Page 34 of Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake
Her body was stiff and tense, but all at once every muscle seemed to relax, and she went boneless against him. She continued to cry, her sobs slowly turning into soft whimpers until her breathing steadied. She let out the tiniest sigh, one Rake felt right in the hollow at the base of his throat. It made his chest tighten uncomfortably.
“I’m scared,” she whispered at last.
Although it seemed impossible, Rake hugged her even tighter. “Me too.”
“I don’t want to get married,” she said. “I don’t know you.”
Rake nodded, trying to swallow that down. It was true. They didn’t know each other. Not much, anyway. But that didn’t stop his intense impulse to take care of her. To take care of their child in the way his own parents had. Two parents, one house. As few confusing variables as possible. It was old and antiquated, but he felt so embarrassingly useless, it was the best solution he could come up with.
“I don’t want to be shut out,” he admitted softly. “I want to be part of my kid’s life.”
She pulled back, fixing him with an intense stare. “You say that now, but what if you change your mind? What if tomorrow you meet the love of your life and want to start a family with them? Or five years from now? What if you don’t like being a dad? What if you don’t like the baby?”
“None of those things will happen,” he said. He wouldn’t let them.
“How do you know?”
He stared into her red-rimmed eyes. “Because some things I just know,” he said with finality. Turning away from her gaze—her searching look that felt like she wanted to crack his head open and read all his thoughts, see all his secrets—he sipped his coffee.
“Tell me your plan,” she said after a minute. “With details.”
Rake took a deep breath. “I’m working on getting a transfer out here. My company is looking to branch into East Coast markets, and I was offered the position shortly before the trip over here, when we met, but I turned it down initially. Now it seems rather fortuitous.”
Lizzie chewed on her bottom lip while tapping a spoon on the table, lost in some train of thought.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. He wasn’t sure why, but something about her made him want to know every vibrant thought that swirled through her colorful mind. She fascinated him in a way no one else ever had before. He wanted to understand her.
She sighed then chugged down her iced tea. “I’m thinking it’s early in this whole… pregnancy thing, and I’m scared. I’m scared for you to uproot your whole life and move across the world for a job you don’t want, when I’m still in that period where so many things could go wrong. So many. Do you know how many women miscarry in their first trimester?”
Rake shook his head, holding her wide, panicked gaze.
“It’s like, ten percent, or something awful,” she said. “And what if that happens to me? To us.”
That little “us” bounced through his ears and traveled down his throat, locking itself there and making it hard to breathe.
“I feel like I can’t have you move here until we’re surer this is… happening.”
“This is happening,” he said gruffly, wanting to push away her words. The idea left him cold. Nauseous.
“But—”
Rake cupped his hand around her neck, his fingers curling around her soft skin and tangling in the wispy hairs at her nape. “We can’t think about everything that could go wrong. If it does, it does. But I’d rather be here to help you through that part of it too. I can’t do much here, Lizzie, and it’s kind of killing me. All I can do is physically be here. For whatever comes next.”
She fixed him with that look again, like she’d opened a trapdoor in his skull and was seeing his brain. Like she recognized the pain in there. He blinked away, dropping his hand.
He quickly lost Lizzie to her thoughts; he could almost hear her mind whirring like a car engine. Absentmindedly, she reached both hands around his wrist, making a circle with her thumbs and middle fingers, then moving it up his arm until the little cage of her fingers broke, repeating the movement over and over as she thought.
“Okay,” she said at last, dropping her hands.
“Okay?”
“Okay, let’s do this thing,” she said with a goofy grin, equal parts hope and panic. “Let’s coparent or whatever-the-fuck. Let’s do it. I can’t stop you from moving here, and God knows I’ll need help.”
“Yeah?” A small yellow balloon of optimism slowly inflated in his chest.
“Yeah.”
He couldn’t resist the need to hug her, and he pulled her close. Never in his life had he had such a strong impulse to touch someone so often. He quickly discarded the notion as some primal instinct for protecting one’s mate. Or, coparent, more accurately.