Something flickers across his face that looks suspiciously like longing, but it’s gone before I can identify it.
“Piper—”
“I should go,” I say quickly, already backing toward the door. “Back to bed. Separate beds. In separate rooms. You know what I mean.”
Real smooth, Pip.
“Right,” he says. And is it my imagination, or does he sound disappointed?
I’m almost out the door when his voice stops me.
“Piper? This stays between us, right?”
I look back at him, this giant of a man cradling a tiny girl like she’s the most precious thing in the world, and my heart does something complicated in my chest.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I promise, the irony of those words not lost on me. After all, I’m keeping a much bigger secret.
I close the door softly behind me and lean against it for a moment, hand pressed to my stomach where our baby grows. Felix Barlowe doesn’t want kids. He’s made that crystal clear—twice now. But watching him with Ellie, seeing that tenderness he tries so hard to hide, I can’t help but wonder if maybe he’s wrong about himself.
Or maybe that’s just the wishful thinking of a woman who’s about to have his baby.
Either way, things just got a whole lot more complicated.
3
FELIX
I wakeup the next morning to the sound of…holy shit, is that silence?
Actual, honest-to-God silence. No crying or whimpering or tiny fists and feet beating against the mattress.
I turn my head to confirm that Ellie is still sleeping, careful not to move any other part of my body and accidentally make a noise that might shatter this miracle.
Only…
Jesus fucking Christ, she’s gone.
I launch out of bed like the goddamn mattress is on fire, my heart doing a spot-on impression of a jackhammer against my ribs. “Ellie!” I shout as I race for the door. “Piper! Are you?—”
“We’re in the kitchen,” Piper calls up, her voice soft as the morning light spilling in through the edges of the blackout curtains. “Everything’s okay.”
Everything’s okay. Sure, sure.
Everything except the way I just lost a decade off my life and my dignity in approximately three seconds flat.
I stand there in my boxer briefs, one hand pressed to my chest like I’m trying to keep my heart from escaping, and consider myoptions. I could stomp down there and unleash the verbal hurricane that’s been building since Piper launched that shoe at me last night. Tell her exactly what I think about people who steal babies from their beds without warning.
She’d take it. Piper Hart might look like something straight out of a fairy tale—rosebud lips, curves in all the right places, and rich brown-green eyes that see all the way to a person’s soul—but she also has edges. Sharp ones. The kind that cut through the bullshit I like to dish out without breaking a sweat.
And, man, I could do with letting off a little steam. Not just our patented verbal sparring either. The other kind. The kind that involves a lot less talking and a lot more?—
No. Absolutely not.
I know she doesn’t want that from me, and I can’t want it from her. Unless I want my older brother to string me up by my toenails and use me as a piñata at the next family gathering.
Besides, I think as I duck back into the bedroom, this is the first time in weeks—since I fired the most recent nanny—that the morning has started without Ellie’s heartbreaking symphony of tears.
I don’t blame her for crying. Hell, I’d cry too if I was in her position. Orphaned and stuck with a guardian who can’t tell if she needs a snack or a nap most of the time.
