An Act of Persuasion(85)

“There are, like, a million left.”

Anna pushed her paper plate toward him and held up three fingers. She watched as Mark dished out the food and then decided two more weren’t going to kill her.

“You’re a bottomless pit, you know that?”

“I’m eating for two,” she mumbled around the bite of steamed dough and pork meat in her mouth. “Cut me some slack.”

“So I know why Sophie doesn’t want to live with me. She thinks I abandoned her and now I’m no better than a stranger to her. She’s mostly right. What’s your deal?”

Anna didn’t know what her deal was. At first she’d needed time to think. Her relationship with Ben was changing at a rapid pace and moving in together was a major decision. Now that he was practically already there it seemed a bit silly to tell him she didn’t think she was ready for him to move in.

There was the argument for letting him move in completely. Her number-one reason to support that idea? She liked having him there. She really, really liked having him there.

Still, she couldn’t get past the fact everything was moving too fast. Her body was growing in leaps and bounds. The baby was mounting an attack from the inside of her body. Anna recalled vividly the doctor telling her she should expect to feel the first fluttering of movement from within.

Not her. The first thing she felt was a swift kick to the ribs. Not too long after that Ben had felt the baby kick, too. He’d spent the entire night with his hand on her stomach waiting for it to happen again. The man was belly crazy. Or at least crazy with what was inside it. One more reason to be cautious before committing to anything.

“We’ve only been dating for a couple of months,” Anna said as she dipped her dumpling in a sauce so perfectly tart and delicious she wanted to drink it. But that might be overkill. “That’s too soon.”

“You’ve known each other for six years and you lived with him once already when he was sick. If that isn’t seeing someone at their worst, I don’t know what is. I think you can safely say you two know what it’s like to live together. In good times and in bad.”

“This is different.”

“Why?”

Anna looked at the man who was her boss, but who had become her friend, too. She wanted to be honest with him. Or, maybe more accurately, she wanted to be honest with herself and she wanted someone else to listen.

“All those years with Ben...I mean, I thought I loved him. I did love him. But now I know how easy it was. How simple and uncomplicated it was. The whole time I got to love him I didn’t have to worry about his feelings for me. I could simply pretend and it was enough. We worked together. We ate together. We were a team. Even when he got sick that was easy, too. I knew what I had to do. Take care of him. Help him to get better. It didn’t start to get hard until—”

“Until you thought you were going to lose him.”

She shook her head. “No, I never thought I was going to lose him. I wouldn’t let myself form the idea. To me it was unfathomable. It was when I realized he thought he would lose his battle. When he decided it was all or nothing...without me, that’s when I knew I couldn’t pretend anymore.”

“So you ran.”

Anna winced. “I made a strategic exit. Everything is different now.”

Mark laughed. “Yeah, because you’re not in an imaginary relationship anymore. You’re in a real one.”

She hated to hear him verbalize it. But she knew it was true. All those years she thought she’d been in love, but never once had she been scared of it. Now she spent most of her days with a knot in her stomach that no amount of antacid would relieve and it wasn’t the baby’s fault.

“I was playing at love, wasn’t I?”

“I don’t think so. If it weren’t grounded in something real, you would have ditched him already and fallen in love with me instead. I would be your new fake work husband.”

Anna rolled her eyes to mock his cockiness, but it did give her some comfort to know that she wasn’t prone to falling in love with every man she worked with. “I don’t think so.”

“No? I would make an awesome fake husband. Just like I was a fabulous fake father all the way from Afghanistan.”

“I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m having an actual relationship with him.”

“You are. And how does it make you feel?”

“Like a freaking scaredy cat.”