An Act of Persuasion(26)

“I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

“Or I can take the bus. I’m not an invalid, you know. It’s just morning sickness. All day morning sickness.”

“I want to be helpful. Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

She tilted her head in his direction. “You’re still not working.”

“In spurts. But certainly not full time. The replacement you found—well done, by the way—has kept everything moving. Everyone is booked with a consulting assignment of some sort. It seems the business can run without me.”

Ben had struggled to digest that fact once he’d started to feel better again. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to the office because of his concerns about being around people. The truth was he was afraid that once he got to the office there wouldn’t be much for him to do.

To her he could admit that. Only to her. “It’s a hard lesson to learn that you’re completely and totally dispensable.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They’ll need you. When something goes wrong, they always need you.”

He found a parking spot on the street in front of her building then got out of the car to walk with her to her apartment. He had this absurd urge to lift her off her feet and carry her, but considering his strength was only nicely returning he could see himself dropping her halfway up the stairs.

That wouldn’t be very Rhett Butler of him.

Once inside her apartment, she immediately went into her bedroom—no doubt to change out of the sundress, which had suffered from her time spent kneeling on the bathroom floor. He could hear the water running and imagined she was standing under the shower, cleaning herself off.

He imagined her naked.

Her breasts covered with hot running water that would trickle over her skin and down her belly to...

Ben groaned and cut off that line of thinking. Not twenty minutes earlier she’d been head down in a toilet bowl. It wasn’t fair to be thinking of her and sex when she obviously felt so poorly.

But when she came out of the bedroom, dressed in a pair of yoga pants and a tank top—an outfit he remembered fondly—with her hair pulled back and her face washed clean she looked better.

She looked beautiful. The freckles that dotted her face and arms and body stood out against her white creamy skin and he found himself wanting to connect the dots. With his tongue.

“I am flipping hungry.”

“Seriously?” He recalled never being hungry after vomiting. In fact, the sensation of hunger altogether had been stripped away by the drugs until very recently. Now he was hungry for food and...other things.

“I know. But it’s not like chemo. It hits me like a truck but then it’s gone and I want a gallon of ice cream.”

Ben wandered into the kitchen, which was merely an extension of the living room but with ceramic tiles on the floor instead of carpet. In the freezer he found a pint of triple chocolate fudge. He held it out to her. “Will this do?”

With a spoon already in hand she practically bounced on her feet. “Gimme, gimme.”

Given her enthusiastic pouncing on the container he was surprised to see his hand still attached when he brought it back empty.

It was so quintessentially Anna. No half measures for her. Ever. She was the kind of woman who bounced up and down for ice cream and ate it directly out of the carton.

That lack of middle ground was why he knew when they were working together that, despite his attraction to her, she would always be wrong for him in any type of relationship outside of their professional one. Of all the women to choose from for marriage and parenting, he never would have considered Anna. Not that he had thought much about marriage or a long-term relationship, but when he had, he conceded he would need something distinctly different from Anna. Someone more sedate, more practical. Someone like him, who would understand him.

She understands you better than anyone.

The thought came and went. It didn’t matter what he thought he wanted in a relationship anymore. He and Anna were in one. They’d had sex. They’d made a baby. While he had to concede he didn’t see her letting him drag her to the altar any time soon, he did want to solidify and define them as...something. A couple. Expecting parents. Something.

In the living room Anna sat on the couch, her legs crossed Indian style, and her mouth puffy around an oversize spoon of ice cream.

“Are you feeling better?”

“Hmm... Good.”