AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And she was filled with terror about it all going away, but this felt good. It felt right.
They could do this. They could do this and it would be okay. It had to be.
“Shared custody.” He was mumbling and muttering while he used a pickax to get granite up out of the ground to clear out the field, and finally, Jace acknowledged the muttering.
“What’s going on?”
“She thinks that we’re going to have a platonic relationship wherein we share custody of the child.”
“Sounds mature,” Jace said.
He looked at Jace. Hard. “And you would be fine with that?”
“I didn’t say I would befinewith that. I said it sounded mature.”
“Well. I’m not fine. And maybe I’m not mature.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“I brought her breakfast this morning. And I aim to keep doing that.”
“Keep bringing her breakfast?”
“Yeah. And dinner. I want her to see that she can’t do this without me. Hell, I want to make it so she doesn’t want to do this without me.”
“And what do you want exactly?”
He thought of the way they’d been this morning, sitting at the kitchen table, that low-level hum of need between them.
“I want her,” he said. And suddenly, it was like the sky had broken open and rained down to hallelujah. Like God had slapped him across the face and said: finally, dumbass.
“I want her,” he said again. Emphatically. “I don’t want to be friends. I don’t want to share custody. If we are going to have a baby, we need to be a family. And hell, how else am I supposed to keep her safe?”
“Fine. But what does that have to do with her?”
And he realized that was the thing. She had said that this needed to be about the baby. But for him it would never just be about the baby. He had wanted her, and they’d slept together because of that long-held desire between them. Longer than he’d ever even realized. At least on her end. And he couldn’t separate the things. The pregnancy was a direct result of that desire. It wasn’t on its own. It wasn’t he could never be neutral about her. He never had been. He wanted her. In his bed every night and damn everything else. He wanted to keep her safe. And that meant keeping her with him. He wanted... He wanted to take care of her.
“Are you in love with her?”
Everything in him shied away from that. That felt like a bridge too far. That felt like the kind of wound you didn’t come back from. And anyway, she might be attracted to him, but she was in love with a dead man.
“I want her. Functionally, for me, it’s all the same.”
“Well. Let’s hope your plan to bait her with food works.”
“I have some other things to fall back on if it doesn’t.”
“And that is?”
“She didn’t get pregnant for just playing checkers.”
“Yes. I guess not.”
“How about you?” he asked. “You ever...”
He shot Kit a look. “Don’t go there.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere. You don’t even know what I was about to ask you.”
