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“I’d have to be extremely dense not to notice you walking around with a spoonful of peanut butter in your mouth the few times you’ve graced me with your presence.” He eyed the tubs of peanut butter with narrowed eyes. “They’re both depleted from the last time I checked, so I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer. Let me know and I’ll pick up more next time I get groceries.”
Heat spread up her chest and took residence in her cheeks. It shouldn’t surprise her so much that he picked up on her eating habits, not when he was obviously watching her so closely, but the thoughtfulness of the simple gesture had her throat closing and her eyes burning. “I, ah, use both.”
Conscious of his eyes on her, she spread first the chunky onto each pancake, and then took the other knife and covered it with smooth peanut butter. She carefully cut the food into tiny bites instead of rolling it up like a burrito the way she would have if she was alone. “Thank you.”
“We can make this work, minx. You just have to trust me.”
That was the one thing she couldn’t do. She did trust that he wasn’t a total asshole, and that he showed every evidence of probably being a good father and a decent friend. But if she let herself sink into the ease of being with him, she was in danger of forgetting exactly how devastating her inevitable heartbreak would be. Everything else might have changed, but that hadn’t.
If anything, her reasons for not tumbling head over heels for Aaron had just multiplied. This wasn’t some guy she could avoid after things fell apart.
He was the father of her future child.
She couldn’t just keep shutting him out, though. He was right about that. There had to be some kind of compromise that got them through this with the least amount of strife. That compromise probably doesn’t include amazing sex and screaming his name. Way to muddy the waters. She silenced the snide little voice inside her. There would be plenty of time for self-recrimination on her seventh run to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
She finished her pancakes and sat back. “Did you want kids? I mean, if life played out according to your perfect plan.”
“What makes you think I have a perfect plan?”
Becka rolled her eyes. “I pay attention, that’s what. I think you’re even more type-A than Allie and Lucy—combined. That’s saying something.”
He made a face. “Guilty as charged. Though I only ever really had a plan for my professional life. I’ve known I wanted to work in cybersecurity since I was in high school, and it only took my first internship in college to solidify that I wanted to work for myself and own my own business. That goal kept me busy enough that the personal stuff was always being pushed to the back burner. And the last time I agreed to a date, my prospective date ran off with the matchmaker.”
His date, her sister.
It hurt to think about, but he and Lucy might have fit. They were both ambitious and driven and more than a little pretty. Lucy and Gideon were perfectly matched, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that Gideon had thought Aaron was a good match for Lucy when he compiled his list of bachelors. That was back when Lucy had hired the headhunter to find her a husband—a position Gideon ended up filling in the end.
Becka couldn’t be more different from her sister if she’d tried. She was driven, sure, but her dreams had never been to make partner in some law firm or to own her own business. All she wanted to do was live her life to the fullest, to do what she loved and make enough money to pay her bills and travel to places she’d never been before.
Hard to travel with a baby.
She took a hasty drink of her orange juice, aware of how closely Aaron watched her. “That’s nice.”
“Uh-huh. To answer your question—yeah, I want kids. I always have. My sisters might have been aggravating to grow up with, but we’re pretty close now, and there’s something comforting about the chaos of a home filled with a family.”
She wouldn’t know anything about that. Becka’s parents had divorced early on, and her mother had always been more concerned with her agenda than with her daughters. When Becka was bullied, it wasn’t her mother she ran to. It was Lucy. Her sister had started filling that parental role from an early age, and she’d never quite stopped.
She still remembered the moment when she realized she was more like her mother than she’d ever be like her sister. Becka was fourteen and had been going on about some drama that she didn’t even recall now, years later, and thirty minutes into her bitchfest she’d realized that Lucy was upset—had been upset through the entire conversation while Becka went on and on about her petty problem.
