Roomies with Benefits: A Brother's Best Friend Baby Romance by Amy Brent (28)

She slept, letting out little snuffles and moans occasionally as though something was bothering her in her sleep. I wondered if there was something on her mind; I felt as though she’d been holding something back from me. Just once in a while, she would look over at me, and I would see something like regret in her eyes as though there was something she wanted to tell me but couldn’t quite find the words to yet.

But I couldn’t spend my whole life sure that she was hiding something from me. Every time I found myself doubting her, I remembered what I had been through with Julia – all the pain she had caused me, all the suffering. And I know I couldn’t let her get inside my head like that. I knew I couldn’t let her keep dictating the way I lived my life; it wasn’t worth it, and she wasn’t worth it, and there was nothing in me that wanted to allow her to have that kind of influence over me anymore. I loved Laurie, and that was all that mattered.

I grinned to myself and glanced over at her once more. There was that word again – love. I had been thinking about it a lot over the last week or so, the word sounding more and more like the only descriptor that made sense for the way I felt towards her. I hadn’t said it to her yet, but I had come close a few times – once when she was lying on my chest and staring at the fireplace peacefully a few evenings before, and once when we had been out for a walk together when she had slipped her hand into mine and squeezed softly. But I had wanted to make it special for her; I had wanted to make sure that she knew that this wasn’t just something I was blurting out. That I had thought about this and that I was sure of it. That was why I had booked the restaurant, to show her that I had planned this and meant it and wasn’t going to take it back. I was nervous as hell about dropping the word on her, especially considering that I hadn’t said it to anyone since I had had my heart broken and that it had only been a couple of months, but I knew I had to. I had sat on my feelings for her for long enough and I wanted her to know I was serious with this.

Finally, we reached the city limits and I took a deep breath as I drove past the boundary and into the place I had been avoiding for so long. Somehow, it didn’t feel like that big of a deal, not with her at my side.

“Hey,” I placed my hand on her leg gently, waking her, and her eyes fluttered open. She stretched and let out a grumpy little grumble, and then smiled when she saw that we were almost there.

“How long, do you think?” She asked, yawning and covering her mouth.

“Maybe twenty minutes,” I replied. “How are you doing?”

“A little nervous,” she admitted, but managed a smile. “But I’m ready for it.”

“Me too,” I squeezed her leg and put my hand back on the wheel, drumming my fingers excitedly. I was ready for this. For the start of our future together.

Chapter Twelve

I sat in the car and peered out of the window, wondering when the fuck Cormac was going to finish paying for parking and come back to pick me up. I drummed my fingers on the frame of the window and bit my lip. My heart felt as though it was about to pump straight out of my chest, and I was long since done with the doctor’s appointment by now.

Everything had been okay, thank goodness – in fat, the baby was doing really well, and I put it down to the bright mountain air clearing out all the city gunk from my body with every single breath. I had been able to pass off my nerves at being back in the city as worry over how the appointment would turn out, but now that it was done I would start looking suspicious any minute now.

I knew I could have requested we go somewhere else for the appointment and the shopping, but I would have had to tell him why and I couldn’t handle that right now. I would tell him eventually, of course – I figured I would have to – but for now I just wanted to keep it under wraps.

He finally returned to the car and I snapped my head up at once, plastering a big smile on my face so he wouldn’t wonder why I was looking so down. He had noticed it a couple of times already, but I had managed to pass it off as just hormones.

“You ready to go?” He asked, and offered me a hand to climb out of the car. I took it and got to my feet; it had only been a couple of months, but I already felt as though this thing was weighing me down a little. I ran my hands over my stomach, remembering only an hour before when I had first seen that thing squirming around inside of me, it’s little heartbeat loud and clear on the screen. We didn’t know the gender yet, but I could tell from the way he squeezed my hand so tight and looked down at me with that enormous great smile on his face that he was as excited as I was to find out what kind of child we were going to have. Whatever it turned out to be, I knew I was going to love it so much – as much as I knew I loved him, and that was saying something.

“Yeah, sure,” I stretched as I stood up. “How much money can we spend on this, again?”

“As much as you want,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, I just like to hear you say it,” I teased, and he tucked an arm around my waist and leaned down to plant a quick kiss on my cheek. It was a little odd, being around people out in the real world again, but I was beyond proud to be seen on the arm of what had to be one of the city’s most eligible bachelors. As he pulled back, I leaned against him and smiled. Even though there was some part of me scared shitless at being back in the city and so close to the life I had left behind a few months ago, I felt so safe around him that sometimes it was hard to remember what I had been so unsettled by in the first place.

“So, where first?” He asked, and I shrugged.

“I have no idea where to start looking,” I admitted. “So…the nearest department store, I guess?”

We headed out of the parking lot, his ridiculously fancy car looking out of place alongside all the people-carriers and beat-up, well-loved vehicles. It was a bright, sunny day, one of those crisp, cold ones that made you feel as though the air was trying to take chunks out of you every time you took a breath.

We did a little shopping for the nursery, but it was hard not knowing what gender the kid was going to be; we picked out a couple of possible cribs and changing tables, but since we would have to get it all delivered it was really just looking for ideas more than anything else. And besides, my feet were starting to hurt and I found myself starving hungry all of a sudden. It had a habit of hitting me like that, when I was least expecting it, this ravenous hunger suddenly sticking its head up over the parapet of my brain to announce that it needed to be taken care of that second or else there would be trouble.

“Can we stop for something to eat?” I asked as we left the fifth shop in a row we’d checked out, and he glanced down at his watch. He had been acting a little cagey all day and I couldn’t figure out why, and had eventually just put it down to me projecting my own discomfort at being in the city out on to him.

“Yeah, I think we can,” He grinned at me, and I tucked my arm through his.

“You know anywhere nice?” I asked ponderously. We were so far away from my old neighbourhood that I couldn’t think of one place around here I actually knew; this was where rich people came to shop and eat and live, and up until a few months ago, I had hardly counted myself as a part of that number.

“I have somewhere in mind,” He replied, flashing me another smile. Fuck, sometimes when he looked at me like that, with that expression on his face, somewhere between joy and disbelief as though he couldn’t believe that he was actually with me, I felt my heart swell to the point of bursting. I almost said it to him there then, almost dropped the words that I had been carrying silently with me for the last few weeks, but I bit my lip and kept it in for now. It was still a little early for that, and I didn’t want to freak him out by being too forward. But then, if knocking me up in the first month of knowing me wasn’t forward, then what was?

“Is it close?” I asked, patting my stomach. “I’m pretty sure baby needs fed right now.”

“Oh, baby does, huh?” He teased. “Well, I can’t turn down baby now, can I?”

He led me around the corner, down another street, and finally he came to a stop in front of a restaurant that I had actually heard of. I mean, I was pretty sure everyone in the city had heard of this place. It was the kind of place you joked about being taken for your anniversary, never expecting to land a table there – hell, even if I had, I would never have been able to afford anything more than a side salad. It was expensive, exclusive, dramatic, and renowned all over the country, and it took me a long moment to realize why we’d come to a stop outside of it.

“Are you serious?” I gasped suddenly, as Cormac stood there next to me looking up at the sign above the door. He nodded.

“You have a table here already?” I asked, and he nodded again. He couldn’t hide the smile on his face now; he’d been trying to play it cool till this moment, but I guess hearing the shock in my voice was exactly what he’d been going for.

“Yeah, I booked it out for the two of us,” he replied. “I wanted to…I just wanted to make tonight special.”

“It’s always special when I’m with you,” I replied, soppily, and found that I was nearly choked up; I put it down to the hormones, as I had done with pretty much everything these last few weeks, but I knew at least part of it was because I’d never had a guy treat me like this before in my life. Not just the amount of money he had to have been dropping on getting us a place at a restaurant as amazing as this one, but just the thought, the fact that he’d even considered that I might be worthy of a place like this. I looked down at my outfit nervously, and then up at the diners already in that place.

“I’m not sure I’m dressed for it,” I remarked, but he shook his head and headed for the door.

“Trust me, they won’t mind,” he promised me, and held the door open for me to make my way inside. I took a deep breath, trying to forget the fact that this dress had cost me twenty bucks five years ago and that I was wearing a pair of scuffed-up black sneakers into the fanciest place in town, and stepped inside.

I had never seen anything like it before. I had worked in some fancy-ass hotels over the years, but nothing that even came close to this restaurant. A large fountain sat in the middle of the room, water cascading down over classical-looking sculptures of intertwined bodies; the place was decked out in royal red and gold, so far removed from the minimalism of Cormac’s place. A host approached us, dressed in a fancy suit and looking like he’d been plucked straight from the lobby of some European hotel in the thirties or something. He gave my outfit the once-over but didn’t say a thing when he saw the way my hands were resting on my stomach. Instead, he glanced up at Cormac and smiled expectantly.

“Do you have a reservation with us?” He asked smoothly, and I relaxed as soon as I realized that as long as Cormac had the pull to get us a table at this place, no-one would give a shit what his dinner companion was wearing.

Cormac gave him his name and the waiter raised his eyes slowly, looking between the two of us.

“Right this way, Mr and Mrs Miller,” he stepped aside and half-bowed, as though he wanted to be sure that he didn’t offend in any way. I shot a look at Cormac and tried to keep the smile off my face. Fake wife now, huh? That was a step forward.

“Seriously?” I nudged him playfully. “Telling them I’m your wife?”

“This is a family place,” he teased back, not looking at me, and I noticed that there was a tiny little flush of red on his next as though he was embarrassed at being caught out. W

e were taken to our table; it was one of those perfect little two-seaters with a spotless white tablecloth and a candle flickering softly in between us. I took my seat and smiled over at him, not quite able to believe that I was here with him.

“This is incredible,” I remarked, glancing around; I was pretty sure that I could see a few people I knew from TV or the movies, but I didn’t want to stare too hard in case I gave myself away as a commoner.

“Yeah, well, the reason I live all the way out in the woods is because then I can splurge on shit like this and look super generous,” he teased, taking my hand and squeezing again.

“Is this what you were all cagey about all day?” I wondered aloud, and he nodded.

“I just wanted to keep this a surprise,” he smiled, and I felt my heart melt. No-one had ever treated me better than this, and there was still some part of me sure that I didn’t deserve it. But as long as he believed I was worthy of it, I supposed I would have to find my way to believing it, too.

“Your menus?” A beautifully-acquitted waitress appeared next to the table to hand us our hefty leather-clad menus for the evening, and I took one and began to leaf through at once, my stomach grumbling at the thought of all that food.

“So, what are you going to get?” Cormac asked, and soon enough we were exchanging a lively conversation about what the best mix of dishes would be to share; I wanted to try everything, and insisted that we owed our baby the chance to try all this ridiculously-delicious sounding food as well. He could hardly disagree, and by the time we were finished, we had practically ordered up the entire menu. They brought it out one dish at a time, laying on the table in front of us until it was practically groaning under the weight of it all, and I clapped my hands together excitedly as soon as it was all laid out in front of me.

“Thank God, I’m starving,” I sighed, and I realized that I hadn’t thought about Richie even once since we had walked in here. That was a win. If I could come through to the city and actually relax, maybe I would never have to tell him the truth about why I left. That was all in my past, now, anyway, and this right here was my future – not just this meal, but Cormac, the baby, all of it. This was what I had to look forward to. So why would I have spent a moment looking back?

He watched me as I started to dig in to the food, and I glanced up at him and furrowed my brow. He was smiling, not at me, but as though something wonderful had just occurred to him and he couldn’t wait to tell me all about it.

“What is it?” I asked, and he looked down at his lap and took a deep breath. And then suddenly, I could feel it in the air – even without him opening his mouth I knew at once what he was going to say. I widened my eyes and stared at him, urging him onward, so keen to hear those words come out of his mouth – to know that everything I felt for him was reflected back in him, too. As though I didn’t already know that.

