He laughed, the disappointment lifting and his mind barely able to grasp the fact that Naya was pregnant! She was pregnant! They were going to have a baby! Damn, he hadn’t thought life could get much better! “Which is why you’re in here, right?”
She shrugged, thinking about the room. “Or maybe I’m just in here so that I can influence the gender of the baby,” she whispered. “You know – because of all the estrogen in here.”
He was stunned for a long moment and then he threw back his head and laughed. Standing up, he lifted her into his arms. Just holding her because he needed to. “I love you, Naya Steele,” he said softly. “And this baby is going to be a boy, so he can join our soccer team.”
Naya laughed. The brothers were all eager to get the males organized onto a soccer team, even though some were only a year or two old. Soccer balls and soccer paraphernalia regularly showed up under Christmas trees and at birthday gatherings, even though the infants and toddlers had no idea what to do with the soccer balls.
“Girls can play soccer too,” she argued right back.
He chuckled. “Yeah, but so far, none of the ladies in my family have given us a girl. I’m just following the trend.”
Naya laughed, but she sobered as reality came rushing back to her. Pregnant! Goodness, she and Luke were going to have a baby! “I love you so much!” she whispered.
“I love you too.” He smiled, thinking about adding a room filled with male stuff that could counter the estrogen in this room.
Excerpt from “A Difficult Man to Love”
Book 1 of the Friends Forever Series
“What am I doing here?” she whispered as she stared out the floor to ceiling windows. The view was magnificent! She’d never seen Washington, D.C. from this height before. The headquarters to Chenko Industries wasn’t actually in Washington, D.C. but was right across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia. Hence the sky rise building and the amazing view. The buildings in Washington, D.C. weren’t very high. There was an old law limiting the height of buildings in the nation’s capital to be no higher than one hundred and ten feet. That law had been amended, but the buildings still couldn’t be very high. Hence, any tall buildings were constructed just outside the actual city limits in both Virginia and Maryland.
And there were very few plants, she thought.
Her eyes scanned the horizon, looking for green. There was the National Mall, which was a swath of grass going from the Capital building all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial with the Washington Monument right in the middle. The grass was lined with big, tall, beautiful trees but…
With a sigh, she turned away from the view. She was focusing on the wrong things. Finding patches of green amidst the sea of concrete structures was not going to help her figure out how to broach the subject of selling her land. Especially not after their last meeting. She’d been so adamant, so firm about not selling her family’s land and home to the man who had…well, he’d irritated her with his arrogance and…and his eyes. Yeah, his eyes had conveyed a completely different conversation.
Of course, that wasn’t the reason she’d refused to sell to him. It had only been why she’d been so rude.
Hayden pulled oxygen into her lungs, trying to get her head back in gear. It was just the thought of how tall he was that was making her feel like this. Shaky. Nervous. She wasn’t excited. Nope. She rejected the possibility that this this tingling sensation was excitement.
He was a challenge, she told herself. And Hayden always loved a challenge.
She looked like a pauper, Hayden thought. The borrowed clothes didn’t fit her properly and everyone could see that. Even the man’s assistant had looked down her nose at Hayden’s dress and shoes.
Ugh! There was nothing to be done about it though. She was a glorified farmer, just like her father and grandfather. She might have a degree in botany and know more of the technical details on how to grow things and she grew things that made a yard more beautiful instead of something one could put on a table, but in essence, she was still a farmer. Nothing more, nothing less.