’d want was to bring a man to her hotel room. But he couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment, already missing the way she’d felt in his arms out on the beach. “I’ll be fine. It’s not that far,” he murmured. Then he brushed his lips against hers. “Spend the day with me tomorrow. I mean…today.”
“You have to work.”
“Spend part of the day with me tomorrow.”
“I have to work,” she said. “Mortimer is meeting with a condo developer, and I need to be available for him. But I think I could manage another visit to the fair in the evening, Mr. Big Bad Carny Man.”
Carny Man. She still believed him to be a traveling performer, living in a camper. Well, at least no one could accuse her of wanting him for his money.
He’d tell her everything tomorrow. Get it all out in the open—his past, why he’d left his job. How what had happened had changed his views about himself—his life, his future.
If he was getting involved with the woman, she deserved to know where he stood on the issue of children. No, he didn’t want to scare her off, but she ought to know right up front that he couldn’t see himself getting married and having kids. Not anytime soon, at least.
But Allie was young, only twenty-two. If things did go the way he thought they might, given the depth of his feelings for her already, they’d have time to deal with that in the future.
Plenty of time. Maybe he’d change…someday. Maybe his fear of failing another child would gradually ease, allowing his heart to open up again. But in case it didn’t, Allie deserved to know up front.
As he walked off down the beach toward the fair-grounds, Damon couldn’t help thinking of his grandmother. Her stories of soul mates and love at first sight.
He had the feeling that wherever she was, she knew what was happening. And was laughing.
Chapter 8
THE NEXT MORNING, Allie got up early, somehow not at all sleepy despite her late night. She felt energized, excited and very happy. It seemed impossible to believe that last night had really happened—that she’d been in the arms of her dream man who’d been both incredibly hot and beautifully romantic.
“You’re going to like him, baby-cakes,” she said to her son as she dressed him for the beach. His bathing suit hung to his dimpled knees like a pair of surfer’s board shorts, and she laughed in delight when she looked at him. As always.
A tiny part of her wondered why Damon hadn’t seemed more interested in Hank—why he hadn’t even asked her his name or anything about him. She could only figure one thing—last night had been a big step, introducing Hank into the equation would be another one. That was all.
“You ready to go play in the waves, like we did yesterday?”
As if knowing what she meant, Hank clapped his pudgy hands together, then tried to roll away.
“Huh, uh. More lotion,” she said, grabbing him before he could struggle to his feet and toddle away. He’d started walking really early and had become one motoring little guy over the past couple of weeks. As Miss Emily had discovered the night of the soap incident.
She covered him with a thick coating of the highest SPF lotion the hotel carried, then grabbed a diaper bag and headed for the beach. She had to work later, which was okay since she couldn’t keep Hank out in the blazing sun too long, anyway.
He toddled in the sand—got it in his diaper, his hair, his mouth. Chased a crab. Barreled through another kid’s sandcastle, leaving Allie to apologize to the crying little girl, all the while chuckling over her bruiser of a son.
God, she loved him. It overwhelmed her, sometimes, how much she loved him. And she knew that Damon would love him, too.
She kept telling herself that, throughout the day, but as the hours wore on, the doubts crept in. Nodding her way through the business meetings, where she took notes for Mortimer, she couldn’t help going back to the same subject. Why hadn’t Damon even mentioned her baby? Okay, so he didn’t want to talk about it. He’d wanted only to take care of her after the attack, then to make passionate love to her. Another man’s baby wouldn’t be high on the conversation list for either of those situations.
But afterward, when she’d told him about Peter, that would have been the perfect moment for him to ask about what she’d revealed in her note—that she had a baby. Yet…nothing.
“He had to have found the note, right?” she kept asking herself as she finished feeding Hank in the room that night, then got him ready for bed. As usual, once his tummy was full, his eyes started to drift closed, and by seven o’clock, he was sound asleep in his portable crib. Miss Emily, the first friend Allie had made on her arrival in Trouble, was right there watching him.
“You’re sure you don’t mind me going out again?” Allie asked doubtfully. She’d spent more evenings out in the past few weeks than she had in the entire time since Hank’s birth.
