Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(31)
She sighed then chugged down her iced tea. “I’m thinking it’s early in this whole … pregnancy thing, and I’m scared. I’m scared for you to uproot your whole life and move across the world for a job you don’t want, when I’m still in that period where so many things could go wrong. So many. Do you know how many women miscarry in their first trimester?”
Rake shook his head, holding her wide, panicked gaze.
“It’s like, ten percent, or something awful,” she said. “And what if that happens to me? To us.”
That little “us” bounced through his ears and traveled down his throat, locking itself there and making it hard to breathe.
“I feel like I can’t have you move here until we’re surer this is … happening.”
“This is happening,” he said gruffly, wanting to push away her words. The idea left him cold. Nauseous.
“But—”
Rake cupped his hand around her neck, his fingers curling around her soft skin and tangling in the wispy hairs at her nape. “We can’t think about everything that could go wrong. If it does, it does. But I’d rather be here to help you through that part of it too. I can’t do much here, Lizzie, and it’s kind of killing me. All I can do is physically be here. For whatever comes next.”
She fixed him with that look again, like she’d opened a trapdoor in his skull and was seeing his brain. Like she recognized the pain in there. He blinked away, dropping his hand.
He quickly lost Lizzie to her thoughts; he could almost hear her mind whirring like a car engine. Absentmindedly, she reached both hands around his wrist, making a circle with her thumbs and middle fingers, then moving it up his arm until the little cage of her fingers broke, repeating the movement over and over as she thought.
“Okay,” she said at last, dropping her hands.
“Okay?”
“Okay, let’s do this thing,” she said with a goofy grin, equal parts hope and panic. “Let’s coparent or whatever-the-fuck. Let’s do it. I can’t stop you from moving here, and God knows I’ll need help.”
“Yeah?” A small yellow balloon of optimism slowly inflated in his chest.
“Yeah.”
He couldn’t resist the need to hug her, and he pulled her close. Never in his life had he had such a strong impulse to touch someone so often. He quickly discarded the notion as some primal instinct for protecting one’s mate. Or, coparent, more accurately.
“It’s still a no to marriage, though,” she said into his neck. Rake nodded. He could live with that. He could figure out a new plan for making their child’s life perfect. But an idea did strike him, and he pulled back.
“Would you consider moving in together? At least for the pregnancy and first few months?”
Lizzie’s instant look of resistance made him push on. “Just while we figure this out. How to be parents. How to work together. Trial by fire, right?” He wanted to be there. He wanted to be there if there were complications, when the baby cried, when they were hungry, when Lizzie needed something in the middle of the night. He wanted it all.
She still had a wary look, but her resistance was softening. Rake went in for the kill. “It’d be helping me out so much. Give me peace of mind to have you close by if something happens. Help me get used to living in the U.S. Help us both figure out how to do this.”
Her wariness transformed into soft contemplation. Even in the short time he’d known her, he’d realized how much she liked to be needed. Liked to be helpful.
“I need to think about it,” she said at last, then laughed. “I always make super impulsive decisions and jump without thinking. But this”—she pointed down at her stomach—“I promised myself I’d think through everything with this.”
Rake nodded. “What if you stay with me while I’m here? I know being in a hotel isn’t real life, but it could give us an idea?”
Lizzie pursed her lips, thinking for a moment, before nodding in agreement. “Okay, baby daddy, you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Chapter 17
RAKE heard Lizzie’s phone buzz as they walked into his hotel room. She fished it out from the bottom of her bag and stared down at it before letting out a soft curse.
“Everything okay?” Rake asked, but Lizzie didn’t seem to hear him. She started pacing the small room, biting her nails as she lost herself in thought.
He watched her dart back and forth for a minute, but as she paced by him on another circuit, he reached out, pulling her to stand in front of him. “Lizzie?”
She seemed to snap back into her body, blinking up at him. “Sorry, what?”
“Are you okay?” Rake asked slowly.
“Peachy keen, jelly bean,” she said with a sharp bubble of laughter, chewing on her cuticles. She tried to slip out of his arms, but he held her still.
“Are you sure?”
She stared at him for a moment, eyes sharp, body tense, before she slumped in his arms, her face wrinkling in some emotion Rake couldn’t understand. She had so many emotions that flitted across the surface of her freckled skin, and for some unknown reason, he wanted to be able to identify them all.
“It’s just my hair hasn’t been washed in a few days, and I’ve cried so damn much today, I know my mascara looks like railroad tracks down my cheeks, and I really want a shower since it was so hot today and I’m smelling kinda spicy, but I also don’t have any clothes with me, but by the time I grab the trolley to the connection with the Market-Frankford Line and then walked the few blocks to my place, I’d be running really late, and I’m not positive I even have any clean clothes, because when I had meant to put in a load of laundry, I’d gotten sidetracked by realizing I’d only unloaded half of the dishwasher the day before, and Indira made it clear she hated when I did that because it screwed up the whole system, and then she had to—”