He jerked back. “No shit. If anything else came out of your mouth, you were about to have a fight on your hands.”
She kept going, ignoring him. “You’re going to act all crazy and—”
“Here’s some crazy for you, darling.” He closed the distance between them, backing her against the wall. “That baby you’re carrying is mine.” He dropped his hand to her stomach, sliding beneath her shirt and splaying his fingers across her skin. “Mine. You made your choice when you came up here to take that test instead of doing it on your own in Dallas. You included me in this, so don’t go crying about how unfair it is that I have a fucking opinion. You’re having our baby, and you’re staying here in Devil’s Falls to do it.”
What the hell? “Staying—”
He kissed her, stealing her words and taking possession of her mouth as if every part of her really was his. It’s not. The token protest withered against the onslaught of sensation, the way his tongue stroked hers, igniting a need in her that she would have thought impossible considering the circumstances. He stroked her stomach, his thumb dipping beneath the waistband of her yoga pants to trail down her hip bone. She shivered, a moan slipping free.
Daniel twisted his wrist so he could slide his entire hand into her pants. He pushed a finger into her. The sensation made her moan again, and he ate the sound and then kissed around to her jaw. “You’re so fucking wet for me. You always were.” He pumped his finger in and out of her as much as he could. “Stay, darling. I’ll have you coming more times than you can count. On my hand. On my mouth. On my cock.”
Her entire body clenched at his words. It sounded so good, the temptation to let him make her feel good almost too much to resist. But if she let him win this one, she’d spend the next nine months—the next eighteen years—losing arguments. Not to mention her job—her life—was in Dallas. She’d been willing to make her plans around Daniel once before, and he’d dropped her like a bad habit the first time things went truly bad.
She couldn’t go through that again.
It was hard to reach down and grab his wrist, harder than she could have imagined. “No.”
Instantly, he pulled his hand out of her pants, though he didn’t back up. “The offer stands.”
She’d just bet it did. Hope put her hands on his chest and gently pushed him back a step. “You can’t sex me up to get your way. That’s not how this works.”
“Is that what you think I was doing?”
Damn, but he could play innocent entirely too well—that was, if she was inclined to forget what he’d just been whispering in her ear. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes, Daniel, that’s exactly what you were doing. It’s a dirty negotiation tactic if I ever saw one.”
He grinned, the expression so unexpected, she was half amazed that her panties didn’t hit the ground. “Can’t blame me for trying.” He raised his finger to his lips—the same finger that’d been inside her—and sucked it into his mouth, his gaze never leaving her face. He released it so suddenly, her knees actually went weak. “You’ll change your mind.”
“No, I won’t.” I might. Hope shook her head. No, I won’t. Sex with Daniel was world ending, which was the damn point—she liked her world exactly the way it was. It would change now, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that, but she could at least try to maintain control in the midst of all the insanity.
Which meant she couldn’t let him have the upper hand. Not now. Not ever again.
She edged past him, well aware that he let her walk out of the room when all he had to do was kiss her again to crumble her admittedly pathetic protestation. She made her way down the hall and into the kitchen, stopping cold at what she saw there. Last night she’d been so distracted by acting like a crazy person that she hadn’t really stopped to check out his place. Part of her had sort of just assumed that it was, she didn’t know, familiar.
It wasn’t.
She looked around the kitchen that could have been in any cookie-cutter house around the country. There was nothing wrong with it, at least until she realized it was in Daniel’s house. She moved around the breakfast bar, eyeing the empty counters, and opened a cupboard. There were two mason jar glasses in it, a stack of paper plates, and nothing else. She turned when he entered the room. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke?”
“This.” She motioned at everything. “This isn’t your kitchen. It can’t be.” It was just too soulless.
“It’s mine.” He opened the fridge and winced, a reaction she shared when she saw how empty it was.
“But…how do you cook here with none of your old stuff?” Even right out of high school, he’d spent a good portion of his checks on fancy knives and food they’d had to drive into Pecos to get because the market in Devil’s Falls didn’t carry specialty items. Her favorite nights had been when they’d holed up in the little house he’d shared with his friends and he’d cooked for all of them. With his current setup, she doubted he could put together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let alone anything like the complicated dishes he’d loved.
