Chapter8
When they reached Luke’s townhouse in the suburbs at the edge of the city, Luke tried to decide whether or not he wanted to make a move on her again. His body insisted that he definitely wanted to, but his brain kept telling him it was a mistake.
“I’ve got a few bottles of wine hanging around,” he told Elizabeth as he led her through the front door. “We could pop one, and you could do the paperwork here if you wanted to.” Elizabeth considered that for a moment.
“Sounds good--if you’ve got some white wine?”
“I’ll do one better: I’ve got a bottle of prosecco in the fridge,” Luke told her. He kicked off his shoes, closed and locked the door behind them, and watched as Elizabeth followed suit, pushing her shoes with her toes off to the side where they wouldn’t be in the way. Luke went into the kitchen, the lights coming up automatically as he did, and headed for the fridge.
“Are all the lights automatic?” Luke lifted one hand and tilted it side to side.
“The ones in the bedrooms and bathrooms are on a slightly different system,” he explained. “In the master bedroom, if I’m not moving for more than about twenty minutes, the system switches over to ‘sleep’ mode. Same if it doesn’t register a presence in the room for twenty minutes.” He opened the fridge and took out the bottle of prosecco he’d bought a month before when he hadn’t even known Elizabeth would be in his life again.
“Sounds like you’ve done a lot with the place,” Elizabeth commented. Luke shrugged it off.
“I had money to play with. I got this place for a steal,” he said. “It was a little under two hundred thousand, about half my budget, so I decided to plow the rest of the money I’d set aside for it on making it a palace.”
“And now, you’re going to bring a kid into this,” Elizabeth said, making it not quite a question. Luke chuckled, opening the bottle of prosecco carefully and taking down two champagne glasses from the cabinet.
“There’s a spare bedroom next to the master, which used to be an office space for me. I’ve moved all the office stuff into one of the bedrooms down here, and I’ll be putting in all the baby stuff there,” he said.
“Sounds practical,” Elizabeth said. She’d taken the folder of paperwork from him before they’d left the car; Luke found her seated on his couch in the living room, her feet tucked under her legs, looking so perfect there--as if she were in her own home--that for a moment, something stirred in him, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He turned on the light directly over the couch, so she could see better, and sat down on the other side of the L-shaped couch, the bottle and both glasses in his hands.
“Anything you want to change in the paperwork?” Elizabeth’s gaze was on the papers, and she shook her head without looking up.
“Everything looks just about the way I’d want it to be,” she said absently. She looked up finally and smiled.
“It is kind of a thing, isn’t it? Actually signing?”
Elizabeth lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug and let it fall.
“I mean, it just feels final to do it, but that’s not a reason not to,” she said. She reached for her purse and rummaged inside it for a moment. Her expression tightened, and Luke wondered for a second why, but then she smiled and produced a ball-point pen.
“Do you want to cheers before or after you sign?” Elizabeth grinned and held out her left hand for a glass.
“I should probably sign this on a steady surface instead of against my leg,” she said, looking around the room.
“Gotcha,” Luke said, rising to his feet to retrieve one of the pull-over TV tables he kept off to the side of the room. He positioned it over her lap, and Elizabeth shifted, freeing her legs more, somehow managing not to reveal too much of what lay underneath her skirt in the process.
Luke couldn’t help wondering if she was, once again, wearing a matching bra and panty set; when they’d been involved in high school, he remembered Elizabeth had been the kind of girl who always liked to be “put together,” down to even her underthings--though of course then, most of what she’d owned had been strictly utilitarian, colored cotton prints ridged with lace. A pretty far cry from the racy set she’d worn the night of their meeting.
Luke shook off his memories of what Elizabeth had been like in high school and pushed the thought of their tryst out of his mind. He could have sex with her again soon enough; she would be going to the doctor within the next two days, and she would be ovulating within a week--that was plenty of opportunity to have sex with her, and if he was serious about keeping things more or less professional between them, Luke told himself, he didn’t need to be looking for extra chances.
