Rachel Gibson - Not Another Bad Date

“Adele’s told me about you ladies, and it’s my pleasure to meet you in person.” He unbuttoned his coat and shrugged out of it as if he intended to stay for a while. Beneath the coat he wore a white-and-blue-striped dress shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s. “Cold enough for y’all?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not bad.”

Maddie tilted her head to one side and looked at him. “It’s been colder.”

“I haven’t been in a good snowstorm since I lived in Denver. Never thought I’d miss it, but I do.” He smiled and the sudden infusion of testosterone in the room messed with her friends’ usually level heads. The tension eased, and they smiled back at Zach. As Adele hung his coat in the closet, they asked about his trip and about flying in through the snow.

Then Maddie got down to business. “Adele’s pregnant. What are your plans?” she asked as if she was Adele’s father.

Zach smiled. “That’s between me and Adele.”

Maddie nodded and gathered her things to go. On her way out she put one hand on Adele’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Do you have the stun pen I gave you?”

Adele frowned. “Somewhere.”

“Get it and the Mace.” She looked at Zach. “If he gets out of line, zap him.”

Adele knew that Maddie was kidding-mostly.

Lucy filed out next. “If you need anything, call.”

“I will.”

Then it was Clare’s turn. “I love you.”

“I know.” She hugged her good-bye. “I love you, too.” She waved one last time to her friends, then shut the door behind them and moved back into the living room. Zach stood by the fireplace looking at the photos on the mantel.

“I wasn’t running away, Zach. I always planned on going back to Cedar Creek.”

“When?” He set down a picture frame and looked at her.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“You don’t think you should have talked to me before you left? You don’t think you should have mentioned your plans?”

“Maybe.” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “But I just wanted to get away and think. I’m confused and scared, and I don’t know what to do or what I’m doing. I’m thirty-five, and this has never happened to me.” She swallowed back tears when all she really wanted to do was lay her head on Zach’s chest and cry. Of course that was impossible. “I feel so stupid, but I did everything short of abstinence not to get pregnant. I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t know how this happened.”

He looked at her across the room, and said, “I believe you.”

Finally. But it wasn’t much comfort.

“I should have known better. I did know better, but I was too wrapped up in being an ass. I’m sorry.”

The apology shocked her, and her poor deluded heart read too much meaning in it. “Well,” she said and crossed her arms over her heart. “You should be.”

“And believe it or not, I didn’t come here to fight.”

She frowned. Could have fooled her. “You came here to see if I ended the pregnancy.”

“While that did enter my head, that’s not the reason I’m here either.”

“Then why are you here?” She dropped her hands to her sides. “And couldn’t you have used the phone?”

“Yeah, I could have, but there is something I need to tell you, and you should hear it in person and not over the phone.” He moved across the room toward her. “You said that in order for a man to be faithful, he has to love his wife. I’ve been thinking about that, and you’re right. Devon didn’t care who I was with, and I didn’t love her.” He paused and looked into her eyes. He took a deep breath and said, “It’s different with you. I love you, Adele. That’s what I’ve come all this way to tell you. I love you.”

She looked up into his face, and her heart squeezed like a sponge.

“When you told me you were pregnant, I thought the bottom dropped out of my life, but I was wrong. When I went to your sister’s to see you yesterday and you weren’t there, that’s when the bottom really fell out of my life.” He placed his warm hands on her cheeks. “I can’t imagine you not in my life.” He lowered his face to hers and spoke against her mouth. “I don’t want to imagine you not in my life.”

“I love you, Zach,” she whispered, just before he kissed her, tender and sweet and filled with blistering heat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, deeper, hotter until he lifted his head. His breath rushed fast and hot, and he pulled her against his chest.

“Come home. Live with me,” he said next to her ear. “Marry me, Adele, and not because you’re pregnant. Not because I feel responsible or because you’re scared. Marry me because I love you and you love me and we should be together.”

She pulled back and looked up at him. Into his hooded brown eyes. A tear spilled from her lashes and she swallowed past the ache in her chest. “Yes,” she said. “And not because I’m scared and pregnant, but because I love you.”

He brushed her tear away with his thumb. “When you first came back to town, I thought that maybe you’d come back for a reason.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “I admit, I thought the reason was purely sexual.”

“I came back to help my sister.”

“You came back to help me.” He gave her a soft kiss that calmed her worries and soothed her heart.

He had helped her, too. He’d helped break the curse, but she figured it was best not to mention it. “You helped me, and you helped Sherilyn. You put Harris’s furniture together.”

“The furniture was an excuse to be with you.”

She wrapped her arms around his chest and pressed herself against his big warm body. “I started to fall in love with you the day you gave me the tool belt.”

“Ah, you were dazzled by the shiny tools.”

She nodded. “You have dazzling tools.”

He laughed. “I remember the day I saw you standing under my portico. You looked like you’d seen a ghost, but you were beautiful.”

“Ah, you were dazzled by my lack of sleep and crazy hair.”

“I’ve always been dazzled by your crazy hair.” He rubbed his hands up and down her back and somehow got her sweater over her head. “Before that day, you were just a memory. A memory of a beautiful girl I knew in college who picked me to make love to her for her first time.” He looked into her face and tossed her sweater on the floor. “I thank God you walked out of my memory and into my life.”

She reached for the button on his shirt. “What about Tiffany?”

“She’ll be fine. I think she’s looking forward to having a couple of brothers.”

Adele’s fingers stilled on the last button and she glanced up. “Brothers!”

He pulled his shirt out of his jeans and looked down at her bare abdomen. “How are the boys?”

“Girls. The girls are making me nauseous in the morning.”

“Sorry about that.” He shucked the shirt from his arms and pulled her bare belly against his hot skin. He smiled, then lowered his brows. “Your breasts are bigger.”

“They hurt.”

“Sorry about that.” But he didn’t look all that sorry.

She shook her head. “Twins. You not only get me pregnant, but you get me pregnant with twins.”

“Yeah,” he said through a smile, but this time he didn’t bother saying he was sorry about that.

She ran her hands up his sides and over the hard planes of his chest. Who would have thought that she’d find love in the last place she expected? With the man who’d once broken her heart to pieces. Who would have thought Zach Zemaitis would be the man to break the curse she’d been living under?

Not Adele. He’d given her his heart and saved her from a lifetime of bad dates. He’d given her two babies growing beneath her own heart, and she would never be at all sorry about that.