a kid, it’s a boat. A hat. A Christmas tree. The possibilities are endless.” He tipped the green cone onto the top of the salt shaker. It teetered, then balanced. “When I was a kid, I used to be like that. Everything I saw, I imagined into something else. My parents complained that I was always in my head, and never out in the world.”
“I bet you read a lot.”
He chuckled. “Everything I could get my hands on. I was a total bookworm. Still am.”
“Me too.” She grinned. “I love books.”
A smile whispered between them. “Something we have in common, then?”
“I’d say so.” Oh, she could feel that thread, that tenuous tether connecting them, just as it had that night. She tried to push it aside, to ignore the feeling. She didn’t want to build a bridge. Not between herself and Linc. She was here for the baby. Only. “Go on with what you were saying.”
“Well, my parents got tired of seeing me with my nose buried in a book twenty-four hours a day, so they shipped me off to a summer camp. One of those long, eight-week ones. My brother was there, too, but he was always the outdoorsy one. He took to camp like a duck to water.”
“And you didn’t?”
Linc snorted. “God, no. Took me seven of the eight weeks to fit in. But then one day a counselor noticed me reading instead of joining the other kids. He got me involved in a project, a camp diary thing. Creating a kind of written and photographed collage about camp that could be left behind for other campers. Sort of an intro to the best parts of camp.”
His eyes lit up with the memory, his features became more animated. “You must have loved it.”
He took a sip of his drink, then nodded. “I did. It was a brilliant idea on the counselor’s part. A way to force me to go outside, collecting information and finding out about camp, in order to get back to my first love—books. In the course of doing that, I found out I loved being outside.”
“And is that where the idea for the software came from?”
“Pretty much. My brother…he was the more adventurous one. Never met a challenge he didn’t want to tackle. He loved the book. For him, it was a way to go back to camp over and over again, and…” Linc’s voice trailed off and he paused for a long second. Then he cleared his throat and continued. “Anyway, he was the one who had the idea of taking the book and combining it with a computer program. Back in those days, of course, games and software were a long way from what they are now, and we were just kids, so we didn’t know what we were doing. That first idea spurred the bug for the two of us later working together, forming the company, and our first project was always going to be that software, but…” He toyed with the green paper hat on the top of his straw.
“What happened?”
“The market research I did said the money wasn’t in software for children. It was in security software. So we went with the better financial decision.” He plucked the green triangle off the straw and crumpled it.
A practical man. She should be happy—it was, after all, the kind of commonsense decision that spoke to Molly’s own practical nature. Instead, disappointment settled in her gut. What had she expected? The same wild spontaneity she’d seen in Linc that one night?
“Have you ever regretted that decision?”
“No. I did what was smart for the company. For the people who invested in it. The people who…believed in it from the beginning.”
Even though he spoke with conviction, she detected a note of regret in his voice, the echoes of lost chances. “Now that you have the company to mega status—” at that, she smiled “—surely you have time to indulge a few of those earlier dreams. I mean, you are the boss. You and your brother could start building birdhouses and hula hoops if you wanted. Who’s going to stop you?”
His face tightened. “I don’t make decisions like that.”
“Spontaneous ones, you mean?” Molly arched a brow.
His gaze met hers, and in that moment the two of them connected again, with a shared thought.
That night.
That amazing, spontaneous, heated, insane night.
“Well, I don’t usually make spontaneous decisions,” Linc said, and fire lit his blue eyes for just a moment before subsiding. “In business, every decision is based on research, numbers, financial projections.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
He considered her words. “There is no fun in that. But it’s reality. As you saw in the car, I’m an extremely busy man, which explains why my entire life revolves around work. Except for that one night, I pretty much live at the office, making all those non-fun decisions.”
If anything screamed “not looking to be a family man,” that did.
“So, it’s not a matter of not wanting to create that software,” Linc went on. “It’s just about smart business practices. As my team pointed out, this has the potential to be a waste of company resources.”
Clearly, his mind was made up. She would have to find another way to provide for her baby. And as for getting to know the baby’s father—
She would simply tell Linc before she left town that she was pregnant and let him decide if he wanted to be part of the child’s life or not. Maybe he would…or maybe he wouldn’t.
The thought that he would turn his back on her and their child sent a wave of disappointment crashing over her. Regardless of how many times she told herself she hadn’t expected an enthusiastic reaction to her presence—
She had.
She wanted to retreat, go home and lick her wounds. She’d been wrong, so, so wrong, and she needed to regroup, find another way of dealing with the mountain of worries in her chest. What was she going to do? How could she handle this on her own? Without a job, a father for her baby, a plan?
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