How could he miss her so much when he’d hardly known her? He’d spent his days at work, a lot of time traveling, and he’d had an hour or two with her on weekdays, slightly more on weekends. Yet her death created a hole in both his and Andrea’s hearts, a hole that widened until it became so big they fell into it and were lost. As individuals and as a couple.
“Hey, sorry. I didn’t hear him.”
Keeping his hand on Ty so he remained on the table, Jaeger looked around. Piper’s hair was a mess of curls, her mascara was smudged and she had a pillow crease on her cheek. She looked tired but, hell, still hot. She walked into the room and saw the dirty diaper, the pile of baby wipes on the counter.
“You changed him? Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, picking Ty up and dropping a kiss on his head.
Jaeger shrugged. “I thought you needed to sleep,” Jaeger replied, his voice rough. Oh, God, he prayed she hadn’t heard him talking about Jess. It was one thing facing your past; it was another confessing it.
Ty leaned away from Piper as if silently asking Jaeger to hold him. Jaeger stepped back and lifted up his hands. “Sorry, I don’t do babies.”
Piper looked at the dirty diaper, the open jar of cream and the powder and lifted her eyebrows. “You changed his diaper but you don’t do babies? Do you know how nuts that sounds?”
Of course he did. But it wasn’t like he could tell her the truth. Jaeger shrugged and made a production of looking at his watch. “I have to go. I’m late for dinner.”
Piper nodded and cocked her head. “Nobody is keeping you here, Jaeger,” she murmured, her voice soft and nonaccusatory.
Yeah, fair point. Yet it still took everything Jaeger had to get his feet to move.
Six
On the following Thursday, the flight from Washington was delayed and Piper, in a taxi heading into the city from JFK, looked at her watch and sighed. Ceri would’ve bathed and put Ty to bed by now, and he’d be asleep. She hated the days when she didn’t see Ty. She’d left before he woke this morning, and her appraisal of a private collection of Cuban art had taken longer than she’d anticipated, which necessitated her taking a later flight back to New York.
She wanted to go home, have a glass of wine and chill out. Actually, what she really wanted was to go home, kiss her baby and climb into bed with a ripped man with amazing blue eyes and a quirky smile. She hadn’t seen or heard from Jaeger since Sunday—how could four days feel like a decade?—and the time apart only seemed to heat her fantasies from hot to scorching.
She had so much to lose. This was the worst time ever to fall back in lust with her one time ex-lover—the provider of all her son’s boy genes! Despite this, she desperately wanted a repeat of eighteen months ago. She wanted Jaeger’s clever mouth trailing kisses over her body, his hands exploring every inch of her, his voice rumbling across her skin, whispering hot, naughty, sexy words in her ear.
“You’re so hot.”
“God, you turn me on”
“You feel so damn good.”
Piper wanted those words; she needed those words. For just one evening she wanted to forget she was a single mother, that she was in danger of losing her house, that she was the daughter Michael Shuttle had never acknowledged. That her life was insanely complicated. She wanted to be anyone other than a frazzled, stressed, almost thirty-year-old who hadn’t had sex for eighteen months. She wanted wine. She wanted heat. She wanted...
Jaeger.
Again. Would a time ever come when she didn’t want him? Probably not. Her pheromones liked his... It was that simple.
And that problematic.
Piper’s heavy sigh filled the back of the cab. Was it even ethical to be thinking of diving back into bed with Jaeger when she was keeping such a huge secret from him? And she had to consider how her actions would affect Ty.
Ty came first. He always had and he always would. If she slept with Jaeger and if they reignited, she would still have to protect Ty.
To do that, she had to continue keeping his parentage a secret.
To do that, she had to withhold information from Jaeger, and that felt like she was lying. Aaargh!
And while she was torturing herself with difficult scenarios, what exactly did she want from Ballantyne? Just sex? Sex with friendship? Sex and a relationship? Exactly what type of explosion did she want to detonate?