AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Look," he told me. "I just got this from my accountant. It’s a receipt for a donation I just made to a women’s charity..."
He pushed it towards me, and I looked down, staring at it—and, sure enough, he was telling the truth. It might not have proved everything, but it proved something, at least. And it was enough for me to trust he wasn’t making this up.
"Fuck," I murmured and lowered my gaze as I tried to gather myself. This was real. This was happening. The man he was, the person I needed him to be, he had come to it on his own terms—not because he was trying to impress me, not because he wanted me to believe in him, but because he wanted it for himself. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
"Hey, don’t curse like that in front of the baby," he joked, and I laughed, a relief from the tears that had been nagging for so long. I looked up at him, eyes wide, and asked the question I couldn’t believe I was going to ask.
"You want...do you want to start a family with me?"
He reached over the table and took my hand.
"Thea, the way you made me feel, I knew I couldn’t just let it go," he told me. "That’s why I wanted to change my life. I wanted to be the kind of man you could be with. I wanted to be the person you could fall in love with. And I knew I couldn’t do that with everything else I had going on in my life. The way your brother reacted made that very clear."
I snorted with amusement.
"Don’t tell me that Mark actually helped us in the long run," I laughed, shaking my head. He grinned and tangled his fingers with mine.
"I guess he might have," he agreed. "I know this is a big ask, and I know we still have a lot to get past—we have a lot of getting to know each other to do before we make this official. But I did this for you, Thea, all for you, and I want to share that with you. If you’ll let me."
I beamed at him. It seemed as though the world had stilled for a moment, allowing just the two of us to sit here together and enjoy this moment of sweet, comfortable quiet before everything else rushed in to cause trouble.
"I think I will," I replied. It wasn’t even a question in my mind. How could it be? I just wanted him. I wanted everything about him. I had done so from the moment we first met. When I had seen his darkness, the mess he was involved in, I had done all I could to push down those feelings, but they were rising up now with nothing to get in their way.
And it felt pretty much perfect.
"I know we’ve got a lot to talk about," he remarked. "How about we do it back at my place?"
I squeezed his hand tight. After everything we’d been through, I never wanted to let him go, not for anything in the world.
"Sure," I replied, and we rose to our feet to leave.
Chapter Eighteen Scott
I opened the door for her, and she raised her eyebrows at me.
"You know you don’t have to do everything for me just because I’m pregnant," Thea protested, but I shook my head.
"If you think for a second I’m going to let you so much as lift a plate, you’ve got another thing coming," I replied. Honestly, I knew I should have been more shocked at the news she had given me, but something about it just felt...right. As though everything was sliding into place the way it needed to, as though this was just what I had been waiting for.
She was pregnant. We were going to have a baby together. And I was so, so glad I had decided to change up the family business before she’d told me. I wanted to be a part of this child’s life. I wanted to make sure I proved myself a strong, reliable father before the child took its first breath out in the real world. And the best way to do that for Thea was to step back from the dangerous legacy my father had left behind.
I guided her to the couch where we had spent our first night together. It seemed so long ago now, given everything that had changed, but I knew it was really just a matter of months. She had just transformed so much about my life in that time, so much I could hardly make sense of it all. I had shifted everything for her, not because she had asked me, but because I had wanted to be with her enough to drop my cling to an old life. I was done. I had left it behind.
And now, I had even more of a reason to commit to it.
I sat down beside her and brushed her hair back from her cheek.
"Can I feel your stomach?" I murmured. I still didn’t know for sure where we stood, and I didn’t want to put my hands on her unless she was totally comfortable with it. She took my hand and guided it down to her belly.
"There’s nothing much to feel there yet," she warned me, but it didn’t matter to me at all. There was something so profound about laying my hand on her stomach. She was right, there was nothing different about it that I could feel, but there was something incredible about knowing there was a child growing in there—not just a child, our child.
The child I would raise with her. The child I would leave a legacy to. But not the legacy my father had left me, no—something better, more honest, something stronger and more grounded in the real world. They would never have to feel the same pressure I did, to step up and take over if they didn’t want to. But, with the plans I had, there was no way they wouldn’t want to take the chance to live up to my legacy.
Our legacy. The one we were going to make together. I gazed into Thea’s eyes, looking at this woman, this woman who had changed everything about my life. She didn’t even know how happy I was to have her here with me right now, how much I wished she could have come along sooner—but I doubted I would have been able to hear what she had to say until now. No, she had walked into my life at the exact moment I needed her most, and it was perfect.
"I want you to help me," I told her, and she frowned at me.
"Help you how?"
