My hands were outstretched, just out of reach to Piper, and she tried to grab them after she let go of the coffee table. The sound of the saw was whining in the garage, otherwise I would’ve run to get Michael so that someone, anyone, could witness this with me. But I didn’t dare move.

Her brown eyes were zeroed in on my hands like they were her salvation, and when I backed up a step, Piper lifted her foot and took one wobbly step toward me. Then another. And one more. When I laughed, sheer delight sweeping through me, she plopped down on her butt, but laughed along with me.

“You did it,” I cried and swept her up in my arms, kissing all over her face. “My big girl, I can’t believe you just walked!”

She squirmed to get down, so I let her, anxious to see it again. The saw turned off, and a minute later, I could hear Michael’s footsteps come down the hallway. As much as possible, I schooled my face, so that my rampant and unquenchable hormones might not be so obvious.

I’d been at work that morning to do a wedding updo for one of my clients when he’d shown up to start working on the wood paneled wall that he’d pushed back because of Piper’s fever. I hadn’t seen him yet. I hadn’t actually seen Michael since he gave me a toe curling kiss on his way out the door a few days earlier.

My inner thighs were still sore, I swear. Or maybe I wanted them to be because of what we’d done.

He turned the corner, and I felt my face heat. But he didn’t notice, because his eyes were trained on Piper, who was taking some more confident steps around the room.

“Hey, look at you,” he said happily, crouching down by her so she could walk toward him, which she did with a giant smile on her face. “You’re going to be doing sprints any day now.”

I glared at him, and when he winked, I tried not to melt into a gooey puddle of heart-shaped glitter or something.

“Not funny.”

He laughed, and stood up. “I was glad to get your text that she’s feeling better.”

I nodded. “Me too. Fever broke yesterday afternoon.”

“Good.”

Our eyes held for a prolonged moment and I glanced away, because it was really difficult not to mount him like he was a mechanical bull. My lips tingled. Actually tingled from the maelstrom force of my desire to kiss him. Everywhere. The strong edge of his stubbled jaw. The sharp edge of his Adam’s apple. The place where his hip bone jutted down in a solid line of muscle.

All those places were so incredibly kissable. And I knew that from firsthand experience now, thank you very much. With extreme effort, I kept my face trained on the kids. Michael wasn’t used to dealing with a stage five clinger, and that wasn’t what I wanted to be either, in truth. Maybe the newfound surge in activity that I currently found my lady parts experiencing was turning me into the hormonal equivalent of a hurricane. Michael was the hurricane, actually, and I was the tiny seaside village just waiting there for the massive pounding that was headed my way.

I snorted, and when he gave me a strange look, I tried to swallow it back. Unsuccessfully too, because I started coughing so hard that he ended up having to go grab me the bottle of water on the coffee table. After I took a small sip of the now lukewarm water, I gave him as innocent of a look as I could manage.

“How’s the wall coming? I’m so excited to see it.”

“Almost done. I just cut the last couple pieces, and once those are up, I’m going to start painting. I thought Anna was crazy for wanting to do that after the wall, but she’s right. The color of the shiplap looks a lot different in there.”

Excitement had me bouncing in place, only the smallest squeal of happiness came out of my mouth, but it was enough to have Michael laughing under his breath, a look so loaded with amusement and … something else. Something warm and sweet that had my heart flipping backwards down into my belly.

“Wanna see it?” he asked, a proud smile spreading across his handsome face.

I nodded, briefly glancing at where the twins were playing in front of the TV. He gestured for me to go ahead of him, and I held my breath while I pushed through the thick plastic blocking off his work area.

“Michael,” I breathed when I heard him come in after me. With one hand covering my mouth, I let out a sigh that could only be described as dreamy. The flooring wasn’t in yet, that would happen after he painted the walls in the light gray that Anna helped me pick, but even with the simple subfloor, that shiplap wall almost made me do a full-on lady swoon. I walked forward and ran my hands over the rough wood surface, the color so perfectly faded that it looked like driftwood.

Over my shoulder, I looked back at him with nothing short of awe. “This is so beautiful. It looks even better than what we talked about.”

His hands were shoved into the pockets of his pants, and I wanted to die when a small blush covered his cheeks. “Thanks. Tristan helped me a bit with the wood. I couldn’t find exactly what we talked about, so I just … made it, I guess.”

I shook my head when I stared back at the wall. “It’s perfect. Those mirrors I found will look so incredible up against it.”

