Slash grabbed me by the belt loops of my jeans and hauled me toward him. “When will you and Jazz be done?”
“I dunno,” I said, looking up at him through the sweep of my lashes. “We have some business to take care of, but I need a few hours to gossip about you and all the changes going on in my life.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But the sooner we buy furniture, the sooner we can move into the house.”
“We?” I raised a brow. “Sounding a little domesticated, aren’t you?”
“You make me sound like a feral cat.”
“Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Woman, you’re playing with fire.”
I placed my hands on his chest and reluctantly pushed away from him. “We’ll go this afternoon, okay?”
He raised his brows. “Don’t you need more time than that to pick out the stuff you want?”
“Not really, no. What do we need? A couch, a coffee table, bedroom furniture… We can tackle the nursery later.”
“Later.”
“Later,” I repeated slowly. “When we—ah—find out the sex.”
He paused. “We haven’t talked about that. Any of it.”
“We’ve been occupied with other things,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush.
“Like screwing our brains out.”
“And bricks through windows,” I added. “I want to know. About the baby’s sex, I mean. So we can plan. Is that okay?”
His eyes darkened and he caught the back of my neck. “Yeah, woman, that’s okay.”
I bit my lip. “Do you have a preference?”
“About?”
“Do you want a boy or a girl?”
“I want a healthy baby. I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl.”
I collapsed against his chest and hugged him to me. He wrapped his arms around me, pulling me even tighter. He bent his head and brushed his lips against my hair.
“I should go,” he commented.
“Mkay.” I snuggled into him.
He groaned. “You’re making it impossible to leave.”
“Good.”
His cell phone trilled in his pocket, and he sighed. “Can’t ignore this shit anymore. Call me when you’re done with Jazz.”
“You kept a key, right?” I asked as he released me and headed to the door. “To the back door of the bakery?”
He cocked his head slightly and smiled. “Yeah. I did.”
I nodded.
“Do yourself a favor,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Don’t bother explaining to Jazz why even though this looks crazy you’re doing it anyway.”
I let out a breath. “Was it that obvious that’s where my head was?”
“Yup.” He smiled and kissed me again. “She’s your friend, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then at the end of the day, as long as you’re happy and safe, that’s all that’s going to matter to her. Shit’s going to look weird to everyone who isn’t us, even her. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not their life. It’s ours.”
“Ours.” I sighed.
“Careful.” He smirked. “You sound like you might be falling in love with me.”
I snorted. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You knock up some woman from a one-night stand and then she falls madly in love with you.”
When he didn’t snark out a retort, I closed my lips.
I was bound to him, and not just because of the baby. It wasn’t even the car or the fact that we were about to live together. Those things you could untangle. Annoying to do so, sure, but possible.
But what I was feeling for him…
That wasn’t hard to decipher.
“I knew this was going to happen,” I mumbled.
“What?” he demanded.
“I knew that if I slept with you again, everything would get all complicated.”
“What’s complicated about it? You like me. I like you. We have great sex. We enjoy eating food together. So, we’re having a baby? People have been doing it for thousands of years. We can do it, too.”
“Why do you make it sound like there’s no problem?”
“Because there isn’t.” He smiled in amusement. “Except for that thing called feelings that you don’t seem to want to admit you feel for me.”
“You’re not admitting to feeling them either,” I pointed out.
I was fishing for answers, but for some reason, I was unable to be completely direct with him.
He stared deeply into my eyes, like he was about to unveil something.
And then my phone rang.
“I should probably get that,” I said with a sigh.
“You probably should,” he said, not moving.
“I’m sure it’s Jazz.”
“No doubt.”
We still didn’t move.
“Later,” he said gruffly. “We’ll have this conversation later.”
Nodding, I reluctantly slipped out of his embrace and went to pick up my phone. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer. I silenced the phone and said to Slash, “It’s not Jazz, but I’ll walk you downstairs anyway.”
We were standing in the doorway of the back door when Jazz drove up and parked.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, putting his sunglasses on and heading to his bike. He gave Jazz a chin nod in passing.
“Hi, Slash. Bye, Slash,” Jazz said to him.
He straddled his bike, turned the key, and a few moments after his engine roared to life, he was gone. My attention was completely on Slash, and I didn’t stop staring at him until he drove out of the parking lot.
“Someone’s deep into it,” Jazz commented with a wry smile.
I sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Well, I want to hear all about it. Wait, is this more of a girls’-pizza-night kind of talk, or we-can-sift-flour-while-we-talk kind of talk?”
“It would be better on my wallet if we sifted flour and talked.”
“Mine, too. Ugh, throwing all your money toward your business is the right answer, but like, I really want a pizza with cheese baked right into the crust.”
I moaned. “Stop. That sounds incredible.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Well spotted,” I said with a laugh as we headed into the bakery kitchen.
“No, I mean, what if it’s the baby that’s craving the pizza? You’d deny your child pizza?” She stared at me, her brown eyes wide and earnest.
“Do people say no to you?” I demanded. “If a siren and a lawyer had a love child, you’d be their offspring.”
“Weird, but I’ll take it.”
“I’m all about not denying my child pizza, but I just ate breakfast.”
“Can’t you pretend to be a hobbit so we can have second breakfast?”
