Chapter Nineteen

F or the next hour, Susan sat in the shower and sobbed. Then she dried off and silently cried into her pillow.

The day Reynolds confessed he never planned to have a biological baby relief flooded her veins. She’d never have to explain her infertility, but reality came calling like it always did.

Like when it took her father.

Like when she realized she had to cancel each of her engagements.

Like when she discovered she couldn’t get pregnant.

Her wounded heart beat hard against her ribs. Deep-seated sorrow held her down, almost convincing her to confess nothing because it wouldn’t change anything.

She shook off her denial. You have to tell him, or this will never be resolved. He will never fully trust you. Why would he?

Lucy was right. If Susan didn’t want to tell any of them what happened, she needed to tell Reynolds.

Give him the option of asking her to stay or go.

She put it off long enough, and she berated herself for not coming clean sooner.

She waited until he returned to his room.

When the rhythmic creak of the rocker they put together last month slowed and then stopped, Susan dried her eyes and exhaled her worry.

Time to suck it up and deal.

Like I always do.

She washed her face and put on a dry shirt before standing in front of his closed door. With her heart in her throat, she softly knocked.

When he opened it, he wore only his sweatpants of truth. He stepped back, giving her plenty of room to enter. “Come in.”

Fear superglued her in place. The cruel truth sliced up her throat. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” Subtle annoyance underlined his words.

Staring at his feet, she let out a long exhale, building up to her confession. “I can’t… have a baby.”

He shifted his weight as she waited for anger.

Annoyance.

Disappointment.

Rejection.

It wouldn’t be anything new. Her former lovers found fault with her. Wanted her to be a pretty package but molded to their liking inside.

Someone who put them before her family.

Someone who’d move away and leave her younger siblings to deal with a chronically depressed and disabled mother.

Someone who could have a baby.

As much as it hurt to expose her soul, if she wanted him to stop picking that thread, to explain why she wanted to be an adoptive mother so damned much, she had to trust he wouldn’t crush her like the men before. “I’ve disappointed you—”

“Stop talking, Susan.”

“Okay.” When he embraced her, she crumbled in his arms. His deliciously smelling body wash offered comfort and unmercifully stroked across her nose.

He scooped her up and she clung to him as if a strong wind would carry her away.

When the coolness of his sheets touched her skin, it registered he carried her to his bed. Gently, he laid her down and crawled in behind her, pulling the covers over them both.

“Talk to me.”

With her bottom lip quivering, she focused on the stack of comics and books about superhero movie art on one of his shelves. “I should have told you before it got this far.”

“Who said you can’t have a baby?” With a tender touch, he ran his fingers lightly over her hair. The caring gesture momentarily calmed her fears, but it didn’t neutralize the pain.

“About a year ago, I had an ectopic pregnancy.”

“Holy shit, Susan. That’s serious. Lucy didn’t tell us…”

Her hand squeezed his arm. “Please let me finish or I’ll lose my nerve.”

He wrapped his ripped arms around her, and she held his hand to her belly. “I didn’t tell my siblings anything about it at first because my fiancé was there with me and there wasn’t time. When they went in to remove it, they found that I… um…”

“Breathe, Susan. Take your time.”

“You need to understand why I’m not giving up anything about a bio baby. You told me to trust you, so here it is.” She exhaled hard. “They discovered that my insides were a mess.”

“What do you mean, a mess?”

If I don’t stop crying, his pillow will be soaked by the time I’m done. “First, the ectopic ruptured my fallopian tube.”

“Holy shit!”

She shushed him as Audrey stirred in her bed before settling back down.

He lowered his voice and kissed her shoulder. “You could have died.”

Everything about Reynolds had been different. Why she expected his reaction to be anything but concern, she didn’t know. She hated that her first instinct was to expect disappointment, but so many had let her down. “Second, my surgeon told me there was a lot of soft tissue damage that didn’t repair in the best ways. Lots of scar tissue. Adhesions. One of my tubes was completely gone. Probably ripped up and dissolved long ago so it was incredible I got pregnant at all.”

He propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at her. “How did all that happen?”

The words stuck to her tongue like peanut butter. She forced them out. “The car accident.”

“From twenty years ago? I don’t understand.”

She rolled to her back, but stared at the ceiling, still fearful of looking him in the eyes. “I sat in the middle back seat. It was only a lap belt. They were standard at the time. The head-on impact threw us all over the place. Amazing only my father died, really.”

“It’s amazing anyone in the front seat survived.” When her forehead furrowed, he followed it with, “A few months ago, it was a slow shift in the ER. Edmund started talking about the accident and pulled up some articles.”

Her hand rested on her belly and his followed. “I remember being beat up, being incredibly sore.”

“You had to be. They clocked the guy going a good ten to twenty over the speed limit when he hit your family.”

The day was always a series of details, moments she pieced together. “I remember the weather. Fighting with Edmund about having to sit between him and Peter. Again. The restaurant Mom picked out. Song on the radio. The breaking of glass and…”

When her voice hitched, he pulled her closer. With him flush to her, the weight of the memories didn’t seem quite so smothering. “Nothing, until I’m staring at an overhead light in a trauma room. A nurse asked me if I could feel my feet as she ran a pen across my sole. No idea where my family was. If anyone else was alive. Or even if I was. What happened? How I got there. How long it had been.”

