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“I’ll book it for Friday. We can grab a hotel.”
A dry laugh chafed her throat. “My parents would die if we booked a hotel. They would insist we stay with them.”
“We can stay with them.”
She watched him for a solid beat, wondering who this man was, really. Was he the billionaire who moved them into a regal house with the snap of his fingers? Or the family guy kicked back on a rocking chair? Could he be both?
“Friday,” she repeated, still unsure.
He grabbed his empty beer bottle, stood from the rocker and bent to kiss her. “But we’re still having sex at your parents’ house, whether they like it or not.”
She pressed a hand to her cheek as he walked inside, waiting until he’d gone to react. Despite her worries about Friday—when reality met fantasy—Zach’s comment made her laugh.
* * *
“How perfect that you both made it here for Fourth of July weekend!” Paula Brand grinned as she piled raw seasoned steaks and chicken breasts onto a platter.
Penelope’s father, Louis, came in from the back and accepted the platter, slicing Zach in two with a curt nod.
Zach was accustomed to suspicious reactions from fathers of the women he’d dated—he’d met a few. Mothers loved him but the dads were harder to win over. Zach took a healthy slug from his beer bottle. He just had to come up with the how.
He’d played down the “Dallas billionaire” bit, sliding into his clothing from his Chicago days. A comfortable and approachable pair of jeans paired with a gray T-shirt.
Penelope opted for a billowy summer dress, cut to disguise the roundness of her belly starting to make itself known. She was leaning against the counter, a carbon copy of her mother, with an hourglass figure and blond hair. Paula’s blond was a paler shade, her stature shorter, but she was as womanly and beautiful as her daughter.
A vision of Pen at that age, standing over a sink while Zach flipped through the mail hit him square in the solar plexus. His next breath was a struggle, but he managed.
“Zach, honey?”
He blinked out of his fortune-seeing stupor to find Paula’s brows lifted in question.
“Another beer?”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah. Thanks.”
Pen raised an eyebrow in his direction but moved to the fridge on his behalf. When she handed over the bottle, she smiled up at him, her eyes sparkling and skin glowing.
It seemed no matter how he tried to cordon off this situation as one he could control, she continually kicked down barriers and knocked him off center.
The real kicker? He didn’t mind it a bit.
“Pen tells me you were a contractor when you lived here,” Paula said as Zach took a swig of his fresh beer. “What do you think of this place?”
Paula and Louis bought and sold real estate for a living, so their current digs was a three-bed, two-bath fixer-upper north of Chicago.
“Good bones,” he said, happy to turn his attention to the surrounding rooms. They’d obviously moved in here while they did the work. The house was clean, but there were various projects started in the kitchen, one of the bedrooms, and the half-bath downstairs had been gutted.
“We bought it for a steal.” Paula washed the cutting board and her hands. “Foreclosure. We’re hoping to double our profit. Louis insists on rebuilding the back deck, but I wanted to tear it down.”
“The deck is a good feature.” Zach walked to the back door. Louis manned the grill, his stout, muscular body stiff. The deck was worn and splintered, and a pile of fresh wood was lying under a tarp in the backyard.
Maybe after they told Pen’s parents about the baby, and Louis didn’t murder him and bury his body in the backyard, Zach and Pen’s father would have a topic in common.
Zach knew how to build a deck.
* * *
Pen didn’t miss the wind in the windy city, that was for sure. She’d wrestled her hair into a ponytail and was forced to hold her paper plate down with one hand while she ate her chicken sandwich to keep it from blowing away.
