She hummed so quietly in her throat, I barely heard it. There was no doubt she felt my cock between her legs now. But this was where I needed to be careful. Maggie didn’t realize it now, but in a few hours, when we were both silently sitting in thetruck, this would be on her mind, replaying like a record, making her overthink everything that just happened. A lump formed in my throat, warning me that, if I crossed this line, there was no going back.
Realizing that I had stopped whatever I was doing to her, Maggie’s eyes met mine again. I dropped my head into the crook of her neck and breathed in deeply. It wasn’t meant to be sensual—I was honestly just trying to gain control of my actions. But something about this woman’s scent drove me crazy in a hundred different ways. She smelled like sleep. She smelled like warmth. She smelled likehome.
“Jack.” Maggie squeezed my shoulders.
“‘Wecan’tdo this, Jack.’” I turned to humor and imitated her words from last night in a high-pitched voice—anything to ease the urge to bury myself inside her for hours in this tiny cottage.
It earned me a belly laugh and a playful shove to the shoulders.
After she caught her breath, her eyes turned solemn. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“What?”
“This back and forth. Us almost doing things we shouldn’t be thinking about in the first place. It’s not good for us or the baby.” She reached down to caress her still-flat stomach.
“Maggie, I—”
“No, look,” she interrupted. “I know this is the weirdest possible situation for us to be in, and we seriously need to have a conversation aboutus, but I don’t want whateverthisis to get in the way of being there for the baby.”
We both took a deep breath as the realization set in.
I knew she was right. We couldn’t risk our chances of becoming enemy co-parents.
Both of us were terrified of turning into our parents. If anything, that would be our downfall.
But the truth was…I could never hate this woman.
“Okay,” I breathed.
“Okay?”
“No more of this. I’m not going to kiss you again. We need to be the best parents for this little one, and as much as I’d love to have you,” her eyes flashed with need for the slightest moment. “We are co-parents first.”
“Thank you,” she replied as my throat dried up like I swallowed a handful of sand. It felt as if we both decided on something we were unsure about. But with my emotional baggage of abandonment issues, it was clear that I was in no place to be a true partner to her, and she had sworn off the idea of marriage entirely. The baby came first, no matter what.
Now all I had to do was prove I would be a worthy father.
Chapter ten
Maggie
Ideserved a fucking award for self-control. For keeping my sanity throughout all of this. For rejecting the advances of Jack Hennicke. This morning could have been a whirlwind of the passion and pleasure I was desperately craving, and he barely even touched me. I was beginning to feel safe with him, trustworthy,reliant. But I couldn’t accept any of those feelings. History taught me that they didn’t last. You could think everything is perfect with your husband for years, and one day find out he betrayed you. Ripped what you thought your family looked like into the disastrous mess it really was. Keeping my heart out of the picture was the easier option. The safest option.
Deciding to avoid my feelings altogether, I pretended that nothing Jack said or did affected me, my heart, or my body. We needed to have the dreadful conversation I had been playing over in my head for the last few minutes.
I shot straight for it. “We should talk about us.”
Jack sighed, his tense shoulders tightening further. “You’re right.”
“I don’t think we should be romantic.”
In an attempt at humor that was not appreciated, Jack held a hand over his heart as if he had been shot. “That hurts, Mags. Right here.”
The side-eye I meant to give him turned into a full-on glare.
“I’m kidding.”
My frown deepened. “Hilarious.”
