Hypnagogia occurs at the threshold of consciousness. Whether you’re escaping into sleep or it is brought on by your screaming alarm clock, it happens. It’s where your lucid dreams arise form. Hypnagogia is the bridge from bodily control to your brain’s freedom. It’s the last few moments of an exciting dream, your borderland state, the predormitum process. It’s where your body feels awake, but your mind is a continuous wanderer, scaling the hollow valleys and soaring to the summits of your imagination.

It was Avery’s favorite place where she could feel relaxed but think at the same time. It was where the epiphanies were born and the hard decisions were made. She preferred to leave the carousel of erratic ideas of the flat, steady land of waking life. She could work out a problem quicker in that state than when awake. There, everything was clear and simple. No one to pull the wool over her eyes or smother her with human interaction, or influence her thoughts and steal away her freedom. She was the one in control over her mind in that abridged hour of utopia.

She had needed it after the past six hours of unbridled passion in Stone Jenning’s arms. Her eyelids fluttered. She blinked a couple of times and forced them open. Her body was warm, relaxed in a cocoon of human heat.

Stone’s hard body was wrapped around her, cuddling her against his chest. His leg rested heavy between hers with one hand covering her breast. She inhaled deeply and cursed when she realized she synchronized her own breathing with his that fell softly in her face. Her heart flipped over.

God, what have I done?

Her thoughts were in a scramble, the past hour spent considering a way to escape, forgotten in the way he cherished her against him.

I have to get away. Before he wakes up.

The thought spurred her to action and she gently pushed his leg off and tried to shuffle out of his arms. He groaned. Avery froze and squeezed her eyes closed, forcing her breath into a deep, easy rhythm.

Stone turned onto his back, his one hand reached out to rest on her belly, his fingers massaging her soft skin gently. She held her breath, cursing as the unconscious caress caused a libidinous reaction in her loins.

Good lord, Avery. Get a grip. He’d just fucked you silly. Enough already!

She waited until the hypnotic strokes stopped and his breathing slowed into a deep lull. It took breathless moments to move away from him and lower his hand to the bed. She sat up, watching him sleep.

His broad shoulders tapered into narrow hips, which were halfway covered by the sheet. From memory when he walked to the bathroom earlier, she knew his buns were toned, as were his thighs. He was muscular, but not bulky; a lean, contoured form that belied the strength underneath. His muscled chest and washboard abs drew her eyes. She drooled at the alluring V low on his hips, knowing what was hidden further down.

Gawd, this man knew how to use his entire body during sex.

His attractiveness was unmistakable even in repose. His chiseled jawline was hidden beneath a scruffy, but neatly trimmed beard, which gave him a roguish look. Her fingers itched to bury themselves in his dark blonde hair; thick and lustrous with a tousled look. Her eyes settled on his full lips, not surprised at the flutter in her stomach when she remembered just where his mouth had been buried not too long ago.

The realization she arrived at while observing him with the children the previous day, that she’d been wrong about him, had been a hard pill to swallow. How could she have been so wrong in her assessment of the man inside the gorgeous body? Why had she missed the caring nature of a man who had more than enough love in his heart to share? Who, from the way he’d treated the children, was a natural born father.

She sighed heavily. It was true what they said about regrets. They always came too late. In her case, it had an added dose of guilt that was riding her back hollow as she gazed at him.

I have to get away from here. From him, before I make a total fool of myself.

She tiptoed around the room to gather her clothes. With a final glance toward the bed, filled with longing, she walked out of the room. She was surprised how much she trembled when she began to dress in one of the adjacent bedrooms. Avery quickly abandoned the attempt to wrestle into her torn jeans. She found a large towel in the bathroom that she wrapped around her waist and silently made her way downstairs in the quiet house. Her keys were where Stone had thrown them on the table in the entrance hall when he’d carried her upstairs. She trotted on wobbly legs toward her car that stood forlorn on the vast side lawn in the dimness of the rising dawn.

“Avery!”

The harsh shout came from the front door behind her. She didn’t look back but sprinted, as fast as her legs could carry toward her car, unlocking it as she approached.

She had the car started and pulled away before she’d even slammed the door closed with another loud, “Avery!” sounding in her ears.

She looked in her rearview mirror. Her eyes widened and then she began to giggle. The sight was too funny even for her frazzled mind to ignore.

