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Sleep had then eluded him most of the night. Not because of her, but because of Mae.
Pregnant.
A baby.
He was going to be a dad. Karma must have laughed her fucking ass off at the irony of him only hours earlier being thankful to not be in Asher’s shoes.
He could just imagine the questions his family would have when he told them. When is she due? How long have you been seeing each other? When are you getting married?
Because they would assume marriage was in the cards, whereas he hadn’t even had the chance to find out when she was due before she ditched him again. And the moment they found out it was Mae, he was going to get all kinds of shit from everyone. His parents. Asher and Honor. Even Roxanna and Loyal and Shelby had bonded with Honor’s best friend and her Scooby Doo-loving kid.
He would be the bad guy. As usual.
Then there would be the inevitable comparison to Asher, in which he’d come up way short. Unlike his happily married brother who’d planned his first child, his future grandchild contribution was the result of a one-night-stand with a woman who pretty much thought he was a man-whore.
The thought made him clench his jaw. Mae’s low opinion weighed on his mind almost as much as the pregnancy. He couldn’t deny there was a time he had been carelessly indiscriminate with his choice of bed partners, and the number of them, but it had been more in his early twenties. Since then, he’d mostly been playing it up because it was his thing. Well, it was the thing he was willing to let them see, anyway.
Not that Mae would believe him after seeing Lyssa, but prior to his night with her, he hadn’t been with anyone since shortly after Honor’s Must Love Frosting bakery grand opening. Finding out Ian was Mae’s son and not her significant other had gotten under his skin, and the one time he’d tried to get her out of his mind with some random hook-up had been a colossal failure. Like he was. Because after he’d had Mae, he didn’t want anyone else.
And she didn’t want him.
Not only did she think he was a womanizer, but her opinion would drop to rock bottom when she found out he now had no money to support her or a baby.
He’d had a brief irrational thought about going to talk to his dad, but he knew exactly what the response would be. “Don’t think I’m changing my mind about your trust fund because you screwed up.”
Other than that one moment of stupidity, he wouldn’t think anything of the kind—nor would he give him the satisfaction of asking. As if he needed to hear his dad say out loud, “Man up and get your ass to work.”
So, he’d started looking for jobs online at about midnight. I
n the middle of filling out his first application at three a.m., he realized he needed to have a resume. In the middle of reading the sample resume he looked up, he realized he didn’t have a damn thing to put on one.
But did Mae really need to know any of that?
No. Because he’d get a job soon enough.
Right now, he needed to talk to her, and her work was the only place he could figure she wouldn’t be able to shut the door in his face or walk away from him.
He reached for the door as he sucked in a deep breath, only to have it shove open and almost hit him. He caught it as he jerked back, and then froze when his gaze locked with Mae’s blue one as she spoke on her cell phone.
“—without the permit. How—” Her words broke off as she darted a glance around before stepping outside while finishing her sentence. “How did this get missed?”
Merit released the door and waited silently for her to finish her call.
After a furtive glance in his direction, she cupped her hand over the phone and whispered to him, “Your sister’s inside.”
“I’m not here for Bells.”
Her brow dipped as she returned her attention to her phone and spun away again. “Why was the permit pulled? The inspection passed last week.”
He stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and leaned back against the side of the building. As he waited, he couldn’t help trailing his gaze down the length of her petite profile. Red T-shirt with her company logo over her left breast, soft, worn skinny jeans, and a pair of tan, steel-toed work boots that were sexier than they had a right to be.
He’d memorized her curves over and over in his dreams the past two months. He’d drawn them with his brush on canvas. None of that was as good as tracing the peaks and valleys of her body with his bare hands.
His fingers twitched with the desire to touch her again. He wanted so badly to hear her breath catch as he stroked her silky skin, to feel the clench of her fingers in his hair as her pleasure exploded and she screamed his name.
Fucking A, he was getting turned on just thinking about her breathy moans and whimpers.
Not helping, dipshit.
