Buch lesen: «The Pregnancy Project»

One

In one of life’s great ironies, Dr. Dante Gates, PhD, had a chemistry problem he couldn’t solve.

Not one single data point from his doctoral thesis had provided clues to this puzzle. Nothing he’d researched in the name of his hit TV show, The Science of Seduction, had revealed even a hint of an answer. Even the work he’d done on proving the effectiveness of quantum chemical models for protein analysis—which had nearly landed him a Nobel Prize—hadn’t helped. And Dante was beyond frustrated by the lack of progress in unraveling this chemistry problem named Dr. Harper Livingston.

Dante and Harper had been friends for a decade. She was the standard by which he judged all other women. Which meant Dante spent a lot of energy being irritated that he could never find a woman as beautiful or as smart as Harper. She did it for him, in all the right ways.

Or wrong ways, more like. Because they were friends. His relationship with Harper was the one constant in his life, the only thing he could count on. They had a sacred bond he valued, one he refused to disrupt.

Dante had pretty much convinced himself the only reason he had such a thing for Harper lay solely in her unavailability. Surely if they tried taking their relationship to the next level, it would be a dismal failure. Once he had a taste of that forbidden fruit, Harper would instantly lose her attractiveness. He’d never think of her that way again.

The problem was that once he’d started imagining just how delicious that fruit would be, he couldn’t stop.

This morning, Harper had called to say she was at the Dallas airport, about to get on a plane and would be at his doorstep in two hours. She hadn’t come to visit him in Los Angeles in the three years since he’d moved here. Something big was up. Seemed like the opportune time to solve his chemistry problem, one way or the other.

LAX was one screaming baby short of hell. Like always. Only Harper could drag him to the airport when he had no plans to fly. Dante checked his Breva watch, which featured an anemometer that he’d geeked out over even though he didn’t sail. Harper’s plane had landed ten minutes ago but no passengers had disembarked yet.

Finally, a stream of people carrying backpacks, pillows and water bottles burst through the gate. Dante leaned against the nearest post, arms crossed, to wait for the woman he’d come to collect.

Harper wasn’t hard to spot. Her flame-red hair stood out from the crowd, and she carried herself differently from everyone else, barreling ahead with no fear. In Harper’s world, hesitation was for losers. It was his favorite of her qualities.

She caught sight of him and instantly lit up with a whole-face smile that whacked him in the gut with unexpected heat. Before he could process that, she dropped her bags and flung herself into his arms. Automatically, he balanced his weight to take on hers, snuggling her deep in his embrace, because holy God she felt good.

“Hey,” he murmured into her hair, breathing it in.

Harper’s perfume wound through his senses, infusing his blood with her essence. Which was not how perfume worked. At best, the scent should remind him of food and thus something his body needed to survive. It was supposed to smell nice, not make him want to kiss her until she couldn’t breathe.

He ignored the heat. It wasn’t easy, but he did have a lot of practice.

Harper—mercifully—pulled back enough that Dante didn’t have to worry about her noticing the inappropriate stuff going on down below.

“What are you doing here?” she exclaimed as she drank him in with her bright gaze. “No one has picked me up at the gate since 9/11. I forgot how nice it is. How did you get past security without a plane ticket?”

He chuckled. “Simple. I bought one. Surprise.”

Dante traveled so often for his job as a TV show host that he could always change the ticket later when he planned to actually use it. Or if not, so what? Harper was worth blowing a few hundred bucks over.

She socked him on the arm. “You didn’t have to do that. But I love that you did. I thought you were filming today. I was totally expecting to take a cab.”

And if she’d been anyone else, he’d have sent a car. Shrugging, he picked up her carry-on bag and shouldered it. “We finished early and now I’m off for two weeks, which I plan to spend with you. Perfect timing for an impromptu visit.”

Perfect timing to figure out how to kill his attraction to her. Surely it would only take a kiss. One simple kiss, it would be weird and he’d be done. Back to being friends.

“Your girlfriend won’t expect to spend time with you? The supermodel. What’s her name?” Harper snapped her fingers a couple of times as if to jog her memory.

“Selena,” he supplied. “Actually, we’re not really an item anymore.”

He’d lost interest in Selena as soon as he’d started seeing her, what, like six months ago? But it was good for his career to be photographed with her, and the sex wasn’t terrible, so he’d held on much longer than he should have. She was a sweet girl in a long line of sweet girls who developed instant Vacant Eye when Dante dared throw X-ray crystallography or self-synthesizing materials into conversation. Harper was the only woman he’d ever been able to talk to about anything and everything.