Stone Jenning was standing buck naked with his legs spread wide, his arms on his hips, and his dangling bits noticeably shriveled by the icy cold of the predawn air.

Avery’s humor had dissipated by the time she sneaked into her house in the quiet neighborhood of Minnetonka.

She removed her boots and ran barefoot upstairs to her room. She quickly pulled on her favorite pajamas before she padded silently to Wyatt’s room.

Her eyes hazed over as she stared at her beautiful baby boy; her little bundle of joy. Wyatt had come to her with the unexpected shock of a whirlwind, upending her life. She still remembered the shock when Doc Sutton had informed her with a gentle smile that she was pregnant. She would never forget the words he had said when he noticed her stunned expression.

“A baby in many ways is a blessing, Avery. Let him be yours.”

She didn’t believe him at the time, too overwrought with the news that she was about to become a mother. A baby born from one night of unexpurgated passion with a man who was a known playboy—a rogue who exulted in the women who swooned over him. A man who did not appear to have one iota of fatherhood in his DNA―and the one man she had been infatuated with for the past ten years. Ever since she had literally bumped into the muscled friend of her cousin, Dave, at his twenty-first birthday party. Stone had chuckled as he assisted her up from the floor where she’d been sprawled staring at him with frozen limbs.

“Careful there, sweetheart. You’re too pretty to break one of those gorgeous legs.” Before Avery could respond, his blond girlfriend had dragged him away. Since then, she had drooled over him—always from afar.

That one night a year ago with him had been her reward for suffering that hankering for so long. Only, she hadn’t expected to be left with a Christmas present at the time.

Her mother had been devastated and promptly made an appointment with a clinic for an abortion. Avery had been livid.

“I am not having an abortion, Mother. I’m thirty-four years old and don’t need your permission for anything. I am having this baby.”

“But you’re a single woman. It’s a travesty, Avery. How could you do this to our family?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake Mother,” she’d ignored her mother’s indignant gasp. “It’s the 21st century. Being a single parent has become the norm, no one bats an eyelid over it anymore.”

“I refuse to acknowledge that child as family,” her mother had snapped back.

 “Then so be it, Mother, but if I ever hear you utter one derogatory word against my child, you will rue the day you gave birth to me.”

 Avery recalled how she had slammed down the receiver and since that day, had not heard another word from her mother. In return, she had never bothered to contact her either.

Avery had been badly hurt by her mother’s words and attitude, especially when she went into labor and would have liked her support.

The pregnancy had been difficult. She’d suffered with high blood pressure and the tension of expanding their business at the time hadn’t helped. Closer to her due date, Avery was forced to sit on a high chair decorating wedding cakes because her feet got so swollen she could barely walk, let alone stand on them for hours on end.

Her little boy, her Wyatt, had become a blessing in her life. He’d taken away the loneliness and regrets she had lived with since the day Avery found out about the pregnancy.

Her heart hammered against her chest. It was one year ago today, when she had run away from his father, silently, like a thief in the night . . . without him knowing who she was or where to find her.

It was the knowledge that he wouldn’t know where to find her, which led Avery to make the decision to keep Wyatt’s existence from the man who had given him life.

Wyatt squirmed his little body until he managed to worm his hands loose from the tightly wrapped blanket. His eyes popped open, like they always did. It had amazed her at first but she’d gotten used to it, the way he awoke so abruptly.

His bright, blue-green baby eyes found Avery’s and his arms lunged and jerked in excitement. The soft gurgles from his widely spread mouth were the sweetest sounds, unblemished by the hurts of life. His little face glowed from a light within as his miniature fingers grasped hers, and held tight. His mouth pulled into a pout and his brows drew together.

“Oh my god,” Avery breathed.

He knew. Somehow it felt like he always knew when his mom needed comfort in the dead silence of night, suffering from the loss of something she never truly had, but which created pain in her nonetheless.

“My beautiful, little darling boy,” Avery cooed with watery eyes as she held him tightly against her chest.

He was the most precious thing in her entire existence and she would protect him with everything she had in her.

But how do I protect myself against the wrath of a father when he finds out about his son?

Avery had realized with belated horror on the way home that this time, Stone knew who she was and where to find her. There would be no point attempting to lie to him about Wyatt’s parentage because he was a mirror image of Stone Jenning as a baby, based on the pictures she’d seen in the hallway of his house.

The moment Stone saw Wyatt, he would know. Avery dreaded what the formidable man might do once the realization washed over him.