“Laurie, these last few months…” He shook his head and let out that breath. I was silently urging him on, wishing that I could just blurt out everything I was feeling to him, but knowing that for the time being I needed to let him speak. He was the one who had been hurt in the last relationship he had been in, and he was the one who actually had something to overcome. I bit my lip and waited for him to continue.

“They’ve been the most intense of my life,” he confessed. “I’ve never felt anything like what I feel for you right now. And I don’t know if it’s the baby or being alone together all that time or…or what it is, but I don’t want to hide it any longer.”

“Yeah?” I was chewing on my lip so hard I was surprised I wasn’t drawing blood. I was so heavily focused on everything around me – the sound of the cutlery glancing off plates, the light pitter-patter of the rain on the windows outside. I just wanted to commit every moment of this to memory, because I knew what he was going to say and I wanted to remember it for the rest of my-

And that’s when I saw him.

I had been seated facing the enormous window that looked out on to the street, and I thought my heart had actually stopped in my chest for a moment when I laid eyes on the man standing outside and looking at me.

I didn’t recognise him for a long moment. He looked a little tweaked-out, like he’d lost weight, and he’d grown his beard out so much that it seemed as though it had consumed most of the bottom half of his face. But it was him, no doubt about it. You didn’t date a guy for as long as I’d dated Richie and not recognise them when they were standing right in front of you. The noise of the restaurant dimmed, and the corners of my vision started to blur. No. This couldn’t be happening. How was he here?

Just like that, I was back in the apartment, the day before I’d run away from the city the last time. And that guy was there with his gun, and I was so sure that I wasn’t going to make it out of there with my life. The fear flooded through me once more, pinning me to my seat, my eyes glazing and my jaw clenching and every part of my brain screaming at me to run, run, run.

“Laurie?” Cormac frowned at me, pulling me back to the table and the moment that I’d just quantifiably ruined with my distraction. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, but we need to get out of here,” I replied, leaning in close and whispering, as though Richie could somehow hear me through the rain-streaked window ten feet away. Cormac’s eyes widened.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He demanded. “We barely just got here.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” I looked past him once more, and found that Richie was still watching me out there. “I just need to leave. I’ll explain everything, I promise, as long as we can go back to the cabin right this instant.”

His face darkened, and I felt my stomach drop when I saw his expression. I knew I was going to pay for this, for keeping this from him, for all of it, and maybe that’s no more than what I deserved.

“I’ll get you out of here,” he sighed, glancing around for a waiter. “But you have to tell me everything, alright?”

“I promise I will,” I swore, and my heart picked up the pace in my chest. This was meant to be some perfect, romantic dinner, the one where I told him everything that had I been thinking and feeling these last few months, and now I had fucking ruined it.

Cormac paid what we owed and we made our way to the door, moving quickly. I kept my head down and looked around as soon as I was outside. I couldn’t see him anywhere, but I still felt as though my entire world had been tipped up a few inches, the angles wrong and impossible to work with now that this had happened. Cormac didn’t take my hand, and I could feel something coming off of him in waves – was it anger, resentment, distrust? I didn’t know yet, but all I cared about was getting the fuck out of here once and for all.

We arrived back at the car and I looked around again, my hand on my belly, wild-eyed and praying to God that Richie didn’t give enough of a shit about me to do anything about his sighting. He was an asshole, but he was a small-time one, and I didn’t think that he would be interested in wreaking revenge on me for what had happened.

Just as I was about to climb back into the car, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Panic pulsed in my veins for a moment and I spun around, trying to catch sight of whatever it was, but it was gone before I could pin it down.

“What the fuck is going on?” Cormac demanded again, exasperated, and I shook my head and got into the car.

“I’ll tell you,” I groaned, leaning my head back against the seat. “Come on, let’s just get out of here.”

“Fine,” He climbed into the driver’s seat next to me and gripped the wheel, so tight I was sure his knuckles were going to shoot out the top of his hands.

“We’re leaving,” He pulled the car out of the parking lot, and I felt a wave of relief hit me as I realized we were going to get out of here without Richie catching up with us. But then, as I turned to look at the man I loved, my heart sank as I realized that I might have just lost him for good.

Chapter Fourteen

“So, are you going to tell me what the fuck just happened?” I demanded. Laurie had been sitting in silence for the first fifteen minutes of our journey, but she had promised to tell me the truth and I was sure as hell going to get it out of her.

She didn’t reply and I turned my gaze back to the road. I had no idea what the fuck had just happened, but I knew that it meant she had to have been keeping something from me all this time, and that was enough to make me want to tear the wheel straight out of the dashboard.

What the hell had I been thinking this evening, playing at a couple, booking that table as though she was my wife? I had convinced myself that there had to be nothing wrong with this woman. I had fucking told myself, over and over again, that she was just this perfect angel dropped on my doorstep out of nowhere, that there was nothing to wonder or worry about with her, as though that had ever happened before in my life. That wasn’t how life fit together, no matter how badly I wanted it to. There was always going to be something wrong with her, and now that it had reared it’s head I was sure as fuck going to find out what it was that she had deigned she could keep from me.

“Laurie,” I spoke her name, more firmly this time. Despite how angry I was, there was still some part of me that hurt seeing her so shaken up by what had just happened. I didn’t understand what it was, but I understood that it had scared the shit out of her. And to think, I had been right on the brink of telling her…well, telling her everything. About how I felt for her, about what I wanted from this. And something had happened to fuck that all up, and now I had no idea if we were going to be able to come back from it.

She finally lifted her head where it had been resting on the window, as though she had only just come back to reality. She turned to me, blinking a couple of times, and I could see that her eyes were already red-rimmed. I turned back to the road, forcing myself not to feel sorry for her. I needed the truth out of her, just like I’d asked for in the first place, and I wasn’t going to let her squirm out of it this time.

“So, you going to tell me what happened?” I asked once more, and finally, finally, Laurie told me the truth.

As soon as she started to talk, things began to fall into place in a way they never had before. Why she had been so keen to get out of the city, why she had been so reticent about telling me about her dating history. Why she seemed so jumpy sometimes. Why there was nothing she could tell me about her family. I couldn’t believe that I really thought that I’d known her before this conversation – now that she was telling me the truth, it was obvious how many holes and gaps I’d overlooked in her because I wanted to love her so badly.

I had to pry it from her, all of it, all the shit about her fuck-up of an ex and everything that had gone down between them. And I tried not to judge her for it, I really didn’t, because I knew that everyone did stupid, fucked-up shit when they were in a bad place. But with every question she answered, with every flicker of light she cast on the truth of who she was, I felt another punch to my gut. She had lied to me for so long – no, not lied, but she had hidden herself from me for months now. I would have listened to all of this when I first gave her the chance, when I spilled my secrets to her, and it would have surprised me but I would have accepted it. Knowing that she had deigned me secondary to the truth was the worst part. That, I couldn’t handle.

So it was with a sinking heart that we finally arrived back at the cabin, the two of us having long since fallen into silence. I didn’t want to have to have the conversation with her in the car, but I knew what I had to do. I had broken enough of my rules for her over these last few months, and look at where it had gotten me – feeling as though I had just been kicked in the teeth, after finding out the truth of the person she really was.

I turned the engine off and the two of us sat there in the overwhelming quiet of the woods for a few, long moments. And then, finally, I turned to her.

“Laurie-”

“Please don’t say it,” she turned to me, eyes shining, the most expressive she’d been since we’d left the restaurant. I stared at her for a moment, and there was some part of me, a not-insignificant part, that was telling me to just let this go – that we could work it out from here and make it stick, that I could set down another set of rules…

But what happened when she broke them, or I did? Where would I draw the line on what I would put up with and what I would indulge in and what I wouldn’t? If I didn’t come down one way or the other, I would just end up spending the rest of my time with her sure that she was cultivating secrets, keeping something important from me.

Her hands were on her belly, moving across it absently, as though she was reminding herself that that was still real, at least – and my heart hurt watching her do it. It could have been so perfect, between the two of us, if she’d just let it be. Us, the baby, this cabin – setting up a nursery and getting my family around to meet the newest addition, giving her a place in a family that she had never had before. It was so real I could almost feel it, could almost hear the chatter overlapping as they all talked to each other, punctuated with those occasional bursts of laughter, the baby in her arms, her in mine. It could have been so perfect. But it wasn’t. And I couldn’t forget what she had done.

I climbed out of the car and she followed me; I was putting off the inevitable. I didn’t want to do this. Every fibre in my body was begging me not to, but I had to. She had given me no choice.

We made our way back into the cabin in silence, and I took a long while before I turned around to face her, as though I could wipe what had just happened from reality if I tried hard enough. But then I did, finally facing her, and my heart sank as I realized I was ready.

“Please don’t do this,” She whispered, eyes wide – I hadn’t turned on the light but the moon was bright outside, and the cold light that flooded into the room seemed to suit how bad I felt in that moment.

“You haven’t given me a choice,” I replied, and my voice was choked with emotion that I was only just keeping down. “You know – I told you, such a long time ago, I told you I couldn’t handle you lying to me.”

“I’m not like her, I’m not like your ex,” She begged me. “You know that. I was just so scared about what you’d think of me if you knew the kind of person I was-”

“You think that would have stopped me?” I cut her off, narrowing my eyes at her. “You really think that would have put me off?”

“I didn’t know then,” She lowered her gaze. “I didn’t know what kind of guy you were. I just – I saw this life you had for yourself, and I thought that the person I was wouldn’t fit into it.”

“And when you knew me better?” I demanded, anger coursing through my veins, just enough to drown out the voice in my head that was telling me to stop while I still could. “What about then?”

“It would have been too late,” she protested. “And I just…I didn’t think any of it was relevant. I’d moved on from that life, I was with you, and I wanted this so badly-”

“You can’t pretend everything that you told me never happened,” I replied, my voice low. “You know that’s not how it works.”

“You didn’t tell me everything about you upfront,” she protested, drawing herself up to her full height and looking me dead in the eye. “You think I hold that against you?”

“I think you would have if you knew that I was still hiding it from you,” I replied. “That’s why I told you. I wanted everything to be out in the open with us. I told you that, Laurie, fuck, I don’t know how many times I told you that.”

“What did you want me to say?” She demanded, despairing. “You wanted me to tell you every little thing about the person I used to be? Because I don’t like her a hell of a lot-”

“Well, I do,” I shot back, then corrected myself. “Did. I did. And I only wanted you to tell me the kind of shit that would have gotten in the way of us, I don’t know, ever leaving this cabin again.”

“I would have told you,” she closed her eyes, as though repeating the mantra to herself. “Even if he hadn’t turned up tonight, I would have told you.”

“I don’t believe you,” I replied simply, and it was those words that confirmed everything I needed to do. I still loved her – fuck, I had no idea how I was going to live in this cabin without her now that I had to break things off – but if I didn’t believe her then there was no way in hell we could make this work. Her eyes filled with tears at the sound of those words coming out of my mouth, as though she knew at once what they meant for us. She took a deep breath and stepped forward, catching my hand between hers.

“Cormac,” She said my name, and the sound of it on her lips was almost enough to get me to buckle and forget the resolve that I’d worked so hard to put in place. I could see it gleaming in her eyes, the promise of everything that the future could have held for the two of us.

“Cormac, I’m begging you,” she looked deep into my eyes, flicking her gaze back and forth, as though she was searching for something that she was sure she would find in there. “I know I fucked up. I get that. But you’ve got to give me another chance. You can’t – I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, you have to understand that. I wish I could go back and tell you the truth, but I can’t. But I can promise that I’ll never lie to you again as long as I live, not as-”

“Laurie, please,” I held my hand up, ripping my gaze away from her. It was too painful to see the earnestness in her eyes and to begin to believe her. I wanted to believe her, more than anything in the world.

