the manager.”
“But you don’t work every single shift,” he guessed.
“No,” she admitted. Karen had shared the managerial duties for a few years now, usually covering the dinner shift so that Molly had a break between lunch and evening duties and could take the occasional day off. “But I’m never too far away if there’s a problem.”
“Is it that you don’t trust your manager to take care of things in your absence?” he wondered. “Or that you don’t trust yourself to be alone with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your ego, is there?”
He only grinned. “I don’t recall you having complaints about my ego—or any of my other parts—when we were together.”
No—there had definitely been no reason to complain and no ability to do so when she was writhing and moaning with pleasure.
“Are we finished here?” she asked, deliberately ignoring his comment. “Because I have to be downstairs for a delivery in about ten minutes.”
He pushed his chair away from the table. “Fiona will let you know the travel arrangements.”
“Thanks.” She followed him to the door.
He stepped out onto the landing, then pivoted back to face her again. “And the answer to your question is no—we’re not even close to being finished here.”
Molly was in a mood when she went down to the bar and she knew it. She was tired and she was cranky and it was all Eric’s fault. As if it wasn’t enough to find out that the man she’d picked up in her own bar was a prince, now he’d suddenly reappeared in her life, wanting to pick up right where they left off.
Of course, he didn’t know that the last time they’d gotten naked and horizontal together, they’d made a baby. She was certain that little bit of information would make him reconsider his pursuit of her, but she definitely wasn’t ready to share.
You have to tell him.
She sighed even as she cursed the nagging voice of her conscience. She knew she had to tell him. She would tell him. Just not yet. Not until she was feeling a little less flustered and emotional about everything.
Okay—that might take a little longer than the seven months remaining before her due date, so maybe that wasn’t a reasonable guideline.
After the wedding, she decided. She would be close to the end of the first trimester by then and there wouldn’t be any reason for them to remain in contact afterward if he didn’t want to.
She nodded, satisfied with that reasoning. “After the wedding.”
“What wedding?”
She hadn’t realized she’d spoken the thought out loud until Dave, the delivery man from the local liquor store responded with the question.
She scrawled her name on the bill he presented to her and shook her head. “I’m babbling to myself. Obviously I’ve got too much on my mind.”
“My brother talks to himself all the time,” Dave told her. “My mother thinks he’s a genius. My dad just thinks he’s nuts.”
“There’s probably a fine line there,” Molly said.
“Which side do you fall on?” he asked curiously.
“Nuts,” she said. “Definitely certifiably insane.”
She had to be if she was still attracted to a man who’d messed up every single aspect of her life.
“Admitting a problem is the first step toward getting help,” he said, and winked at her.
She restocked the shelf behind the bar, then carried the extra inventory to the storage room. The boxes were heavy, and though the weight wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle right now, she knew there would come a time when she would have to stop that kind of lifting. She wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize the well-being of her child.
But, as she stifled another yawn, she found herself worrying that she might already be jeopardizing her baby’s well-being. She was tired—physically and mentally exhausted. Was that normal in the first few months of pregnancy? Or were the erratic hours at the restaurant taking an additional toll on her body?
She’d had to drag herself out of bed this morning, and she’d turned the shower spray to cool to jolt herself awake. What she’d told Eric was true—she’d never been at her best in the mornings, but she wasn’t usually so grumpy.
Even when she’d been in high school and had to get up for classes in the morning, she often worked late to help her dad. When she was a teen, he’d been strict about keeping her away from the bar, but when the last customer was gone and the door was locked at the end of the night, she would come out of the kitchen to help him with the clean-up of the restaurant and the close-out of the register and anything else that needed to be done.
She’d loved that time of night, the quiet camaraderie they’d shared. Just thinking about it now, she felt an aching emptiness inside. Her father had been gone for almost ten years now, but there still wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about him and how much she missed him.
He’d been in her thoughts even more than usual recently, and she wondered if that was because she so desperately wanted to tell someone about the baby she carried. She knew her father would have been disappointed about the circumstances of her pregnancy, but he would have been thrilled about the child. Family had always been the most important part of life to James Shea, with even the bar running a distance second.
When his wife bailed on him after fifteen years of marriage, he’d raised his daughters alone, and he’d raised them with love and compassion. If he’d had one regret, it was that Maureen had cut all ties when she’d walked out. He felt it was important for children to have the love of both parents, and he always lamented the fact that he couldn’t give that to his daughters.
He wouldn’t approve of Molly’s decision not to tell Eric about her pregnancy, of that she had no doubt. Not that she wasn’t ever going to tell him, she reminded that nagging voice in the back of her mind, just that she needed some more time to assimilate what she’d learned about her baby’s father before she told him he was going to be a father.
She thought about how her dad would react to that bit of information.
“You always were my princess,” he would have said with a smile. “And now you’ll have the title to prove it.”
Because he would also assume that, being pregnant with Eric’s baby, she would marry him—whether or not it was what either of them wanted. Yes, family was important to James Shea, and so was responsibility, as he’d proven when he married Molly’s mother after learning that she was carrying his child.
But that was thirty-one years ago, and even if Eric offered marriage as a solution, she knew it wasn’t one she could accept. It certainly wasn’t a solution that had worked for her parents. Not that they hadn’t tried—at least for a while. But in the end, Maureen Shea had woke up one morning and,
