Oh, and she’d needed sleep, too. And the gym.
Because all those pieces together had finally unsnarled the tangle.
Or maybe rather than untangling, she’d passed the snare from her to Jordan, like some perverse game of emotional telepathy.
He was sitting at the kitchen counter, his laptop open, a file from Heather open on the screen that he was reviewing for her. But his eyes were shadowed, and when he heard her come in, he jumped up and crossed to her. “Hi, sweetheart,” he murmured, tugging her close and giving her a peck on the lips. “Need anything?”
“No, thank you, baby,” she said, squeezing him back. “I’m just going to start dinner.”
“It’s already in the oven.”
She froze. “I told you it was my turn.”
“I was here and knew the recipe.”
“Jor—”
He hesitated, uncertainty on his face, and she hated that she’d made him doubt himself. “Yeah, sweetheart?”
Which was why she said, “Thank you” instead of anything else.
And then the same later, when he ran her a bath and rushed to gather up the kids so she could have private time—definitely much-appreciated, aside from the thread of vulnerability in his eyes, the slightly-desperate tone of his voice.
But it was his expression this morning that made her shift her thinking from this would pass—that it would just take some time to convince him she didn’t think of him as his father or hers, for that matter—to recognizing this wasn’t just going to fade away. She could be as patient as possible, could keep trying to reassure him that she knew the difference between him and their dads, but he wasn’t going to absorb that.
Because she’d hit at his greatest vulnerability.
And that wasn’t something that was easily erased.
Luckily, she had an idea.
Chapter Eight
Jordan
The kids were asleep.
And so was his wife.
But he was sitting at the kitchen table, putting the finishing touches on the file for Heather and wondering if he’d done enough over the last couple of weeks to prove to Abby that he was in for the long haul or if he needed to do more.
Did she know?
Did she feel how desperate he was to keep her? To prove to her he had staying power?
He hoped for the first, not for the second two. No man wanted to be seen as desperate, and certainly not by the woman he was desperate for.
At least, he thought that should be the case.
But it was becoming harder and harder to not just tell her that he was still thinking about what she’d said, that it was affecting him still, that he wanted her to know that—
Ping.
An email hit his inbox, his eyes flashing to the corner and seeing that it was a message from . . .
Abby?
“Uh,” he muttered, not particularly eloquently, but his fingers moved over the trackpad, and he clicked on the message anyway.