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Her entire body clenched at his words. It sounded so good, the temptation to let him make her feel good almost too much to resist. But if she let him win this one, she’d spend the next nine months—the next eighteen years—losing arguments. Not to mention her job—her life—was in Dallas. She’d been willing to make her plans around Daniel once before, and he’d dropped her like a bad habit the first time things went truly bad.
She couldn’t go through that again.
It was hard to reach down and grab his wrist, harder than she could have imagined. “No.”
Instantly, he pulled his hand out of her pants, though he didn’t back up. “The offer stands.”
She’d just bet it did. Hope put her hands on his chest and gently pushed him back a step. “You can’t sex me up to get your way. That’s not how this works.”
“Is that what you think I was doing?”
Damn, but he could play innocent entirely too well—that was, if she was inclined to forget what he’d just been whispering in her ear. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes, Daniel, that’s exactly what you were doing. It’s a dirty negotiation tactic if I ever saw one.”
He grinned, the expression so unexpected, she was half amazed that her panties didn’t hit the ground. “Can’t blame me for trying.” He raised his finger to his lips—the same finger that’d been inside her—and sucked it into his mouth, his gaze never leaving her face. He released it so suddenly, her knees actually went weak. “You’ll change your mind.”
“No, I won’t.” I might. Hope shook her head. No, I won’t. Sex with Daniel was world ending, which was the damn point—she liked her world exactly the way it was. It would change now, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that, but she could at least try to maintain control in the midst of all the insanity.
Which meant she couldn’t let him have the upper hand. Not now. Not ever again.
She edged past him, well aware that he let her walk out of the room when all he had to do was kiss her again to crumble her admittedly pathetic protestation. She made her way down the hall and into the kitchen, stopping cold at what she saw there. Last night she’d been so distracted by acting like a crazy person that she hadn’t really stopped to check out his place. Part of her had sort of just assumed that it was, she didn’t know, familiar.
It wasn’t.
She looked around the kitchen that could have been in any cookie-cutter house around the country. There was nothing wrong with it, at least until she realized it was in Daniel’s house. She moved around the breakfast bar, eyeing the empty counters, and opened a cupboard. There were two mason jar glasses in it, a stack of paper plates, and nothing else. She turned when he entered the room. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke?”
“This.” She motioned at everything. “This isn’t your kitchen. It can’t be.” It was just too soulless.
“It’s mine.” He opened the fridge and winced, a reaction she shared when she saw how empty it was.
“But…how do you cook here with none of your old stuff?” Even right out of high school, he’d spent a good portion of his checks on fancy knives and food they’d had to drive into Pecos to get because the market in Devil’s Falls didn’t carry specialty items. Her favorite nights had been when they’d holed up in the little house he’d shared with his friends and he’d cooked for all of them. With his current setup, she doubted he could put together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let alone anything like the complicated dishes he’d loved.
He shut the fridge door. “I don’t cook anymore.”
That shocked her almost more than anything else that had happened since she woke up. Daniel didn’t cook? It struck her that as well as she used to know the boy she’d dated, she didn’t know a damn thing about the man standing in front of her.
And she was going to have his baby.Chapter SevenDaniel didn’t like the way Hope was looking at him—as if he was broken. As if she saw through all the walls he’d built up around himself since that night thirteen years ago, and she knew that he wasn’t anywhere near as okay as he liked everyone to think.
It set his teeth on edge. He didn’t want pity from anyone—least of all from her.
To get away from the knowledge in her dark eyes, he’d do damn near anything. So he turned the tables. “We need to talk about the next nine months.” And the next eighteen years. But he knew her well enough—or at least he used to—to know that coming at her with the rest of their lives on the table was a surefire way to get her to dig in her heels and shoot him down flat. He had no intention of rolling over and playing dead for her, but he’d let her think he was willing to settle for her sticking around for pregnancy and ease her into the idea of staying here for the long term.
