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“Hey, in case you’ve forgotten, scientists are not known for their six-packs,” he murmured and leaned in, eliminating the space between them. “I worked hard to put on muscle after spending so many years hunched over pages of equations. If someone wants to pay me to take my shirt off, I’m not going to say no.”
All this talk of shedding clothes had set off serious sparks. Did she feel them, too?
She blinked as she looked up at him, her smile slipping a touch. Her tongue darted out to drag across her lips and he followed it pointedly with his gaze, then shifted back to her eyes. The heat in her cheeks mirrored the flare in his gut as he let the moment drag out.
Would wonders never cease? She was feeling it.
Maybe she’d clued in that he was a hot property. Not that he’d let any of his press go to his head. But come on. Women flocked to him. Empirical evidence suggested there was something about his spiky brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses and fit body that they liked.
It was way past time to get his inconvenient attraction to Harper worked out. If he’d read her wrong, they’d laugh about it and go on. He’d prove there was nothing here other than a healthy appreciation for a great woman. The electricity in the atmosphere and the heightened sense of anticipation was nothing more than the product of his imagination.
Without taking his gaze from hers, he reached out and traced the line of her jaw. Not as a friend. Not companionably. But with intent.
“What are you doing?” she asked as a line appeared between her brows. “This isn’t... I mean—we’re not...”
“Haven’t you ever been curious?” he interjected smoothly. “About what it would be like between us?”
“Be like? What what would be like?” Her eyes widened as his meaning must have registered.
There was still time to backpedal if taking things up a notch ended up being the worst idea ever conceived, but that window of opportunity rapidly shrank the longer they stood here in this blanket of awareness.
“I’ve thought about it. A lot,” he continued, since she hadn’t pulled away and hadn’t fled in horror. “No time like the present to find out.”
Before logic could kick in and remind him of all the reasons this could go south, he sank his hands into Harper’s soft red curls, spread his fingers across the back of her head and tipped it up. Slowly—because he wanted to give his body plenty of time to soak in the lesson to be learned here—he lowered his lips to Harper’s and claimed them in a sweet kiss.
Which instantly caught fire. Heat erupted where they’d joined, sensitizing him, claiming him. Harper flowed through him, waking up his blood.
And that’s when he realized his mistake—one kiss and all he’d proven was that he was not done. Not even close.
* * *
Dante was kissing her.
Shock opened Harper’s mouth without her permission and he took it as an invitation, swirling his tongue forward to find hers and oh, my God.
The sensations overwhelmed her and all she could do was cling to his shoulders. She’d meant to push him away. She didn’t do this, not with Dante, not with any man. And then she wasn’t pushing him away because wow.
The chemical reactions firing off inside her body were fascinating, amazing. Unprecedented. She wanted more. That was the most shocking thing of all because normally she avoided this sort of contact.
Her lips tingled as he reshaped them. Little pulls in her abdomen increased the urgency and she leaned into him, her hands drifting from his shoulders to his back. Hard. Strong. He felt good under her palms and she dipped lower, eliciting a groan from deep in his chest. It vibrated her own, teasing her breasts, and that’s when she realized their torsos were touching.
That sculpted chest was pressed up against hers. Dante was kissing her and she was kissing him. In the airport. Oh, God. This was all wrong. What was she doing?
She sprang back, wrenching away, and he followed for a half second until he realized she’d stopped. Hugging the wall behind her and legs shaking, she stared at the man who had been her best friend for a decade. “I’m sorry.”
His big brown eyes watched her from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, which sat slightly askew. Her fingers flexed to fix them automatically, as she’d done a hundred times. But she didn’t.
“For what? I’m the one who kissed you.”
Yes, he had. For God’s sake, why?
Some better questions were why she’d kissed him back. Why it hadn’t felt weird. Why her body felt like it had been twisted in a knot and dipped in a volcano. Why of all men, Dante had jump-started her sex drive.
The problem was, Harper knew exactly why. How was she supposed to explain that she’d completely overreacted due to an influx of hormones that her body didn’t know what to do with? That she’d hopped on a plane to share the most exciting news of her life with her friend?
Somehow, she hadn’t envisioned blurting out I’m pregnant in response to being kissed by the man she’d come to for support.
“I’m the one who didn’t stop you,” she said instead.
“No. You didn’t.”
When he didn’t ask how come she hadn’t, the swirl of uncertainty under her skin pulled the response from her throat anyway. “I was...curious. But please, don’t take that the wrong way.”
He already had, she could tell. Dante wasn’t inexperienced, not like she was, and he’d noted how much she’d liked kissing him. It was a surprise to her, too—she hadn’t been kissed in years and even then, it had been a horrible experience, never to be repeated.
