Vegas Baby

James sat up and moved next to me, sliding an arm around my waist. He was so warm, so strong against my side, I just wanted to melt into him and let all of my walls fall down. Why did I even have walls up? If anyone in the world had proved that I didn’t need them around it, it was James.

“So, you’re leaving at two today?” I murmured, unwilling to turn and look him in the face.

“Yeah. Gonna catch a plane then head home and handle everything that needs to be handled. I was able to get in contact with Trevor, and I arranged a meeting two weeks from now for us to get the final details of our divorced settled.”

“Oh, has it been three months already?” I asked, Legitimately surprised.

“It will just about be by then.”

“Huh… I had no idea. I guess a lot has happened since then.”

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”

We sat there for a long moment, and I urged myself to say something, anything. To tell him how I felt and stop being such a damn coward, but I just sat there, feeding my child and enjoying his company.

I guess some happy endings were never meant to happen. Goodness knows mine was pretty unrealistic as it were.

“Do you have to go?” I managed to eek out finally.

There was a long pause before he answered, giving me a small burst of hope, but then he was speaking again, and I just wanted to die. “Yeah. I have a lot of work that’s been piling up. I’ve managed to keep the worst of it taken care of, but I really need to get cracking. You know how it is.”

“I don’t,” I answered honestly. “But I know that you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t important.”

“That’s right. And remember, I’ll be back in just two weeks, and if any emergencies happen, let me know and I’ll be on the first flight out here.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I said, shoving down all of those feelings inside of me and willing myself to forget that I had ever had them.

After all, I had little Kireina to devote all of my heart to and that would have to be enough.

Chapter Forty

~James~

Never before had two weeks gone so slowly while also rushing by too fast to comprehend. As soon as I returned home, I hit the ground running, making arrangements for everything I needed and lining all my ducks up in a row.

And there were an awful lot of ducks that needed to be lined up. I found myself talking to lawyers, not just my own, coworkers and real estate agents day in and day out, trying to speed through something that normally took months in just fourteen days.

Often, I worked from seven am to nine pm, putting in fourteen hours and rarely leaving my desk even to eat. But when I did eventually go home to my penthouse -which seemed so gold and empty now compared to the warm stay I had with Nicole- everything was too quiet, and I was incredibly lonely.

Suddenly the Bachelor life just wasn’t that fulfilling. I wanted more. But soon I would be divorced, and I would be able to go back to the high flying, well-traveled, ways of my past

I snorted at that thought. There was no way I would ever be able to go back to that life. I had become attached to Nicole and Kireina in a way that I never thought possible, and no matter what happened in the coming days, we were tied together for the rest of our lives.

My phone buzzed right at nine thirty, as it had every night since I had arrived. I reached over like a flash and pulled it to my face, accepting the video call before I even drew a breath. And just like every other night, Nicole and a very sleepy Kireina were there waiting for me.

“Hello there!” Nicole said, picking up our baby’s hand to make her wave. “Look, my baby bean, it’s Daddy!”

Our gorgeous little girl looked somewhat towards the camera, her eyes sparkling at me. “Dear lord, has it really only been two weeks?” I asked. “She’s getting so big!”

“I know, right?!” Nicole said. “We just had our check-up today and she is almost up to weight of a healthy, fully baked baby.”

“Aw, nothing better than a fully baked baby!” I said, laughing genuinely. I didn’t know what had happened to my sense of humor, but I found anything and everything about our baby seemingly hilarious. Maybe it was a chemical thing in my brain, but I needed to cut it out or people were going to start to think that I was getting soft.

“So, you’ll be here tomorrow?” Nicole asked, looking at me with that same cautious expression that she had used all the way back in St. Louis. I still couldn’t quite decipher it; even after having a child together, some of her walls were still too high for me to vault.