Find Me (The Found Duet #2)(87)
Author: Laurelin Paige

He leaned his forehead against mine and stroked the back of my hair.

“It’s only one week before we find out you’re the father. We could leave for our honeymoon and then not come back.”

I stared at his lips as they turned up into the slightest of smiles. “If it looks like we need to, we will,” he promised.

The next question I could only ask because he was holding me so intimately and because I couldn’t see his eyes. “And if you aren’t the father?”

He let a beat go by. Then two.

Finally, he said, “You already know I am.”

It wasn’t a real answer, but I didn’t press him. I was too afraid I wouldn’t like what he’d say if I did.

Chapter Nineteen

I spent the weekend in a daze. There was a lot to organize in terms of security. It was easy to hide a bodyguard at the club. The apartment, not so much. Neither JC nor I wanted someone inside the condo, invading our personal space, but I was willing to adjust in order to feel protected. JC, on the other hand, insisted on keeping the watch outside the doors.

“We have a high-tech security system set up already. No one’s getting in here,” he insisted. “A man outside is more than enough.”

I could agree to that, except I wanted the man just outside our door, and that wasn’t happening in our luxury apartment building. We settled for a man in the lobby. Dom made arrangements to have a team member pose as an additional doorman on each shift. It worked well enough, but I couldn’t believe it was something we could carry on for any length of time.

And the few times I tried to ask JC how long he thought we could pull this off, he dismissed the question. “I’ve got this,” he assured me.

Part of me believed him. Part of me believed he might even have something up his sleeve that he wasn’t ready to share. Another part of me believed he was in denial. That scared me too much to think about it for long, so I pushed that part of me aside and joined him in his delusion.

I worked both Saturday and Sunday night, which was a benefit. The familiar groove gave me something to focus on that wasn’t terrifying or out of the ordinary. At the club, my guard kept so well out of sight, it was easy to forget he was there. If Laynie had been working, I would have had to explain him, but she had weekends off. It bought me time to settle into the new routine.

Unfortunately, as grateful as I was to have the distraction, the hours at The Sky Launch were also a burden. There was much to do to get ready for my leave of absence, which started on Wednesday, and that made my shifts jam-packed. I was exhausted by the time I got home, with no mental bandwidth to deal with anything that wasn’t right in front of me. Luckily the majority of wedding plans had already been taken care of, so I could effectively ignore that for the time being. But there were other things I was avoiding. Two days passed before I let myself really think about the danger JC was in, that I was in.

On top of all of it, I had a baby growing inside me. I still hadn’t absorbed that. Monday morning, I got ready for bed, eyes already half-closed, when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror as I undressed. Wearing only my panties, I stopped to examine myself. My belly was taut, which explained why all of my waistbands had seemed snug recently. And my breasts looked full, and my nipples seemed darker. The changes were subtle but there. Yet I still felt exactly the same as I always had. If I hadn’t seen the screen fill up with a face and a spine and limbs that waved at the doctor’s office, I’d never have believed the test I’d taken was accurate.

In the mirror, I saw JC come up behind me before I felt his hands at my waist. “You glow,” he said softly, his voice filled with awe.

I squinted at my reflection. Yes, maybe my skin did seem to have a rosier complexion than usual.

He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his body tight against mine. Since the meeting at Pierce Industries two days before, there’d been a subtle tension between us. We hadn’t ignored it, exactly, but we’d maneuvered around it. We talked about being safe without again addressing our alternatives. We’d fucked, we’d made love, but we hadn’t simply held each other. Until now.

He pressed his cheek to my head and sighed, and I felt the weight of it in his hot breath on my temple. “I love you. You know that, right?”

I nodded and placed my arms over his, tightening his embrace. “Everything you do tells me how much.” If he didn’t love me like he did, he wouldn’t have come back for me. He wouldn’t insist on staying while Mennezzo was free on bail.

“Too much,” JC mumbled. “Or not enough. I’m not sure which sometimes.”