Page 31 of My Tempting Boss

Afterward, she sat against my chest with my arms around her and her cheek against the open collar of my shirt, and the car moved smoothly through the late-afternoon traffic toward her mother’s house. She’d already pulled her panties back on and smoothed her skirt, and I’d zipped my trousers. We looked, almost, like people who’d spent the drive talking.

“That’s going to be the one,” she said.

“You said that last month.”

“I have a feeling.”

“You said that last month, too.”

She tipped her face up to mine. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, the way they sometimes were after, and her mouth was a little swollen, and there was a piece of hair that had come loose from her knot and was clinging to the side of her neck.

I tucked it behind her ear.

“If it’s not this time,” I said, “we’ll try again next week.”

“And the week after.”

“And the week after.”

“Sutton?”

“Yes?”

“You really think we’ll have another one?”

“I know we will.”

She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she was looking at me the way she’d looked at me on a rooftop on the first night I’d ever spoken her name out loud. The way she’d looked at me across my desk on the morning she’d told me she was leaving my building to figure out who she was without me, and the way she’d looked at me when she’d come back.

“I love you,” she said.

“I’ve loved you,” I said, “since you said hi on the rooftop.”

She made the small sound she always made when I said it—half laugh, half exhale, like the line still surprised her even though she’d been hearing it for five years.

The car turned the last corner toward her mother’s house.

Elyssia was on the front porch with her grandmother, waiting for us, her dark hair in two small lopsided pigtails and her face already lighting up the second she saw the car. She was three. She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s love of notebooks, and she’d been the best surprise of my life from the moment Joss had shown me the test on a Sunday morning at our kitchen table four years ago.

I helped my wife out of the car.

She tucked the loose piece of hair back into her knot. She straightened her blazer. She took my hand.

We walked up the path toward the porch where our daughter was already running down the steps with her arms out, and I thought the thing I’d been thinking on and off for five years and would, I suspected, be thinking for the rest of my life.

Everything I’d built, I’d built for this.