1. Nate

ONE

NATE

I hit send on an email with the real estate agent, directing her to make the offer, hopefully closing the deal on what would be the space for a bistro and wine bar, and leaned back, stretching my arms up.

“Hey.”

Startled, I nearly fell out of my chair in my effort not to be murdered, and I swung around, blood pulsing in my ears, only to find Tabitha. Slapping my palm to my chest, I folded over in relief. “Christ, Tabby cat. You scared the shit out of me.”

She stayed silent, as usual.

“I swear to god, I’m gonna put a bell around your neck.”

That earned me a stiff shake of her head. I’d never known anyone to make less noise than her. She mostly communicated with stern eyebrow arches and murderous glares.

“I hate when you call me that,” she said finally, and I grinned.

“That’s why I do it.”

Those impossibly high cheekbones of hers pinked, and she straightened, plucking at her T-shirt, an unusual nervous tic. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure.” I spun in my chair to fully face her. “What’s up?”

Her long fingers, tipped with black nail polish, dragged over the side of her neck as she breathed deeply.

“Are you sick?” I asked, reaching for the trash can. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well, even called out a few days ago, but I’d figured she’d gotten over it since she was back to her regular schedule and doing inventory today.

“No, I’m fine.”

I didn’t believe her and offered her my water bottle. She accepted it, took a sip, then played with the cap for a few seconds before twisting it back on. She cleared her throat and stood tall. “I wanted to let you know that I’m pregnant.”

I froze, blinked, and blinked again. A long time passed before I finally spoke. “You’re pregnant?”

She nodded. “That’s why I haven’t been feeling well lately.”

“How are you feeling now?” I asked, hopping up out of my chair to push her into it. I didn’t know much about pregnancy. In fact, I tried to actively avoid the topic as much as possible. But, fuck. Tabitha— my Tabby —was pregnant?

“I’m okay. I’m still a little nauseous now and then, but for the most part, it’s passed.”

“When did you find out?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“A few weeks ago?” I nearly shrieked, annoyed that she’d been walking around here, working as if everything was fine. Everything was not fine. She was pregnant, and I was positive pregnant ladies shouldn’t be serving beers to dumbass twentysomethings. I studied her, from the top of her head with dark, almost-black hair to the tips of her black boots. She appeared all right. But still. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was important for you to know yet.” She tipped her head back, lips pursed in a way I knew that was the best I’d get.

I took a breath, all kinds of questions forming in my mind, and picked the closest one. “How many months…?”

“I’m fourteen weeks, about three and a half months along,” she said, with so much calm it made me nuts.

And everything else in my brain came rushing out. “Who’s the dad? When are you due? I didn’t know you wanted a baby.”

Her right eyebrow arched so high, I bet she put a curse on me mentally. “Why would we have ever talked about children? All you say is you don’t want them, so…”

“Yeah, but…” I pulled off my knit beanie and dragged my hand through my hair a few times. “This is different.”

She laughed, low and reverberating, like a deck of cards being shuffled. An evil queen kind of laugh. “Why is it different?”

I tossed my arms out to my sides. “I don’t know. It just is. Who’s the dad? Don’t tell me it’s Henderson.”

“Harrison.” She folded her arms across her chest, briefly drawing my focus to her ample breasts. She was stacked. A true dime piece. And that simpering douchebag she was always on and off with wasn’t worthy of spit shining her Doc Martens.

“Whatever.” I waved away her correction, waiting for her answer. When she didn’t give me any more, I had all the information I needed. I leaned against the wall, unexpectedly overcome with ire. Fucking Henderson.

“When did you tell him?”

“I didn’t yet.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I—” She halted, gaze slanting to the corner. The office at the back of Walt’s was small, but it had never felt as small as when I noticed how her throat bobbed and her eyes blinked rapidly. Was she about to cry?

I sank to my haunches, curling my hands around the arms of the chair so I didn’t touch her. “What can I do?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“It’s a universally acknowledged rule that when women say they’re fine, they are, indeed, not fine.”

“Oh yeah?” She shot her gaze back to mine. “Where’s it written?”

“The Feminine Mystique accords.”

“Not a thing,” she said, standing and forcing me away.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

I jumped up, blocking the door. “I don’t think so.”

“ Excuse me ?”

“You can’t work. You’re pregnant.”

She scoffed, and chills rolled down my spine. “Do you think pregnant people don’t work?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but how can you? Isn’t it, like, against the law or something for you to work in a bar while you’re pregnant?”

“No.”

I looked down at her still-flat stomach. “What about your school? Didn’t your semester just start?”

She rolled her eyes, shoving me out of the way. “Be a good boy and get back to your work, so that I can get back to mine.”

Fat fucking chance of that happening. Now that Tabitha—my Tabby—was pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to work another minute.

Not until I knew she was taken care of.

I followed her through the small kitchen, where Sydney fiddled with the knobs on the stove, readying for the day. Out in the bar area, another one of our bartenders, Mickey, appeared to be finishing up their station.