“Please,” she repeated the word, and she reached up to touch my face, to draw my gaze down to her once more. Her skin on mine was more than I could handle, and yet I didn’t have it anywhere in me to brush her off, even though I knew I should have. She leaned up and planted a soft kiss on my mouth, just lightly, brushing her lips across mine in a way that she knew drove me crazy. When she pulled back, her eyes had softened, and I knew what was coming next.

“The baby,” she breathed, the words tantalising on the tip of her tongue. “Think about the baby, Cormac, all of this…”

“I know, I know,” I slipped my arms around her waist, almost on instinct, and then swiftly removed them, turning away from her and facing the wall. It was still so dark in here, but that seemed about right – I felt as though flicking a light on in these circumstances would only serve to make it seem real. I could hide here in the darkness, hide from what I knew I had to do. I could still feel her lips on mine, and I brushed my fingers across my mouth to remind myself how recently they’d been there, how good they had felt.

She moved towards me again, following me, not letting me get away from her that easily; this time, she planted her hand on my chest, right over my heart, as though I needed a reminder of how deeply embedded she already was in there.

“Remember today?” She reminded me softly, her voice gentle. “Remember when we saw the baby?”

“Laurie, don’t do this-” This time it was my turn to beg her to hold back, but she cut me off and kept talking.

“You remember how it felt, right?” She prompted me. “When you saw it for the first time?”

“Of course I do,” I murmured. I would never forget that moment, as it happened. It had made everything so real, thrown into such sharp focus what was happening with all three of us. I had felt tears prick my eyes briefly, though I swallowed them down at once. Seeing my child for the first time was more than I ever thought it was going to be, more intense. I had no idea how I thought it would be, but seeing that creature in there had really brought it home for me that this was all I wanted in my life right now. Her, that baby, the three of us hidden up in that cabin so far from the rest of the world and living our lives out intertwined together.

“I saw the way you looked at our baby,” she ran her hands over her stomach again. “I know…I know you felt what I did. We can’t just go back to pretending this is some kind of contract, Cormac, you know that. After everything that’s happened…”

“It’s only been a few months,” I protested weakly, but I knew that wasn’t going to be good enough to get her to give up on this. Yeah, it had only been a few months, but what had kindled between us was impossible to ignore, to escape. I knew if I cast her out of this cabin now and never looked back, that I would never forget her, that everyone who came afterwards would be matched up to her and would fall short. She bit her lip, and the tears fell down her cheeks at last; she angrily dashed them away with the back of her hand, as though pissed that she had shown that kind of weakness.

“What were you going to say to me, at the restaurant?” She asked, her eyes shining in the darkness. “What were you going to tell me?”

“It’s not important now,” I lowered my gaze, remembering so vividly how excited and nervous I’d been at the start of the day to tell her how I truly felt about her, how certain and secure I had been in that belief. That those feelings were still there now, just as sure as they had been before, but now I couldn’t bear the thought of saying them to her.

“Yes, it is,” she implored me. “Cormac, I…I know what you were going to say, and I have to, I know that now isn’t, but I have to-”

“Don’t say it,” I tried to stop her, but it was too late. Laurie had always been a woman of her own mind, and even now, she wasn’t going to forget that.

“I love you,” She finally spoke the words, and they seemed to hang in the air between us – like a gunshot, the sound of them ringing out dangerously. I felt as though they had punched a hole in me. I couldn’t believe this was the first time she’d said them to me, and that I wouldn’t be able to say them back, even though every fibre in my body was screaming at me to just forget all of this and pull her into my arms and carry her to bed and kiss every inch of her body until both of us had forgotten anything that had gone done. Lock those doors, never leave the house again, just the two of us in this place together, and then the three of us. In love. A family. The image rotated around and around my head, taunting me, teasing me.

She stood there, her face clear, as though there was nothing more she knew she could say to me. And there wasn’t. She had laid herself, raw and open, for me to see, and there was nothing I could do or say in response to the words that had just come out of her mouth. I wanted to say it back. I wanted to take her face in my hands and look her dead in the eyes and repeat the words back to her, and then have her say them again to me, and then turn them on her again, until we’d heard them so many times in a row that they’d lost all meaning.

But I couldn’t.

“I love you,” she repeated, as though she wasn’t sure that I’d heard her the first time. I shook my head. I didn’t have the words to say what I needed to.

Her face dropped with horror, and she planted a hand on the counter next to her, as though to keep from collapsing to the floor right there and then. Her eyes scanned my face, for some kind of reaction, some kind of promise that I wasn’t going to be this cold to her.

“Plase don’t turn your back on us,” She murmured, and her voice cracked on the last word and I felt my heart literally ache for her. How could she do this to me? It was the first time she had ever referred to the baby and her as an us, I supposed before because the “us” had been the three of us. But now there was a removal, a severing – I was at arm’s length, taken out of the situation.

“I’m not going to leave you,” I promised her, and she misunderstood and for a second relief passed over her face – but I had to shut it down, even though I didn’t want to.

“I’m not going to abandon you,” I corrected myself, and then reached out to touch her stomach, feeling the tiny outward bump that had begun to form beneath the sweater she was wearing. I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered that at least this little thing was healthy, at least that part of the deal was still standing up.

“I’ll support you and the baby through the pregnancy but that’s it,” I shook my head. “You’ll get the money and then…then you’ll go.”

Even the thought of her leaving this place, leaving this cabin and me and everything behind, it hurt. I hadn’t considered what raising a baby alone would be like until that moment, but it suddenly came into sharp focus: living in this cabin, calling up my mom for help all the time, hoping to God that the little thing never thought to ask about it’s mother or where she was or what had happened between us…

“Cormac,” The tears welled and burst now, running down her cheeks, and it took everything I had in me not to pull her into my arms and rest my head against hers and tell her that this was all going to be alright, that she should forget everything I’d just said in favour of whatever she wanted to hear.

“Cormac, you can’t do this to me,” She demanded desperately, as though she had much of a choice. “You can’t – our future, all of us together, I don’t want to-”

She was gasping for breath now through the tears, scrambling for something that was going to get me to change my mind and coming up blank. I hated this. I hated seeing her suffering. I hated knowing that the same pain, the pain that I had dulled with anger before, would rise up inside me and take me over soon enough.

“Laurie, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this,” I turned away from her once more, feeling like the biggest monster in the universe for walking away from her like this. “It’s over between us. It’s done. We’ll see out the rest of the contract, and then you’ll go. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” She gasped, and then inhaled sharply; I glanced over my shoulder to see her sinking to the floor, face crumpled and contorted from what had just happened. The way she looked – bent over in the darkness, tears coursing down her face and dripping from her chin on to the floor, her body wracked with sobs – was a perfect reflection of how I felt and it pained me in ways I would never be able to put into words to see her in that state. Despite it all, I still wanted to go to her and take her up in my arms and carry her to bed, but I knew if I laid so much as a finger on her now it might be taken as a confirmation that she should forget everything I’d told her and that we could be together again at last. By her and by me. I knew I was on the brink of wavering, giving in, giving her what she wanted so badly. What I wanted, too.

But I pulled open the bedroom door and stepped inside, closing it behind me, and staring out the window above the bed and at the cold, callous light of the moon pooling on the floor in front of me.

Chapter Fifteen

I wasn’t sure how long I sat on the floor of the cabin, tears wracking my body. It could have been hours – the night seemed to stretch out in front of me, endless and hopeless and lonely, as soon as he closed the door to his room and left me out there all by myself.

I could never have imagined in a million years that he could treat me this way. I felt as though…I felt as though I’d known him, known him at least well enough to be sure that he wouldn’t end things as soon as I made the smallest mistake. And okay, maybe that hadn’t been the smallest mistake, but it wasn’t enough for this, surely?

I made deals with myself inside my head, that I would get up and go into his room and talk with him more, try to get him to see my side of things if he didn’t come out in ten breaths, twenty breaths, fifty, one hundred. I was sure that door was going to open, and I stared at it all night long, listening to every single creak that came from inside, every movement, every hint that things were going to be alright. There was no way that the man I loved so much could just walk away from me like that. There was no way.

Eventually, the tears stopped – not because I felt better, but because there was nothing left in my body to cry out. I forced myself to stand up, and drank a glass of water, leaning on the sink like I was scared it might give out from underneath me at any moment. I wasn’t doing this for me – some part of me just wanted to sit there on the floor and cry until I was nothing but a shrivelled-up old husk of the person I used to be – but for the baby. I placed a hand on my stomach and looked down at the tiny bump that was just visible under the big sweater I was wearing, and felt the tears come once more. I had to grip hold of the counter just to stay upright this time, the thought of that tiny thing inside of me that needed my help to stay alive. I could remember, still so vividly, the look on his face when we’d first seen it moving inside of me. He had wanted me so much then, wanted this, wanted everything that came with it, and now he was there, in his bedroom, not giving a shit about me or the agony that I was suffering through because of what he had done.

What I had done. I had to remember that. He had given me the rules and I had been the one to break them, not him. It was only fair that he…that he…

I felt the tears rise and take over me once more, and I found myself sinking to my knees in the kitchen as a wail burst forth from my mouth. I would have worried about waking him up, but there was no way that he could have been asleep in there, not if he had ever felt anything for me. Not if I knew him at all.

I had told him that I loved him. I had said the words twice, to make sure that he hadn’t missed them the first time. I had been so sure that was what I had needed to fix things between us; how could it not be? Yes, I had messed up, but I had committed to him more deeply than I had ever committed to anyone in my life. The moment before I said the words, I had realized that I had never meant them before in my life. I had said them because they were expected of me, not because they actually represented the way I truly felt. But for Cormac, they seemed to flow into the emotion I felt for him perfectly, fitting together as though that was how they’d always meant to come out of me. They felt like poetry on my lips, the truth that I had been hiding for so long – and then they just fell flat, with a clunk between us. He didn’t say them back. He didn’t say them back. He didn’t say them back.

I sat there on the floor thinking about that for a long time, long enough that by the time I was done the light had started to seep in through some of the windows and remind me that what had happened had happened in the real world and not just some nightmare vision of what could have been. I pulled myself to my feet, every bone in my body feeling as though it was cracking and clicking with every move that I made, and dragged myself through to my own bedroom.

I hadn’t slept there properly since the first night – I still kept a lot of my stuff in there, but I had slept every single evening since the first time we’d hooked up in Cormac’s bed next to him. And it had felt so right, every single morning, so wake up next to the man that I was pregnant by, or to hear him in the kitchen making us both some breakfast, or to know that he was just out for a walk or to gather some wood. There was a comfort in it, a safety that I had never felt before with anyone. And now that he had torn it away from me, I felt as though I was spinning out of control through open space, impossible to catch, impossible to stop. I lay on the bed and knew logically it was beneath me, but I couldn’t connect with the feeling of the pillow beneath my head or the covers tugged up and over my body. I felt distant from myself, as though my brain was trying to escape from what had happened already, trying to protect me from the horror of what had gone down over the course of the last twenty-four hours.

I pricked my ears every time I heard a moment from his room, but I knew most of them were nothing; if he was going to come in and comfort me, he would have done it by now. But no – he had chosen to leave me out here, all alone, the cold of the mountains finally seeping deep into my bones and reminding me just how alone I was in the world.

How the fuck was I going to get by now that what had happened had happened? If he really did want to stick to this break-up, and for the time being at least it seemed as though he did, then what were the two of us going to do? Just live here, in this cabin, in this place, pretending that we had never felt what we had felt for one another? It would be ridiculous. I couldn’t just switch off my feelings for him and I knew that he couldn’t do the same for me, or else he’d have cast me out of this place already.

What would I do if he changed his mind about all of it? I doubted that was going to happen, he seemed too good of a man for that, but what if he did? He had more power over me than I did over him, and I hadn’t read that contract back to front, and there might have been a clause in there that let him call things off if something happened that he didn’t like. I pulled the covers tight around me, as though I could pin myself to this bed and never let go.