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry. But I’m sure it’s for the best since there’s no way she was good enough for you.” Harper grinned. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Cass is pregnant.”

“That’s fantastic,” he said and meant it. Babies were great. For other people.

Harper and Cass had been friends a long time, since college, when they’d devised a plan to open a company together, along with two other friends, Alex and Trinity. Fyra Cosmetics had thus been born and Harper had made a place for herself as the chief science officer. He was so proud of what she’d accomplished since getting her doctorate in analytical chemistry. Dante had known all four ladies for a decade, but as he had the most in common with Harper he’d naturally become closest to the redhead.

“Gage is making a big deal out of it.” Harper sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes. “As husbands go, he’s perfect for Cass. But I would shoot him if he treated me the way he does her. ‘You’re working too much,’ he says. ‘Let me take care of you.’ And my favorite, ‘You might be craving potato chips, but you need to crave vegetables.’ Men. Like they know anything about pregnancy.”

Dante couldn’t imagine a woman as fierce as Cass letting Gage railroad her. “His heart is in the right place. How is Alex doing, speaking of pregnancy?”

“Much better now that she’s further into her second trimester. No more morning sickness.”

He hadn’t realized so much of what was happening with Harper’s friends revolved around babies. The whole subject made him vaguely uncomfortable, no doubt because of his own history. Sure, people started out wanting kids, but no one could know that they’d still want one next year, or the year after that. After being shuttled from home to home as a foster kid, Dante knew that fickleness firsthand.

Dante guided Harper toward baggage claim. She laced her fingers with his and held his hand as they walked, chatting about her friends and business partners.

It was companionable. Or at least that was probably how she viewed it.

Dante had a burning awareness of her that was only heightened by the glow radiating from Harper’s face. That glow was new. Where had that come from? He adjusted his trademark horn-rimmed glasses with his other hand, but the corona didn’t fade. Why the hell was she so much more beautiful today, of all days?

He might have to get to that kiss sooner rather than later, or this whole trip would slide into disaster.

“Did you have a good flight?” he asked.

Harper pushed her soft, red curls behind her shoulders and nodded. “Not bad. But the vending machine by my gate at DFW didn’t have any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and that’s the only thing I want. I’m starving.”

“Come on.” He pulled her into a newsstand shop and scouted until he found the candy in question, picked up the entire box from the shelf and handed it to the clerk along with his American Express.

“Dante!” Harper laughed. “I just wanted one, not twenty. You’ll have me looking like a blimp if you keep that up.”

The cashier did a double take as she zeroed in on Dante’s face, then she glanced at the credit card, her eyes rounding. “Dr. Gates! I’m a huge fan of your show. Please, can I get a picture with you?”

She held out her phone, because of course the answer was yes. Fans were part of the gig, and as the producers of The Science of Seduction funneled millions of dollars into Dante’s bank account to host it, he couldn’t really complain. But secretly, he hated nearly everything about the show.

Money was nice, he could not deny it, but he missed real science. The kind that made a difference in the way people understood the known universe. Helping a guy hook up didn’t amount to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, no matter how good Dante was at his job. Science had long been his refuge when the rest of the world didn’t care, yet he’d abandoned his roots for sensationalism.

He let the cashier fawn over him as much as she wanted because fans had made him a celebrity, and he did not take that for granted. Harper watched with no small amount of amusement.

Finally, he extracted himself from the cashier and the newsstand, handing Harper the bag of candy. “Sorry about that. Comes with the territory.”

With a snort, Harper grinned. “Are you kidding? That was awesome. I rarely get a chance to see you being Dr. Sexy. Due compensation for losing your attention.”

He matched her grin. “I have to live up to my tag line.”

Dr. Dante Gates Brings Sexy To Science. That line had graced magazine covers, promo for his show, you name it. Never in a million years would Dante have assumed that agreeing to host a show about how to use science to attract a lover would mean he’d become the poster boy. Of course, he had positioned himself as an expert in the subject. He should have realized women would come out of the woodwork to beg him to test his theories on them.

The attention flattered him. At first. He was only human. The field research alone made the women worth his time, and he’d long ago acknowledged that being abandoned by his birth mom to foster care had created a craving for acceptance and connection. It wasn’t a crime. The real travesty was that not one of the truly inventive and quite beautiful women had eclipsed his attraction to Harper.