Tabitha had come in early to do inventory. Sunday mornings were the time when both of us prepared for the upcoming week. I completed reports and paperwork, while Tabby made orders of anything we needed. She also handled all the training of staff, and I hired and fired based on her recommendations. Hell, I didn’t make any changes without running it by her first.

I trusted her implicitly with my bar—my baby.

And now, she was having a real-life human baby, and everything felt upside down.

I glared at her as she unlocked the front door, ignoring me. She didn’t need me breathing down her back, but what the hell else was I supposed to do? My most important employee was pregnant.

I knew I’d lose her eventually since she had been slowly working toward her degree for the past few years, but I didn’t think I’d lose her to someone else. A crying, wailing someone else.

A crying, wailing someone else spawned by a man who wore wrinkled khakis and had once brought a carnation into the bar for her. A goddamn carnation!

A fucking toolbag she’d once described to me as nice.

Nice .

Ha.

Tabitha didn’t need nice.

She needed extraordinary. Because she was extraordinary, and I hadn’t even been graced with the opportunity to see all of her puzzle pieces. I had the outline completed, most of the inside put together, but some of those unusual shapes hadn’t quite fit yet.

And it pissed me off that I’d lost the chance to find how the edges connected. With a growl, I marched back into the office for my coat, keys, and water bottle then tapped out a message to my friends to find out where they were. Once a month, they all got together at this terrifying jungle-gym-type place so their kids could play, and when they confirmed that they were indeed there, I told them I was on my way.

I stomped back out to the bar, where our Sunday regulars lounged. I barely acknowledged their greetings, too intent on the unsmiling woman behind the bar who’d turned me inside out with only a few words. I slapped my water bottle on the bar top in front of her. “Drink this, and you’re done at five.”

“What? I?—”

“I’m calling Juanita to cover for you. She needs the hours anyway.” We closed early, at ten, on Sunday nights, and Tabitha usually worked twelve hours. She wouldn’t be today.

Or any other day, in fact.

Winter was a slow time of year, especially January. Coming off the holidays, everyone tended to hunker down, and I wasn’t about to have my all-star on her feet when she didn’t need to be. She’d fight me tooth and nail.

Before she could bitch at me about it, I aimed my index finger at her. “If you’re still here when I come back, so help me God, I’ll hold your paycheck.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“I will if you make me.” Then I whirled around, Imagination Station and Play Center my destination.

I pulled into the lot about fifteen minutes later, parking haphazardly and tumbling out of my car like my legs didn’t work anymore. Flinging open the door, I spotted my friends immediately. The three of them huddled in their usual spot, on a bench along the wall, in front of what was supposed to be a fake doctor’s office. I charged at them. “Tabby’s pregnant.”

Jude, who I’d known since high school, squinted at me. “Are you drunk right now?”

“No, man. I’m completely sober, but I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Dylan, my future brother-in-law, eyed me from under his baseball cap. “Sit down. You’re freaking the kids out.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the dozen or so kids running around the place, playing dress-up and pretending to be cops or whatever. “Is that Finn?”

Liam nodded because, yes, it indeed was his four-year-old son blaring “Wee-oh! Wee-oh!” while waving his hand above his head as if riding on a bucking bronco.

“I can’t sit down,” I said, ripping off my coat and tossing it on the bench.

Jude held his hand up like I was a feral dog. “Slow down and explain.”

I took a deep breath and set my hands on my hips. “Tabby’s pregnant.”

“Tabby, as in your bartender?” Liam asked, and I nodded.

Dylan set his to-go coffee cup on the floor. “Tabby, as in the girl constantly frowning?”

I tossed my hand out toward him. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

Dylan grunted, his mouth in a straight line, save for a tic in the corner. Grumpy motherfucker only started smiling when he’d begun sniffing around my sister.

Liam scratched at his jaw. “So, Tabby’s pregnant? And not with your kid?”

“Not my kid,” I affirmed, hating that fact but not super clear on why. “It’s that real tall dickweed she’s on and off with.”

Jude grinned. “So that’s why you’re wild about this?”

“Of course I’m wild about this. She’s my—” I stopped my pacing, Jude’s words finally setting in. “What do you mean?”

“She’s your what?” he insisted, biting into a cookie from a Tupperware on his lap like all of this was no big deal.

“She’s my bartender, my manager,” I said, snatching up one of the cookies before resuming my pacing.

“That’s it? She’s nothing else?”

“I guess she’s my friend.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I wielded my cookie at him. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Dylan smirked, smug as shit. “You’re so fucking dumb, bro.”

“Why? And you know you’re in the middle of this kiddie freakin’ nightmare of a place, and you’re cursing. You probably shouldn’t be.”

“Oh?” He cocked his head to the side. “You care about that now?”

I shoveled the rest of the cookie into my mouth, chewing vigorously. As if it would make me feel better. Make any sense of the burning in my chest and the spinning in my brain. I finally stopped pacing and chewing to stare at each of my friends in turn. They all watched me warily, as if I might tear off my face and reveal another one. But they’d all lost their shit before. I’d witnessed it, each and every time.

