Adored (Masters and Mercenaries #8.5)(22)

She was almost distracted by that. Almost.

“Why did you tell him that?” She leaned over so she could maybe minimize the damage. The servers were looking her way and whispering behind their hands. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if it was Ally. She knew Ally, but there were two women she didn’t know talking about her “engagement” that wasn’t going to happen. “He didn’t need to know that.”

Mitch looked at her over his porterhouse with truffle mashed potatoes and shrugged. “Everyone’s going to find out anyway. And there’s no such thing as being barely pregnant. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.”

“Well maybe I would like more than three minutes to process it before we tell the world that we screwed up.”

“Did we?”

She sat back, regarding him. He looked tired. Like he wasn’t sleeping or he was staying at the office. He did that at times. She would walk in and find him asleep on the couch in his office and she would close the shades and put a blanket over him and try to let him get an hour or two. “What is that supposed to mean, Mitch?”

This was the type of conversation that would typically upset her stomach. Not so now. She couldn’t resist the siren call of that creamy sauce or the bacon and pancetta. Even the noodles were perfect.

“It means that I didn’t use a condom and you didn’t ask me to use one.”

She leaned over. “I didn’t think. I wasn’t thinking, Mitchell.”

He cut a piece of steak but didn’t eat it. “Do you usually not think?”

“Of course not.” How did she put this without sounding pathetic? “Not that there have been many times for me to not think.”

“I never have sex without a condom, Laurel. I’ll be honest, there hasn’t been a lot lately, but that’s simply not something I do. I’m always careful. The last thing I want is to get trapped again.”

“Well, I guess I should thank you for at least being honest.” Maybe she was going to lose her appetite.

He reached across the table and put a hand on hers. It was the first time he’d willingly touched her outside the kiss or that night they’d had sex or when he was trying to kidnap her. Tender. He was trying to be tender with her and it made Laurel stop.

“I wasn’t saying you trapped me, Laurel. I was wondering if maybe deep down I wanted to be trapped with you. I was wondering if subconsciously maybe we knew what we were doing and we took the risk anyway because deep down we wondered if it wouldn’t be so bad.”

She’d wondered the same thing herself. “Maybe we did.”

“How many boyfriends have you had?”

“How many girlfriends have you had?”

He shrugged. “Two. But if you’re asking about women I’ve slept with, it’s a lot more. I’d ballpark it at thirty.”

That was a big number. And only two girlfriends? “You married both of your girlfriends?”

“No. Margot was my college girlfriend. We went to law school together and when we got out, I built my firm from the ground up. My father threw me a bone and got me hooked up with a man named Garrison Cage.”

She knew his business story. She’d spent long nights looking him up on the Internet. “The tech guru. That’s why they called you the Silicon Counselor.”

He’d been a legal consultant to some of the biggest tech firms in the business. He’d made millions before it all fell apart.

“Yeah, I had a partner in the firm. Nolan Pence. We got close in law school. He was kind of my first friend, I guess. I moved around a lot as a kid. I never made close friends. Anyway, he decided he liked both the company and my wife. I’d been stupid because I’d made Margot a partner even though she wasn’t practicing at the time. She was mostly f*cking Nolan. They had the majority of the firm behind the two of them, so I was asked to leave.”

Yes, she knew that part, too. “So who was the other girlfriend if it wasn’t your second wife?”

She asked the question with a cautious tone because this was the first conversation they’d had about his personal life. They’d had long lunches talking about the law or sports or politics, but they’d never done this.

They’d had sex and made a baby and they’d never even gone on a date.

“I had a girlfriend when I was a teenager. My mom sent me to boarding school the last couple of years of high school. Best thing that ever happened to me. Her name was Natalie. She went to the girls’ school. I guess I was wrong. I guess she was really my first friend. We were together for three years.”

“Did you break up when you went to college?”

He shook his head. “She died. Car accident. She was coming home with some friends and a drunk driver killed them all. I found out from the news the next day because all the people who would have told me were dead.” He took a quick drink of the Coke he’d ordered. “Those were my two girlfriends. I wouldn’t call Joy so much a girlfriend as a hookup gone wrong. I left San Francisco and moved to LA, where I started a new firm, and I met Joy at a Hollywood party. I was drinking a lot back then. I woke up in Vegas married about two weeks later. The marriage lasted three years and then she divorced me and now she’s living in our old Hollywood Hills house that I still pay the upkeep for. So that’s how I have two girlfriends and two wives but not the same. Now, I’ve politely answered your question. Could you please answer mine?”