He shut the fridge door. “I don’t cook anymore.”
That shocked her almost more than anything else that had happened since she woke up. Daniel didn’t cook? It struck her that as well as she used to know the boy she’d dated, she didn’t know a damn thing about the man standing in front of her.
And she was going to have his baby.
Chapter Seven
Daniel didn’t like the way Hope was looking at him—as if he was broken. As if she saw through all the walls he’d built up around himself since that night thirteen years ago, and she knew that he wasn’t anywhere near as okay as he liked everyone to think.
It set his teeth on edge. He didn’t want pity from anyone—least of all from her.
To get away from the knowledge in her dark eyes, he’d do damn near anything. So he turned the tables. “We need to talk about the next nine months.” And the next eighteen years. But he knew her well enough—or at least he used to—to know that coming at her with the rest of their lives on the table was a surefire way to get her to dig in her heels and shoot him down flat. He had no intention of rolling over and playing dead for her, but he’d let her think he was willing to settle for her sticking around for pregnancy and ease her into the idea of staying here for the long term.
Yeah, she had her job, and a life in Dallas that didn’t include him or Devil’s Falls, but he didn’t much like the idea of her raising their kid hours away. The best he could hope for in that situation was every other weekend. Fuck that. Hope would stay here. He just had to figure out how the hell he was going to convince her of that.
He was reaching, and he damn well knew it. Daniel grabbed the carton of milk out of the fridge and mentally cursed. It had expired over a month ago. If she’d been freaking out in Dallas as much as she was last night and this morning, she hadn’t been eating or taking care of herself. In order to convince her to stay, he had to prove he still knew how to do that.
So far, he was batting a thousand.
He dumped the milk into the sink and rinsed the carton out. As long as he wasn’t looking directly at her, he could keep his cool. In theory. “How do you see this working?”
There, that was as nonthreatening as it could get.
Hope crossed her arms over her chest and raised her chin like she was stepping into the ring. “I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. Devil’s Falls is my past, and I’m keeping it that way. I have a life in Dallas, Daniel. A good one. This wasn’t part of the plan, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to drop everything to run back here and play little wife to you so that you can feel like you’re fulfilling your duties. I’m not a duty, and neither is this baby. We both deserve better than that.”
He couldn’t argue that logic, but the truth was that it was his duty to do right
by both of them. Daniel considered her. There had to be something he could say to get her to stop arguing long enough to see that this was the only way. “Where are your parents living these days?”
“San Antonio.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
That’s it. That’s the pressure point to push.
He had her, she just didn’t know it yet. “It sounds like you have shit for a support system in Dallas.”
“I have friends.” From the defensive tone, she knew exactly where he was going with this.
“None of them that were good enough friends to be there for you when you took that test.” Not that he was complaining on that note. She very well could have taken the test and moved on with her life in Dallas, and he never would have known the difference. The thought left him cold. He braced his hands on the breakfast bar and leaned forward. “Instead, you drove seven hours across the fucking state to my house to take it. Because you had no one else.”
Hope sucked in a breath. “That’s not fair. Unlike you, I wasn’t going to hide from something that scared me. Yes, I came back here—back to you—to take the test, but it’s only for the weekend. I’m going home tomorrow.”
He ignored that, ignored the clock that instantly sprang into being, counting down until she walked out of his life again. If he thought too hard about it, he’d drive himself batshit crazy. “My point is that Devil’s Falls has a built-in support system. Your parents are within easy drivable distance. I’m five minutes from my parents’ place, and don’t even get me started on my cousins.” Every single one of them would lose their minds when they found out Hope was pregnant. She’d be so damn taken care of, she wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
A part of him didn’t want to tell anyone, solely so he could be the one seeing to her every need.
Rein it in.
Easier said than done. There was nothing but stubbornness on Hope’s face, so he pressed his point. “What happens if you fall? Or there are complications with the baby? Are you going to call a fucking cab to come get you and then sit in Dallas traffic on the way to the hospital? If you’re here, Doc Jenkins has no problem making house calls, and he’s the same fucking doctor who delivered you, so don’t tell me that some fancy city doctor is going to be better. They won’t. They don’t know you. Devil’s Falls does.”