Page 104 of Beach Cottage Kisses

Loving her.

Oh God.

Oh God.

Her heart pounded, she started to shake and wrapped her arms around the miniature collie’s warmth. People couldn’t get through to her.

She’d closed her heart off tightly to that source.

But the dog…her precious little girl…

Was showing her the truth that Scott had just challenged her to see.

If you don’t believe in love, why are you so afraid of it?

Shewasafraid. So afraid that she couldn’t let herself…

A vision of Ivy’s knowing smile crossed her mind’s eye and in that instant,Iris recognized it for what it was. Not just a memory from the past.

But a living entity that surpassed understanding.

Ivy’s body was gone. Her love was not.

Nor was Iris’s capacity to feel her. Or Angel.

Or…

Out of bed in an instant, Iris slid into a pair of flip-flops, grabbed a long sweater from the hook on the back of her bathroom door, clicked her fingers for Angel and ran out the front door.

Scott had said he’d be waiting.

He wasn’t there.

But she knew where to find him.

Jogging as best she could with foam flapping at her feet, she was sweating by the time she got to his front door. Heard Morgan barking inside.

Followed by Angel’s bark beside her.

Leaving no doubt to the man inside about who was pounding on his door after midnight when he had to be up early for work in the morning.

When he opened the door, she met his gaze, and said, “I could have waited until tomorrow, but what if something happened to you on the way to work in the morning? Or before you made it home? What if something happened to me?”

His gaze soft, he stood there, bare except for the briefs, and said, “You trying to tell me something?”

“I do want to be a mother. But the thought of bringing a child into the world and then dying on it, hurting it like that when I have no control over such a thing, or having it die on me, scares me so much I can’t breathe.”

“It’s all part of being human,” he said. “You don’t get to control that, either. You’re human. Not something you can change.”

He’d changed. Was as calm as she was agitated.

“Anything else?” he asked, crossing his arms as he leaned against the doorjamb. Not shutting her out, at all. He seemed really interested in anything she might have to impart.

But he wasn’t inviting her in.

“You didn’t take pain pills. No matter how bad your pain got, you’d made a choice that you’d deemed vitally important, with implications beyond your ability to endure physical pain, and you stuck to it.”

“Okay.”