She paused and looked over to the chair where she sat in the morning, sipping her coffee. Without thinking too hard about it, Tarr stepped that way, tugging her with him. He sat first, and she settled easily onto his lap—something she’d once protested about but now did as if it were second nature. She’d talk to him easier, too, if she didn’t have to look him straight in the face, and Tarr could hold this woman in his arms forever and never grow tired of it.
He pushed them back and forth while Wiggins circled and lay down next to the chair.
After a few rocks, she said, “It’s not bad news, Tarr, but it’s not exactly good either.”
“All right,” he said.
“She wants to check my fallopian tubes for damage. She says there could be some uterine scarring that may affect implantation, which would obviously make conception difficult. Along with that, if there’s a lot of scarring around my uterusor fallopian tubes, that could cause narrowing in the tubes, and obviously then I might not have eggs that can be fertilized.”
She drew a breath. “She said she’d put me in the reduced-fertility or unknown-impact category, and she wants to do more tests so we can see if there’s any of that scarring from the hip replacement or pelvic injury. Something called an HSG.”
“All right,” Tarr said. “You want to do that?”
“Yeah,” Briar said. “I have an appointment in another couple of weeks for that.”
“I can drive you,” Tarr offered.
Briar drew in a long breath, and it shuddered through her chest. Tarr’s heart broke for her. He really didn’t want her to have to go through this alone. He also knew he’d have to force himself on her if he really wanted to drive her to do the testing, because Briar still resisted help from almost everyone.
“She said that it’s entirely possible that I can get pregnant,” Briar continued. “But she then has a lot of concerns about carrying a baby and delivering it properly. Because of my hip replacement, my pelvic width might not be big enough, and it’s very likely that I would have to have a C-section. So there are lots of things.”
“Well, we can deal with things,” Tarr said. “Things that we know about are far better than things that we don’t.”
“Yeah.” Briar sighed and got to her feet. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She reached for both of his hands and playfully pulled him to a stand. “Take me to dinner?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He wrapped her in his arms and leaned down, hesitating only millimeters before his mouth touched hers. “Thanks for telling me, Briar,” he said, using her name in a rare showing of saying it out loud. “Where do you want to go eat?”
She closed the distance between them and pressed her lips to his. Tarr quickly deepened the kiss, the sense of knocking down even more of Briar’s barriers flowing over him. He didn’t go ontoo long before he whistled for Wiggins and put the dog back in the house. Wiggins barked a couple of times as Tarr brought the door closed between them, and he turned back to Briar with guilt streaming through him.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Briar said. “I want to go to that gourmet hot dog place.”
Everything Tarr knew about Briar shifted. “You want a gourmet hot dog?”
“After the doctor’s appointment that I’ve been anxiously awaiting and dreading at the same time? Yeah, I want an all-beef foot-long with caramelized onions and spicy brown mustard,” she said. “And maybe some of that tangy sauce they put on yours last time.” She grinned at him. “It sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Hey, I’m always up for a gourmet hot dog,” he said.
With that, he led her toward the truck, and after she climbed in, he pressed in close to her and rested his arm across her lap. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, sweetheart,” he said. “And even if you can’t have kids, it doesn’t make you less.”
Her eyes met his, searching and searching as if he might not be telling the truth. “You really mean that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s one tiny little part of who you are. It doesn’t define you, and it’s definitely not a deal-breaker for me, because you’re amazing exactly how you are.”
Briar cradled his face in her hand and let her eyes drift closed. “Thank you, baby. That means a lot.”
Tarr kissed her again, still a little surprised that something he’d fantasized about for almost a year could actually happen now. He wanted to provide a safe harbor for her in every way possible, and as he stood there in her driveway, the sun slowly sinking into twilight and reminding him that it was far too cold to be carrying on for very long, Tarr definitely started falling in love with Briar. And maybe if he managed to provide the perfect birthday for her, she could fall in love with him too.
thirty-one
Briar woke up on her birthday, the scent of bacon filling her senses. She’d figured Tarr would help her start her birthday in the best way possible—and that meant breakfast sandwiches.
She opened her eyes to find darkness still covering the windows. That also made sense, though the days were definitely getting longer and longer. She noticed that her bedroom door stood more ajar than she usually left it, and she felt around with her feet for Wiggins. He was gone, and of course he was. The dog loved her unconditionally, and though Briar had been resisting the cowboy’s charms with everything she could, she also knew why Wiggins felt the way he did about Tarr.
Tarr knew how to take exceptional care of those around him, and it helped that he fed Wiggins whatever he wanted. With a start, Briar realized Tarr did the same thing to her. She dictated where they went for dinner, and he was currently in her house right now, preparing to feed her exactly what she wanted.
So she and Wiggins weren’t all that different.
Part of her wanted to shower and get dressed before she showed her wild morning hair to Tarr and inflicted her morning breath on him. But he’d seen her plenty of times in her pajamas—and quite literally at her worst when she’d awakened in the hospital and found him at her side—so she left on her pajamas and padded down the hall in bare feet to the kitchen. She paused just out of sight so she could drink in Tarr’s tall, dark form as he whisked something on the stove.
