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Piper took her pencil back. “My father didn’t tell me to do anything. I made a choice and now you have to make one.”
“Marry you or what? Break up? You’re giving me an ultimatum?”
“No, it’s a fake wedding plan for a fake engagement. The plan was never to get married. You made it clear that was never your intention.” She continued to write in her notebook, refusing to look at him.
“And when summer comes and we don’t get married like everyone expects?”
Piper shrugged her shoulders. “You’ve made yourself clear and I think I’ve done the same. I won’t play house. I’m not going to date you for the next ten years while you figure out how you feel about me. I won’t do that to this baby. He deserves to know how his parents feel about each other.”
“I never said it would take ten years. I’m asking for a little time to be with you before we make a once-in-a-lifetime commitment.”
She put the pencil down and lifted her eyes to his. “I love you, Sawyer. I was falling in love with you while we were recording ‘You Don’t Need Me.’ Maybe my dad talked me into walking away. Maybe I listened. But you have to understand, when I do something, I put my whole heart into it. I didn’t think I could give you all of me, which is what you deserved. That’s why I walked.”
Sawyer was stuck on the first three words she’d said—I love you. How did she know? Why didn’t he? What was wrong with him? What was he so afraid of?
“Now there’s a baby and everything has changed,” she continued. “I see us together as a family, Sawyer, but I can’t make you feel the same way. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. I won’t wait forever, though.”
“Piper needs to get ready to go,” Heath said, standing in the doorway with her hair-and-makeup team behind him. “We have to be at Thornberry’s in forty minutes for the signing.”
Someone always needed her for something. She was usually being pulled in ten different directions. Maybe that was what scared him the most. What if one of those things eventually pulled her away from him?
* * *
“IS YOUR BABY going to wear this perfume?” The preteen waiting for her signed poster picked up the display bottle of Starlit on the table.
Piper couldn’t tell her the baby was a boy. She wasn’t ready to share that information with the world yet. “Well, not right away. I love the way babies smell. I wouldn’t want to cover that up.”
The young girl’s face scrunched up. “My baby cousin does not smell great when he needs his diaper changed.”
Piper handed her a signed Starlit poster and thanked her for the advice. The line ran all the way through the department store, and she only had ninety minutes to get as many fans’ posters signed as possible.
Thornberry’s was a large chain with stores all across the country. They were the biggest sponsor of Piper’s tour and would exclusively sell the Piper Starling perfume brand.
The Nashville Thornberry’s had rolled out the red carpet for Piper’s arrival. There were Starlit banners hanging all over the store and bouquets of lavender roses, stalks of purple and lavender gillyflower, and bunches of fresh purple statice decorating the signing table to match the purple bottle of perfume.
“You look so pretty. Even prettier in person,” the next girl said as she waited for her poster.
Piper appreciated the compliment. The purple off-the-shoulder dress she wore was a tad tighter than it had been when they’d bought it. All she could think about as she’d posed for pictures with the Starlit bottle before the signing was her baby bump.
“Thank you, sweetie.” Piper handed her a poster and readied herself for the next fan.
A woman close to her mother’s age approached the table. She had chestnut-brown hair that reminded Piper of the models in shampoo commercials. Her eye color matched her hair, and she seemed somehow familiar.
“Thank you for coming out today to support Starlit,” Piper said. The woman stared at her without saying a word. “Can I make this out to someone in particular?”
“I needed to see you in person and this was the only way I could think to make it happen.”
