oney to stay anywhere else...”
“Whoa, whoa!” Jeff interrupted. He tugged on her shoulder until she turned around and looked him in the eye.
“Leah, can I tell you how I see the situation? Because it’s not the same at all, from my perspective.”
She nodded.
“The way I see it, your ex abandoned all of his responsibilities and left you to try and do an impossible task by yourself. You succeeded for way, way longer than any reasonable person would expect, and now you’re asking for help from your family, exactly the people who should be helping you out in a situation like this.”
Leah started to protest that her mom had no obligation to help her if she didn’t want to, but Jeff held up a finger, and she subsided to let him finish.
“You had the bad luck to be driving in an unexpected snowstorm, but that was my good luck. And listen carefully now, because this is the most important thing that seems to be different in how we see the situation.”
Jeff took hold of her shoulders and spoke the next words with a determined truthfulness that was impossible to disbelieve.
“You are not a burden, Leah. I know you think that you and Emily are an inconvenience to me, but that’s just not true at all. I’m so glad I met you both. I’m so glad you’re here right now.
“Because you know what I’d be doing if you weren’t here? Looking for a way to keep myself busy. Cooking dinner for myself, and wishing I had someone else to cook for. I don’t want you to leave, Leah. I want you to stay here as long as you’re willing. Forever, if you want to.”
Leah’s mouth fell open.
Forever? She had to have heard that wrong. Or Jeff had to be...mistaken, or something.
But Jeff had been looking straight at her and speaking clearly and forcefully. He knew what he was saying, and he meant it. She couldn’t believe anything else.
“Jeff...” She didn’t know what to say. “If it were just me...I’d say yes. I’ve come to really”—love—“care for you, since we met. I’m happy when I’m with you, and if I lived here, if it were just me, I would want to spend as much time with you as I could, for as long as possible.”
She took a deep breath. “But it’s not just me. It’s my daughter, too. You can’t want to become a father to someone else’s baby. I love Emily more than anything, but you don’t know how stressful it can be, how much work and time a baby takes...You lose sleep, you don’t get time to yourself. You can’t want to take that on for someone you just met.”
“You’re not ‘someone I just met,’ Leah,” Jeff started, but he was interrupted by a shrieking wail from the other room.
Leah smiled sadly at him. “See?” she said, and pulled away to go get her daughter.
***
At first, Jeff was frustrated that the conversation had been interrupted at exactly that moment. The moment when he’d been about to tell Leah that she was his mate.
That they were destined to be together—and so he was destined to be Emily’s dad.
The thought sent a rush of happiness through him. A dad. He was going to get to be a dad, all at once, right away, instead of having to wait through dating and engagement and marriage and trying to conceive. That baby there in the other room was going to be his baby.
Assuming Leah decided to stay with him.
That was the most important thing, and that was why, after a moment of thinking about it, Jeff wasn’t sorry that they’d been interrupted.
Because he could tell Leah that she was his mate until he was blue in the face, but he would bet all the money he had in the bank that it wouldn’t convince her to stay. She wasn’t a shifter, and therefore had no way of knowing what the mate-bond meant.
More importantly, she’d heard words of commitment before. She’d been engaged. Jeff had heard her story, and he knew that she’d gotten used to disappointment and heartbreak. The way she’d looked when she told him she was a screw-up...her mouth set, her eyes sheened with tears that she stubbornly kept back.
He wasn’t going to convince Leah with what he said. He was going to convince her with what he did.
So he turned the chili to a low simmer and followed Leah into the spare room. She was just picking a sobbing Emily up out of the Pack-n-Play.
“She threw up,” Leah reported. “I’m so sorry, Jeff; she’s definitely sick. She feels warm, too.”
“Poor kid.” Emily’s face was flushed and her hair was damp with sweat. Her face was messy and she was sobbing miserably. “What does she need? I’ll run out to the store.”
“Pedialyte and infant Tylenol,” Leah said, sounding tired. “Where’s your washing machine? I need to get these sheets off...”