He stepped forward, his biceps brushing against my shoulder when he lifted a hand up. “The overhead lights you wanted will go in tomorrow once the painting is done, and once we figure out exactly where you want the mirrors hung on the wall, I’ll put in the sconces on either side of them.”

“It’s really happening,” I whispered, my fingers still hovering over my lips. Michael didn’t respond right away, but when he did, it was exactly what I needed to hear.

“You should be really proud of yourself, Brooke.” He moved just a hair, and his arm pressed fully against me. Neither one of us moved, and I had to close my eyes against the wave of emotion. “Not everyone has the balls to make a leap of faith like this. And the fact that you did is one of my favorite things about you.”

When I turned my head to look up at him, his eyes were so dark and fathomless, burning with an emotion that I couldn’t name, that I lost my breath a little bit.

“Thank you,” I told him quietly, and the movement of my lips drew his attention.

The moment didn’t feel casual, it didn’t feel like we were trading words without meaning or thought. Michael telling me that he had a favorite thing about me, besides the places on my body normally covered by a bathing suit, threw all sorts of strings over our relationship. Heavy ones that were loaded with intent. I blinked away from him, from the moment, and my confusion over what was happening had us lapsing into silence. Why was he looking at me like that? No, casual was not what this felt like, and I couldn’t understand why.

I couldn’t understand why I wanted it to be more, so badly in that moment. Why I wanted to be the person that he gave that kind of look, the only person.

“Any plans for the rest of the day?” he asked, his tone light, no caution or disappointment evident in the words that we’d traded dozens of times before.

I rubbed at my forehead before smiling up at him. “Umm, yeah, I do. Kevin should be here in about,” I glanced down at my watch, “twenty minutes. I thought it would be good to hang out somewhere that wasn’t my house. You know?”

Michael swallowed and I saw a muscle tense in his jaw. “Yeah. What are you guys doing?”

“There’s a class at the Cherry Creek Gymboree for kids their age. Thought it might be something fun to try. I think he needs some structured activities to try and get used to playing with the twins. He was a little lost the last time he came here.”

He pulled his hands out of his pockets only to perch them on his hips, and then he turned to face me more fully. “He needs structure to know how to play with his own kids?”

Normally, I loved Michael’s sarcasm. To a certain extent, I could understand where his cynicism came from, now that I knew his history. But nevertheless, it rankled.

“He’s never been around kids. Not everyone is a natural.” Like you. I thought it, but kept those pesky little words in my mouth.

“I know,” he said on a rough exhale, and he scrubbed a hand over his jaw before giving me a concerned look. “I just … it’s hard for me to give him the benefit of the doubt, and that’s only from one encounter that lasted less than five minutes.” Then he lifted his eyebrows meaningfully. “And knowing everything that came before those five minutes.”

My hands itched to reach out to him, grab his hands, something. Even more, I wanted to thank him for his concern, which I knew was as deeply rooted in me as it was Piper and Jacob.

“If he’s willing to try, I’m going to give him a chance.” When his face didn’t change, I mirrored my stance to his. “He’s not your father, Michael. I’m not going to punish him for mistakes that he hasn’t made yet.”

“Because he hasn’t already made some?” he asked lightly, but his eyes were hard and cold as granite.

I looked away, unable to argue with him on that. Slowly, I inhaled and exhaled, actively keeping my thoughts on what we were dealing with now, and not in our respective pasts.

“This is my decision,” I said quietly, my voice firm. “No matter how much you or Julia or anyone else for that matter might hate it, I’m the only one who gets a vote in what happens next. There’s not much in my life where that’s true to this extent, and I can’t back down on it, as much as everyone’s concern matters to me.”

“He left you.”

Under my breath, I scoffed. “I know. I was there.”

Michael closed his eyes briefly, then looked beyond me when he opened them.

“I’m trying to move forward, Michael.” When I spoke, he gave me his attention again, so I held his eyes. “That’s the only thing I can do right now.” He didn’t answer, and I took a chance by stepping closer so that I could lay my hands over his stomach, the warm skin covered by a thin layer of soft cotton. “You not liking him, not trusting him, makes sense to me. I don’t blame you for that. But as much as I understand your frustration, I need you to understand why I’m not going to shut him out. I’m taking this chance on Kevin for my children’s sake. He’s their father, and right now—today—he wants a relationship with them.”

Michael clenched his jaw and finally nodded. His hand came up and he tucked a piece of hair behind my ears. Slowly, holding my eyes the whole time, he leaned down and laid a soft, glancing kiss across my lips. Neither one of us deepened it, but my fingers curled into his shirt when he pulled away.

