It takes all my willpower to leave the hotel room with Hudson still there and even more when I get in the car with Harper not to tell her everything. Good thing Adley is in the back seat.
“Mommy!” she says in a tired voice.
I turn to sign to her while I speak outloud. Hey, sweetie. Did you have fun with Harper?
With a sleepy smile, she raises her hands to show me her painted nails. “Look.”
Very pretty.
“Buckle up,” Harper says to me.
I put on my seat belt, and she accelerates a little too fast for my liking. Especially with my daughter in the back.
“So?” She looks in the rearview mirror at Adley.
I shrug. “So nothing.”
“Don’t you dare hide details. I told you—”
“Harp, there’s a three-year-old in the back.”
“She’s already half asleep. We stayed up a little past her bedtime last night.”
“How late?” I frown.
The sheepish grin on her face tells me all I need to know. “I’m not going to stop asking. You sleep with one of the hottest guys in snowboarding, and you’re not going to tell me about it? Although Dax Campbell is more my type.”
I shake my head at her love of snowboarders. “He’s married to that other medalist, Demi Harrison, isn’t he?”
“Oh, I can do what she did.” Harper waves it off.
“You’re a wedding planner, not a skier,” I inform her in case she forgot how different her job is than going seventy miles per hour downhill.
“Dealing with bridezillas is ten times harder and more dangerous, just in a different way. She might fall and die, and I might get shanked.”
Laugher spills out of me. “They have kids.”
“Ask Adley, I’d make an excellent stepmom.” She stops at a light and smiles at me.
“You have an excuse for everything.” I glance back and see Adley’s cheek resting along the one side of the car seat. She’s out.
“Hey.” Harper smacks my leg to grab my attention.
“You don’t have to hit me.”
“Did you read Buzz Wheel?” She ignores my comment.
I nibble my cheek and look out the window. “No.” I hate lying. She presses on the gas when the light turns green, and I fly back into the seat. “Jeez, Harp.”
“Hudson was there last night too.”
Okay, I can either be straight or continue to lie through my teeth.
“I have to tell you something,” I relent—mostly because what happened last night is a lot, and I need to download. And Harper, although she loves gossip, has never outed any of my secrets. She knew I was pregnant before I arrived in Lake Starlight and told no one.
“That Hudson came into the restaurant and confessed his undying love for you, then he got a hotel room, and the two of you had wild sex all night?” She smiles smugly for a moment before returning her attention to the road.
I look over my shoulder to make sure Adley is still asleep. “How did you know that?”
“I have eyes everywhere in this town.”
“Are you Buzz Wheel?”
She laughs and hits the steering wheel with her hand. “Hell no…let’s just say there was a chatty chef texting me last night.”
Jeez, Linus. I thought I could trust him.
She pats my knee and squeezes. “Your secret is safe with me. But why are you being secretive about it? I mean, the two of you have a daughter.” She looks in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know. I’m kind of confused.”
“What?” She stops the car in the middle of the road and stares at me, lowering her voice. “You slept with him without knowing if you had feelings? I hate to break it to you, but bad decision. You two have such a great thing going, and that kinda thing is gonna blow it up.”
“I never said I didn’t have feelings. I just have to make sure this is going to work before we tell Adley.”
She puts her hand over her heart. “Thank God, because that man loves you something fierce, and if you break his heart just because you’re scared—”
“Why does everyone think I’m scared or I’m gonna run? It’s starting to piss me off.” In truth, it’s only been her and Hudson, but they’re two of the people who know me the best.
“Everyone knows you harbor some things because of your parents’ past.”
I roll my eyes. “I handled that. Sure, it messed with me when I was younger, but you know I don’t like baggage, which is why I let mine go a long time ago.”
She sighs and moves the car forward again. She’s holding something back.
“What, Harp? Just say it.”
“Nothing. I’m happy for you two, and I won’t tell anyone. You know me, you, and Linus keep our secrets between us.”
I nod, but her reaction to my words triggers me to find out exactly what she means.
“Please tell me,” I say as she pulls into my driveway.
She turns off the ignition and faces me. “I hate to break it to you, but everyone has baggage. Your issue with your parents is your baggage, and Hudson might have more baggage than you know.” I open my mouth, and she raises her hand. “Everyone comes with baggage, Palm. Even you. That’s life.”
I open my door and place one foot on the driveway. “I have to go write. Hudson is going to be here shortly to get Adley. Do you mind staying just a little longer?”
She gives me her expression like what the hell is wrong with you, we’re in the middle of a conversation. Then her shoulders sink, and she nods. “Of course. All I have to do today is get with Maven about a bride’s flowers that are on backorder.”
“Thank you. I owe you big.”
“A dedication would be nice.” She smiles.
I hope she understands I heard her, but if I think too hard about what she’s saying, I might freak out and run, and I can’t do that to Hudson. I don’t want to do it to Hudson.
“Done.” I lean forward and kiss her cheek.
