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

“I just wanted to see you, to talk to you, without an audience.”

“Why?”

“For a lot of reasons,” he said. “But primarily because we’re living in the same town again, which means our paths are going to cross on occasion, and I don’t want things to be awkward between us.”

“Our paths are only crossing now because you showed up at my door.”

He helped himself to another slice of pizza. “Actually, my door is just down the street.”

She frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Number fifty-eight. The SOLD sign on the front lawn.”

The pizza in Ashley’s stomach suddenly felt like a ball of lead. “You bought that house?”

“The rent they were asking was astronomical,” he said, as if that was a perfectly logical response to her question.

“I can’t believe you bought it,” she said.

But what she was thinking was that she was completely unprepared to be neighbors with her ex-lover. It was one thing to accept that he’d returned to Pinehurst—it was a big enough town that she wasn’t likely to run into him at the grocery store very often—and quite another to know that he would be living just down the street and that she would have to pass by his house every single day on the way to and from her own.

“I thought you weren’t sure this was a permanent move, that’s why you wanted a one-year contract …” She let the words trail off, realizing she’d already said too much, admitted too much.

“You asked Elijah about me,” he guessed.

She shrugged, an implicit admission that she’d done just that after Paige had warned her of Cam’s impending return. “I was curious about the rumors that you were coming back. It’s not like he violated any doctor-patient privilege by confirming it was true.”

“Curious in a good way?” he asked her.

She lifted her hand to brush her hair away from her face, winced. “Just curious.”

Cam frowned at the expression of discomfort. “Are you still experiencing pain?”

“A little.”

“You shouldn’t have any with the meds I prescribed.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You did take the medication, didn’t you?” he prompted.

“No,” she admitted.

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t like taking anything stronger than over-the-counter drugs.”

“Honey, you didn’t come into the office because you had a headache, you had fifteen stitches put in your hand.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “And don’t call me ‘honey.’”

“You didn’t object to Irene calling you ‘hon,’” he pointed out.

She didn’t say anything.

“Or was that okay because she hasn’t seen you naked?”

Ashley blushed at the reminder that he had seen her naked, as he knew she would, but tilted her chin. “Actually, Irene has seen me naked.”

He lifted his brows.

“But not since I was in diapers,” she admitted, and gave him a small smile.

She’d always been beautiful. But when she smiled, when the light of humor sparked in the depths of her violet eyes and those soft pink lips curved, she was absolutely radiant.

Sitting across the table from her now, looking at her over a pizza box, he wondered how he’d ever settled for anything less, how he’d ever believed that his feelings for anyone else could compare to the emotion that filled his heart when he was with Ashley.

His gaze locked with hers, held. And suddenly the air was sizzling with the attraction that had always sparked between them.

“Did you have those five freckles at the base of your spine when you were in diapers?” he asked.

He could tell by the darkening of her eyes that mention of those freckles had stirred memories for her, too.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

“Do you still have them?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

Obviously the ex-fiancé had never kissed each and every one of those freckles, as Cam used to do. But he wasn’t going to mention the other man’s name again. He didn’t even want to think about her being with anyone else. He wanted—

The scrape of chair legs against the floor tiles severed his thought as Ashley pushed her chair away from the table. Which was probably for the best, because he had no business thinking about what he wanted to do with Ashley when so much of his life was still unsettled.

“I should, uh, clear this up,” she said.

He carried the plates into the kitchen for her, and pulled out the waste basket to scrape them before loading the dishwasher. But he paused when he saw what was in the receptacle.

“I’m guessing this is the eleven-by-fourteen,” he said.

“What?” She turned around, saw that he’d found the broken picture frame. “Oh. Yeah. It is.”

“It’s a good picture of you,” he said. “You look happy.”

She shrugged. “I was.”

And the man in the photo with her looked happy, too. Of course, he had Ashley in his arms, so he had reason to be happy. Which made Cam realize her former fiancé wasn’t just a bastard, he was an idiot. He’d been poised to start a life with this beautiful, vibrant woman, and he’d thrown it away.

Okay, so maybe he was being a little bit hypocritical. Because twelve years earlier, Ashley had wanted to talk about their future and he’d let her go. But he’d barely been nineteen years old, too young to be thinking in terms of “till death do us part” and too stupid to know what he was giving up.