With a chocolaty smile, he kissed her. “I do realize they’re almost two weeks old, and no. The unhealthier the better.”
She smacked her lips together, tasting the small bit of chocolate he stamped on them. Considering he had teeth any dentist would be proud to say they worked on, she was surprised he basically lived off of anything coated in sugar. The sweeter, the better. Over the last couple of months, she’d discovered other little things about Gavin that made him who he was. Who she kept falling in love with. Without fail, twice a day, he’d spend at least thirty minutes, sometimes longer, in the shower, filling up the bathroom with hot steam while blasting Breaking Benjamin from a surround sound system built into the walls. Oh, and in his best efforts, he sang along. To her surprise, but without a doubt to her liking, he had a wonderful addiction of sleeping nude. She was a lucky girl who awoke every morning to nothing but rock hard, naked alpha male.
He wasn’t without odd habits either. Emily considered him borderline OCD and possibly in need of therapist intervention. He was a clean freak in the worst possible way. Shit, if he found a crumb from a sandwich she’d eaten, it didn’t take him but a split second to grab some paper towels and Windex and swiftly wipe down the surface. This she’d laugh at, confused, because he had a housekeeper who came to clean four days a week. It was as if he needed the penthouse sparkling before the woman came to do her job.
Needless to say, Emily was attempting to break him of that quirk, easing him into the fact it was indeed okay to leave some laundry piled up in the corner. However, that was a battle she usually lost. Either way, she considered every one of his little quirks and idiosyncrasies ravishingly cute. She couldn’t help but love his many layers.
With a smile, she dropped her purse and a towering stack of mail onto the kitchen island. Gavin followed her and lounged into a chair, watching Emily pull open the refrigerator. Shuffling through the slush pile of invitations to local charity balls, Gavin plucked out his first delivery of Architectural Digest.
“You have a letter here,” Gavin informed her, sliding the envelope across the granite countertop. Opening the magazine, his eyes scanned a luxury Italian villa in Agropoli, straddling the Tyrrhenian Sea. “I also paid off your Visa. I suggest if you’re going to hide your credit card statements in a horrible effort to dissuade me from taking care of your bills, you should come up with a savvier hiding place than your jewelry box.” Sporting a devious smirk, he lifted his shoulder in a casual shrug. “There’s a surprise for you in the lower level compartment. Now we’re both sneaks.”
Pressing her lips together, Emily lifted two guilty brows, but she couldn’t deny he was correct about finding a better spot to hide her bills. Challenge accepted, she yanked the envelope from the counter and popped a kiss onto his sneaky temple. “What did you get me?”
Eyes locked on his magazine, his tone was as cool as a lazy fall breeze. “I’ll pass on that question and let you figure it out for yourself.” With a slight jerk of his head in the direction of the bedroom, those baby blues still glued to the magazine, a smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Go.”
On a sigh and a smile of her own, Emily started for the bedroom. She slid her finger under the lip of the envelope, tearing it open. With a small gasp, she stopped, looking down at the finger that’d been assaulted with a fresh paper cut. She sucked the wound, trying to ease the pain. With the envelope in her uninjured hand, and the burn starting to dissipate, she flipped over the envelope, her heart nearly stopping when her gaze triggered in on the handwriting on the front.
Though it was void of a return address, there was no mistaking Dillon’s scrawl. She swallowed and pulled out the paper, quickly unfolding it. Heart jumping wildly, she scanned a photocopy of an explanation of benefits from her old insurance company. It was a detailed breakdown of her doctor’s visit from a few weeks earlier. Confused, because she specifically remembered giving the receptionist her new insurance information and address, Emily didn’t understand how the paperwork wound up with Dillon. With a blood red marker, he’d circled the words “First trimester fetal sonogram.” At the bottom of the paper, he wrote:
Swiping a shaky hand through her hair, Emily turned around, slowly making her way back into the kitchen. Gavin had insisted they didn’t tell Dillon. He firmly felt Dillon didn’t deserve to know she was pregnant until they had a definite answer as to who the father was. Not wanting to buck against his decision, though she had reservations about hiding it, Emily had reluctantly agreed.