“Lia?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
I sank against the wall again. “I need to apologize for how I reacted last night. I was a total arse.”
“Yes, you were.” She sighed heavily. “But … I shouldn’t have stormed off either. I guess the insinuation that I was lying didn’t … sit well with me.” Before I could open my mouth, she interrupted. “And I know, I know why you’re cautious. But that’s why I told you about Logan first. I’d never ever take advantage of someone because of what they do.”
“I know,” I told her. “The truth is, Lia, we don’t know each other. At all.”
“We’re kinda going about this backward, huh?”
I smiled. “A bit.”
“Can we, I don’t know, meet for coffee? Or tea?”
“That sounds like a very smart, adult decision for us to make.”
Lia laughed, and the sound of it, after the past twenty-four hours, finally felt like I was doing something right. It was okay to have my priorities shift, no matter how the conversation went with her or how she wanted to handle it.
“I’m open tomorrow, if you are.”
“Why don’t we meet somewhere in London? Bit of a happy medium for both of us.”
“You can do that without being … I don’t know … mobbed?”
It was my turn to laugh. “Yes. In Shepperton, I get recognized far more often than I do when I’m in London. Sometimes a fan will approach, but it’s not common.”
“That’s kinda how it was for my brother too,” she said. “We actually had a pretty normal life growing up, considering what he did.”
She was an anomaly, and I found that I quite liked it.
Not only that, but I still had to wrap my head around the fact she was pregnant, and it was mine.
Suddenly, I wanted to tell her that. Offer some olive branch to this woman who I didn’t exactly know very well.
“I can’t get over it,” I admitted quietly. “To be honest, Lia, I’ve never given it much thought. Having kids.”
She exhaled audibly. “I know what you mean. I’m only twenty-two, Jude. This wasn’t in the cards for me for a very long time.”
I closed my eyes. Young, especially compared to me, hardly past the cusp of truly feeling like an adult.
“Lia,” I said, “we’ll figure this out together, yeah?”
Through the speaker, she sniffed quietly. “Yeah.”
LIA
The things I knew about Jude Michael McAllister could fit on my pinky finger. At least, for the time being.
You’re going to be a baby daddy- take two was already off to a better start as I sat across a tiny table in a tiny cafe, watching him wolf down that English breakfast thing I loved.
Add that to the list of things I knew:
-Jude could eat an entire meal in four bites.
-He looked great in a black knit hat.
-He took his tea with one sugar.
And so far on take two, he hadn’t accused me of trying to pass off another man’s baby as his.
“Are you not hungry?” he asked, eyeing my plate. “Do you feel all right?”
It was a graveyard of the poor croissant that I’d picked at, and the scone that had gotten similar treatment.
Which was a sad thing, because carbs were my jam in pregnancy.
I sat back and gave him an appraising look. “I feel okay. Morning sickness tends to hit me in the afternoon, but it’s only happened a couple of times. When it did, I kinda thought maybe I hadn’t eaten enough or wasn’t drinking enough water.”
He nodded.
The owner of the cafe ducked under the counter and swept away some of the trash from our table. “Will you loves be needing anything else?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I said, smiling up at her.
“Thanks, Sheila,” Jude told her. “Maybe just a bit of privacy while we chat, if you don’t mind.”
He slid her some cash, and she patted him gently on the shoulder before dashing off to flip the closed sign on the door. “I’m just going to pop over to the market for a few things. Be back in a tick.”
As she slid out of the door and jogged down the steps, I watched her tuck the cash Jude had given her into the cup of a vagrant sleeping curled around his dog at the end of the block.
“She’s nice.”
Jude nodded. “She gave my brother, Lewis, his first kitchen job years ago.”
“Is that your only sibling?” I thought of the picture in the flat, the man who looked so much like Jude.
“It is. The pub where we met, I helped him buy it after I started playing. He wanted a place to call his own.”
My eyebrows popped up. “That’s a generous gift.”
Jude shot me a rueful smile, showing just the slightest hint of a dimple in his scruff-covered jaw. “It was. We grew up on a sheep farm, actually. And neither of us particularly warmed to that life, so I thought I’d help him take a different path.” He took a sip of his tea. “What about you? Brothers or sisters?” At my immediate, wide smile, Jude laughed. “Is that a loaded question?”
“No. Well, maybe.” I set my chin on my hand and took a deep breath. “Claire is my twin sister. Isabel is two years older than us. Molly is two years older than Isabel. Logan, who is actually my half-brother, is the one who raised us from the time I was ten. And his son Emmett, with his wife Paige, is technically my nephew, but he also feels like my brother, because I’m closer in age to him than I am to Logan.”
Jude’s jaw was all but unhinged by the time I finished. “That’s not a family, that’s a bloody army.”
I laughed. “It’s … chaos. I love it.”
“Do they know?” he asked quietly.
The laughter dried up in my throat, an ache welling immediately behind my chest, like he’d turned on a faucet with his words. “Just Claire. I wanted to talk to you first.”
“I’m so sorry I reacted the way I did, Lia.” He leaned forward and pinned me with those green eyes. So green that I felt that same swirly feeling in my belly that I did when I met him. When he started kissing me in his kitchen before his stupid mouth and my stupid temper ruined the moment. “It’s not an excuse, but it was one of those moments where—because I’d never even given it much thought, having kids, you know—my reaction caught even me off guard. If that makes sense,” he added.
“It does. I think I suffered from the same problem.” I covered my hot cheeks. “I’ve never told anyone to get fucked in my entire life.”
He laughed, a large, booming sound born from somewhere deep in his broad chest. Oh, that sound set off a series of sparks that should have worried me. Lack of chemistry was not our problem.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.