“Okay, what’s first on your list?” I ask Aerie.

She pulls out an organized stack of folders and I know we’ll be here for a while. Around four in the afternoon she pulls out the March layout. As I stand up and walk around the room to stretch, my phone buzzes. It’s another text from S’belle.

Can you meet me at Pebbles for dinner?

I look up at Aerie. “Can we finish this tomorrow?”

“Sure, I have a ton of other things to do anyway.”

“Thanks.” I quickly look back down to respond.

You have to be joking!

Please.

Not if you’re going to break up with me!

No! I’m not. Why would you think that?

Never mind. You’re not going to tell me the world will end tomorrow, are you?

No! And I think I get what Misty was talking about.

You’re crazy. You know that. Right? See you soon.

If I said my nerves weren’t back in full force, I’d be lying. By now I’ve really begun to hate S’belle’s favorite restaurant. But I make it there by six. She’s already seated at a table by the window with her back to me, and her red hair hangs in curls. The restaurant is by no means busy, so the atmosphere is tranquil and the room is somewhat quiet. Bending down, I swipe her hair to the side and kiss her neck. “Hi, sexy.”

She twists and her lips meet mine. “Hi.”

I take a seat and pull my chair right up to hers. When I glance at the tabletop I see two glasses of sparkling water and a dish of lemons as well as a wrapped package that looks a lot like the one I brought her from Fiction Vixen the last time we were here.

I grab her hands. “Let’s cut to the chase. Please don’t torture me by making me wait until after dinner to tell me why I’m meeting you here.”

Her innocent green eyes shine, although she looks a little peaked and a little scared.

“Are you still sick?” I ask, concerned.

She shakes her head. “I have something to tell you and I’m really nervous.”

“Why, have you been bad?”

“No,” she says quickly, and looks more sickly with each passing second.

“Shit, I thought I was going to have to spank you,” I say, trying to ease her nervousness, but honestly my stomach feels as if it might fall at any second, so I’m not sure I’m doing a great job.

But when a slight smile crosses her lips, I think I’ve succeeded. She twists and pulls a brown paper bag out from her purse and hands it to me with trembling fingers.

“What’s this? Nothing that’s going to jump out at me, I hope.”

She stares at me, looking scared shitless.

My own hands are shaking as I unfold the bag. What the hell could it contain that makes her look like that? I pull out a purple box that reads EPT, with the words early pregnancy test written out below it. My eyes widen, my heart pounds, and my pulse races as my head snaps to her.

“Are you pregnant?” I ask in shock.

“I don’t know but I think I might be,” she answers. All the color has left her face now.

A million different emotions pass through me, but I settle on one—pure elation. I jump from my chair and take the box and her hand. “Well, let’s find out.”

“Now?” she asks, completely taken aback.

“Right now.” I grin at her.

“You’re not upset?” She sounds surprised.

I pull her flush to my body, not caring that we’re in a restaurant. “Upset? Are you out of your mind? Now come on, you have a stick to pee on.”

She tugs on my hand.

I turn around.

“What if I can’t go?”

I stride back to the table and pick up both glasses of water. When I return to her I tell her, “Drink these, baby.”

She smiles in a way that lights up her eyes and gulps both of them down.

“You can’t come in here,” she says when I push open the door to the restroom.

“Fuck I can’t.”

She shakes her head and enters under my arm.

I shakily open the box and hand her the stick.

She stares at me.

“You have to go in there,” I say, pointing to the stall door.

“I know.”

“Then go!”

“So bossy,” she says as she takes the stick.

When she comes out we both stare at it as she sets it on the counter.

“The instructions say to wait two minutes to read the result. Be sure to read the result before ten minutes have passed,” I tell her.

With my hands gripping the counter, my eyes are locked on the stick as the time slowly passes by. S’belle is pacing the room. My foot taps the floor at a hundred miles an hour. When a blue line appears in the square window, I twist toward her. “It’s turning.”

She looks at her watch, the one I finally had fixed for her. “It says wait two minutes. It hasn’t even been thirty seconds. You shouldn’t be looking yet.”

“I’m impatient and never follow instructions. You know that.”

She gives a little giggle. The one that makes my heart flip.

I decide I’ll pick up the instructions to see what the window means.

“I thought you didn’t follow the instructions.”

“Shhh . . . let me figure this out.”

She rushes over to me and pushes her way under my outstretched arms.

I read out loud with her cocooned inside my arms, “If a blue line appears in the square window within ten minutes, the test has worked.” I continue reading the instructions. “A plus sign in the round window indicates a pregnancy result—”

She pulls the folded paper from my hand.

“Hey, let me finish reading that.”

She holds the stick up. It has the biggest, bluest plus sign displayed in the first window.

Every part of my body hums with a kind of happiness I’ve never felt in my life. “A baby?” Shock takes over.

She nods.

“How?” I ask her.

She grins. “Well, the birds and the bees . . .”

I pull her to me and kiss her, soft and gentle. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I got a second chance at life.