This kiss...it had been the stuff of teenage dreams and an R-rated movie all rolled up in one. Because Dr. Harper Livingston’s body reacted to conception by suddenly craving the touch of a man. Apparently. What was she supposed to do with that—ask him to kiss her again?
“How could I possibly take that the wrong way?” he asked.
She was botching this and if she didn’t fix it, she’d lose everything important to her. “It can’t happen again. Dante, I need you. As a friend. Please don’t change anything.”
God, this was all backward. The results of the four positive pregnancy tests she’d taken that morning weren’t the only reason she’d hopped on a plane to LA. Her career had imploded over Fyra’s decision to develop a product that required FDA approval, and she really wished she’d known that snafu was coming before she’d visited a fertility clinic.
On the brink of both professional and personal disaster, she’d run to the one person who had always been there for her, who was one-hundred percent on her side...only to smack headlong into something she had no context for.
A foreign expression popped onto his face. “Harper. I wanted to kiss you. Surely you realize there’s something new happening between us—”
“No!” Her lungs hitched and somehow, a lone tear squeezed out before she could catch it. “Nothing new. I need everything to be exactly the same as it’s been. You’re so important to me. As a friend.”
Friends had each other’s backs. Friends were there through thick and thin and she needed the promise of knowing she had that in him. That he’d be the way she’d thought of him every day for the last ten years. Until this one. She’d responded so readily to his experimental kiss that he’d gotten the wrong message.
His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. She knew that look. He was about to argue with her and she could not do this right now.
With a strained smile, she touched his arm, like she’d done for years and years, before thinking better of it. “Let’s just forget about it for now. Would you mind getting my bags?”
Ever the gentleman despite the tense circumstances, Dante firmed his mouth and did as she asked, then ushered her into a sleek, red Ferrari. The silence laced with weirdness settled heavily in the car, nearly choking her, as they hurtled down the freeway toward his home in the Hollywood Hills. She scarcely enjoyed the unfolding LA scenery, but what could she say to get everything back to where it was supposed to be?
Dante rolled the Ferrari to a stop at a gated drive, then pointed a clicker at the black wrought-iron gate. It opened, allowing him to drive onto his lush, expansive property, where he parked on the circular drive in front of the sprawling Spanish villa. All without uttering a word.
Which lasted only until they cleared the doorstep. He dropped her bags on the Mexican tile under their feet in the spacious foyer and faced her, brows lowered. “We’ve been friends a long time. Why would that change just because we’re exploring what else might work between us?”
“Because I don’t want to do anything more,” she burst out. “All of this scares me.”
How could she get through the problems at Fyra, pregnancy, birth—good grief, the next eighteen years with a kid—if she didn’t have the friendship that had carried her through the last ten years?
“Come here.”
Before she could blink, he whirled her into a deep hug, the kind she’d welcomed so many times in the past, but it was different now as his strong body aligned with hers.
So different. The tease of his torso against hers set off tingles in places that shouldn’t be tingling over Dante. She tore away, devastated that she couldn’t stay in the circle of his embrace, devastated that things had already changed without her consent.
Hurt sprang into his big brown eyes but he banked it and crossed his arms. “So now I can’t hug you?”
“Sure you can, if you drop twenty pounds of muscle,” she shot back before realizing how that sounded. Quickly, she amended, “I want things like they were before you turned into Dr. Sexy.”
And that wasn’t much better as explanations went. He’d been Dr. Sexy for a long time—what she really meant was before she’d become aware of it. But he had her all flustered.
A brief smile lifted his lips. “I thought you liked that side of me.”
She did. That was the problem.
Dante was one of the few friends she had left who was still the same as he’d always been—she’d thought. She didn’t make friends easily. Cass and Alex, two of the three women she’d built Fyra Cosmetics with, had moved on to new phases in their lives, marrying great men and starting families. Which was amazing, and she didn’t begrudge them their happiness. But Harper felt...left behind.
Which was why she’d decided to have a baby of her own. But minus the husband, who would expect things of Harper she couldn’t fathom giving. Intimacy. Control. A promise of everlasting romantic love that no one could guarantee because it was nothing more than a series of confusing chemical signals in the brain.
Men complicated everything.
“How many friends do I have, Dante? Should be easy for you to count them. No advanced degree required to get to four.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Cass. Alex. Trinity. You. Now imagine that two of those friends have recently gotten married and started families. Everything’s changing around me and I can’t stop it. I need you to stay the same.”
Because she was the one who had already changed things, the one who had gone off and gotten pregnant, and by default, Dante had to be the constant in this equation.
Understanding dawned in his eyes. “You’re scared of things changing.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what I just said.”