With Dylan, who went from commitment-phobe to borderline obsessed with my sister. I had clocked him when he’d lost it and broken her heart. Merited that shiner.

And Liam, he was the smartest person I’d ever met yet lost all sense of self when he’d met his son’s nanny—and probably soon-to-be wife, with the way things were headed. But I recalled having to talk him off the ledge when things got a bit dicey.

Then there was Jude, the guy who deserved a good woman in his life, maybe more than any of us, and recently got together with his best friend after family drama with his kids. He’d spent weeks trying to balance everything and had the sleepless zombie eyes to prove it for a while.

So how they could sit there like a bunch of assholes, gaping at me as if I were a monkey banging cymbals together, I didn’t know.

“I think you need to take a walk or something and cool off,” Liam suggested. “Settle down.”

I waved him off, jutting my chin to Jude instead. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because you’re finally seeing it.”

I glanced behind me. “Seeing what?”

“What’s been right in front of you this whole time.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t talk in riddles, okay? Say whatever it is you want to say.”

He shrugged. “You love her.”

Again, I glanced over my shoulder. “Her who?”

“Tabby.”

I choked out a laugh. “I do not.”

Liam tipped his head side to side, that intelligent air about him baiting me. Like, I know something you don’t know.

“I don’t love her,” I said, pounding my fist in my hand because I was serious.

Dylan mumbled a sarcastic, “Okay.”

“I do not love her. I couldn’t love her.”

“Why not?” Jude asked, benignly curious.

“Because.”

Liam sipped on his coffee. “Because why?”

“Because…” I spun my hands in the air. “She works for me. She’s my best worker— manager . And she’s scary in a probably knows witchcraft sort of way. Plus, she’s…” I tunneled my hands through my hair. “She’s… She’s…”

“Special in a sort of indescribable way,” Jude offered, and I nodded then immediately shook my head because that didn’t help my cause at all.

“She’s pregnant with another man’s kid,” I said, folding my arms.

Dylan grimaced. “Yeah, that one’s a kick in the nuts, huh?”

“It doesn’t matter because I don’t care.”

“No, you don’t care at all,” Jude agreed, while Dylan and Liam nodded along like my behavior made absolute sense for someone who didn’t care.

I sighed. “I don’t want to lose her. Strictly in the work sense.”

Liam dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Right.”

“She’s gonna be done with her degree soon,” I explained. “So she’s going to be leaving anyway, and I already don’t want to think about replacing her. But now she’s baking a kid? What the hell am I gonna do about that?”

Dylan rubbed the backs of his fingers over his jaw. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much for you to do, is there?”

“Because you don’t care,” Jude added.

“Of course I care. I’m—” I didn’t appreciate being trapped, and I wagged my finger at them. “Listen. I came here for advice, but since you want to act like immature assholes about this, I’m leaving.”

Dylan flicked up the brim of his hat, his eyes practically glowing with amusement. “Say hi to Tabitha for us.”

“Fuck off.”

I grabbed my coat but only made it three steps before I swung back around with a warning. “This is cone of silence. Do not tell your girls about this.”

None of them agreed, and I barely restrained from flipping them the bird.

“Uncle Nate!”

I stopped and bent down, catching Amelia—Jude’s daughter, who’d recently turned six—when she jumped at me. “Hey, little Lu.”

She played with the beanie on my head. “Where are you going?”

“Running some errands,” I lied because she wouldn’t understand what it meant for me to have to pick pieces of my brain up off the floor.

“Wanna play with us?”

“No thanks. Maybe another time, okay?”

“’Kay!”

The girl couldn’t control the volume of her voice to save her life, but I loved her even more for it, and I hugged her to me, kissing the side of her head. That was when the rest of the rascals noticed me, the lot of them scurrying over. My grandfather, the one I named Walt’s after, always joked I was like Saint Francis. Kids and animals flocked to me.

I handed out hugs and high fives to Finn, Scarlett, Tucker, and even Sebastian, Jude’s eleven-year-old, who clearly did not want to be here anymore. Same, kid. Same.

“All right, you heathens. I need to get out of here.” I shook off Finn from climbing on my back and patted Amelia’s head before setting her down. When I looked back at their dads, they all waved cheerily at me like the bunch of assholes they were.

In my car, I slouched behind the wheel and pulled up the internet browser on my phone to search pregnancy then clicked on the first link. It was for an app that I immediately downloaded because of the fetus growth chart. Tabitha hadn’t told me anything about what she planned on doing with it, but…

Fuck.

I didn’t want kids.

Nothing about being a father interested me, when my own relationship with my father didn’t exactly set a great example.

And yet…

Fuck .

Why did the idea of Tabitha’s baby have me clicking on the picture for fourteen weeks to find out it’s the size of a lemon?

Why were they comparing fetuses to citrus fruit?

And did they all look like shrimp?

Did Tabitha know she was growing a shrimp in her belly?

Did she actually go home like I told her to? I’d sure as shit throw her over my shoulder and make her go home if I had to.

Because I loved her and wanted what was best for her…

I loved her.

I loved Tabitha Reynolds, my bartender.

Fuuuuuuck.