He remained silent. Stoic. Absolutely unreadable.
“It’d be really great if you could say something,” she finally said.
That mobilized him. He came to the couch where she was perched but didn’t sit. “What are you going to do?”
“What am I going to do?” she repeated, staring up at him towering over her. “Don’t you mean what are we going to do?”
“Your body, your decision,” he said.
She gaped at him. “Well,” she said through gritted teeth, “I suppose I’m going to have a baby.”
He relaxed slightly at this, and she stared at him. “What did you think I was going to do?”
Shaking his head, he sat on the coffee table facing her. Taking her hand in his, he looked at her with those warm brown eyes. “What do you need from me?” he asked quietly.
“I have no idea.” She let out a breath and dropped her forehead to his chest. “Whatever you’ve got.”
He gathered her into his strong arms. “Everything,” he said, and brushed his mouth along her temple. “You’ve got everything I’ve got and everything I am.”
The next morning Chloe awoke and knew she was once again alone in the bed. But this time she wouldn’t open her eyes to the sight of her sexy-as-sin husband packing his bag.
Because he was already gone.
Every snippy, bitchy, unhappy comment she’d made to Sawyer over the past few months as she got bigger and more and more anxious about the baby had haunted her all night long.
She wanted to take back each and every one of them, but she couldn’t. Her heart trembled as she forced herself to roll out of bed. Quite the feat with the Bean like a basketball out in front of her.
She headed to the bathroom—where she seemed to live these days—and paused by Sawyer’s dresser, eyeing the two picture frames he kept there. Sentiment was mostly wasted on the man, but sometimes he surprised her. Like he had with these, which he’d picked by himself.
The first had been taken back when she’d still been flirting with screwing up her entire life. She’d been pulled over on her Vespa by none other than Sheriff Sawyer Thompson himself. It wasn’t a flattering pic of her. She was sunburned and windblown and looking a little bedraggled.
Not Sawyer. He looked big and badass, and like maybe he wouldn’t recognize a smile if it bit him on the ass. Someone had snapped the pic with the two of them staring at each other like caged tigers.
The second picture was Sawyer with his best friends and partners-in-cahoots Ford and Jax, the three of them barely out of their teens on a boat looking like the scofflaws Sawyer now caught for a living.
The pics represented the people he cared about most, and gave her some comfort. If he could love that crazy girl she’d been, he could love the pregnant shrew, right?
Shaking her head at herself, she moved to her dresser and went still. There was a small wrapped box sitting there. It definitely hadn’t been there yesterday. Gingerly she picked it up. Shook it. Finally, curiosity got the best of her and she opened it and gasped.
It was a gorgeous locket on a long chain in the shape of a heart.
She called Maddie first. Maddie was the middle sister, the one with all the emotions, the one who cried at the SPCA commercials and made her two ornery sisters hug and kiss when they fought. Maddie had kids of her own and was super enthusiastic about the baby, so whenever Chloe’s fears about becoming a mom got the best of her she entertained a secret fantasy of turning the baby over to Maddie.
If anyone had gotten Chloe a sentimental heart locket, it’d be Maddie.
“You okay?” Maddie asked immediately.
“Sure. But if you see a plate of bacon running down the street screaming ‘help me,’ please return it to me. It’s totally overreacting.”
Maddie laughed in delight, and Chloe asked her about the necklace.
“Not me,” Maddie said over the sound of her kids playing. “Maybe Sawyer before he left—”
“No,” Chloe said, a lump in her throat. “He was already gone when it appeared.”
She didn’t add that, given the state of their relationship, it was unlikely he would have left her anything at all.
“Chloe,” Maddie said softly, reading right through her baby sister. “He loves you more than his own life.”
“I’m not exactly lovable right now,” she admitted.
“Of course you are. It’s just pregnancy hormones.”
“Even when I told him this whole baby thing was his fault?”
There was a pause. “Um, excuse me,” Maddie said, “but didn’t you jump his bones every chance you got?”
Chloe blew out a sigh. “Did I start this by saying I was lovable? No, I did not. I told you I am unlovable!”