off tingles in places that shouldn’t be tingling over Dante. She tore away, devastated that she couldn’t stay in the circle of his embrace, devastated that things had already changed without her consent.
Hurt sprang into his big brown eyes but he banked it and crossed his arms. “So now I can’t hug you?”
“Sure you can, if you drop twenty pounds of muscle,” she shot back before realizing how that sounded. Quickly, she amended, “I want things like they were before you turned into Dr. Sexy.”
And that wasn’t much better as explanations went. He’d been Dr. Sexy for a long time—what she really meant was before she’d become aware of it. But he had her all flustered.
A brief smile lifted his lips. “I thought you liked that side of me.”
She did. That was the problem.
Dante was one of the few friends she had left who was still the same as he’d always been—she’d thought. She didn’t make friends easily. Cass and Alex, two of the three women she’d built Fyra Cosmetics with, had moved on to new phases in their lives, marrying great men and starting families. Which was amazing, and she didn’t begrudge them their happiness. But Harper felt…left behind.
Which was why she’d decided to have a baby of her own. But minus the husband, who would expect things of Harper she couldn’t fathom giving. Intimacy. Control. A promise of everlasting romantic love that no one could guarantee because it was nothing more than a series of confusing chemical signals in the brain.
Men complicated everything.
“How many friends do I have, Dante? Should be easy for you to count them. No advanced degree required to get to four.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Cass. Alex. Trinity. You. Now imagine that two of those friends have recently gotten married and started families. Everything’s changing around me and I can’t stop it. I need you to stay the same.”
Because she was the one who had already changed things, the one who had gone off and gotten pregnant, and by default, Dante had to be the constant in this equation.
Understanding dawned in his eyes. “You’re scared of things changing.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what I just said.”
Instead of backing off, he leaned in and captured her arms, holding her in place. “You did. I’m just catching up. So it’s not that you mind the idea of me kissing you. You’re just scared of losing our relationship. But I don’t want to lose it, either.”
Those melty chocolate eyes speared hers, and all at once, she didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as if she held the secrets to his universe. Except he’d always looked at her like that and she’d explained it away as affection between friends. But now that he’d veered completely off the friendship track, it made her uncomfortably aware that he’d just had his mouth on her in a very non-friendly way.
“You’re practicing selective hearing.” She shook her head and tried to back up a step so she could breathe. And pick up her luggage, so she could…do something with it. “I do mind the idea of kissing. And everything that goes along with it. Or comes after it.”
“Everything?” he murmured and somehow she was still in his arms. “You mean sex?”
Heat leaped into his expression and that was so much worse than the melty eyes because her body flared to life at the promise of feeling the way it had when he’d kissed her. More. Now.
“Yes.” She squeezed her eyes shut, groaning. “I mean, no. No sex. Geez, what is this conversation we’re having? I came here to visit my friend. How did we start talking about sex?”
“You brought it up,” he reminded her needlessly. “I was just trying to clarify.”
“Sex is not a part of this conversation.”
“What if I want it to be?” he countered softly and his fingers slid up her arms to grasp her shoulders. “Your hearing is bordering on selective too if you can so easily ignore what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Caught, she stared at him, taking in his familiar horn-rimmed glasses and spiky hair, desperate to get back to a place where she could be secure in her relationship with him. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Our friendship is the most important thing in my life. That’s why I’m trying to save it. I can’t unkiss you. There’s something here that isn’t going away until we explore it. Harper…” He drew out her name reverently and the sound sang through her suddenly taut body. “Kiss me again. Think of it as an experiment. Let’s see how far this thing goes, so we can deal with it, once and for all.”
Her eyelids slammed shut because holy mother of God. “That’s a hell of gauntlet to throw down.”
“Tell me no and I’ll step away.”
“No.” Instantly, his hands moved from her arms and his heat vanished. She opened her eyes to see him standing a few feet away, his expression hooded and implacable.
“Can I at least know what your major objections are? In case there’s something—”
“I’m pregnant, Dante.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “And that’s only the first in a long line of objections.”
All of the blood in Dante’s brain drained out. “You’re…what?” he whispered.
“Pregnant,” she repeated and the word still sounded like pregnant.
“With a baby?”
“Science has not yet successfully crossed human DNA with any other species, so yeah,” she confirmed darkly. “I didn’t want to tell you this way but you gave me no choice.”
Blindly, he stuck out a hand and sought the nearest hard surface to sink onto. Happened to be an end table in the adjacent living area but so what? His knees wouldn’t have held up much longer.
“I don’t understand how this happened. Are you seeing someone?”
There was no way. Not as eagerly as she’d responded to his touch. Not as close as he’d have sworn they were. She’d have said something about a man in her life. Wouldn’t she? He thought back to the last time she’d mentioned a guy—all the way back in college.
She shook her head. “No. Artificial insemination.”
“Why in the world would you do something like that?” He bit off the syllables, not bothering to temper the harshness.
Babies needed a family. A father. She’d deliberately set herself up to be a single parent. It was inexcusable.
Her face froze as she took in his expression. “I wasn’t interested in sharing parenting duties with anyone long-term. So a donor who was willing to sign away his rights seemed ideal.”
This got better and better. Or worse and worse, more likely. He laughed without humor. “Most
