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His eyes lift to mine as soon as I add the middle name, and the smile on his face softens.

“Mark,” he says.

I smile. “Yeah. That part was easy.”

I run my fingertips over his wrist where his hand rests on my stomach. “Dane’s my own spin on Daniel.”

His eyebrows lift.

“I thought about using Daniel somewhere, but I like that Dane gives the baby his own name while still tying him to your dad.” I smile. “And Mark is Mark. Middle names don’t really give us our identity the way first names do.”

Sumner stays quiet for a few seconds, looking down at my stomach while his palm moves slowly over the roundness of it. When he finally looks back at me, his eyes are shiny, and his throat moves when he swallows hard.

“You really like it?”

“I love it.”

The roughness in his voice makes my chest squeeze, but I decide to be nice and not call attention to the fact that he’s getting emotional.

“So... that’s it?” I ask.

His eyebrows pull together. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t have any names you want to throw at me?”

He shakes his head. “Why mess with perfection?”

I laugh. “Just like that?”

“They’re good names, Goldie.” His hand slides slowly over my stomach again. “I care what we name our kid. I don’t care which one of us thought of it first.”

Well, fuck.

I smile at him. “You know that’s a dangerous amount of trust to put in me.”

“You’re the one growing the baby. If we ever disagree, you get the tie-breaker.”

“See, this is why I love you. You say things like that and make it really hard for me to be unreasonable.”

Sumner goes still.

My smile hangs there for another second before my brain catches up with my mouth.

Oh.

Oh.

When I look at his face, he looks almost as surprised as I feel.

“Well, fuck.”

A quiet laugh slips out of him, but he doesn’t take his eyes off me.

Heat spreads up my chest and into my face, and I pull the blanket a little higher over my legs mostly because I need something to do with my hands. “That wasn’t exactly how I planned to say that.”

“You planned to say it?” His voice is softer now, and the way he’s looking at me makes my stomach feel weird and fluttery in a way that has nothing to do with the baby.

“I almost did the other night,” I admit. “Then you tried to burn the house down.”