Going Down Easy (Boys of the Big Easy #1)(13)

Now he squeezed her hand, his eyes bright and happy. Those blue eyes that made her a little stupid.

“It is completely amazing,” he told her with a nod. “There’s something I haven’t told you, either.”

Her stomach knotted at that. Oh, boy. Here they went. Personal stuff..

“Gabe, I—”

“I have a son. Cooper. He’s five, too.”

Addison heard the words. They weren’t complicated words. Not overly long or hard to pronounce. And he’d put them together in simple, short sentences. But for several long seconds, she couldn’t make them make sense.

But when she did, she felt her eyes widen and her heart thump, and she definitely pulled her hand back.

“What?”

He nodded again. “I’m a dad.”

Well, holy-complicate-everything. She frowned. “But you . . .” Okay, she’d been about to say, “You never said anything about having a kid,” and realized that was maybe the stupidest thing she could have come up with. She had been the one to first decide that they shouldn’t get too personal in their conversations. He’d gone along with it readily, she noted, but yeah, that had been her idea. And she hadn’t said boo about Stella. “You don’t even have juice boxes in your fridge,” she finally said weakly.

Keeping Stella from Gabe was pretty easy, considering she was thirteen hundred miles away in New York, and Gabe really saw very little of Addison’s personal life. But she’d been in his apartment. At his place of work. Hanging out with his brother.

There were no photos up anywhere. Of course, it was a bar. And she’d only been in the office of Trahan’s once. And it had been such a mess of paperwork and boxes that there was no way she would have seen a photo. But the apartment was another story. There were no toys, no kids’ books—or really many books of any kind, come to think of it—and there wasn’t even a place where a kid might sleep.

“He lives with his mom,” she concluded out loud a moment later. And hell, that meant there was an ex. Another woman in Gabe’s life.

Frankly, in her opinion, there was nothing awesome about any of this.

“No, he lives with me,” Gabe said. “Well, with my mom and me.”

“Your mom?” She frowned. “You live with your mom?”

He looked a little sheepish. “Yeah. Because of Coop,” he added quickly.

“But the apartment.”

“Logan lives there. But it belongs to the bar. I use it when I’m working late or over the weekend.”

Or when I need a place to take a woman for sex. He didn’t say it, but Addison could have sworn she heard the words out loud. “I see.” She sat back and crossed her arms.

“So this really is amazing,” he went on. “We’re both parents. That was the one thing that was keeping me from thinking this could really turn into something. Well, that and your living in New York.”

He gave her a little grin, and Addison honestly wished he’d quit doing that. She loved his grins. But now, in this context, they were making things even more difficult.

“Now neither of those things is an issue,” he went on when she said nothing. “And I’m sure that Stella was why you didn’t think we should keep seeing each other. And I get it. It’s a big deal to bring someone into your kid’s life. But there’s nothing to worry about. I love kids. I love being a dad. I’ve always wanted more kids.”

Addison actually felt her mouth drop open. Gabe was an enthusiastic guy. It took about five minutes in Trahan’s with him behind the bar to figure that out. He laughed big, he told big stories, and he had big sex. Big, amazing, blow-her-mind, enthusiastic sex. It shouldn’t surprise her, really, that he’d jump from a weekend fling to “I’ve always wanted more kids.” But it did. Because who said that? Who looked at the woman he barely knew and who had just told him about her daughter and said, “I’ve always wanted more kids”?

“Wow, so I guess we should just get married and all move into your mom’s place and start having family movie nights,” Addison said. “We should start trying for more kids right away. Maybe we’ll get lucky and have twins.”

Gabe lifted a brow. “It’s weird, but you sound a little sarcastic when you say that,” he said. Sarcastically.

She lifted her eyebrows back at him. “You think?”

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Seriously? You mean besides the fact that I’m trying to break things off and you just essentially proposed?”

He sat back in his chair, again assuming that casual, nonchalant posture, but with the tight jaw and flashing blue eyes that said “I’m not amused.”

“We don’t have to get married right away. We can have a long engagement if you want. But don’t think for a second that the idea of twins scares me off.”

Holy crap. She now knew something about Gabe Trahan that she hadn’t realized before this moment. He was crazy.

“Okay, so on that note, I need to be getting back to work. And getting off your project. And maybe hiring a bodyguard,” she said, scooting her chair back.

“Addison.”

Her heart was pounding, and she was trying to decide if she was freaked out or just completely flabbergasted, and yet, him saying her name, just her name, stopped her. Well, it was him saying her name in that low, commanding tone.