I tried to hold on tight to the image of him in my head, but it was flickering in and out of reality. The smell of him, the taste of him, like it was in a dream that I was already forgetting. Would he make me breakfast and bring it in to me? Would we talk this out, or would we leave all of it unspoken?

I closed my eyes tight and buried my face in the pillow, and tried to ignore the fact that it smelled so strongly of him. This whole house did. Maybe I would have been able to escape the thought of him, the pressure and the weight of all that had happened between us, if I hadn’t been trapped in this place for the next few months, but I had signed a contract that meant I had to stay up here or lose out on all the money that he had already given me and the rest that I was due. And what would I do? Go back to the city, try to raise this baby by myself, and do my best to avoid Richie and that entire side of my life? Like Cormac would let me go that easily. He would chase me down with every resource he had access to, and that wasn’t going to stop just because I had tried to leave him.

Besides, the thought of starting all over again scared the fucking shit out of me. I couldn’t keep running away from things when they didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to. I had to stand up and own the decisions I’d made, good or bad. Look at what had happened last time I’d tried to flee from what happened in the city – it had wound up destroying the life I’d managed to build for myself here. And where would I go? Would I just keep running across the country until something stuck, hiding from the truth of the past I was doing my best to leave behind?

I ran my hands over my bump, and the feel of it grounded me, bringing me something close to comfort, the nearest thing to peace that I’d had since he had done what he had done. He couldn’t take this away from me. I didn’t know if he would let me stay a part of the child’s life after it was born, but I was pretty certain that he would want me to be there to some extent. And I was already getting attached to this thing, so if he thought that he was getting rid of me that easily he had another thing coming. I didn’t know whether I would have a girl or a boy, but I knew that I would be it’s mother and that I was going to be part of it’s life, same as Cormac. There was nothing in the contract about him being able to boot me out of his life just like that, and I was sure there was some kind of legal route I could go down…

My heart sank again, and I felt this wave of exhaustion flooding over me. I couldn’t believe I was having to thin about the lawyers I might have to hire to make sure that Cormac didn’t cut me out of his life. Up until a few hours before, I had been thinking about the future we might have, the two of us together, the romance of all. And now, here I was, lying in this cold bed alone and wondering how much I would have to sue him for to get him to take notice of me and let me be a part of this kid’s life.

I finally closed my eyes, dawn having long-since broken, and pulled the covers over my head. Maybe I could sleep long enough that Cormac would change his mind and we could talk this over. And maybe, just maybe, I could sleep long enough that my heart wouldn’t ache every time I thought about the man in the next room and what I had just lost with him.

Chapter Sixteen

Two weeks. That was how long I held out. Two weeks.

I was amazed that I had made it that far, if I was being honest. Every moment around her was a living agony the likes of which I never thought I’d see again as long as I remained broken up with my ex; sure, I had know that maybe things wouldn’t always be roses with Laurie, that we might annoy each other or get under each other’s feet as the pregnancy drew on, but that hadn’t happened for one second of those few months we were together. But now that we were split up, the cabin suddenly seemed oppressively small, in a way it hadn’t before.

I did my best to avoid her, especially those first few days after the break-up. I could tell she wasn’t sleeping much and some part of me wanted to intervene and get her to eat and rest, for the sake of her and the baby, but I knew that she must have been trying as hard as she could and didn’t need any more lecturing from me on the matter. Still, I would watch her as I went to make myself coffee (about the only thing I could stomach in those first few days, when the break-up was fresh and stung every time I thought of it) and see those dark rings beneath her eyes and the way that her head would droop down every now and then as though she was about to fall asleep on the spot, and I would have to fight the urge to march over there and scoop her up in my arms and take her to bed.

Speaking of bed, the physical side of it was…harder than I’d though to let go of, if I was being honest with myself. Just seeing her walk around the house, often in not much more than a shirt and a pair of panties, it was hard not to just grab her and throw her down on the nearest hard surface and fuck her until I felt that familiar sensation of her pussy clenching around my cock as she came, hard. I remembered so vividly the look on her face when she would come, the way her body would tremble in my arms, the way her breath would pick up and then hold as she tipped over the edge. Before I had met her, I had been sure that sex was just sex and that it was pretty much the same with everyone that you did it with, but I knew now that there were some connections which were impossible to hide from. I still felt this pull to her, something more than physical, something deeper than that, and it was harder than I’d ever thought it would be not to touch her. Those casual little moments, where she would rest her hand on my back when she brushed past me or when I would absently plant a kiss on her temple as I passed her on the couch, those were the hardest habits to break.

Once, early on, I forgot that we were broken up at all. She was sitting on the couch, staring into the dead fireplace with a blanket wrapped around her, first thing in the morning when I got out of bed to go collect some wood. I was a little bleary, pulling on my shirt as I came out of the door, and when I saw her there I felt that unfettered rush of affection for her that put an instant smile on my face.

Making my way over to the couch, I squeezed her shoulder and leaned down to kiss her; she turned her head towards me and planted her mouth on mine eagerly, a smile on her face as she did so. When I pulled back and saw that hope in her eyes, my heart sank when I realized what I’d just done.

“Cormac…” She murmured, and I quickly withdrew my hand from her shoulder.

“Sorry,” I muttered, looking away from her. That earnest expression on her face, the one that told me if I’d wanted to fuck her right there and then she would have let me, that was hard to ignore.

“No, no, it’s okay,” she got to her feet, the smile blossoming across her face, lighting her up with the kind of joy I hadn’t seen for a hell of a long time. “If you want to…”

She watched me for another moment, that smile wavering as she seemed to realize that I wasn’t actually going to do anything else. I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing myself to remember everything that I’d been focused on these last few days, all the good damn reasons I’d come up with for calling this off. In that moment, as she looked at me, they seemed distant and unimportant. I could hardly remember any of them, finding them muted to grey in my memory.

“Sorry,” I apologised again, and went to pull on my coat and my shoes. “Reflex action. I shouldn’t have done that…”

Her shoulders dropped down and her head sank. The smile was gone, and it was painful knowing that I could have put it back on her face but had to actively choose not to do that.

“I should go,” I headed for the door before I could say or do anything else that was going to give her the wrong idea. The ground was crunchy underfoot when I got outside, and I tried to focus on the crisp sound of my footsteps instead of all the thoughts rushing through my head.

I could still practically smell her on me, her sweetness lingering in all of my senses. I swear to God she was like some kind of drug, impossible to deny, her effects impossible to argue with. I wanted to storm back in there and take as much of her as I could – her smell, her taste, her lightness, the way she made me feel. But I knew I would come around to my choice in the long run. Wouldn’t I? I would see that a life spent wondering if she was hiding something else from me was worse than one where I spent all my time thinking about what could have been between us. There was no point lingering away in the past – I had the future to think about, the future with my baby and my family and my cabin, all the way out here and far removed from the real world.

What would I tell my parents about her? I had been thinking about it a lot recently, specifically what I was going to tell them about the nature of the kid’s conception. I knew my mom would eat me alive if she knew that I’d dropped a good stack of cash on having someone supposedly removed from me to bear my child for me, when she would no doubt argue there were loads of women who would have done this for free if I’d just looked. Call it instant gratification, call it protecting myself after what had happened the last time I’d fallen for someone, but I had wanted a child now and had wanted one with someone who I could at least pretend I wasn’t emotionally invested in. I had convinced myself that my life was best lived all by myself, where no-one could hurt me, but I wasn’t sure how the fuck to explain to my parents that hooking up with this girl strictly for the sake of conception had led to me falling in love with her and then calling things off when I found out she had been hiding something from me. The whole thing was a clusterfuck, and the cold morning air wasn’t doing anything to scrub my brain free of all the shit that had been rotating around and around it since we had broken up.

I decided the best course of action, after the accidental kiss, was just to avoid her entirely. It was childish and I knew probably not the best way to go about handling my feelings, but it was all I could deal with for the time being – we could figure things out when the wound of us wasn’t so raw, but for now, I needed time to myself to think it out. To solidify in my brain how I had made the right choice and would be ready to move on from her soon enough.

But it didn’t happen. We had only been together a few months, but the bond we had created already felt indelible. And I supposed that I knew something was going to bubble over at some point during her stay here – but I didn’t realize it was going to happen so soon.

Two weeks after the day that had split us up, I was sitting in my bedroom and flicking through some book that I had been telling myself I was going to read for months now, but was having trouble focusing on any of the words on the page before me. None of it was sinking in, not even close. My brain refusing to take in anything remotely useful. I had closed the door to the bedroom after she had emerged from her room to get something to eat, in the hopes that it would force her out of my head for a while, but I had failed dismally. I lifted my gaze and looked at the panelling on the wooden door, listening to her rummaging about beyond it. At least she was eating something. She had begun to look a little less tired these last few days as well, from what little I’d allowed myself to see her. Her belly was really starting to show, too, and it was hard to be around her and not just want to touch the spot where I knew my baby was growing. I wanted to be involved with every part of this process, but I knew that laying a hand on her would just be asking for trouble, so I held myself back as best I could.

But something in me that night just didn’t have the energy to hide from her any more. I sat there, on the edge of my bed, and thought about what lay beyond that door – of the woman who was out there, the woman who still wanted me. I would have given anything to have her in my arms right then, to be waking up after a nap together, to roll on top of her and hold her arms above her head and…

I got to my feet. Something in me snapped. I needed to see her, to talk to her properly – none of this bullshit the two of us had been trying to make work these last couple of weeks. I wanted to look into her eyes and remind myself what it was that I had fallen for in the first place. I wanted to forget, if just for a while, what stood in our way.

I opened the door and stood there for a moment; she was standing in the kitchen, staring at the open fridge, her eyes glazed over as though her head was somewhere else entirely. I wondered if she was thinking about me. After a moment, she looked up, and jumped slightly as soon as she saw me standing there.

“Sorry, do you need to get in here?” She asked, ducking her head down and breaking our eye contact. “I didn’t mean to get in your way-”

“No, don’t go,” I moved towards her, and she looked up, staring at me as though rooted to the spot, a deer in the headlights. She was wearing a heavy sweater and a pair of old boxers, looking so delicate under all those layers of clothes. She bit her lip as I drew closer, and I instantly imagined biting it for her.

“What’s up?” She asked, leaning up against the counter and crossing her arms in front of herself awkwardly, protectively, like she didn’t want me to get too close. But she didn’t move – she didn’t run, didn’t look away from me, as I came to a halt on the other side of the breakfast bar from her. I planted my hands on the table and stared at her for a long moment, and it all came flooding back to me, all that I had been pushing down since I had called things off with her. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to live a life without her, in some half-life of a fake marriage where we shared a house but not a life.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. She had always been able to read me almost better than I could read myself – I wondered if she had known this was coming, if she had been sure I was going to crack. Well, if she had, she had been fucking right. I felt as though these last few weeks had stretched me to breaking point, and I needed to get everything that was filling up my head out once and for all before I went totally crazy.

Chapter Seventeen

The way he was looking at me – I had never seen that of expression on his face before. He looked angry. I had never seen him angry. Even when he had broken up with me, he had looked more sad and tired than anything else, none of this rage that seemed to be radiating off him in great pulses present back then. The air was so thick with tension I was surprised I could even make him out through it. I chewed my lip, which was almost raw after the last few weeks, and watched him, waiting for him to say something. Anything. I just needed him to actually talk to me, to stop ducking and hiding the way he had been since the two of us had split.

“What’s up?” I repeated myself, but the words came out almost as a whisper instead of sounding as certain as they had in my own head. He hadn’t moved. His hands were by his side, and one of them had balled into a fist, like he was trying to find his way to forcing the words out of him.

“You know what’s wrong,” He muttered at last, finally breaking my gaze and brushing past me. I knew what he was talking about at once, but I turned to him and played the fool, needing to hear the words out of his mouth.

“No, I don’t,” I replied. This felt odd – the last time we’d had a serious conversation like this one, he had been the one in control and I had been the one spiralling out. But this time, it seemed as though it was entirely the other way around.