“What else do you remember?”

“Hurting. So much. Bruised. They cleared me of any internal bleeding, but I hurt for weeks. Nothing that would have been picked up with an X-ray. CT scan cleared me of any acute belly bleeding.”

His embrace encouraged her to continue. “Things didn’t heal in a way that would help me conceive later in life. Adhesions formed. Caused problems that couldn’t be typically picked up by any sort of pelvic exam or an ultrasound. They only found it because of the ectopic.”

“That’s intense. Are you okay?”

She turned to face him and tucked her hair behind her shoulders. “That’s the first thing you think of? If I’m okay?”

His forehead creased in confusion. “What else would I ask?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Tell me.”

“Why? It’s just—”

“Sad backstory.” He ran his finger along her jaw. “You can’t use that excuse anymore. If we’re going to co-parent, going to be… married, you’ve got to be honest with me. Tell me all of it. Even if it’s awful. Even if it changes nothing.’

Taking him in, she didn’t see everything she feared.

No judgment or disappointment.

All that swam in those hazel eyes of his was understanding.

And love. Oh, don’t get ahead of yourself. “My sad backstory is this. I’ve had three fiancés. I’ve called off three engagements. The first because he always wanted to be first, above anyone else in my life.”

“First? What was he, four?” He caught her tear with his thumb before it hit the pillow.

She admired the lines of muscle in his arm. The perfect triangle of his deltoid where that cute purple dinosaur lived. “Something like that, but I wouldn’t rank him above my family. Not then. I broke that off.”

“The second?”

Audrey fussed a bit, then settled back down.

“He wanted me to leave Florida. Go with him to his new practice on the West Coast. Demanded that Edmund and Lucy take care of my mother.”

“How old were they?”

“She was entering her junior year of high school. Edmund was in his first year of college. I couldn’t do it. They’d come to rely on me, and I was the only one who could get our mother out of bed. They had no idea how to juggle her care, her paperwork. Her depression. I worked to pay the bills. I wouldn’t simply walk away from them. All that and he cheated on me.”

“Two jerks down. And the third?”

She closed her eyes, refusing to witness Reynolds’s reaction of pity. “He also wanted me to leave Florida. Mom passed before we started dating and everyone was on their own. Seemed like my time had come, but the emergency surgery happened. When we discovered that I couldn’t get pregnant, he changed.”

“Changed how?” Reynolds growled a noise she found simultaneously endearing and sexy.

“He told me to do whatever was necessary to fix my issues because I was broken. He wanted a baby because if I couldn’t, then why were we together?”

“Fucking asshole. Who says that? Who says that bullshit after the person you love has a life-threatening—”

She kissed him without restraint. Hot tears ran down her face as the weight of sadness lifted off her tired soul. “Thank you for hearing me.”

“You didn’t get the surgery, did you?”

“I strongly considered it.” She cupped his face. “The day before I met you, I talked to a specialist friend of mine. She does GYN reconstruction. She said with my tubes gone and my uterus not sitting well, I would never get pregnant much less carry a baby to term.”

“The day before?”

“That’s why I was there at 0-dark thirty, driving in the pitch black, in the snow, like a moron because I couldn’t sleep. Too upset about everything.”

“I was there because I couldn’t sleep either. Drove in to meet a birth mother who never showed. Angry at the system. Started driving and stopped because the roads were so treacherous.”

“And then we met and birthed a baby.”

He cupped her chin. “Guess that was a pretty good meet-cute.”

“It was.” Her heart thudded in her ears as she anticipated his touch. Maybe rom-coms are more realistic than I thought.

Tentatively, he brushed his lips to hers before running his tongue along the seam of her mouth. “Susan.”

“Touch me.” Her heart beat in quick time as she soaked in every ounce of him.

“Yes.” He pulled her flush.

The fragrance of oranges and spices filled the air around them. She ran her fingers through his thick hair, relishing the softness of it against her skin. The way she dreamed about and only gotten a nibble of before.

Her body short-circuited as his tongue danced along the opening of her mouth before sliding partway in.

The length of him pressed against her and she was done waiting. She sat up and held her arms over her head. “Reynolds.”

He began to remove her shirt when Audrey wailed, and her stomach sang.

They both froze for a moment before they each laughed.

Hope and lust swam in his eyes, despite the impending disaster that would certainly take place across the room sooner than any of them wanted it to.

With another soft kiss, he chuckled. “We need some alone time.”

“We really do.”

When he got out of bed to grab a T-shirt, she almost pouted at him covering up. So close to getting my hands on that chiseled body.

For the first time, Susan didn’t overthink what this moment meant.

For the first time, she opened her heart and allowed someone in. Someone who’d earned her trust.

Now, all they had to do was make it to the finish line for Audrey and they’d get their—

“How much shit can come out of a baby?” Reynolds cringed. “How did she make all this happen so fast?”

Susan popped out of bed. “I’ll start the shower.”

“And I’ll get the hazmat suits.”