his throat, he looked her in the eye. “Nice as that sounds...”
Her heart took on a rapid, uneven beat.
Fearing rejection, she persuaded swiftly, “You want kids, too.” She removed her hand from his, sat back. “You’ve said so, at least half a dozen times.”
He nodded, his beautiful mouth set in a sober line. “When the time is right. Yeah, Sage, I do.”
Restless, she leaped to her feet. Hands knotted at her sides, she began to pace. “What if it’s never right?” She whirled back to face him then watched as he rose, too. “What if, like me—” her tone grew as strangled as the hopes inside her “—you don’t find someone and fall madly in love? What if we wait too long and then something happens and we find we’re no longer as fertile as we once were and we suddenly can’t have children? I don’t want to live with that kind of regret, Nick. Especially since I’ve already wasted so much time.”
“Chasing after Timothy Wellington.”
“Terrence Whittier,” she corrected, aware that was the one thing he could never get right, her ex’s name. “And you’re right, I don’t want to do that again. Live so far in the future that I don’t appreciate the here and now. I don’t want that for you, either, Nick.” She trod closer, hands raised beseechingly. “And since...”
She stopped, aware in her eagerness to convince him, she may have spoken a bit too bluntly.
“I’ve already had two broken engagements?”
Knowing she had no room to talk, given her own relationship failure, she wrapped her hand around his bicep. Felt it swell beneath her touch.
“My point is,” she continued, her fingers curving intimately around the hard-packed muscle, through the soft chambray of his shirt, “you’ve been no more successful at finding the perfect match than I have.” She stepped back, jerked in a breath, gave it one last shot. “So why not accept that the odds are against us? And simply make it happen, on our own terms.”
* * *
SAGE HAD A POINT, Nick knew.
Waiting might bring them everything they wanted. The kind of fantastic, enduring love he knew Sage still dreamed about—even if she wouldn’t admit it. And it might bring them nothing. Hadn’t he put off pursuing his long-held dreams for too long? An orphan since age ten, he knew better than anyone how short life could be. Still, there were problems with her proposition. The least of which were his growing feelings for her. Compared with the way she still felt—might always feel—about him. As a friend. A bed buddy. Nothing more.
And although their casual arrangement was fine for now—more than fine actually, since he had so much else going on, work-wise—he wasn’t sure that would always be the case.
Because like most deeply ambitious souls, he knew this about himself. He always wanted more.
And that was never more true than when it came to Sage Lockhart. She was five feet nine inches of nonstop energy and enthusiasm, her slender body as feminine as it was curvaceous. With a breathtakingly beautiful face, mesmerizing golden-brown eyes, soft pink bow-shaped lips and a thick mane of wheat-colored hair that fell in soft waves to her shoulders, she drove him wild with lust. It didn’t matter if she was dressed in fancy cowgirl attire, like she sported now, or the white chef’s coat she wore to work, he was constantly wanting to pull her into his arms and make love to her.
Unfortunately, making her physically his wouldn’t solve this dilemma.
Sobering, Nick put on the brakes. “As much as I want a family of my own, too, you know I’m married to the Monroe family business right now.”
As always, at the first hint of conflict, a wall went up. “That’s just it, Nick. I’m not asking that marriage be part of this equation. Not now. Not ever.”
“Even when you become pregnant and/or the baby is born.”
“Even then.”
She said that, but did she actually mean it? Nick studied Sage skeptically. “Yet, to hear your family talk, you’re one of the most hopelessly romantic women ever born.”
“I used to be. Before I met you.”
Ouch.
She waved an airy hand. “You made me realize that reality is better than romance any day,” she confided in a sweet, matter-of-fact voice.
He tamped down his disappointment. Faced her with his legs braced apart, arms folded in front of him. “How so?”
“You and I started out as just friends.”
Only, he thought, because she would have refused to date him in the tumult of the family scandal that had brought her back to Texas in early June. Then, she had wanted to concentrate on helping her shell-shocked mother clear the Lockhart name of any wrongdoing, while also figuring out what to do with her own inheritance from her late father—a commercial building, complete with a personal residence, on Laramie, Texas’s historic Main Street.
Over the course of the summer, Sage had accomplished both, while her “friendship” with him had morphed into a no-strings-attached affair.
She had opened a thriving café-bistro, The Cowgirl Chef, which was just down the street from his own family venue, Monroe’s Western Wear. She’d also moved off her mother’s Circle H Ranch and into the apartment above her coffee shop.
“And because we got to know each other platonically first before we fell into bed, we never viewed each other through rose-colored glasses.” She stepped close enough he caught the intoxicating scent of her perfume. “The point is, Nick, we were honest with each other. About everything from Day One.”
Except for one thing, he thought.
How much I wanted to be with you.
Sage might have fallen into a sexual relationship with him, but he had known all along that he wanted to make her his woman. Luckily, she had felt the chemistry between them, too. Sighing, she looked up at him from beneath her lashes and went on, “I’ve never had to pretend to want things I didn’t want, just to be with you. The way I did with Terrence.”
Instead, he realized ironically, it was him, pretending he didn’t want the things he did. Not that this current roadblock was going to stop him. He would win her heart, no matter how long it took.
“Like marriage,” he guessed, keeping his attitude as ultracasual as hers.
The soft swell of her breasts rose and fell. “It’s not for me.” She gripped his forearms beseechingly. “And since you’re as wedded to your family business as I am to my new café-bistro, we make a perfect pair.”
That much he could agree on. He’d never met a woman who fascinated him the way Sage did.
That being the case, maybe he should be a gentleman, try it her way. “So how would this work?” he asked curiously. If there was anything his own joke-of-a-love-life had taught him, it was never to crowd a woman. Never jump the gun. It was slow and steady patience that would win out in the end. A tact that had moved them from friends, to lovers and possibly parents, thus far. He took her all the way into his arms. “Us