“I better get back to work,” he said with a small smile on his face. “Have fun at your class. I’ll still be here when you get home.”

My heart thrashed in my chest while I left the room, his eyes boring into my back the entire way. As easy as it would have been to stay in that room with him, let the loaded moment deepen into something delicious and heated, I had to get myself and the twins ready to go.

They were still playing contentedly when I walked back into the family room.

“Okay, tesori miei, let’s get ready for our adventure.”

* * *

Only the adventure didn’t happen at all.

Three and a half hours later, I walked out of the twins’ room after finally laying them down for naps when I realized Kevin wasn’t going to show up. All of my calls had gone unanswered, my texts showing that they were delivered, but I hadn’t gotten a reply.

The worst part was, as I sat on the couch and tried to call him again, I wasn’t even mad. I felt numb. When he was only fifteen, and then thirty minutes late, I was annoyed. Majorly annoyed, because getting ready to get out the door with two one-year-olds was no small feat. The class at Gymboree was a moot point when we hit forty-five minutes and then an hour. Mad happened from hour one to two.

Now I felt cold.

And I felt stupid.

I hated feeling stupid.

Maybe that was the worst part. That the only other time in my life that I really and truly felt stupid was when Kevin left me. There was no big fight, no final goodbye, because he packed up his stuff one Saturday morning while I was at work and left me a note that said he couldn’t handle it, that I’d be better off without him.

With two unborn children inside me, a small bump underneath my shirt that had only managed to make me puke a lot and feel super fat, I felt like the world’s biggest idiot for accidentally getting myself pregnant by an ill-bred asshole who didn’t have the decency to say goodbye to my face.

And now I felt stupid again. On a much smaller scale, but still stupid.

My thumbs swept across the screen of my phone, and it showed no missed calls, no returned texts.

“You better be unconscious in a ditch somewhere, Kevin,” I muttered under my breath when I tossed my phone onto the couch. “Because if you’re not, I’ll knock you the hell out myself.”

The sound of footsteps coming down the hallway had me standing from the couch, a sudden burst of nerves making my belly light and flippy. I wasn’t mad right now, but I knew one person who would be.

“Hey,” he said, and when I turned around, he had paint flecks on the corded muscle and tan skin of his forearm. “How was the class?”

His eyes were guarded, and that’s when I realized he probably had earbuds in the entire three and a half hours, so he wouldn’t have heard that we were home. For a single heartbeat, I thought about lying to him. I thought about telling him that it was fine. That the time with Kevin had been fine. That I was fine.

But it was Michael, and I didn’t want to lie to him.

I took a shaky breath and held his stare. “He didn’t show up.”

Michael’s eyes closed. “Damn it,” he said under his breath, an angry hiss of sound that barely made his lips move.

For the past almost four hours, I hadn’t felt a single stirring that I’d cry. But when Michael opened his eyes, they were so wholly focused on me, so bright with anger and disappointment and worry and rage, that my throat closed. I tried to swallow past it, but it was as if all his emotions, worn so vividly on his face, had shoved a balled-up sock into my mouth, effectively gagging me with all those same things he was feeling.

He took a small step toward me, and instantly, I held up my hand.

“If you hug me right now, I’ll lose it,” I told him in a firm voice. But my heart. My heart tore in jagged little pieces. As much as I could, I begged him with my eyes to give me space, but my traitorous, greedy, hurting heart longed for him to grab me tightly, crush me to his chest so that I could be safe to let go of all the things that I was bottling up inside.

Michael looked as tortured as I felt, but he stepped back and nodded. “Okay.”

I breathed a little easier at his distance. “I’m sorry, I just … I can’t lose it right now.”

“You don’t have to explain.” He attempted a smile, but it was so far away from the actual thing, that I laughed a little bit. At that, his smile looked more natural, the crooked tilt of his lips easing the iron band locked around my heart.

When a noise came from the twins’ bedroom, I gestured behind me. “I’m going to go check on them.”

“Okay. I’ve got some cleaning up to do, and I may start on installing the trim, if you’re okay with me working a little bit longer.”

My nod was quick, and he stayed in place while I turned to go down the hallway. Before I did, I glanced over my shoulder, and his eyes hadn’t wavered from me in the slightest. With my face on fire, my heart conflicted and my head unsure of what the hell I was going to do next, I hurried down the hallway and out of sight.