After a few moments she leans back. “I think this explains my mood swings and my puking. My mother told me taking antibiotics makes the pill less effective. I had no idea—”

I shut her up by putting my finger over her lips. “Shhh . . . I don’t care how it happened.”

Her hands go to my cheeks and she holds them there. “Are you sure?”

I nod with emotion clogging my throat. Is she kidding me?

We stare into each other’s eyes for a long while and then I drop to my knees. She follows my movements as I lift her shirt and kiss the shamrock she wears to never forget our first baby. I look up at her and then glide my mouth to kiss above the gleaming green symbol of remembrance. And this time when I look up again I say, “S’belle Wilde, I love you and I promise you forever.”

CHAPTER 38

Happy

Bell

Seven and a half months later

You might be a little horny were the first words I read when I opened a pregnancy book to a random page many months ago. It made me laugh because the description fit. I had bought Ben two books from Fiction Vixen the day I thought I might be pregnant—the first one The Modern Kama Sutra: An Intimate Guide to the Secrets of Erotic Pleasure and the second Finding Out You’re Pregnant. It was the latter that shared that helpful tidbit with me. Once we both calmed our racing nerves in the bathroom, we went back to our table and decided food to go would be best. I was ready to leave my refuge and go home. I just wanted to be alone with Ben.

Sex with Ben has always been . . . well, amazing. And in the past several months my need for him has been off the charts. When we were first together I knew that what we had was different. I don’t know how I knew—I just did. And no one I was with after him had ever made me feel the way he does. Everything about him, every touch, caress, word, and whisper, makes my body come alive. It still does. And now even though my belly is swollen beyond belief as I enter my ninth month of pregnancy, I want him more than ever.

Ben doesn’t mind at all. He’s happy to indulge my every need—whether it’s a slice of triple-crusted pie from Four & Twenty Blackbirds at midnight, or my weird craving for vegetables, especially carrots with lemon juice drizzled over them, or of course my constant arousal. He likes that my br**sts are bigger—a fact that amazes him on a daily basis. The Kama Sutra book has come in handy because as my body has changed, our favorite sexual positions have grown uncomfortable and some aren’t even feasible.

We’ve had to get very creative and experiment with different ways to please ourselves. We take turns picking new positions to attempt. It’s been so much fun.

After showering, I tug the towel off my head and let my hair dangle in curls, patting the water from it.

He picks up the book as I walk into the bedroom and with complete focus looks through it.

I point to one of the drawings. “That one.”

He strokes his chin. “You think? I’m not sure about the leg placement.”

I giggle and toss the book aside, throwing myself back on the mattress and bringing him with me. “Let’s make something up.”

Both of our towels come undone. “Sounds like a plan,” he growls.

It’s not an exaggeration that we have sex at least twice a day. I made the mistake of telling my new girlfriend Summer from Lamaze and I don’t think she believed me. We took a spin class together and when we went to the juice bar afterward, I told her my vagina was really sore and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to have sex tonight.

Her head snapped to mine as she rubbed her own swollen belly. “You’re still h**ing s*x?” She went on to say, “God, that’s the last thing I feel like doing.” And then she laughed.

I didn’t answer but laughed along with her even though that couldn’t have been further from the truth for me. I love Ben and we do it a lot. Obviously I’m very attracted to him and with him I’ve discovered I love sex, I really love it—a lot. And I know he definitely feels the same.

When he rests his head on his elbow and moves one hand to caress my stomach, I’m pulled back to the here and now. His lips trail down my neck, over my br**sts, and stop to kiss the shamrock in my belly button, then just below it. He kisses the baby like this all the time. It gives me butterflies.

He looks up at me. “So we agree. We’ll name the baby Huck?”

We found out the sex of our baby at my four-month prenatal visit, and ever since then Ben has been relentless about naming him Huck. I peer down at him. “No, we did not agree. Remind me when we had the conversation where I said yes.”

His fingers drift down to circle me.

I let out a long heavy breath, knowing soon my body will be hovering on the edge waiting for the crashing pleasure to peak.

“This morning,” he murmurs as his tongue licks a path down the curve of my belly to join his fingers.

I raise myself up on my elbows. Still breathing heavy, I try to see over my stomach. “Do you mean when your mouth was”—I point to where his fingers are—“there and you were whispering things I couldn’t even try to understand in the frenzied state you had me in?”

His devilish grin widens. “Yes, when I had my tongue on your cl*t and you were screaming my name and calling out to heaven—yeah, that’s when. You said yes.”

“I love you, Ben Covington, but we are not naming our child Huck.”

He stares at me and pats my cheek. “Maybe once you see him you’ll change your mind.”

His eyes gleam whenever he talks about the baby. It’s so cute. His thumb strokes my face and he kisses me gently before he moves his mouth to that spot behind my ear that makes my body dance on its own. When I arch my back and moan, I feel the grin that forms on his lips. I knot my fingers in his hair, feeling more than a little ready to do this again. His hand moves back down to caress my belly as we lie in bed n*ked getting ready to make love for the second time since I got home. I can’t even wait until tonight.