Obviously he knew that she was a single mother, and he’d still said, I want another chance to be with you, last night. Tears welled in her eyes as she remembered it because it was one of the best and sweetest moments of her entire life. It was exactly what she wanted too: another chance. A second chance to be together. A first chance to be a family.
Were he to withdraw those words, even now, when their reunion was so fresh and new, her heart would surely break all over again.
I have to tell him about Ava Grace.
Before things got much further, she owed him the truth about everything: about finding out she was pregnant and how her family would have disowned her were she to have a baby out of wedlock, about going to Utopia Manor that Thanksgiving to tell him, about his mother telling her that he and Van were engaged and threatening to have her arrested if she didn’t leave, about being completely out of options. She would tell him that she walked the long way from his house to the Pamlico House to find Judith that terrible, terrible night, and she would tell him that—by the grace of God—Judith had been her guardian angel and taken Laire under her wing. And that she’d turned out to be a surrogate mother to Laire and the very best nana Ava Grace could ever know.
And maybe—maybe, please maybe—he would see things through her eyes and understand why she’d kept Ava Grace a secret, and why she would have kept her a secret indefinitely if fate hadn’t thrust them back into each other’s arms.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she grabbed her cup of coffee as she walked to the window and pulled back the sheer curtains to watch the sunrise over the ocean, desperately hoping for the best.
Biting her lower lip in thought, she winced, reminded that it was bruised from two hours of kissing last night. He’d put a chair in front of the roof door to jam it closed, and when he returned to the couch, Laire straddled his lap, pulling the shearling blanket around them as they kissed. More times than she could count, his wandering hands had plumped her breasts over her shirt or slipped into the crevices of her thighs, touching her intimately over her jeans. Because she was a mother, no doubt he believed she was far more experienced than she was. She’d given birth, but all her sexual experience, without exception, had been with him. And it had been so many years ago that being with him again last night felt scary and new.
Except.
She twitched her nose and took a sip of coffee.
Except not all scary and not all new.
She wasn’t as inexperienced as she’d been the summer they first met. She’d loved Erik that summer—learned about his body, touched him, been touched by him, and lost her virginity to him, even if they’d stopped the act prematurely. In their time apart, she’d read books and met different men, and although she’d never been intimate with any of them, she had matured, and her desires were those of a grown woman, not a coltish teenager.
On one hand, she was scared to move too fast, but on the other, she couldn’t bear to keep herself from him physically after missing him so desperately. After years of such poignant and painful loneliness, she wanted the warmth, the heat, of his body on hers.
She reached up to touch her lips and sighed with longing, craving so much more than their deep, passionate kisses from last night. For years, her deepest and hottest dreams had been about Erik finishing what he’d started the night they conceived Ava Grace. And now? Now that her Erik was returned to her? She wanted to make those dreams a reality.
She flicked a glance at the ceiling, whimpering softly, wondering how long she’d have to wait until they were naked in bed together, and—oh, please—she hoped it wasn’t too long.
As the sun cleared the horizon and made its bright ascent into the sky, she crossed the room and opened her laptop, placing her mug on the desk. As her computer rebooted, she turned to look at the perfection of her baby’s sleeping face in repose. Slack pink lips, long dark lashes and ginger-colored hair. Her heart swelled with a love so pure, it took her breath away.
More than anything—more than anything else in the world—Laire wanted Ava Grace to have the family she deserved: a mother and a father who loved each other, and loved her to the moon and back. And now that that once-unlikely dream felt almost possible, she could only clench her eyes shut and wish, with every fiber of her being, that it would actually come true.
***
After their epic make-out session last night on the roof, before they’d said good night, while she was still straddling his lap, Erik had asked Laire if he could spend New Year’s Eve, tonight, with her and Ava Grace. She’d accepted with a smile, her lips slick from his attentions, her eyes dilated and dark.
“What did you have in mind?”
He’d chuckled lightly, keeping his hands on her hips, his erection straining his jeans uncomfortably. “Darlin’, what I have in mind is impossible with Ava Grace in the same room.”
“What if she was asleep . . . and we were in the room next door?” she’d murmured, her heavy-lidded eyes locked with his.