“You know,” He repeated himself impotently, planting his hand at the top of the fireplace. “You must have felt it.”

“What are you talking about?” I pressed him, crossing my arms tight over my chest as though I was attempting to keep him out. Even though all I wanted was to walk over there, throw my arms around his neck, and tell him that I forgave everything and that I would put it all behind us if that’s what he wanted.

“I can’t fucking live like this, Laurie,” he gestured to me, still staring into the flickering flames of the fireplace; the way the light was hitting his face, one half in shadow and one in light, seemed to reflect the conflict that was clear in every word that was coming out of his mouth.

“You think I want to?” I replied, suddenly giving up any sense of playing it innocent. I didn’t want to anymore. I still felt like a wound, picked the raw, and I was ready to give all of that up for now. For good. “You think this is how I pictured the two of us being together? You think I wanted…you think I wanted to be stuck around you, knowing the whole time that you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you,” he corrected me at once. “I never did. It’s just – I broke so many of my rules for you, and then you had to go and break mine.”

“What the fuck was I meant to tell you?” I shot back, angry now. I had been brewing up this argument quietly inside of me since he had called things off, repeating the words and the defences over and over to myself until I knew them off by heart, and now that he had given me a chance to come out and say them, I wasn’t holding back.

“The truth, Laurie,” he snapped. “That’s all I asked from you. And you couldn’t give it to me.”

“The truth?” I tossed my hands in the air. “Like it’s that easy? Like I can just…like I can just tell someone like you everything about the kind of person I was?”

“What do you mean, someone like me?” He demanded, rounding on me at last, looking me in the eye. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I mean, look at the kind of life you’re living,” I gestured around the place. “Look at the kind of money you were offering me. That’s more – that’s more fucking money than anyone I ever knew saw in their entire lives, do you understand that?”

“And what about it?” He fired back, voice tense.

“What about it?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “You know what that kind of cash does to separate your life from mine? You always had everything you wanted – the business took off, the money came in-”

“It hasn’t always been easy for me,” He furrowed his brow. “You know that-”

“Yeah, of course I do,” I conceded, pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “But the way your life has been hard and the way my life has been hard – they’re so different.”

“And you think that I wouldn’t understand what you’d been through?” He asked, his voice breaking a little bit, as though he couldn’t believe I’d ever thought of him that way. I lowered my head.

“Yes, I thought you wouldn’t understand,” I admitted. “I thought you’d judge me for getting involved with people like that. I thought you’d think less of me. I thought you wouldn’t want this baby anymore.”

“You really thought I wouldn’t want the baby because of the life you used to live?” He was mad again, maybe in an attempt to cover up the hurt.

“I had no idea what to think,” I spread my hands wide, admitting my mistake. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, Cormac, I’ve never had this kind of relationship before. You know how hard it is to believe that someone like you could actually want to be with me?”

“So hard you would hide literally everything about who you were from me?”

“Yeah, that hard,” I replied. “It scared me shitless, the thought of you finding out the truth. And now that you have, look, you broke up with me just like I thought you would.”

“Yeah, but it had nothing to do with the fact that you were…it didn’t matter what you were keeping from me, it was that you kept it from me in the first place,” He shot back.

“Then give this another chance,” I implored him. “I know it’s hard. I do. But think about…I’ve spent the last two weeks not even sure that you’re going to let me be a part of this kid’s life. I’ve gone from thinking I had a future with you to having all of that ripped away. You don’t know what the fuck that’s like.”

“I know what it’s like to have everything you were sure of pulled away from you,” He replied softly, that flash of vulnerability in his eyes.

“Then why are you making me do this?” I demanded, imploring him, my voice almost cracking with emotion. I couldn’t handle this. I felt like we were so close, but so far, standing only a few feet apart but a mile away when it came to our heads.

“Because I can’t spend the next six months wondering if I made a mistake ending things with you,” he replied through gritted teeth. It was clear that, like me, he’d been doing his best to crush down the feelings that had been coming up in waves since he had broken up with me.

“What do I need to do to convince you that you did?” I asked. “Really, tell me. I want to be with you, Cormac, I want to believe that you’re…that you…”

I let the words hang in the air unspoken between us. He knew what they were. So did I. But it wasn’t my place to say them, not when he had been the one to reject them the last time I had come out of them.

“Laurie, you know how I feel about you,” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I just don’t know if I can…”

“Then say it,” I demanded. “Tell me.”

He looked at me, intent, and I refused to pull my gaze away from his. I was going to hear those words out of his mouth, even if I never got to be with him the way I truly wanted – even if this was the only time I did. I needed to hear them, to hear the confirmation that I was worthy of his love, his effort.

“I love you.”

I felt a little dizzy as soon as he said it. I hadn’t been expecting the words to feel so heavy, but they dropped down inside my head like stones to the bottom of a pool. I had wanted him to whisper those words to me when we were wrapped around each other, waking up in bed together, but instead I had to hear them when I had no idea if he was even going to take me back.

“Then do something about it,” I shot back, challenging him. I lifted my chin and looked at him, and realized that my hands once more had fallen to my stomach, feeling that bump, that promise of our future.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” He demanded. “What do you want? You want me to just forget about what you did? Because I’m sorry, but I just can’t get over it like that…”

“I’m not asking you to get over it,” I replied, cutting him off. “I’m asking you to accept that the way I fucked up has nothing to do with your ex or what she did to you, and just because I kept something from you doesn’t mean I’m going to keep everything from you.”

He fell silent. He seemed to be brewing on my words. I knew I should have counted them out more carefully, should have taken this chance while I had his ear to make sure I didn’t say or do anything that might jeopardise my chances with him, but I couldn’t keep the words straight in my head and just had to get them out for him to hear.

“You don’t know how much that fucked with me,” he shook his head. “I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t have been so quick to break things off. I was just so sure that if I let this slip then it was only a matter of time…”

“A matter of time until what?” I stepped towards him, taking his hand and putting it on my face. “Cormac, you know this is real. You do. Feel me. Touch me…”

He let his hand lay there for a moment and I closed my eyes, letting that sweet feeling of his skin on mine sink through me again. It felt like returning home; I didn’t want this moment to end, wanted to let this play out for as long as I could. I would have talked to him all night long if I thought there was a hope in hell of the two of us getting back together. I would have done it till the end of time if it meant he would touch me like this. He brushed his thumb across my mouth, just lightly, and I felt a jolt of desire move through me.

“Laurie, I don’t know if I can do this,” He admitted after a long while. I finally opened my eyes again, forcing myself to look at him. It was harder than I cared to admit, being so close to him and knowing that I couldn’t just lean in and plant my lips against his.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Be with you,” He reached out to touch my stomach, the tiny bump feeling so safe beneath his hand. “I mean, some part of me…I want this. I want you and I want the baby and I want everything that comes with it, I know that.”

“Then why can’t we just do this?” I implored him. “I know it’s scary, I know we’ve been through a lot, but I…I can’t share this place with you and know there’s no chance for us to be together again. And I don’t think you can either.”

He looked down at his hand, the one of my bump, and he stared at it for what felt like a full minute.

“You can do this,” I whispered to him, leaning my head against his. Even if nothing more came of this, it felt so good to be near him again. The father of my child, the only man who had ever felt as though he had really loved me. He had said it now – even if he never did again, I could hold on to that for the rest of my life and knew that I would, clinging to those words as though they were the only things keeping me afloat in a sea of uncertainty.

He looked at me again, and this time there was a softness in his eyes, so far removed from the anger that had been pulsing there just a few moments earlier. I could feel him wavering.

“I can’t promise that I’m going to be perfect, but I promise that I’ll love you and this baby and everything we have right here so fucking much,” I whispered, worried that if I spoke any louder my voice might crack and give away the tears that were threatening even as I stood there in front of him.

“I know you will,” he slid his hand around to the back of my neck, forehead touched to mine. Finally, for the first time in such a long time, I felt as though the two of us were functioning on the same wavelength. I tilted my head up, looked at him, and I was just about to lean forward and kiss him when-

“What the fuck was that?” He pulled back suddenly, and I blinked myself back into the real world.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, and watched as he looked around wildly, casting his gaze back and forth over the apartment.

“You’re seriously telling me you didn’t hear that?” He demanded, breaking away from me and heading over to the door; he paused for a moment, and this time I could make out what he was referring to. My heart dropped and my stomach tightened, and I grabbed for my bump protectively.

Footsteps. Footsteps outside the cabin. There was no doubt in my mind that was what they were. I could hear the crunch on the dry leaves, a few times in a row, like whoever it was out there was scuttling around the building in the hopes of not being found out.

“What the fuck is that?” I widened my eyes. “Is there someone out there?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and there was a doubt in his voice that I had never heard before. Where only moments ago this love had filled me up, terror flooded in it’s place. The baby. Cormac. The sanctity of this place. It could have been nothing out there, but it could have been something, something to threaten everything that I’d come to need so much.

“I’m going out there,” Cormac nodded definitively, and I reached for him, catching his arm. I felt as though I had only just got him back, and now he was leaving again.

“Please, don’t,” I begged him. “Call the cops or something, just…don’t go out there. Please.”

“They won’t be here in time,” He pulled away from me. “I have to get out there. I’m sorry.”

He pulled me in close suddenly, pressing his face into my hair and letting out the tiniest sigh against me, as though he couldn’t believe this was happening now.

“I’ll be back in a second, you’ll see,” he promised as he pulled on his shoes. “Go wait in my room. “You’ll be safe in there.”

“You think I need to be kept safe?” I asked, voice tiny.

“I don’t know,” he replied, and went for the door. My heart was pounding in my chest, the intensity of the last few minutes roiling in my head.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promised, and I nodded. And, as he walked out of the door to investigate the noise on the other side, I tried my best to believe him.

Chapter Eighteen

I knew what I had heard out here. There was no doubt in my mind about that. But I didn’t want to scare her, so I did my best to make like I was totally in control and beyond calm, even though every muscle in my body was tense and ready for action as I walked out of that door.

I had never heard anyone else up here, not in the whole time that I’d been living in this place. Not once. I didn’t know that anyone knew where the hell I was, but I assumed someone stalking around the house had come looking for me – or Laurie.

“Hello?” I called out into the darkness. The winter came in so suddenly here, it went from cool, long evenings to ice-cold blackness in what felt like a matter of days. I shivered, not wearing enough to be out here this late into the day. Or maybe I was just unsettled by the thought of what I was going to find out here waiting for me.

The footsteps came again, this time from behind me, and I flashed around at once, heart leaping with fear – if they were behind me, they were close to Laurie, even if she was hiding out in my bedroom. The baby. The woman I loved. Adrenalin pumped through my veins and I forgot the cold and the dark and hurried towards the space I was sure I’d heard that noise come from, back around the side of the house. And that’s when I saw him.

My stomach dropped when I saw the figure standing there, his hand on the door – I stared at him for a long moment, trying to place him, and then it hit me where I’d seen him before.

Richie. That fucking ex of hers. That fucking guy – the one who had driven her out of the city in the first place, the one she was still so clearly shit-scared of. It was him again, that motherfucker, and somehow he had come all the way out here to shatter what was left of our lives together.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I stormed towards him. He jumped when he saw me coming towards him, but then seemed to straighten himself out and hold his ground, eyeing me angrily from where he was standing.

“I’m here because you stole my woman,” he snapped back. He was a pasty-looking fucker, uneven dark stubble across his jaw and messy hair that looked as though it hadn’t seen a shower in days; he had narrow eyes and a pointed jaw that made him look distinctly rodent-like, which was appropriate given the rat that he was.

“Stole your…?” I trailed off, disbelieving, and shook my head. “You’re talking fucking bullshit. I didn’t steal anyone. She came to me.”

“I don’t care how it happened,” Richie stepped towards me out of the darkness and into the light, and I saw that his fists were clenched at his sides. “I just want her back. Laurie’s mine. She always has been.”

