The Pregnancy Plan / Hope's Child: The Pregnancy Plan / Hope's Child

He hadn’t seen her again before their high school reunion in the spring, hadn’t realized until then how much of a hole had been left in his life when he’d cut her out of it. But the worst part of seeing her again was realizing how much she still mattered to him, and learning that she was in love with and engaged to someone else.

He’d recognized that his feelings were more than a little hypocritical, considering that he’d already been married and divorced, but he just couldn’t imagine her with anyone else. He didn’t want to imagine her with anyone else.

Deciding to move back to Pinehurst when he knew she was planning a wedding to another man had been difficult. But in the end, he’d known it was what was best for his daughter. With Danica now living in London, there was no reason he had to stay in Seattle, and every reason to move closer to his family so that Madeline’s grandparents could be part of her life.

“Hurry up, Daddy.” Maddie’s voice called back to him, prompting his feet into motion.

“Sorry,” he apologized, when he caught up to them.

“What were you doing back there?” Ashley asked.

He shrugged the pack off of his shoulders, opened the zipper and pulled out the blanket they’d brought to spread out on the ground. “I thought I saw a … an owl.”

“An owl?” She lifted her brow.

“Owls are … noc-tur-nal,” Maddie said, carefully enunciating the word and looking to her teacher for confirmation. Ashley nodded.

“That means they sleep during the day and come out at night,” his daughter informed him.

He shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t an owl.”

“Owls eat mice and frogs and birds.” She made a face after reciting that fact, as if the idea was as distasteful as eating peas or Brussels sprouts—her least favorite vegetables.

“Speaking of food,” Cam said, beginning to unpack their lunch.

“I hope you didn’t bring mice and frogs and birds,” Ashley said.

Maddie giggled. “No, we made samiches.” She took a plate and balanced it on her lap. “What kind of samich do you want, Miss Ashley?”

“What are my choices?”

“Peanut butter, peanut butter and jam, or peanut butter and banana.”

Ashley mulled over the options, finally deciding, “Peanut butter and banana.”

Cam watched as Maddie carefully selected three pinwheel sandwiches from the plastic container and arranged them in a semicircle on the plate. Then she added two cookies—peanut butter, of course—and a small cluster of green grapes.

“That looks absolutely delicious,” Ashley said, accepting the plate.

Maddie beamed in appreciation of her praise, and Cam felt his heart swell. Until he’d started spending time with Maddie and Ashley together, he hadn’t realized how much his daughter needed a woman’s attention. She missed out on so much not having a mother involved in her life, and though his mother tried to spend as much time as possible with her granddaughter, it wasn’t the same thing.

Gayle had mentioned—several times in recent years—that he should think about getting married again, that he needed a wife as much as Maddie needed a mother. But even if he’d agreed with her assessment—and he was definitely on the fence about the wife part—none of the women he’d dated had tempted him to think any longer term than the next date. There certainly hadn’t been anyone whom he’d wanted to wake up beside every morning for the rest of his life, and there hadn’t been anyone who’d ever made his daughter smile as she was smiling at Ashley now.

Not that he was thinking in terms of marriage with Ashley. Definitely not.

And yet, he knew that if there was a woman who could tempt his thoughts in that direction, it was Maddie’s first-grade teacher. Yes, Ashley tempted him. But he knew it was going to take some time to figure out if he could still tempt her.

Tearing his thoughts back to the picnic, he noticed that Maddie had taken a second plate and was loading it up with all of her favorites.

“What about my lunch?” Cam asked, indicating the last empty plate.

“Ladies always get served first,” she informed him primly. “And you can get your own.”

Ashley’s cough sounded more like a laugh, and when he looked at her over his daughter’s head, he saw the amusement that danced in her eyes.

Those beautiful, sparkling violet eyes.

The same eyes that had haunted his dreams for years, and that continued to haunt his dreams now.

He held her gaze for a long moment, a moment that spun out between them, until there were no birds chirping in the trees, until there was no wind rustling through the leaves.

Until there was nothing but the two of them.

Until Maddie broke the silence by asking for juice.

Ashley blinked and looked away, and the moment was gone.

Something had happened between them at Eagle Point Park. Ashley wasn’t exactly sure what, except that something had changed. Until that moment, she’d managed to convince herself that the feelings she had for Cameron were only remnants of a long-ago attraction. And maybe there were still remnants of that attraction, but there were also new feelings stirring inside of her. Stronger and deeper feelings that she’d managed to ignore because they were only her feelings.

In the space of a heartbeat, with the heat of just one look, Cam decimated that belief. And the realization that there was still a connection between them, a simmering awareness that pulled at both of them, terrified her.

So when Maddie approached her desk at the end of the day on Monday, it was an effort to smile, to pretend that everything was the same. And then the child’s question shattered even that illusion.

“Are you dating my daddy?”

The marker Ashley had been using to prepare a math chart for the next day’s lesson slipped from her fingers.

She bent to retrieve it, wishing she could pick up an easy answer to the little girl’s inquiry at the same time. Instead, she responded with a question of her own. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“Because I told Victoria that we went on a picnic on Saturday and she said that you must be dating my daddy and maybe you would marry him and be my new mommy.”

She had worried that agreeing to go on a picnic with Cam and Maddie was a bad idea—she just hadn’t known how bad. And the desperate yearning in the little girl’s big green eyes nearly broke her heart.

Ashley carefully recapped the marker and set it aside so she could give Maddie her full attention.

“I’m not dating your daddy,” she said gently. “But he and I are old friends and you and I are new friends, and friends spend time together.”

The light in Maddie’s eyes dimmed. “So you’re not going to marry him?”

“No.” She swallowed. “I’m not going to marry him.”

“But if you’re friends, you must like him,” she insisted, with the unequivocal reasoning of a first grader. “And if you like him, then you should marry him.”

“Lots of people like one another without getting married.”

Maddie sighed. “But Grandma says that Daddy needs a wife who will make him happy and I need a mother who cares more about me than her career.”

Out of the mouths of babes, Ashley thought, and cautiously asked, “She said this to you?”