With a pained expression, Howler does.
The segment’s ending. Mouth close to the microphone, the girl says, “I’m Tess Truelove with Atlas Rose Design.” And then she looks at the camera. Looks straight at him. Her bright smile socks him in the gut as she says, “Remember Atlas Rose Design. Los Angeles’s number-one celebrity design firm.”
A commercial pops on. Toothpaste.
“Shit,” Howler hisses. “I knew she was fucking trouble when she took that shot with a straight face.”
Solomon, frozen, can only blink.
“Maybe she’s married.” Howler gapes, slack-jawed, up at the TV, the cocktail shaker held, forgotten, in his hand. This is his friend’s worst nightmare. Knocking up a one-night stand.
He curls his fists on the bar top. “She’s not married.”
“I thought you used a condom.”
“We did.”
“Bullshit.”
Solomon lets out a growl, and Howler instinctively takes two steps back.
Guilt and confusion twist like a tornado in his gut. He hasn’t seen or spoken to this woman in six months. But now he’s found her.
Beautiful.
Blond.
Pregnant.
Go get her, Sol. Serena’s voice sounds in his head. Go.
Solomon hates LA already. Hates it with a fiery passion he usually reserves for tourists who don’t tip or people who kick their dogs. Since he’s arrived, he’s seen someone walking a vibrator down the street on a leash and a woman pushing a ferret in a stroller. He wants to be back in Chinook, back in his cabin with his dog and his carpentry tools. Back on his mountain.
For the hundredth time since he saw her on the news, he thinks of the girl. Tess. Sophisticated. Sharp. A far cry from the goofy, vulnerable girl he met in the Bear’s Ear bar.
Who is Tess Truelove?
One thing he knows—it’s the second time this girl’s pulled him from his quiet life in Alaska. Of fucking course they live on opposite ends of the world.
Get a DNA test, Howler proclaimed. Could be anyone, man. Don’t let her shackle you down.
His sisters—especially Evelyn, a cutthroat family attorney—are shitting bricks. His parents told him to do the right thing, and was that a smile he detected in his father’s voice? Goddamn. He’s thirty-five years old. It’s not like time’s-a-ticking, but what if the kid’s his? As the oldest of four, he always wanted a big family. He and Serena had planned for it, eventually, but back at twenty-two, it seemed so far away. Like a dream of a plan. Only now. . .he’s not getting any younger.
But a baby? A baby blows up his life. But hell, he hasn’t had much of one since Serena died.
He’s here for answers. If he’s the father? He doesn’t know what it will mean for him and Tess. He walked away from his family. His career. But walking away from his kid, being a deadbeat dad—absolutely fucking not. It’d haunt him forever if he was that kind of man.
Pausing on the sidewalk, he digs his phone out of his pocket, double checks the text from Evelyn, comparing the address with the one on the crumbling stucco apartment building in front of him.
The late afternoon sun makes slanted Rorschach-like shadows across the gated entrance. He frowns, not liking what he sees. The garbage cans overflow. Graffiti mars the side of the building. This is where she lives? It seems unsafe as hell.
Stepping up to the keypad, he hovers a finger over the buzzer. One push and he’ll get answers.
He could be a father.
He’ll see Tess. The girl he’s thought of nonstop for the last six months.
Nerves churn in Solomon’s gut. This is real. He’s here, about to see her in person.
“Fuck,” he mutters, rolling out his shoulders to ease his aggravation. “Get a goddamn grip.”
“Excuse me. I’m just gonna wedge on in here. . .”
The voice, coming from behind him, has Solomon turning. A tall, dark-haired girl in combat boots and a black leather jacket slips in front of him. A bag of Chinese takeout propped on her hip. The scent of lo mein wafting between them, she punches in a code on the keypad. She tilts her head as she evaluates him, looking him up and down with laser-like precision. And then she sucks in a choking gasp that has Solomon jerking to attention.
“Holy shit. It’s you.” Her gray-green gaze pins him down. “The bearded baby daddy.”
He scowls at the nickname. “You know Tess?”
“Know? She is my lifeblood. My force. My personal pan pizza.” Before he can search for a retort, she flaps a hand. “She’s my cousin. How’d you find her?”
“TV.”
“So you saw.”
“Oh, I saw.”
The girl crosses her arms. Draws herself up. “And you’re here to what?”
He shifts, not liking the way her eyes have narrowed in suspicion. “You her personal bouncer?”
“I am all the things to Tessie. But most importantly, I’m Ash.”
He extends a hand. “Solomon Wilder.”
She cocks her head, a shock of black hair slicing across her face as she runs her gaze down to his black logging boots and up to his red flannel shirt. Attention back on his face, she lifts her brows. “Are you a lumberjack?”
Chef, Serena says in his ear. You’re a chef.
But he can’t say it. Hasn’t since the day she died.
He lets out a tired sigh. “No. Why?”
“Because you’re so. . .I mean. Just like. . . jacked. Like a bear.” Her smile is feline. “Broad.”
Jaw ticking, he runs a hand down the length of his dark beard. “Listen. I’m here to talk to Tess to see if. . .” He clears his throat, the hard rock that’s settled in it. “How is she?”
Ash chuckles. “Oh, she is very pregnant. And you are the culprit.” An arc of a dark brow. A stamp of a hard finger against his chest. “She’s got your DNA in her, dude.”
“I’m aware of that,” he grits out.
First time he has sex after a seven-year drought, he gets the woman pregnant.
Christ.
Ash takes his elbow and pulls him off to the side to stand in a bed of rocks and rose bushes. “Listen,” she says, holding up a finger as she frowns. “I’ve been with Tessie for every doctor’s appointment and pukefest and frantic late-night Googling session, and if you’re only here to make her feel bad or yell at her, you can just skedaddle back to Hulk Island or wherever the hell you’re from.”
He flinches, hating that this woman assumes, right off the bat, that he’s a world-class asshole. “I’m not here for that,” he says, inhaling a steady breath. He shifts in his boots, ignoring the perspiration that runs down his spine. The late September sun has no damn right being this hot. “I’m here because, if the baby’s mine, then I want to be involved.”
Ash’s eyebrows skyrocket. “You do?”
“I do.”
She chews her lip, considers him carefully. “Really? You won’t leave?”
He frowns at the strange question. “No. I don’t do that.”
Nose wrinkling, Ash leans in. Solomon’s entire frame tenses as she looks him up and down and then does a full-torso sniff. She shudders. Smiles. “Hmm. You pass the smell check.”
He groans, sick of the interrogation techniques. All he wants to do is see Tessie. “Can I just talk to her?” he asks, taking a step toward the gate.
The girl lunges, grabbing his arm. With surprising strength and a bruising grip, she yanks him back. Before she lets go, she squeezes his rock of a bicep, an under-her-breath squeal barely contained.
“Oh no, no, no. Don’t go in there. She will rip your face off. Hormones, you know.”
Solomon scowls, looking up at the crumbling fa?ade of the building. “You have a better idea?”
“I do actually.” Ash’s brows shoot up. “I have a plan. I have all the plans, and this plan is the plan. Do you understand me?”
“Not really, no.”
“You gotta ambush her where she can’t get rid of you. You have to be sneaky.”
Sneaky. He’s never been sneaky, not once in his goddamn life. He crashes around his old cabin like a pack of marauding wolves. “What are you talking about?” Solomon grits out, frustrated as hell.
Ash throws him a grin. “I’m talking about a babymoon.”
He draws back. “A baby what?”