“She told me everything about the two of you,” I remarked coolly. “I don’t think she’s your anymore, buddy.”

“I’m the one who came all the way out here to find her,” Richie hit himself on the chest, as though underlining his point. “I’m the one who gave enough of a shit to-”

“You think I don’t give a shit about Laurie?” I snapped back at him. Maybe it was just the leftover tension from the conversation we’d been having, but I was so fucking done with this kid. “I’m the one who gave her a decent fucking life. I’m the one who takes care of her now.”

“You don’t know anything about her,” Richie sneered. “You don’t know the kind of chick she is…”

“And you do?” I shot back, voice raw. “She left you, remember?”

Richie fell silent for a moment, and then shook his head, as though accepting what I’d just said as truth would undermine his reasons for coming out here in the first place. I had no idea what he thought he was doing here, but I needed to get him away without making too much of a scene. Laurie was still inside, and the thought of her hearing any of this made my heart ache.

“I dated her for years,” Richie continued, finding his feet in the conversation once more. “I know her. And all this shit, the…the fucking taking her out to fancy restaurants and living up here in this place? It isn’t her. She’ll get tired of it eventually. She lives on the streets, like me, we understand each other like that-”

“Did it ever occur to you that she didn’t want to live like that?” I snarled back. I was running out of patience. I could feel something primal kicking in inside of me, something that wanted this fuckhead as far away from my woman and my child as I could get him right this instant. Richie moved forward again, closing the gap between us, pushing his ratty little face towards mine like it was going to scare me.

“Maybe we should ask her, huh?” He suggested. “Because I know that I fucked up, but I came all the way out here and she’s going to see-”

“Don’t go fucking near her,” I hissed. If he saw her, he would see that she was pregnant, and I had no desire to deal with the backlash to that discovery. He was already angry enough that I had stolen his woman that he had come all the way out here, and I had no idea what his reaction would be if he found out that I had gotten her pregnant, as well.

“Oh, yeah?” He grinned, without mirth, looking like a shark with those dark eyes glinting in the blackness of the night. “What are you going to do about it? Laurie’s always going to be mine, man, and you need to get over that and just let us get back together where we belong-”

“Fuck off,” I shoved him away from me roughly, already more than tired of his bullshit. He held his hands up and staggered back a few paces, looking around, as though hoping that Laurie had seen me lose my temper like that.

“Hey, hey,” he pushed my back, but I didn’t – little fucker like him probably burned out all his energy on drugs before he so much as got in his car to follow us up here.

“You really think she’s going to stay with you?” He goaded me once more, knowing that it hit my buttons. I closed my eyes and tried to centre myself. I didn’t want to have to make a scene, but if he wasn’t going to get out of here then I would have to.

“Yeah, I fucking do,” I snarled back. I didn’t have to explain myself to him, but the way he was talking to me, disrespecting me…

“Prove it,” He went for the door, going to pull it open, and without thinking I wrenched him back and away from it.

“You get the fuck away from there,” I growled at him, my adrenalin pumping now. I could hardly see straight it was so intense; I had never found myself in the position where I’d actually needed to fight anyone before, but this motherfucker was pushing my buttons.

“Oh, she’s in there, right?” Richie taunted me. “She’s waiting for me? Does she know I’m here? You should let her choose, buddy, but if you don’t-”

And that was all I could take from him. I swung my fist and landed it on the side of his face, knowing that if he got in there and got to Laurie she would never feel safe in this place again. He tumbled away from me, sprawling to the ground, and swiftly scrambled to his feet and shoved me away from him. He was pathetic, so much smaller than me, and I wondered if he had ever actually been in a fight himself; the panic in his eyes seemed to tell me that he hadn’t.

“What the fuck, man?” He demanded.

“Get the fuck away from my house, and never come back here,” I ordered him, voice low, hoping that the one punch would be enough to convince him that I was in no way fucking around. “You leave Laurie and me alone and you never look us up again, alright?”

“I don’t think you understand how this works,” he shook his head again. “I need to see her. I need to talk to her-”

He moved towards the door again, and this time I couldn’t hold myself back. I pulled him off, pushed him to the ground, and crouched down over him, grabbing the hem of his shirt and wrapping it around my hand to draw him closer to me.

“Leave,” I murmured again, and even to me my voice sounded saturated in menace. “Now.”

He looked up at me for a moment longer and I could see him weighing up the pros and cons of the situation, whether or not it was worth it to stick around in the face of the threat that I seemed to pose. He scrambled away from me a few feet, but I didn’t let go. I wasn’t going to be satisfied until I saw this fucker turn tail and run into the woods. And even then, I’d be calling the cops to bust him.

“Fine,” he snapped, and I let go.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he whined, gingerly touching the side of his face where my punch had landed. “You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”

“When it comes to her?” I glanced back inside the house. “Yeah. I am.”

He looked up at me for a moment longer, and I could see a second thought in his eyes. I pulled him to his feet and shoved him back towards the dark trees behind him.

“Get the fuck out of here,” I ordered, and finally, finally, he vanished back into the forest, leaving nothing but a whiff of cheap aftershave and a sore fist to remind me that he’d been there in the first place. I stood there for a long while, waiting for my breath to return to normal and making damn fucking sure that there was no way he was going to come back again. I would call the cops as soon as I got inside and let them know about him and his little dealing business, and hopefully he would get tossed in prison and that would be the last we would see of him.

When my heartrate had returned to normal, I slowly turned back toward the house, peeling open the door and making my way inside with trepidation. I stood there for a moment, in the living room where only a few minutes before we’d been embroiled in the middle of the scariest conversation of my life, and now that I had dealt with Richie I had to face up to the fact that that conversation was far from resolved. I had told him that she was my woman, but I had no idea if that was actually the case or not yet.

“Laurie?” I called into the quiet of the house. For one, crazy moment, I was sure that she had run away – that she had fled when she’d heard Richie’s voice and that it would be the last I heard from her. But, after a beat, the bedroom door opened slowly and I found myself looking at the woman I loved.

“Laurie,” I made my way towards her at once and pulled her into my arms, glad that she was safe. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, not saying a word. She didn’t need to. I pulled back, with every intention of telling her about what had just happened, but before I could she kissed me.

It had been so long since we’d last kissed that it took me a moment to recognise the feeling of her lips against mine. And then, as soon as I realized what was happening, I gripped her waist and pulled her against me and pushed my tongue into her mouth and gave myself over to the moment.

I backed her into the bedroom quickly, guiding her hurriedly towards the bed; I didn’t know how long it would be before one or both of us realized that we had a hell of a lot of talking to do before we could actually say we were together once more, and I needed to feel myself inside of her right this instant. Her body felt so small against mine, so vulnerable, and I felt another surge of rage that Richie had seriously thought that he could just come in here and make her his again. She belonged to me – my woman, the mother of my child, my wife…

I pushed her down on to the bed and she pulled me on top of her at once, her lips slightly parted and her eyes wild with desire in the glimpse of her that I got. I pushed my hand up her shirt, grabbing for her breasts, pinching the nipple roughly between my fingers and drawing a squeal of pleasure out from between her lips for my trouble. I moved down and kissed her neck, and remembered the first time I had ever taken her in this bed, when it had been her first time and she had given herself to me so fully and so completely. I felt my cock harden at the memory, and pressed my hips against her.

“I need to feel you inside me,” she begged, a note of pleading to her voice, as though this was the only thing in the world that mattered to her at that moment. I knew how she felt; despite what had just happened, or maybe because of it, I couldn’t fight this feeling that I needed her, that we needed to confirm whatever it was between us once and for all. She gripped the back of my head, her nails digging into my scalp, as I pulled down her pants and pressed kisses across the soft skin of her lower belly, exposing her tiny bump. Somehow, the reminder of that, that she was carrying my baby, made the moment even more intense, and I realized my hands were shaking a little as the desire and adrenalin mingled in my system to wipe any thought but her out of my head.

I stripped down just enough and pushed her legs apart, sliding between them with my cock in my hand and then guiding it inside of her. She groaned loudly as I pushed into her for the first time, and tried to remember the last time we had done this – but I couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was happening now, here, in this moment, that her slick, tight pussy was already clenched around my cock, and before I knew it I had utterly lost myself to her for the first time in a long time.

She wrapped her legs around me, slipping her arms around my neck, and pressed her head against my chest as she rocked her hips back to meet mine. The feeling was unlike anything I’d ever had before, even with her – more intense, deeper, darker, spinning me out of control. She was mine. Even though that asshole had come here and tried to take her away from me, she was mine, and she wanted to be mine, and that was all I needed to wipe away the last doubts of insecurity from my mind. She clung to me like I was the only thing keeping her safe, keeping her afloat, and I fucked her as hard as I could, as though I was trying to bond our bodies together for good.

The pleasure came in waves, so intense that it took me a moment to realize how close I was to coming. I would have held myself back any other time, but I could tell from the way her breath was coming quick against my chest that she was ready as well. I pushed her head away from my chest, kissing her lightly, just brushing my lips against hers, and without a sound she came – her pussy clenching helplessly around my cock, her hands digging into my back as she guided me into her, again and again, and I took that as all the permission I needed to lose myself inside of her too. I thrust deep, one last time, burying myself in her up to the hilt, and then finally my cock filled her up as I came inside her once more.

We were both panting – that was the first thing I noticed when I came back down to Earth after what the two of us had just shared. Panting as though we’d just finished running a marathon. I didn’t move for a long time and neither did she, until I was sure that our limbs would never fully unwrap from one another after this, but eventually and reluctantly I pulled out of her, and then slid down on the bed beside her and pulled her against my chest. She closed her eyes, her breath still coming a little ragged, and let herself relax against me. It was like all the tension she’d been carefully storing up these last couple of weeks had come pouring out of her all at once, and I knew precisely how she felt.

“Was it him?” She asked finally, tilting her head up to look at me and peeling her eyes open. I nodded, and a shadow crossed over her face.

“But I made sure he knew what the situation was,” I promised her, pushing a strand of hair that had become stuck to her head back from her face. “He won’t come back here.”

“How do you know that?” She chewed her lip, and just like before, I reached out and brushed my thumb over her mouth to still her racing thoughts.

“Because I’m going to call the cops as soon as I can be bothered to get out of bed,” I cocked an eyebrow at her. “And I’m going to make sure he gets fucking busted and never bothers us or anyone else again.”

“Seriously?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Seriously,” I replied firmly. “Nobody comes to my house and tries to take my woman from me. That asshole’s going to pay for this.”

“Your woman?” She looked up at me, a genuine smile curling up the corners of her mouth. I realized, with a slight shock, that we had never actually talked out whether or not we were back together. After what had happened, it felt like a no-brainer, but still.

“I think we both need to get some sleep,” I slipped out from underneath her, and planted a kiss on the side of her temple. “I need to call the cops and make sure they pick up that sorry excuse for a man who just came by here.”

“You’re right,” she agreed, and she watched me as I made my way out of the room. I paused for a moment and looked back, and couldn’t resist heading back over to tuck her into bed, wrapping the covers around her carefully. It was a cold night, but it was warm in here with her, especially with the way she was looking at me at that moment. I leaned down and kissed her again, this time on the mouth.

“We’ll talk it all out in the morning,” I promised her. “You need to get some rest now. It’s been a stressful day.”

“Yup,” she yawned once more, and then covered her mouth. “I…I’ll see you tomorrow, Cormac.”

“See you tomorrow, Laurie,” I smiled at her, and watched as her eyes drifted shut and sleep came for her at once. And then, I decided that the call could wait for a little longer, as I sat on the end of the bed and watched my woman drift off to sleep.

Chapter Nineteen

I woke up the next morning, and blinked in the bright of the morning light. The way it lit up everything around it, almost gleefully, was enough to put a smile on my face, as I realized that I was in Cormac’s bed. Everything that had happened the night before came flooding back to me, and I twisted and turned to stretch myself out and beamed at the world at large.

