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“I’ll pick you up around nine,” he insisted. “I’ll send a truck with a crew to get your stuff around eight thirty.”
“I wish I knew if we were doing the right thing,” I mused aloud before I could censor my words.
“She’ll be fine, Skye. I’ll make sure she’s always okay,” he affirmed.
I searched his eyes, and found a committed determination that actually helped me relax.
His comments made me feel safe.
For so long, I’d been the only one who had been there for Maya no matter what. There was some kind of relief in knowing I wasn’t all alone in those goals anymore.
“What are we going to tell your family?” I asked hesitantly.
“The truth,” he drawled. “I think they’ll all be ecstatic about having Maya in the family. It’s not like the Sinclairs are exactly hesitant to have more relatives.”
I shot him a small smile because I knew the Sinclair family had grown significantly over the last few years. It had exploded with growth once Aiden and his siblings had discovered that they had a slew of half-siblings and cousins on the East Coast.
I strode to the table and picked up my purse. “I need to go. Maya is with a sitter.”
He grabbed me by the upper arm to stop me. “You work a lot. You look exhausted, Skye. Is that really what you want? Is the Weston Café what you really want?”
I easily shrugged out of his hold on me. “Does it matter? It’s my way of supporting Maya.”
It had been a hell of a long time since anybody had asked me what I wanted, and I wasn’t quite sure how to answer him. The café was an icon in Citrus Beach, but working long hours there, and spending so much time away from Maya, had never been my choice.
I did it to survive.
“If you’re marrying me, your choices will become unlimited,” he said huskily.
“It’s my security,” I tried to explain. “It brings in some income.”
“I plan to take my daughter to see the world,” he warned. “If you want to be with her, you’ll need to find a manager, and more staff. Honestly, that dinosaur could use a serious makeover. The painting made it look better, but the building is old. It must need repairs. Maybe you need to think about turning it into something you can love by doing a complete remodel. I’d invest in you and your ideas. But you aren’t going to need to be involved in the day-to-day stuff.”
“I’ve always wanted it to be so much more,” I confessed. “But I didn’t have the funds to sink into making the place something different.”
He shrugged. “Now you do, if that’s what you want.”
My heart tripped at the possibility that I could really transform the café into a success instead of a restaurant where I could barely eke out a living.
I eyed him with curiosity. “Why would you want to do that?”
“You’re the mother of my child, Skye. I want you to be happy. You’re going to be my wife.”
I balked. “I’m still not sure about the marriage part of the deal.”
“I’m not over wanting that,” he warned. “In fact, the idea keeps sounding better and better. You said you never wanted to marry again, and I had no plans to get hitched, either. So there’s no reason why we can’t become a family for our daughter.”
“We don’t even like each other anymore,” I said desperately.
He shrugged. “Then we learn to put our differences aside to raise our daughter together.”
What about friendship?
What about mutual respect?
What about love?
What about . . . sex?
I shuddered. I hadn’t really wanted the last one on my mental list for a long time. But Aiden was bound to want to screw a woman eventually. He’d always had an insatiable sexual appetite.
“I’m not agreeing to marry you.” I was putting my foot down. “Let’s just give Maya a chance to get to know you right now.”
“Let’s do both,” he said with a small grin.
“You’re exasperatingly stubborn,” I accused.
“I am when I want to take care of what’s mine,” he said in a dangerous tone.
My heart started to gallop as I turned to leave. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
I wasn’t going to win the argument, so I’d just try to convince him after we’d moved in together that marriage wasn’t the answer.
It never was.
CHAPTER 6
AIDEN
“Turns out, I fathered a child,” I announced bluntly to my siblings later that night. “I have a daughter. She’s eight years old.”
I’d called a family meeting, and my brother and sisters had turned up without asking many questions. Noah, Jade, and Brooke had all arrived right on time.
I’d had very little doubt that all of them would be curious, since we’d never actually had a family meeting.
The only one not currently staring at me like I’d grown multiple heads was Seth. He hadn’t been invited because I really, really wanted to hurt him right now. There was no way he would have been safe if we were in the same room.
Owen, my youngest sibling, hadn’t come into town yet for Jade’s wedding, so he’d find out a little later, too.
“How is that possible?” Noah asked calmly, because Noah was always the most levelheaded, as our eldest sibling.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who told me how women got pregnant, when we were younger.”
Noah had even gone so far as to show us how to use a condom with a banana once. And I had used a rubber with Skye. My guess was that we were one of a small handful of failures.
My eldest sibling had been there for all of our questions growing up. It was strange that he’d seemed so grown up when he was only a few years older than I was.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Noah grumbled.
My family was still gaping at me from their seats in my family room. “I dated Skye Weston for a while, right after she graduated from high school. She was pregnant with my child when she moved to San Diego and married Marco Marino. I never knew. We had a miscommunication and she thought I blew her off.”
“Maya is your child?” Jade asked incredulously.
I nodded.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Somebody wrote to me from the DNA site. They matched me as the child’s aunt. But I never knew it was somebody so close, or so young. I know she’s gifted, but her message sounded like somebody older, and children usually can’t send in their DNA to be analyzed.”
I grinned. “She must take after me. She’s pretty damn smart. And she obviously knows how to break the rules. Why didn’t you say something about a match on the site?”
It was always strange when we didn’t know everything about our sisters. Noah, Seth, and I certainly knew how to get into their business. We’d made it our personal mission to screen every man they dated.
Jade frowned. “I never heard from her again after one communication, and I had no idea who she was. Eli was trying to do some investigating to figure out which one of you fathered a child. I didn’t want to spill the beans without any information. I knew it would bother all of you until we figured it out. I was going to tell you before the wedding. But I guess the mystery is solved. I wonder why Skye never told me.”
