Southern Seducer (North Carolina Highlands 1)

Sipping her coffee, she arches a brow. “Is it the greasy hair? Or no. My gremlin.” She somehow manages to pull back her robe with the hand holding Maisie to expose her hip. She wiggles her pelvis, making the gremlin dance. “A work of art, right?”

I laugh, and goddamn if I don’t feel the prick of happy tears in my eyes.

I want to wake up with Annabel every day. I want to see her eyes light up when she sees me, the way she never lit up for her ex.

I want to stop running. Forfeiting.

I want to stay and fight. I want to be the man who lights her up every day. Who earns every smile because she’s so damn happy with me.

But how the fuck can I do that knowing what I do? Being the man I am?

“Here, I’ll take her. You drink your coffee,” I say, taking Maisie into my arms. It’s a total shithead move, using the baby as a shield.

But I need some kind of armor right now. Because somewhere along the way, I lost mine.

Annabel grabs a seat at the island. She holds her mug in both hands and brings it to her lips, tipping it back. She closes her eyes as she takes a sip.

She moans.

“Mouth orgasm,” she explains, eyes still closed. “Coffee that’s still hot. Thank you so much, Beau. PS. What the hell is that delicious smell coming from the oven?”

Maisie grabs my beard and gives it a vicious tug. I yelp. Bel’s eyes fly open, but I wave her away, untangling the baby’s tiny claw from my face.

“Bread pudding. Samuel gave me the recipe. Dessert for breakfast seemed like the right way to start the day after all that exercise we got last night.”

Bel’s brow furrows, and she whimpers. “Seriously. How the hell am I going to go back to normal life after living like this?”

You don’t have to.

The answer pops into my head. It must pop into Bel’s, too, because suddenly she’s very interested in draining her coffee mug.

Twisting to face the oven, I flip on the oven light.

“Look what Uncle Beau’s got baking.” I give Maisie a little wiggle, and she looks at me. When I smile, she smiles, too. “Can you see inside there?”

I attempt to bend down enough so the baby can see inside the window on the oven door. My knees crack—of course—and my back lets out a silent yelp as I pop into an awkward half-squat thing.

I groan. Maisie giggles, pounding her little palm on the door. I grab it and wrap it in my own, giving it a quick kiss.

“Careful. That’s hot.”

My back is screaming now.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” I say, grabbing onto the oven door handle to hoist myself back up. “Uncle Beau is an old man.”

Bel moseys on over to us, smiling up at the baby. “Like she cares. Look at her, Beau. She adores you.”

“Is that right?” I hoist her above my head and airplane her around the kitchen. She goes wild, letting out this grunting giggle thing that is so scrumptious I have to laugh.

“It’s not always easy to make her happy. But when she’s in the right mood, it’s very easy to make her smile.” Bel looks at me and grins. “Kinda lightens the mood, doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

I mean that. I’d forgotten what having a baby around is like.

It’s nice.

“Reminds me of our house growing up,” I say. “There was always a baby crying, but then there was always a baby giggling, too. Probably because the giggling baby beat up the crying one.”

Annabel laughs and rests her head on my shoulder. Like we’ve been at this forever, the two and a half of us playing house.

“Sounds about right,” she says.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Annabel

I don’t know how he manages it.

But each day I spend with Beau gets better and better.

I thought our bonfire dancing session was peak life. You know, those moments when you’re flooded by that feeling of wholeness Beau and I talked about.

Then he saved me from single-mom dinner hell, and the bar was set higher.

The afternoon cooking lesson, even higher.

But this? Waking up with my best friend in my bed, drinking coffee with him while he loves up on my baby, working my way through my second helping of the most delicious blackberry bread pudding on earth?

It’s only downhill from here, because this is heaven.

And maybe it feels that way because I know it’s ending. There’s a bittersweetness to it.

I try to focus on the sweet parts. The tasty, weapons-grade coffee. The friendship that’s fast forming between Maisie and Beau.

The steady beat between my thighs. I’m sore, but that isn’t stopping me from wanting a repeat of last night’s amazing sex.

But the bitter, it’s there. I want to accept it with grace, like the good, rational adult I am, but it’s hard. Because if I could just get Beau to change his mind—if I could just make him see—