He wasn’t in bed with me, but that was pretty normal. He would be out early, making breakfast or chopping wood or something like that, and I would just have to hang around to catch up with him later. I was more than happy to lay in this bed, this place that the two of us shared, and wait for him to return.

I felt a little quirk of nervousness as I thought about seeing him again. I mean, what had happened the night before – it had been so much to take in, for both of us. I didn’t know what had happened with Richie the day before, but I had my fingers crossed that the cops had picked him up and that he was far away from me and Cormac and the baby for good. I assumed that he’d followed us back from the city when he’d spotted the two of us at that dinner, and had just been biding his time since then. I hadn’t heard precisely what had happened out there when Cormac had confronted him, but I had caught the raised voices, the sound of a scuffle, and that had been enough to unsettle me. It was a reminder that, while this place felt so far removed from the real world, it was still very much attached to it. The real world could still come looking for us if it wanted to, and the thought didn’t exactly thrill me.

I closed my eyes and snuggled back down into the bed, and the scent of him on the sheets reminded me of the night before. Making love to him again had been beyond anything we’d shared before. I guessed that absence had made my loins grow fonder, or maybe it was just that pregnancy-horniness kicking in, but whatever it was, I had loved fucking him once more.

But we hadn’t really spoken after that. I had been so tired that I had all but fallen asleep on the spot, and he had promised me that we could talk in the morning. I knew it had been a big deal, what had gone down, but I didn’t know if it was a big enough deal for him to renege on everything that he’d seemed so set on the night before. The conversation we’d been halfway through had seemed so significant at the time, but it had dulled in retrospect to what had happened and I wondered if he even remembered how close we had been to kissing before Richie had arrived.

I dozed for a little bit, more than happy to let myself lounge in this state of unknowing, until I heard the door open and lifted my head to see who had come in. In my half-sleepy state, I felt a jolt of panic, my brain convincing me that somehow Richie had come back and he was here to claim what he thought was his once and for all. But instead, and to my great relief, I saw Cormac making his way into the room, wearing a grey t-shirt and a pair of jeans that made him look every bit the laid-back dad-to-be.

“Hey, you’re awake,” he slid down on the bed next to me, and I turned to face him.

“How can you be this functional first thing in the morning?” I whined playfully, rubbing the sleep away from my eyes.

“Because I’m not busy growing a baby in there,” he slipped his hand beneath the covers, and I realized that I was still naked from the night before. His cool hands on my bare skin sent a shiver up my spine, but he just let his hand come to rest on my belly. The little bump felt as though it was swelling by the day, and I loved the way it was starting to feel. A reminder of what was going on inside of me, of what the two of us had made together.

“That’s a fair point,” I conceded, and yawned. “Hey, are you hungry?”

“Yeah, actually,” he shook his head and blinked, as though he’d been distracted from whatever it was he’d come in here thinking on. “I made some breakfast. You want me to bring it in here?”

“Yeah, I would love that,” I stretched and sat up, propping myself up on the luxuriously thick pillows behind me and watching as he headed out of the room and then returned a moment later with a tray heaving with food. I laughed when I saw the amount of stuff he’d piled on to it.

“I didn’t know what you would want,” He shrugged by way of explanation.

“So you brought me everything?” I teased, and reached out to pluck the cup of decaf coffee from the tray and took a deep sip. “Mmm. You make it just how I like it.”

“Well, I’ve known you long enough,” He remarked, and he began to butter a piece of toast while I picked at the fruit sitting on the tray in front of me. It was all so bright and fresh, as though it had only been picked an hour or so before, but I felt my appetite was still a little stilted from not knowing where the two of us stood.

“Are you okay?” Cormac asked, and I nodded, biting my lip and eyeing him. And then, I sighed and shook my head.

“I just want to know what’s happening with us,” I admitted, my voice smaller than I had intended it to be. “Last night, it was so much, and I felt like we were so close…”

“We were,” He touched his fingers to my face, tracing the shape of my jaw. My heart dropped. Were?

“But…when your ex appeared out of the fucking ether, he tried to come in here and tell me that you were his woman and that he owned you and that I would never understand what the two of you shared,” he went on, and I rolled my eyes heartily. That kind of ridiculous, arrogant talk sounded precisely like the kind of thing that Richie would come out with, without understanding what any of it truly meant.

“And I was so mad at him for all of that,” Cormac went on, lowering his voice, as though he was trying to contain his anger. “I couldn’t believe…when he came out with all of that shit, it was just like I couldn’t handle what he was saying because I knew he was so fucking wrong and I hated him for it. I wanted to tear him apart for even thinking that he had any kind of claim over you, over us, over…you know, the baby, too.”

“He doesn’t,” I assured him, and it was the truth. Even if Cormac were to kick me out on my ear tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t go back to Richie, not for anything.

“I know,” Cormac took my hand, and a rush of adrenalin ran from my fingertips all the way up my arm at his touch. “But the way I reacted, I knew that he was just…wrong. We’re together. We’re meant to be. And I can’t deny that any more.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat as the words came out of my mouth. The scent of breakfast that he’d brought through, the sunlight picking out the details of the room, I couldn’t focus on any of it. Just him.

“Laurie, I want us to be together,” he finally finished up. “I know I’ve been…I know this hasn’t run the smoothest, but I know for fucking certain that the only thing that matters to me in the world is you and the baby and keeping you safe.”

He fell silent for a long moment, and I realized he was looking at me, waiting for me to respond to what he had just said. My head was still processing, but it didn’t take long for me to take it all in and come up with an answer.

“I want to be with you, too,” I blurted out at last, and the smile that broke across my face felt as though it was going to split it in two. “I..I always have, Cormac. And I know I kept stuff from you, but you have to know that I’m never going to do that again. With Richie gone, there’s…there’s nothing more of my old life that’s going to come looking for me. I get to start over. With you.”

I realized that I was tearing up, and quickly dashed away the tears forming at the corners of my eyes with the back of my hand, giggling at myself.

“I’m sorry,” I shook my head. “This is just…I’ve been waiting to hear you say that for so long. I’m just happy you’re where I am.”

“No, I feel it too,” he promised me, squeezing my hand. I looked up at him, expecting to see tears in his eyes too, but he was still Cormac through and through – which meant he wasn’t likely to start bawling just because we had gotten back together. I giggled again, the giddiness running through me and feeling as though it had set me on fire. He wanted to be with me. No secrets, no second-guessing, no mystery, no playing. He wanted to be with me and I wanted to be with him and it was hard to imagine anything in the world more important that that.

He leaned forward and kissed my temple, and I leaned my head up against his for a moment. It felt as though everything had been moving so fast since I had met him. From the first moment we met in that diner, everything had been running on fast-forward, because both of us were so keen to just get there and seal the deal and escape from the lives that we had built for ourselves; for me, I was desperate to get away from Richie and the involvement I had with that nightmare world, and for Cormac, he was hiding from his own loneliness, starting a new life that he could use to escape from the past that he was doing everything he could to leave behind. And in that running, we had found each other. We had come to a standstill, stopping for the first time in a long time, and finding each other. And now, we were actually going to be together. I reached for some of that fruit, and bit into the sweet, giving flesh of a strawberry, letting the juices run down my chin, and closed my eyes. The taste of it was sweet, but nothing on how sweet these moments with him were.

We ate breakfast and talked about this and that; when we were next going into the city to see the doctor, when we would tell his family, when I would meet his parents, when we would decorate the nursery. Every time he talked about his future with a “we” I felt as though my heart was going to swell and burst with excitement. How could it not? This was the most perfect thing I’d had in my life, and it was all laid out in front of me, only really just beginning.

As we finished up and he took the tray back through to the kitchen, I got out of bed and went to pull on some clothes, before remembering with a start that this wasn’t my room and that none of my clothes were in here. I grabbed one of his shirts, pulling it to my face and inhaling deeply and hoping to goodness that he wouldn’t-

“What are you doing?”

His voice came from behind me, clearly amused at catching me in the act. I turned, flushing bright red, caught out unarguably.

“I was just borrowing one of your shirts,” I replied, as innocently as I could, and he grinned and made his way towards me. He pulled the shirt out of my hands and dropped it to the floor, and stood behind me in front of the enormous mirror that dominated most of his wardrobe door. He slipped his arms around me, and pressed his face into my neck.

“Mmm,” he sighed, satisfied. “How do you smell this good first thing in the morning?”

“No idea,” I admitted, and smiled as I ran my hands over the top of his. I was still naked, and the feel of his clothes against my naked skin was doing something weird to me. Something I didn’t mind one little bit.

His hands moved down, to form a diamond shape around the little bump that was forming on my stomach. He looked down at it over my shoulder, and just watched him in the mirror; a smile formed on his face, slowly, as though something was dawning on him.

“I can’t believe how much you’re showing already,” he murmured, holding me close. “I can’t believe our baby is actually in there.”

“We should get a printout of the ultrasound,” I suggested. “Hang it up somewhere. I’d like the reminder.”

“As if I could forget,” He teased, still holding his hands there in front of my bump. I was still unclothed and normally I would have been feeling a little self-concious about being so exposed for so long, about letting him see this much of my body, but I found myself surprisingly relaxed despite myself. There was something about the way my pregnant body was changing that I found totally fascinating, and I liked the chance to take it in.

“I can’t believe we’re going to be having a baby,” he murmured again, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head against his. I couldn’t believe it either. The moment hung in the air, as though it was holding us there, and I knew at once what he was going to say. What I’d dreamed of him saying for so long. And the moment couldn’t have been more perfect.

“I love you,” he murmured, looking at me in the mirror. It was so strange, the two of us reflected back at each other like that, but we looked so right together. We looked so good, so obvious.

“I love you too,” I replied, and my breath caught in my throat again and I felt a tear leak out the corner of my eye. I smiled and shook my head.

“Damn, I’m emotional this morning,” I laughed at myself. “Guess you just bring it out in me.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” he joked, and ran his nose lightly up my neck. The smile on his face was almost as big as the one on mine, and I could hardly believe, after all that back and forth, that we had actually said it to each other. We loved each other, we were together, we were having this baby…

And then, his hand began to move a little further down. My heart skipped a beat as I watched him in the mirror, moving his hand between my legs just gently and guiding them apart.

“Mmm,” I sighed, leaning back up against him for support. He drew his hand up, pressing it against my pussy, and then dipped two fingers inside of me, moving them lightly back and forth against my slit. The teasing was already getting me there – maybe it was the intensity of the moment we’d just shared, but I felt more connected to him physically than I ever had in my life.

“You’re so wet,” he purred against my ear, and I opened my eyes to see him watching the two of us in the mirror. And even I had to admit, we looked really good; his strong arms holding me up, my hands clutching for him any way I could. He pushed his head against my shoulder, the feel of his hair a new sensation that seemed to wake up any last nerve endings that might still have been sleeping. And then, at last, he pushed those two fingers inside of me.

I felt my legs tremble dangerously beneath me, and I quickly focused in on the sight of the two of us in the mirror, like it would be enough to pull me back down to Earth. And it did the job. The sight of him, fingering me, planting a series of long kisses up my shoulder and my neck as he did so, was so painfully erotic it was as though the moment had been tossed into sharp relief.

“You feel so good, Laurie,” he groaned in my ear, and the way he spoke to me when he had me like this, at his mercy, was almost enough to push me over the edge right there and then. I felt oversensitized, my body prickling from top to bottom, but he was soothing me by sweeping his hand up and down my arms and my back and my ass and my legs, taking in as much as he could at one time. I moaned softly, parting my lips, and tried my best to sear the image of the two of us together like this on to my memory. It was almost too much, but in the best possible way. Intimate and sexy and smoking hot all at the same time – everything that he was, caught in one moment.

