The Moment of Truth

She turned away as if she didn’t believe him. He’d been on nude beaches enough times to know what he was talking about. But he didn’t think she was ready for that much honesty from him at the moment.

Her face turned back to him, and when he read the turmoil in Dana’s eyes, he wanted to take her into his arms and kiss her until she was breathless.

“Can you wait just a second?” she asked him.

“Of course. It’s not like the pub takes reservations.”

“Or needs them on a Tuesday night.” She was herself again, giving him that sassy tone of voice. As long as he had the real Dana back, Josh was willing to wait for as long as she needed.

His mother would be shocked.

* * *

“WHAT?” DANA HAD BEEN about to put a carrot stick into her mouth and stopped. Josh was staring at her rather than eating.

Maybe this would be the moment. Before dinner, not after like she’d been thinking.

He’d ordered a beer. She had cranberry juice. Until she talked with an obstetrician, she wasn’t even going to drink diet soda, let alone the occasional glass of wine she’d read was permissible.

“I’m just so glad you changed. I’m not kidding, Dana, you’re so much more beautiful this way.”

The sincerity in his eyes was hard to miss, even for a disbeliever like her. He must really have it bad for her.

“I’ve been with a lot of women,” he continued. “Women who spend more on their hair, nails and clothes than I’ve budgeted for my monthly living expenses.”

Thinking about her sisters, she smirked and nodded.

“And you really have them topped.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” she said with a chuckle, but she understood him being perplexed. She was, too. They’d only known each other such a short time and yet it—them together—seemed so right.

Natural.

Or it would be as soon as he gave her the ring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“SO, YOU SEE, if you look at the facts, the best option for both us and the baby is for me to buy that house and for both of us to move before next month’s bills are due. Sooner for you, if you can sublet now, because that’s more income that will just be added to our monthly overage for extra breathing room.”

Dana studied his sheets. The amount of work he’d done in such a short amount of time, including a column for “profit sharing,” giving her a percentage of the money he saved by paying for one household instead of two, was mind-boggling. He’d already opened an investment account for the baby. Not a savings account, an investment account.

At the moment it only had five hundred dollars in it, but he’d shown why he was putting the money where he was and how it was going to grow. And she understood why Montford had promoted him his first week on the job.

“I have a question for you,” she said, sitting next to Josh in the booth rather than across from him as she had over dinner, so that they could both look at his charts together.

“Sure.”

His tone was confident. Obviously the man was in his element. Even with her own business success, she was kind of intimidated. She told him about the money she had in her savings. “Can you help me do this—” she pointed to the baby’s investment page “—with it?”

“Better yet, I can teach you how to do it,” he said. “You already understand the basics. We can follow the market together, play around with it a little bit, and you’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

“Is that how you learned?” Their faces were only inches apart, and her stomach turned over. In a good way.

“I took a certain amount of money that could be lost without undue hardship and played the market,” he said.

“How’d you do?”

“I got lucky.”

She wasn’t surprised. In spite of his need to come up with a budget to afford his plans for their family, Josh reminded her of someone who’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He just had that air about him.

Motioning toward the spreadsheets before them he asked, “So, what do you think?”

“I think it all looks good,” she said. He’d figured out a way for her to be able to afford to choose new furniture for the nursery. She’d been envisioning spending many spring days frequenting garage sales, hoping to score baby paraphernalia in good shape.

“Oh, one more thing,” he said, putting another sheet in front of her. “Ian turned me on to this handyman guy who says he can build kennels in the back corner of that yard and have them climate controlled, so if you want to you can expand on Love To Go Around, you know, beyond what Zack and the clinic do—or in partnership with them—and have a place to house many more dogs. You could have potential families come to you rather than you taking dogs to them.”