Instead of backing off, he leaned in and captured her arms, holding her in place. “You did. I’m just catching up. So it’s not that you mind the idea of me kissing you. You’re just scared of losing our relationship. But I don’t want to lose it, either.”
Those melty chocolate eyes speared hers, and all at once, she didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as if she held the secrets to his universe. Except he’d always looked at her like that and she’d explained it away as affection between friends. But now that he’d veered completely off the friendship track, it made her uncomfortably aware that he’d just had his mouth on her in a very non-friendly way.
“You’re practicing selective hearing.” She shook her head and tried to back up a step so she could breathe. And pick up her luggage, so she could...do something with it. “I do mind the idea of kissing. And everything that goes along with it. Or comes after it.”
“Everything?” he murmured and somehow she was still in his arms. “You mean sex?”
Heat leaped into his expression and that was so much worse than the melty eyes because her body flared to life at the promise of feeling the way it had when he’d kissed her. More. Now.
“Yes.” She squeezed her eyes shut, groaning. “I mean, no. No sex. Geez, what is this conversation we’re having? I came here to visit my friend. How did we start talking about sex?”
“You brought it up,” he reminded her needlessly. “I was just trying to clarify.”
“Sex is not a part of this conversation.”
“What if I want it to be?” he countered softly and his fingers slid up her arms to grasp her shoulders. “Your hearing is bordering on selective too if you can so easily ignore what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Caught, she stared at him, taking in his familiar horn-rimmed glasses and spiky hair, desperate to get back to a place where she could be secure in her relationship with him. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Our friendship is the most important thing in my life. That’s why I’m trying to save it. I can’t unkiss you. There’s something here that isn’t going away until we explore it. Harper...” He drew out her name reverently and the sound sang through her suddenly taut body. “Kiss me again. Think of it as an experiment. Let’s see how far this thing goes, so we can deal with it, once and for all.”
Her eyelids slammed shut because holy mother of God. “That’s a hell of gauntlet to throw down.”
“Tell me no and I’ll step away.”
“No.” Instantly, his hands moved from her arms and his heat vanished. She opened her eyes to see him standing a few feet away, his expression hooded and implacable.
“Can I at least know what your major objections are? In case there’s something—”
“I’m pregnant, Dante.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “And that’s only the first in a long line of objections.”
Two (#u224fe564-9045-593a-9ba4-cb7709d68960)
All of the blood in Dante’s brain drained out. “You’re...what?” he whispered.
“Pregnant,” she repeated and the word still sounded like pregnant.
“With a baby?”
“Science has not yet successfully crossed human DNA with any other species, so yeah,” she confirmed darkly. “I didn’t want to tell you this way but you gave me no choice.”
Blindly, he stuck out a hand and sought the nearest hard surface to sink onto. Happened to be an end table in the adjacent living area but so what? His knees wouldn’t have held up much longer.
“I don’t understand how this happened. Are you seeing someone?”
There was no way. Not as eagerly as she’d responded to his touch. Not as close as he’d have sworn they were. She’d have said something about a man in her life. Wouldn’t she? He thought back to the last time she’d mentioned a guy—all the way back in college.
She shook her head. “No. Artificial insemination.”
“Why in the world would you do something like that?” He bit off the syllables, not bothering to temper the harshness.
Babies needed a family. A father. She’d deliberately set herself up to be a single parent. It was inexcusable.
Her face froze as she took in his expression. “I wasn’t interested in sharing parenting duties with anyone long-term. So a donor who was willing to sign away his rights seemed ideal.”
This got better and better. Or worse and worse, more likely. He laughed without humor. “Most people have a life partner they decide to have kids with. Because they’re in love and want to raise a family together. Did that ever enter your thought process?”
“Not once.” She tossed her red hair. “A romantic relationship would only complicate everything.”
“A baby needs a male influence,” he insisted. “That’s not an opinion. Study after study shows—”
“I know that, Dante!” Hands on her hips, she towered over him as he perched on the end table. “Why do you think I said I needed you, you big moron? That’s why I’m here. I want you to be the male influence. Dummy me, I thought our friendship was strong enough to add a baby and then you had to go and kiss me.”
Dumbfounded, he blinked. “Did you think to ask me about this before you got pregnant?”
Because he would have talked her out of it if she had. This was the most ridiculous idea she’d ever heard.
“It’s my life and my body,” she announced as guilt flashed through her expression.
She must have guessed he might react like this, because she knew his history, knew how he felt about kids. And had done it anyway. “You know anonymous donors don’t always tell the truth about their medical history on those questionnaires. There’s no telling what kind of genetic mess you’ve created in there.”
He jerked his head toward her abdomen. She had a baby in her womb and it was suddenly a sacred place, not available for desecrating with the kind of activities he’d had in mind mere minutes ago.