Because she was the only one he couldn’t have. Probably.

Harper rolled her eyes as they arrived at the baggage claim area for her flight. “You don’t need to appear shirtless in a dish soap commercial to be sexy, silly. Your brain is the most attractive thing about you.”

Something about her smile caught him sideways and he nearly did a double take. He’d let her reference to Dr. Sexy roll off because…well, that was part of his TV persona. But now this. Was she flirting with him?

Interesting. Had these nuances been there before and had he missed them in his struggle to keep his thoughts about Harper in the friend zone?

After all, she’d just admitted she found him attractive, which he liked far more than he should. What if she’d been shooting him subtle signals this whole time, hoping he’d make a move? She probably thought he was blind. This impromptu trip to LA might have been solely designed to correct his vision.

With that in mind, he guided her to a secluded spot in the very back of baggage claim, between two dark, locked offices. The milling people around them were focused on the stationary carousel, which meant he had Harper all to himself for a few minutes. At least until luggage started arriving.

“Hey, in case you’ve forgotten, scientists are not known for their six-packs,” he murmured and leaned in, eliminating the space between them. “I worked hard to put on muscle after spending so many years hunched over pages of equations. If someone wants to pay me to take my shirt off, I’m not going to say no.”

All this talk of shedding clothes had set off serious sparks. Did she feel them, too?

She blinked as she looked up at him, her smile slipping a touch. Her tongue darted out to drag across her lips and he followed it pointedly with his gaze, then shifted back to her eyes. The heat in her cheeks mirrored the flare in his gut as he let the moment drag out.

Would wonders never cease? She was feeling it.

Maybe she’d clued in that he was a hot property. Not that he’d let any of his press go to his head. But come on. Women flocked to him. Empirical evidence suggested there was something about his spiky brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses and fit body that they liked.

It was way past time to get his inconvenient attraction to Harper worked out. If he’d read her wrong, they’d laugh about it and go on. He’d prove there was nothing here other than a healthy appreciation for a great woman. The electricity in the atmosphere and the heightened sense of anticipation was nothing more than the product of his imagination.

Without taking his gaze from hers, he reached out and traced the line of her jaw. Not as a friend. Not companionably. But with intent.

“What are you doing?” she asked as a line appeared between her brows. “This isn’t… I mean—we’re not…”

“Haven’t you ever been curious?” he interjected smoothly. “About what it would be like between us?”

“Be like? What what would be like?” Her eyes widened as his meaning must have registered.

There was still time to backpedal if taking things up a notch ended up being the worst idea ever conceived, but that window of opportunity rapidly shrank the longer they stood here in this blanket of awareness.

“I’ve thought about it. A lot,” he continued, since she hadn’t pulled away and hadn’t fled in horror. “No time like the present to find out.”

Before logic could kick in and remind him of all the reasons this could go south, he sank his hands into Harper’s soft red curls, spread his fingers across the back of her head and tipped it up. Slowly—because he wanted to give his body plenty of time to soak in the lesson to be learned here—he lowered his lips to Harper’s and claimed them in a sweet kiss.

Which instantly caught fire. Heat erupted where they’d joined, sensitizing him, claiming him. Harper flowed through him, waking up his blood.

And that’s when he realized his mistake—one kiss and all he’d proven was that he was not done. Not even close.

Dante was kissing her.

Shock opened Harper’s mouth without her permission and he took it as an invitation, swirling his tongue forward to find hers and oh, my God.

The sensations overwhelmed her and all she could do was cling to his shoulders. She’d meant to push him away. She didn’t do this, not with Dante, not with any man. And then she wasn’t pushing him away because wow.

The chemical reactions firing off inside her body were fascinating, amazing. Unprecedented. She wanted more. That was the most shocking thing of all because normally she avoided this sort of contact.

Her lips tingled as he reshaped them. Little pulls in her abdomen increased the urgency and she leaned into him, her hands drifting from his shoulders to his back. Hard. Strong. He felt good under her palms and she dipped lower, eliciting a groan from deep in his chest. It vibrated her own, teasing her breasts, and that’s when she realized their torsos were touching.

That sculpted chest was pressed up against hers. Dante was kissing her and she was kissing him. In the airport. Oh, God. This was all wrong. What was she doing?