I hate leaving Adley after an entire night away from her, but if I don’t finish this book, I can’t feed my little girl. I go inside and change quickly before grabbing my bag and heading to the cabin.
A sense of peace envelops me when I enter the cabin, though my mind is on Hudson. I get myself situated, open my laptop, and read the chapter I wrote about Bea and Pete and the morning after.
The morning after they slept together, Pete went into the kitchen and made pancakes. He didn’t know how Bea was going to react, and he worried that he’d be looking for a new best friend and a new apartment.
He was just finishing the first batch when she walked in, her hair a mess but her cochlear implants in place. He smiled to himself. Last night was one of the best of his life, even if it was a little fuzzy. They had slept together, and it was just as he imagined it would be. Combustive. Explosive.
“Good morning,” he said.
She grabbed the pot of coffee he’d brewed and poured a cup. “Mornin’.” She brought the cup to her lips and sipped. “Tell me you’re just as hungover as I am.”
“I chugged two glasses of water and took some pain meds. Yours are on the table.”
She walked over and stared at the pills and the water. She didn’t put down her coffee mug or take the pills or the water. She just stared, her eyes glued to the two white pills.
Pete brought over the first plate of pancakes and set them in front of her. A lone tear fell from her eye and onto the table.
He grabbed her shoulders, turning her to face him. “Bea, what is it?”
Her head slowly rose, and Pete saw it there. The hope that had sprung inside him after last night plummeted as quickly as a fall from the halfpipe. One misstep and boom, game over. But he didn’t think they’d made a misstep. He’d thought things might finally be moving forward with Bea.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to lose you.” She stepped into Pete and wrapped her arms around his waist so tightly he felt his lungs struggle to breathe.
He held her for a few minutes before asking, “What are you talking about?”
She stepped back and wiped the tears that were flowing down her cheeks. “Because we slept together, and now you’re making me pancakes and leaving me pain meds and water. You want a relationship, and I’m not sure I can go there.”
Pete laughed then registered the smell of smoke from the pancakes on the stove. He ran over and turned off the burner, tossing the pan to the other side of the stove.
“Now I ruined the pancakes,” Bea wailed.
Pete laughed. “What the hell is going on? I would have done this had I slept on the couch all night.” He was being truthful, but at the same time, he was pushing down the hope that maybe Bea would be ready for a relationship with him. He’d played the friend card for a year, and they’d gotten to know each other better than anyone else in their lives.
She shrugged. “You mean you don’t expect a relationship now that we slept together?”
“Bea, it’s pancakes, water, and pain meds. I didn’t order six dozen roses and heart-shaped candy and teddy bears.”
Bea looked at the ceiling and back at him. “So, I overreacted?”
“Maybe a tad.” Pete put up his fingers, measuring a sliver of space between them. “But…”
“Oh, thank goodness because I thought this was…” She shook her head. “I do love you, you know that. As a friend.”
Pete had learned to hate the word friend, especially when it came out of Bea’s mouth. But he pushed his feelings aside, swallowed them down like those pills he’d taken earlier, and made the rest of the pancakes. Bea took her pain meds with the water and sat down, pouring syrup all over her pancakes before digging in.
They sat at the small table for two and talked about everything except them. That had become the norm lately.
Pete moved in the following week.
They lived together for seven weeks before Pete decided that he was going to be honest with Bea and tell her that he was going to move out. That he needed some space away from her and his feelings for her. That maybe friendship wasn’t an option since the feelings he had for her weren’t fading.
She had never promised him anything but friendship. This was on him, not her. Plus, he had an opportunity that might pan out to something more in the snowboarding world, but it meant he had to leave here…leave Bea.
He grabbed them dinner from a sushi restaurant they loved, so it wouldn’t be the worst night of his life if Bea got upset with him.
Bea walked through the door, and Pete immediately saw that something was wrong. He hugged her as he usually did when she’d had a shitty day at work. She was struggling to find what she wanted to do for an occupation, and the office jobs she was taking were horrible.
He sat her down at the table, poured her a glass of wine, and brought out the sushi from the fridge.
She stared at it, then looked at Pete. “Is this some test? A joke?”
Pete was baffled. “What?”
“You always know what’s going on with me, so did you purposely buy this to pry it out of me?”
Pete was clueless. He grabbed his chair and slid it across to sit right in front of her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Tears flooded Bea’s eyes and cascaded down her cheeks. She shuddered out a breath, and her crying quickly got out of control. “I’m…” Another deep breath.
Pete wanted her to spit out. He couldn’t handle being in the dark, and he felt sick at seeing her so upset and not knowing what he could do to fix it.
“I’m…pregnant.” She buried her head in her hands, inconsolable.
Pete leaned back in the chair as thoughts piled up inside his mind like a heap of garbage.
A baby. She was having a baby. His baby.
Everything he had planned that night flew out the door that Bea had walked through moments ago.