Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(104)

He’d never cheated on her.

He’d loved no other but her.

And, reading between the lines, from what he and Hillary had told her, despite everything, he still loved her.

Such bounty was foreign to Laire, but when she remembered the fire in his eyes last night, she knew it was true: he still belonged to her if she wanted to claim him.

And she did.

She’d never stopped loving her Erik either, turning down countless dates with fellow students, and even Patrick, the sweetest, kindest man in the world. She hadn’t been ready to give up the dream of Erik Rexford, even though he’d eviscerated her heart. Part of her must have still wondered, must have still hoped that one day, someday, he could be hers again.

She grinned, taking a sip of the coffee she’d made in her room and savoring the bitterness as it slipped down her throat. But as she turned her face toward the just-rising sun outside the windows, her buoyancy took a dip.

Heaven and hell.

The hell of it was that she had borne his child and kept her hidden from him for six years. Her beautiful, incomparable Ava Grace, who slept like an angel in the bed beside hers, was still a secret from Erik. A secret that never should have been kept from him.

She sighed, placing her mug on the bedside table and rolling onto her side. Outside, the colors of the sky lightened steadily from lavender to orange, but her mood remained heavy.

Would he be angry with her for not telling him about Ava Grace? But how could she have? When she’d gone to Utopia Manor to tell him, his mother had misled her and threatened to call the police if Laire didn’t leave. What if she told him what had happened with his mother? Would he believe her? Blame her?

Though he was very good with Ava Grace from what she’d seen so far, did he even want a child? What if he did? And what if he couldn’t forgive Laire for keeping Ava Grace from him? Would he try to take her away? To get custody of her? Laire’s circumstances had changed in six years but not enough to win a legal battle against the North Carolina Rexfords.

On the flip side, what if he felt burdened by the sudden responsibility of having a daughter? What if he rejected her claim that Ava Grace was his and washed his hands of both of them?

Obviously he knew that she was a single mother, and he’d still said, I want another chance to be with you, last night. Tears welled in her eyes as she remembered it because it was one of the best and sweetest moments of her entire life. It was exactly what she wanted too: another chance. A second chance to be together. A first chance to be a family.

Were he to withdraw those words, even now, when their reunion was so fresh and new, her heart would surely break all over again.

I have to tell him about Ava Grace.

Before things got much further, she owed him the truth about everything: about finding out she was pregnant and how her family would have disowned her were she to have a baby out of wedlock, about going to Utopia Manor that Thanksgiving to tell him, about his mother telling her that he and Van were engaged and threatening to have her arrested if she didn’t leave, about being completely out of options. She would tell him that she walked the long way from his house to the Pamlico House to find Judith that terrible, terrible night, and she would tell him that—by the grace of God—Judith had been her guardian angel and taken Laire under her wing. And that she’d turned out to be a surrogate mother to Laire and the very best nana Ava Grace could ever know.

And maybe—maybe, please maybe—he would see things through her eyes and understand why she’d kept Ava Grace a secret, and why she would have kept her a secret indefinitely if fate hadn’t thrust them back into each other’s arms.

Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she grabbed her cup of coffee as she walked to the window and pulled back the sheer curtains to watch the sunrise over the ocean, desperately hoping for the best.

Biting her lower lip in thought, she winced, reminded that it was bruised from two hours of kissing last night. He’d put a chair in front of the roof door to jam it closed, and when he returned to the couch, Laire straddled his lap, pulling the shearling blanket around them as they kissed. More times than she could count, his wandering hands had plumped her breasts over her shirt or slipped into the crevices of her thighs, touching her intimately over her jeans. Because she was a mother, no doubt he believed she was far more experienced than she was. She’d given birth, but all her sexual experience, without exception, had been with him. And it had been so many years ago that being with him again last night felt scary and new.

Except.

She twitched her nose and took a sip of coffee.

Except not all scary and not all new.

She wasn’t as inexperienced as she’d been the summer they first met. She’d loved Erik that summer—learned about his body, touched him, been touched by him, and lost her virginity to him, even if they’d stopped the act prematurely. In their time apart, she’d read books and met different men, and although she’d never been intimate with any of them, she had matured, and her desires were those of a grown woman, not a coltish teenager.

On one hand, she was scared to move too fast, but on the other, she couldn’t bear to keep herself from him physically after missing him so desperately. After years of such poignant and painful loneliness, she wanted the warmth, the heat, of his body on hers.

She reached up to touch her lips and sighed with longing, craving so much more than their deep, passionate kisses from last night. For years, her deepest and hottest dreams had been about Erik finishing what he’d started the night they conceived Ava Grace. And now? Now that her Erik was returned to her? She wanted to make those dreams a reality.