She sprang back, wrenching away, and he followed for a half second until he realized she’d stopped. Hugging the wall behind her and legs shaking, she stared at the man who had been her best friend for a decade. “I’m sorry.”

His big brown eyes watched her from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, which sat slightly askew. Her fingers flexed to fix them automatically, as she’d done a hundred times. But she didn’t.

“For what? I’m the one who kissed you.”

Yes, he had. For God’s sake, why?

Some better questions were why she’d kissed him back. Why it hadn’t felt weird. Why her body felt like it had been twisted in a knot and dipped in a volcano. Why of all men, Dante had jump-started her sex drive.

The problem was, Harper knew exactly why. How was she supposed to explain that she’d completely overreacted due to an influx of hormones that her body didn’t know what to do with? That she’d hopped on a plane to share the most exciting news of her life with her friend?

Somehow, she hadn’t envisioned blurting out I’m pregnant in response to being kissed by the man she’d come to for support.

“I’m the one who didn’t stop you,” she said instead.

“No. You didn’t.”

When he didn’t ask how come she hadn’t, the swirl of uncertainty under her skin pulled the response from her throat anyway. “I was…curious. But please, don’t take that the wrong way.”

He already had, she could tell. Dante wasn’t inexperienced, not like she was, and he’d noted how much she’d liked kissing him. It was a surprise to her, too—she hadn’t been kissed in years and even then, it had been a horrible experience, never to be repeated.

This kiss…it had been the stuff of teenage dreams and an R-rated movie all rolled up in one. Because Dr. Harper Livingston’s body reacted to conception by suddenly craving the touch of a man. Apparently. What was she supposed to do with that—ask him to kiss her again?

“How could I possibly take that the wrong way?” he asked.

She was botching this and if she didn’t fix it, she’d lose everything important to her. “It can’t happen again. Dante, I need you. As a friend. Please don’t change anything.”

God, this was all backward. The results of the four positive pregnancy tests she’d taken that morning weren’t the only reason she’d hopped on a plane to LA. Her career had imploded over Fyra’s decision to develop a product that required FDA approval, and she really wished she’d known that snafu was coming before she’d visited a fertility clinic.

On the brink of both professional and personal disaster, she’d run to the one person who had always been there for her, who was one-hundred percent on her side…only to smack headlong into something she had no context for.

A foreign expression popped onto his face. “Harper. I wanted to kiss you. Surely you realize there’s something new happening between us—”

“No!” Her lungs hitched and somehow, a lone tear squeezed out before she could catch it. “Nothing new. I need everything to be exactly the same as it’s been. You’re so important to me. As a friend.”

Friends had each other’s backs. Friends were there through thick and thin and she needed the promise of knowing she had that in him. That he’d be the way she’d thought of him every day for the last ten years. Until this one. She’d responded so readily to his experimental kiss that he’d gotten the wrong message.

His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. She knew that look. He was about to argue with her and she could not do this right now.

With a strained smile, she touched his arm, like she’d done for years and years, before thinking better of it. “Let’s just forget about it for now. Would you mind getting my bags?”

Ever the gentleman despite the tense circumstances, Dante firmed his mouth and did as she asked, then ushered her into a sleek, red Ferrari. The silence laced with weirdness settled heavily in the car, nearly choking her, as they hurtled down the freeway toward his home in the Hollywood Hills. She scarcely enjoyed the unfolding LA scenery, but what could she say to get everything back to where it was supposed to be?

Dante rolled the Ferrari to a stop at a gated drive, then pointed a clicker at the black wrought-iron gate. It opened, allowing him to drive onto his lush, expansive property, where he parked on the circular drive in front of the sprawling Spanish villa. All without uttering a word.

Which lasted only until they cleared the doorstep. He dropped her bags on the Mexican tile under their feet in the spacious foyer and faced her, brows lowered. “We’ve been friends a long time. Why would that change just because we’re exploring what else might work between us?”

“Because I don’t want to do anything more,” she burst out. “All of this scares me.”

How could she get through the problems at Fyra, pregnancy, birth—good grief, the next eighteen years with a kid—if she didn’t have the friendship that had carried her through the last ten years?

“Come here.”

Before she could blink, he whirled her into a deep hug, the kind she’d welcomed so many times in the past, but it was different now as his strong body aligned with hers.

So different. The tease of his torso against hers set 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.”