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Pregnant. Emily’s empty uterus spasmed. Lucas almost sounded envious, but she knew better. Or maybe she didn’t. He’d said she’d been wrong about his not wanting children.
Was that what had driven him to seek her out? That his best friend had settled down and Lucas realized he was the odd man out?
The possibility seemed hard to fathom, but just his being there, having taken a job at Children’s, telling her he wanted to have a relationship with her, his ex-wife, all of it was hard to take in.
“Do you think we’d have kids by now if we hadn’t divorced?”
Lucas’s question gutted her as surely as if he’d stabbed her. She leaped out of the bed. “It’s too early in the morning for questions like those.”
Not glancing his way, she rushed into the bathroom, shut and locked the door. She slid down to the floor and cried tears she refused to let have sound no matter how badly her body shook.
* * *
From the time Emily had emerged from the bathroom, Lucas knew something was different.
There was a hollowness to her eyes, a blankness to her facial expression that told a deeper story.
Plus, she hadn’t met his eyes a single time. Not even when he’d cupped her chin and tried to get her to.
She was shutting him out and he felt the gap between them widening with every breath she took.
She was going to end things. In his gut, he knew she was.
A desperation hit him.
He didn’t want Emily ending things between them.
He needed her.
A heavy realization to make.
He needed his ex-wife.
“I’m going to call the hospital and find out what Kevin Rogers’s funeral arrangements are. I feel I should go.”
Staring into her cup of coffee, Emily nodded.
“Will you go with me, Emily?”
She glanced up, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. “Why?” Her voice squeaked.
“I’m not good at funerals, and especially not a kid’s.”
“I—” Her expression pinched. “Lucas, we really don’t need to be spending so much time together.”
He’d known it was coming, but her words still punched at him.
“Please go with me.”
Her inner turmoil was palpable in the room, but in the end she nodded. “If you want me there.”
“I want you there.” He needed her there, at his side, where she belonged.
Because Emily belonged beside him.
And he belonged beside
her.