Elizabeth signed each of the required pages quickly with decisive movements of the pen against the paper, nodding to herself as she re-skimmed everything she was agreeing to. “Okay, so that takes care of the contract stuff,” she said, looking up.
“Cheers, then,” Luke said. He raised his glass, and Liz carefully clinked her own against it, smiling at him.
“Probably one of the last times I really get to drink, if we want to be serious about this,” she said wryly.
“Well, I think you can probably at least keep drinking until you’re ovulating,” Luke pointed out. “Maybe treat it like Mardi Gras and have one last, big night of getting just absolutely sloshed before you have to abstain.”
“I might, at that,” Elizabeth said, as if the idea amused her. “Though I hope I have the presence of mind to stop short of actually getting sick.”
“As long as you’re in top shape when we start trying to make this baby, I have nothing to say about what you do beforehand,” Luke told her. They both sipped their sparkling wine, and Elizabeth bent back over the paperwork to fill out her banking details.
Luke decided to turn the TV on to have some background noise going while they went through the paperwork. The fact that they had managed to transition into kind of a more professional setting, a more business-oriented activity, had thrown metaphorical cold water over him, which was--he thought--a blessing. He picked a series at random from his Netflix queue and started it up.
“Let me know if you have any questions,” he told Elizabeth. She nodded, still filling out the details for the bank transfers, consulting her phone every few moments.
“I think that’s about it,” she said. She looked over it one more time and then nodded to herself, confirming it.
“Sounds good then,” Luke said. “Do you want the whole tour of the place?” Elizabeth looked around her, sipped her wine, and then nodded.
“I think I’d like to see how a billionaire lives in the Chicago suburbs,” she told him with a little grin.
So, they both got up, and Luke made sure that Elizabeth’s glass was still full as he showed her around the spacious townhouse. There was a ground-level patio and a tiny almost-yard, with a table and chairs for those nights and mornings that he wanted to eat outside, and a formal dining room attached to the living room, which he hadn’t done nearly as much with as he had the rest of the place; there was a long table that he had taken from his parents’ place when they offered it to him, and his mother’s china hutch, but not much else.
“This is the guest bedroom that’s actually a guest bedroom,” he told her, opening the door to the room where half a dozen of his friends had crashed over the past few years. He’d gotten a decorator to do most of the design of the house, and she’d done him proud in the guest room: it looked comfortable without looking overly masculine or feminine. The bed was comfortable enough that, more than once, Luke had crashed there--from being too drunk or too exhausted to feel up to taking the stairs up to his own proper bedroom. There was a guest bathroom attached to that, with a tub shower and two-sink vanity.
“It looks really nice in here. Hell, if I was your guest, you’d have a hard time convincing me to leave,” Elizabeth told him with a little grin.
“I had them redo the counters and the floors,” Luke said. “Same with the master suite upstairs--you’ll see.”
He showed her the office, which did have a small twin-sized bed in it as a backup, and then led Elizabeth upstairs. “This is where the baby’s bedroom is going to be,” he said, opening the door to the almost-empty room that used to be his office. The lights came up as they entered, revealing the new paint job he’d had done: a soft, buttery yellow colored the walls, perfect for either a boy or a girl. Everything had been swept, and the wood floors had been steamed, and he’d gotten the dimensions written down so he knew what size furniture he could put in for his future child.
“It’s kind of amazing that you’ve actually already gotten this far,” Elizabeth said. “You must be really into the idea of having a kid.”
“I am,” Luke said. “Also, I figured it would be easier to start the process before the pregnancy actually happens. That way when it gets closer to the end, there’s not as much of a transition to take care of.” Elizabeth nodded.
“So, I guess that just leaves your refuge in this big old house,” she said with a playful smile, and Luke rolled his eyes.
“Okay, but you’re not allowed to say that I have to give you the same,” he told her jokingly. “I am not investing that much money in a place you might only live in for a year.”
“I fully intended on doing my own decorating, thank you very much,” Elizabeth told him tartly.
“I know, I know…” Luke led her away from the almost-empty room and down a short hallway into the master suite.