“I want to make you come,” he mumbled against my neck, his mouth still pressed firmly against my skin; the heat of his breath warmed me in the cool morning air, and I felt my legs trembling threateningly again. It was one thing to do something like, and it was a whole other thing to watch him doing this to me, to see how damn good we looked together, and it was already getting me close. He moved his fingers into me, deep, a promise of what was to come, and I felt my pussy contract and my body give out as the orgasm finally swept over me.

“Oh…” I groaned, the noise coming out of my mouth ragged around the edges, as though I could hardly control myself. He knew my body so well, every inch of it, as though he’d studied it for years, and knowing that he still wanted me as badly as that very first time was impossibly sexy to me. As I came back to reality and clicked in to the world around me once more, I realized that his breathing was heavy, hungry, horny, and opened my eyes to see his gaze flashing with a dark need.

“Fuck, you look so good like that,” he traced his fingers up and over my pubic hair, letting them trail over my stomach for a moment before he brought them up to my mouth; I parted my lips at once an watched his brow furrow in the mirror as I tasted myself on his fingers. I could feel his cock stirring against my ass, and I needed to feel him inside me sooner rather than later.

“Fuck me?” I asked as he drew his fingers from my mouth, and a grin spread over his face.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he growled, and he moved around me, picked me up, and carried me over to the door; pushing me up against it, he held me in place with one hand and unbuckled his jeans with the other. I squirmed against him, hooking my legs around his back for support, marvelling at how strong he was that he could just toss me around like this, like I weighed nothing. I guessed he wanted to take advantage of that while I was still small enough to do so.

He pushed up inside of me in one thrust, letting out a throaty grunt that let me know this was all he’d been thinking about all morning. I bit my lip and held on to him tight; the angle we were at made it feel so different than normal, me helpless in his arms as he thrust up into me. All I could do was hang on to him for dear life and hope for the best. Good thing that he always delivered.

The door creaked slightly as he moved into me, but I couldn’t focus on that; no, the way he was holding me let me run my hands all over his body, his back, his neck, his head, my fingernails raking through his hair. This was intense in the best possible way, like the two of us were blowing off steam that we’d been trying to keep in for way too long. I leaned down to plant kisses on what parts of his face I could see, his forehead and his cheeks and his nose, so desperate for him to know just how much I loved him and just how much I always would.

He slowed for a few thrusts, and the deep corkscrew motion of his dick sent agonising waves of pleasure through me once more. How did he always know exactly what I needed? I supposed that was the connection, the intimacy we had fostered between each other – the fact that he was mine, and that I was unarguably his. And that realization took me over the edge again, the orgasm mellowing me and making my limbs a little limp as he did his best to keep me up against the door. He moved a little faster as soon as he felt my pussy clenching around his dick, and I ran my nails over his back and shivered in his arms as I felt him come inside me all over again.

He let me down gently, his breath ragged around the edges, and I landed with a small thump on my feet on the floor below me. I giggled again, unable to keep in how giddy I felt from everything that had just happened, and made my way towards the bed, pitching myself head-first on to the covers and snuggling in. Whenever he made me come I always felt as though I could have dozed off right then and there, the rush of endorphins fading and leaving pure comfort in their place.

“Fuck,” he shook his head as he did his jeans back up and staggered over to join me. “That was…”

“That was no exactly the kind of sex I imagined after the first time we said “I love you” to each other,” I teased.

“What, you were expecting some tender lovemaking thing?” He cocked an eyebrow as he ran a hand over my bare ass, letting it linger on the curve. “You know that’s not really my style.”

“Not mine, either,” I agreed, squirming into the sheets beneath his hand and loving that he couldn’t seem to get enough of my body this morning.

“That should teach you not to think you can just put on clothes without my permission,” he teased, but there was a gorgeous edge to his voice that made everything between my legs tingle with excitement.

“Oh, yeah?” I turned over and looked him dead in the eye, challenging him. And he grinned right back.

“Oh, yeah,” he nodded, and he moved on top of me once more – and I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to be needing clothes for a long, long time yet.

Chapter Twenty

I paced up and down the living room, in front of the crackling fire, and tried to ignore the squirming nerves in my gut. This was going to go fine. I was sure of it. Well, as sure as I was ever going to be.

Where was she? I looked down at my watch. I had asked her to make sure she was back from her walk around seven, and it was a couple of minutes past now. I tried to calm myself, to remind myself that just because she was a moment or two late didn’t mean that something terrible had happened to her. She had insisted that she was fine to go out on this walk by herself, and I knew I had to trust her. Still, every time she had walked out of here by herself since that thing, I had found myself nervous and I knew that I had to get over that eventually.

But this time it had given me an opportunity to put the finishing touches on the surprise I had been working on for weeks no. It was deep into winter, her pregnancy a good seven months deep, and I was excited to show her what I’d been working on all this time. I had a feeling that she was going to love it. I sure as hell hoped so.

I had started work on the nursery a few weeks ago, and it had been more fun than I’d cared to admit to put the place together. I started small, picking up a crib on a long drive here and ordering in a few toys and mobiles there, making sure that she had no idea what was happening, and had used the room I usually kept for storage to start building the place from the ground up. I had kept it locked, brushing her off every time that she asked me what I had in that place, telling her the truth – that it was just where I kept the stuff that I didn’t have a use for yet. Little did she know that soon enough it would be the centre of our house, of our lives.

The baby was due soon, and everything with the pregnancy had gone better than I ever could have expected. There were no issues with her, completely healthy, and the baby – whose gender we had decided not to find out yet – was doing awesome. I couldn’t believe I was going to get to meet my son or daughter in just a matter of weeks. Couldn’t believe that the two of us were going to be parents.

It was that thought, the realization that we were going to be a family, that finally prompted me to make an honest woman of her. I mean, she hadn’t said yes yet, but I was pretty sure that she was going to; we had already committee the rest of our lives to each other with this kid, and I felt like this marriage was just one more step towards that. I knew that even if she never wanted to get married, I would have done everything I could to be with her for as long as I was alive.

We had told my parents about us a month or so ago – it had come as an enormous shock to them, unsurprisingly, but they had come around to the idea soon enough. They had had to. The two of them were already planning a visit in the new year, to meet Laurie and get to know her before the baby came along. She was nervous about their visit, but I had promised her that no matter what I wouldn’t reveal to them the truth of how we met. I knew they would never understand, and besides, what we’d told them was the truth – that we’d met, fallen in love, and gotten pregnant really quickly, and had decided to stick it out and stay together and keep the kid.

I wanted her to meet my parents because I knew that soon she would be part of our family proper – I didn’t need their blessing to marry her, but it would sure as hell help if they liked her. I knew they would. She was smart, funny, busted my balls when I needed it, and I was certain that was all my mom ever wanted for me in a wife. I knew that’s what I wanted. I knew she was what I wanted.

It had been hard, at times, rebuilding the trust between us. I knew I hadn’t even tried when things had gone to shit with Julia, and sometimes I had wondered if I should. But now I knew that all of it, everything that had happened, had been pushing me towards meeting this woman, towards making her mine at last, and now I looked back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Not one moment of it. Not the pain, not the loneliness, not the sadness. I would do it all a million times over if it meant that I got to her at the end of it.

I heard the door open and reached into my pocket, closing my hand around the ring box I had picked up a few days before. When I had been back in the city, sorting out the selling of my final few shares so I could focus on raising the kid with Laurie, I had snuck into a jewellers and scoped out the perfect ring for the occasion. And I had found it. Now I just had to hope that she was going to love it, too.

“Cormac?” Laurie called through the house, rubbing her hands together to warm them up. There was a smattering of snow over her shoulders, and I reached out my hand for her.

“Hey,” I grinned widely, already ridiculously excited. “I have something to show you.”

“Oh?” She cocked her head at me and allowed her to lead me towards the nursery that Id spent so long putting together. Her belly protruded even under the jacket, and she rubbed her hands absently over it as she often did these days.

I took the key that I had left in the lock and, with a flourish, unlocked the door and pushed it open. She stepped inside after me – and as soon as she was there, her jaw dropped.

“Holy shit!” She exclaimed, then planted her hands on her bump, as though covering the baby’s ears. “Is this…?”

“Yep, this is the nursery,” I nodded, the grin somehow widening even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t got any more room for it on my face. I looked around, seeing it through her eyes, and I had to admit that I’d done a pretty good job. I had painted the walls in bright yellow, carefully detailing the edges of the room with bursts of green leaves and flowers that I had drawn on with a stencil. There was a changing table set up next to the window, which I had draped in pastel-blue curtains to keep out the light when the baby was sleeping; a crib sat on the other side of the room, next to the door, and I shook my head slightly as I remembered the hours I had spent putting that damn thing together when she had been napping. Thank God I wouldn’t have to do that twice. There was a playmat and a small box of toys sitting in the corner of the room, even though I knew that the little creature wouldn’t be able to play with them for a while after they came along yet.

Laurie turned to me, her hands clasped in front of her chest.

“I can’t believe you did all of this,” she murmured, shaking her head. There were tears glistening in her eyes, and I frowned.

“Do you not like it?” I asked nervously. I knew I had gone out on a limb doing this for her, but I had wanted to make a statement, to do something that let her know how serious I was about this.

“I love it,” she wiped the tears away quickly. She had been crying a lot more often recently – she put it down to the mess of hormones that pregnancy had unleashed in her, but that didn’t stop me gently teasing her about tearing up when she an advertisement with even remotely sad music. And that didn’t stop her chewing me out for doing the same.

“You do?” I pulled her up against me, and she wrapped her arms around my waist and looked up at me.

“I do,” She smiled. “I love it. How long were you working on it?”

“Just a few weeks,” I admitted. “I wanted to be able to surprise you.”

“Well, you really got me with this one,” Laurie beamed, her face shining with excitement. “It looks amazing in here.”

“I’m glad you like it,” I sighed with relief. “I was worried…”

“You never had to worry about anything,” she assured me. “You have great taste.”

“Well, I picked you,” I teased, and leaned down to kiss her. When I pulled back, she started to look around the room once more.

“I can just imagine how it’s going to look in here when the baby comes along,” she sighed with excitement. “It’s going to be…I can lay them down in the crib right there, I can set the mobile going when they’re dozing off, I can let them play by the window so they can get the sunlight…”

I looked around at the bits of the room she was pointing at as she spoke, and I could almost see what she was talking about. I could picture the baby already, could picture us in there with them. The thought of it was so intense that I almost found myself tearing up too. But then I remembered what else I had planned for her while she was in here, and I pulled myself away and dipped my hand into my pocket. I had proposed before, but I had never been this invested in the answer. I had never really understood what it meant to want to marry someone until I met Laurie, but now that I did, it was an almost peaceful certainty deep down in my soul. I just needed to hear her say yes, and I knew I would be able to hold on to that forever.

“Everything okay?” She furrowed her brow.

“Everything’s great,” I promised her, and took a deep breath before I got down on one knee. Her jaw dropped, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out the ring box. Her eyes widened as I popped it open, displaying the perfectly-cut diamond in the gorgeous, slimline gold band I had picked out.

“Laurie,” I began. I hadn’t prepared what to say, but I felt as though I had been ready for this moment my entire life through. The words came easy.

“We’ve been through so much, and all I want is for us to be a real family for when this baby comes,” I began. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life, and I know I’m going to love this baby just as much. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, more than I can ever say. Will you…?”

“Yes!” She shrieked, and then clapped a hand over he mouth and let out a bubble of laughter that made my heart sing. “Holy shit. Yes. Yes, of course I will.”

I stood up and slipped the ring over her finger, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and leaned up to kiss me. The sweetness of her mouth, still cold from the outside, on mine made it all feel so real, even though I still felt like I was in a fantasy – standing in the nursery for my near-born child, with the woman of my dreams and my fresh-made fiancée in my arms. For everything I’d lost, I’d found so much more, and I would never stop feeling like the luckiest guy in the world for it.

The End

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