He nodded, like a wise sage with a giant boner. “I told you, Winnie. We need to figure out our shit first. And maybe this will give you some incentive.”
Incentive! This was torture!
I glared at him and then, like a pissy kitten, nipped at the fingers still in my mouth.
He pulled them back and then gave me a stern look that made my toes curl. I had a very vivid fantasy of being draped over Kallum’s lap—my jeans pulled down and my bare bottom awaiting some Stern Kallum punishment—play out in my mind.
Did I really want that? For Kallum to spank me sometime?
All signs from my erogenous zones saidYES, YES, YES.
“Careful, babe,” warned Kallum. “Next time, I might bite back.”
The erotic threat in his words was intoxicating—maybe to us both, because he suddenly shook his head and rubbed his non-bitten hand over his face. “Okay, I might have to find a different talk-to-me incentive, because this one is getting me all worked up too, and that’s the exact opposite of what we need.”
Guilt crept in, thick and heavy. I didn’t need hostage orgasms as incentive; not when all the incentive we needed was currently growing its genetically blessed vocal cords somewhere vaguely north of my bladder.
Kallum was right. I was horny and selfish and Kallum was right.
“No,” I said as I started doing up my jeans. “I think you’re right. We should talk first.”
His voice had softened a little when he added, “Iwantto figure this out. I meant what I said in LA, babe. I love you.”
My throat went tight; I blinked and kept my eyes on my hands as I hiked my jeans up over the barely there swell of our lemon-size baby.
“You don’t have to say it back,” Kallum said, and he said it so gently, so vulnerably, that I pressed my face into my hands.
“I want to say it back,” I murmured. It was the truth. The horrible, glorious truth.
I loved him back.
But how could I say it when I still had to tell him about the baby? When I still wasn’t sure if I could count on him not to hurt me with some throwaway comment or thoughtless moment? Because if he’d thought I was embarrassing before, God only knew what he’d think of a frazzled Winnie panicking about car seat installation appointments with cabbage leaves stuffed in her bra... and I didn’t know if I could handle him being careless with me then.
Or God forbid, careless with the baby.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to either of us to say it until there were no more secrets, until I knew for sure that I was ready to take the leap.
I looked up to see Kallum watching me like a starving man.
“Tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “We’ve done enough tonight. We’ll sleep and then start fresh tomorrow, and then we’ll get the two of us sorted out.”
The reshoots schedule was pretty brisk, and even when we weren’t on set, we’d be working with Jack and Gretchen on choreographing the new love scenes, so I wasn’t sure how much time we’d be able to carve out.
But there wasn’t a choice—not when the two of us had a future where there would be three of us instead.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kallum
I sat in my room wide awake. It was nearly one in the morning and all I wanted was to relive that hot little moment in the alleyway. Until I ended it like a painfully responsible adult.
It’d been two hours since Winnie and I walked back to the Edelweiss Inn and I was still rocking a moderate chub. But I was trying to think with my brain, and my brain knew that there was no path forward with Winnie without us hashing our shit out like grown-ups. With the way the rest of the world turned to silence any time our bodies collided, part of me wondered if we would have better luck talking through a wall.
I sent off a quick and way-too-late text to my mom, telling her that I’d made it here safely, and another to Tamara, promising to check in on Topher several times a day.
Shockingly, after myShark Tankno-show, the investors were still interested. They were disappointed—and fuck, that was a word I’d heard too much lately—but they were interested in restructuring their expansion plan, so until then I was sort of in a holding pattern. I kept telling myself that once I had all that squared away, I could get Topher back in school and talk to Tamara about his (hopefully) brief college dropout status.
Just as I flipped the switch on the bedside lamp, a knock tapped at my door.