He had devoted the largest part of his budget to that space and told himself at the time that it was the only real choice to make: after all, he planned on living in the townhouse for years to come, and he wanted everything to be exactly right for his tastes. As they stepped into the room, the lights came up, and Luke watched as Elizabeth took it all in. “I actually had them expand the room a bit--not a whole lot, but some--to fit everything,” he explained.
“It does kind of look...well, huge,” Elizabeth observed.
“The bed is a custom job, a little bit larger than king size,” Luke explained. “I had the hardwood floors replaced, commissioned a rug for the floor space.” He opened the closet to reveal its contents: mostly clothes, with a few other odds and ends that were neatly arranged. There was a couch in the spacious room, positioned next to the fire but with as good a view of the big, flat screen smart TV that dominated one wall.
The real selling point of the room--and where he’d invested the most money--was the master bath: a big tub, large enough for two people to lie in it, along with a smaller walk-in shower cubicle. One wall of the bathroom was dominated by the vanity: two sinks with a mirror inset into the wall from just above waist height to the ceiling. The floors and walls were done in marble, and he’d had an infrared heating system installed. “This way, I can avoid that whole situation where you get out of the shower and suddenly you’re freezing,” he explained to Elizabeth.
“The ultimate in comfort,” she said dryly. Luke grinned.
“You’re just jealous because when you get out of the shower, you have to grit your teeth and bear it while you dry off,” he told her. Elizabeth rolled her eyes.
“I think that billionaires solve problems that barely qualify as problems,” she countered, moving a little closer to him. In spite of the warning bells going off in his mind, in spite of the little voice telling him to keep things professional and businesslike between them for at least another week, Luke couldn’t help himself. He reached for her and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her body close to his.
He leaned in and kissed her lightly on the lips, giving her plenty of opportunities to pull away or tell him no if she wanted to. “Tell me to stop if you don’t want this,” he murmured, holding back for a moment longer before he deepened the kiss. Elizabeth responded almost immediately, her arms draping around his shoulders as she leaned up onto the balls of her feet, pressing her body against his.
Luke felt the heat gush through his body, headed straight for his groin. Even just kissing Elizabeth was enough to make his cock start to harden, and for a little while, Luke gave into it, letting it happen. But after a few minutes, as things began to intensify between them--hands wandering, almost groping and caressing each other--he started to pull back. It felt like trying to dig a fish hook out of his skin; he didn’t want to break away from her, didn’t want to stop things, but he knew that for his own peace of mind, he had to.
“We shouldn’t do this again--not yet,” Luke murmured against Elizabeth’s lips.
“Why not?” The disappointment in her voice cut through him, and Luke almost gave in, almost gave up any pretense of keeping things businesslike.
“You aren’t ovulating,” he said. He kissed her lightly on the lips again and then pulled back completely. “We should save it for the time when you’re most likely to conceive.” Elizabeth frowned up at him, and Luke wanted more than anything to apologize, but he knew if he did, he’d have to explain more: she was already worried that he was going to back out, and while he had no intention of doing that, he couldn’t help feeling like he was going to lose control of his feelings, his ability to keep them separate from what they were doing, if he went all in.
“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “Though I should point out that there are studies that suggest that having sex more often--even when you’re not ovulating--increases the chances of conception.” Luke smiled slightly.
“I know,” he said. “If you don’t get pregnant this month, we’ll work out a weekly schedule for next month.” He resisted the urge to kiss Elizabeth again, knowing that if he did, he’d give into the whole thing for sure, and that would just open up new complications. She’d only just signed the paperwork; she’d only just officially, formally agreed to let him get her pregnant and have his baby. He had to keep his head on straight if he wanted to see this through without causing a boatload of legal trouble for the both of them.
“Why don’t we finish off that bottle downstairs?” Elizabeth suggested. “It would be a shame to let it go flat.”
“Let’s do that,” Luke agreed. “And then I’ll get David to take you home.” Elizabeth still looked a little hurt, but she nodded, giving him a smile. The moment--such as it was--between them had passed, and Luke hoped he hadn’t managed to screw things up even worse in his attempt to avoid screwing them up in the first place.