“Call Mario’s,” I commanded. “I’m not strong enough to hold out any longer.”
“Atta girl.” She dug through her purse for her phone while I went to the desk and removed a sketchbook and pencil.
While Jazz placed our order, I sketched out the vision I had for the Bennington’s engagement cake.
“Pizza will be here in forty-five minutes. I told him to come to the back entrance because of the street. Speaking of the street, have you seen construction workers doing any sort of work at all, trying to get it finished?”
I paused mid-sketch. “Now that you mention it, no.” I tried to think about the last time I’d seen anyone, and it had been a while. A couple of weeks at least. “I’ll call the city and see if I can find out what’s going on.”
She leaned over to peer at the sketch book. “You drew that just now?”
“Yep.”
“Seriously? On the fly?”
“Not really on the fly,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, mulling it over. It sort of came to me last night in a dream.”
“Get out.”
“It’s true.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s the new batch of hormones or—”
“Hot Papa Biker in your bed?” She waggled her brows.
“And you’re done.”
“I’m impressed,” she said with another look at the sketch. “The Benningtons are going to love it. Okay, that’s out of the way. Tell me all the good stuff.”
“But the pizza isn’t here,” I said. “And I can’t tell you all the good stuff.”
“Why? Because it’s R-rated?”
My cheeks flamed.
Her mouth dropped open. “X-rated?”
I cleared my throat. “Let’s start with the brick through the window.”
“Yeah, that’s a good place to start. Did the cops find a suspect?”
“We never called the cops,” I said.
“No? Why the hell not?”
I blew out a puff of air. “Slash was handling the situation and he has a thing about cops.”
“Oh. Because he’s a biker?”
“I guess, yeah. We never got into why, but he called a couple of Blue Angels and they got the window fixed. And Slash took me to a hotel. He didn’t want us to stay here that night.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. I still think you should’ve called the cops. Then you could’ve filed an insurance claim for the window.”
“Yeah, I guess I could’ve gone that route, but I checked the security feed and all I saw was a shadowy hooded figure. They just threw the brick and then ran away.”
“Did the alarm scare them off?”
“I don’t know.” I frowned. “I haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about it.”
“You haven’t?” she demanded. “Someone threw a brick through the front window of your bakery! I don’t know if it’s safe for you to live here. Especially by yourself.”
“You don’t?” I asked.
She adamantly shook her head. “No.”
“Good,” I said dryly. “Because Slash asked me to move in with him and I said yes.”
Jazz blinked. And blinked again. “He asked you—wait—what? Seriously?”
“Seriously,” I repeated. I rubbed the back of my neck. “He, ah, took me to this little house in an older neighborhood. Two bedroom, one bathroom. It’s a rental, but, yeah. So that’s happening…”
“Holy shit. This is going at warp speed.”
I pointed to my belly. “This kind of changed it all up.”
“So, if you weren’t pregnant, you wouldn’t be moving in with him.”
“Definitely not,” I quickly voiced. “I mean, I don’t think so. No. I mean, there’s—whew. There’s a lot going on.”
“Where the hell is that pizza?” she grumbled. “You’re right. This was totally a pizza-worthy conversation. And beer. But it’s morning and you’re pregnant.”
“Oh, beer.” I sighed.
“Sorry. I reminded you.”
“Reminded me what?”
“That you can’t have anything alcoholic.”
“If this were a pizza night and there was beer, you shouldn’t feel bad about drinking in front of me. Enjoy yourself.”
“From the looks of you, you’re enjoying yourself, too,” she teased. “You’ve got whisker burn on your neck.”
“That’s not the only place,” I muttered before I could stop myself. When I realized what I’d said, my hands clapped over my mouth.
Jazz let out a peal of laughter. “Ah, so I see the real reason you’re moving in with him. Let’s be honest.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely an added bonus.” Waking up next to Slash every morning, looking the way he looked, was no hardship.
“What is it? You got all pensive,” she said.
“He bought me a car.”
“Yeah.”
“Now we’re moving in together.”
“Uh huh.”
“We’re having a baby.” I looked at her. “Is it possible?”
“What?”
“To get everything I ever wanted just like that? I mean, it’s in a weird, unexpected sort of way, but is it really possible?”
“It’s possible,” she said earnestly. “It’s so possible.”
I smiled at her. “You’re not judging me?”
“For what?”
“For moving so fast with a guy I hardly know?”
“I don’t know. Sounds to me like you know the most important things about him. He wants to protect you and keep you safe. He’s not going anywhere and proves it by asking you to move in with him. All that other stuff—like his favorite food, where he grew up, all that stuff can come later.”
“He grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma.”
“See? You know things. You’re good.”
A knock resounded on the back door and Jazz jumped in excitement. “Pizza!”
She went to answer the door. I closed the sketchbook and set it aside. We’d work on the cake topper after pizza, and then I’d call Slash.
Jazz returned to the kitchen, her face pinched. Behind her was Kurt Antol and he was carrying a pizza box. His gaze raked over me as he set it down onto the counter.
“I saw the delivery guy and offered to bring it to you,” he explained, as if that was completely normal, as if we were friends.
Jazz looked at me, but my eyes remained on Kurt. After his offer to buy the building, and the fact that I’d shut him down, I thought for sure that would be the end of it.
So why the hell was he here now?