He dropped to the bed, but immediately rolled to his side, not wanting to crush Ashleigh under the weight of his body. The flickering spark of hope returned as she cuddled into his side, throwing her arm across his waist, but she didn’t linger for long. It sputtered, but didn’t die, when she rose and dressed. He sat up against the headboard of the bed and watched, enjoying the opportunity to simply observe the movement of her body, the graceful actions of her limbs and the sweep of her tousled, golden hair. As she made to leave, she paused with her hand on the door handle and turned to face him.
“I need some time.”
“Not too long, beauty. I want you to be sure, but don’t doubt that I want you.”
He let her walk away and hoped that she would come back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The party had been Aunt Dolly’s idea. Any party that wasn’t about club business was usually Aunt Dolly’s idea. She’d decided that they were going to celebrate Ashleigh’s birthday, albeit a little belatedly, whether she liked it or not. Apparently a celebration was just thing everybody needed after all the trauma of the past weeks. Ashleigh wasn’t sure whether she agreed with that. She certainly didn’t agree with celebrating her birthday without Dean there. Dean had always been there and now he wasn’t and never would be again. Ashleigh wasn’t sure she wanted to celebrate anything without Dean to share it with.
Plus, there was the whole ‘not knowing what she was going to do with her life’ thing that she had going on at the moment. The decisions she had to make were too big, it was all too big, and she had been taking the coward’s way out and ignoring it all. She had only left the apartment to go to work and buy food in that time, and visit the hospital. She’d had a scan to figure out dates and now she knew that she had become pregnant around the time of the shooting in the park. She’d wracked her brain, which had been an equally wonderful and terrible experience, and the only thing she could come up with was that the intensely pleasurable and erotic dream from that night had obviously been all too real.
It had been almost three weeks since she’d last spoken to Paul. For the majority of that time he’d been in Texas with her father. She didn’t know the details, but evidently the carnage that had taken place at the motel the night she had been kidnapped had caused the club some sort of issue that her daddy had been trying to sort out, and he’d taken Dizzy and Paul with him.
Paul had said that he would let her have the space to figure her own mind out. After the first couple of days she’d found a Passion Vine flower tucked under the windshield wiper on her car with a note that read ‘Not too long.’ She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected that it had come from the spot by the creek that she’d shown him. Since he’d been away she’d received a couple of text messages saying the same thing, but she hadn’t responded. She wondered if her lack of response was causing him to seek comfort while he was away, but she didn’t know how to put what she felt into a text message.
She’d missed him. She’d missed him a lot. And she couldn’t help but factor in that the club appeared to have forgiven him. In fact, she was struggling to think of reasons why she shouldn’t give him a second chance, because she believed him. God help her, but she believed him. He’d said that he wanted to build a home and a family with her, and that’s what she had wanted, too. It’s what she still wanted for herself, and she was beginning to think that she might be able to believe that she could trust him enough to let him be a part of that.
Her mother had been carefully noncommittal on the subject, and she hadn’t really seen her daddy to talk to about it all. Aunt Dolly was following Moira’s lead, which was to follow the club’s lead. If they disagreed with the verdict that had passed the vote, they wouldn’t say. Of course, none of them knew she was pregnant, which had definitely bought her some room to think, but may or may not have bought Paul any goodwill. Ashleigh figured if Paul came back from Texas in one piece then he hadn’t mentioned his impending fatherhood to her daddy. She hadn’t specifically told him not to, but then she hadn’t known they’d be spending the better part of a month in another state.
So currently she was evaluating her wardrobe options, which thankfully were only limited by heat and humidity since she didn’t even have the merest hint of a bump yet. She was going to have to tell people before that happened, but she needed to figure out what the hell to say first. Her parents wouldn’t cut her out for being pregnant out of wedlock, but they’d be disappointed, more so if she decided she was doing this alone. She had maybe a snowball’s chance in hell that no one would notice that she wasn’t drinking tonight, but she was going to see how long she could get away with it. The fact that she wasn’t on any sort of kitchen duty was both a blessing and a curse. Being around food had unpredictable results at best these days; seemingly random smells made her nauseous, but she wouldn’t be able to hide in the kitchen, either.