But please, don’t take that the wrong way.”
He already had, she could tell. Dante wasn’t inexperienced, not like she was, and he’d noted how much she’d liked kissing him. It was a surprise to her, too—she hadn’t been kissed in years and even then, it had been a horrible experience, never to be repeated.
This kiss...it had been the stuff of teenage dreams and an R-rated movie all rolled up in one. Because Dr. Harper Livingston’s body reacted to conception by suddenly craving the touch of a man. Apparently. What was she supposed to do with that—ask him to kiss her again?
“How could I possibly take that the wrong way?” he asked.
She was botching this and if she didn’t fix it, she’d lose everything important to her. “It can’t happen again. Dante, I need you. As a friend. Please don’t change anything.”
God, this was all backward. The results of the four positive pregnancy tests she’d taken that morning weren’t the only reason she’d hopped on a plane to LA. Her career had imploded over Fyra’s decision to develop a product that required FDA approval, and she really wished she’d known that snafu was coming before she’d visited a fertility clinic.
On the brink of both professional and personal disaster, she’d run to the one person who had always been there for her, who was one-hundred percent on her side...only to smack headlong into something she had no context for.
A foreign expression popped onto his face. “Harper. I wanted to kiss you. Surely you realize there’s something new happening between us—”
“No!” Her lungs hitched and somehow, a lone tear squeezed out before she could catch it. “Nothing new. I need everything to be exactly the same as it’s been. You’re so important to me. As a friend.”
Friends had each other’s backs. Friends were there through thick and thin and she needed the promise of knowing she had that in him. That he’d be the way she’d thought of him every day for the last ten years. Until this one. She’d responded so readily to his experimental kiss that he’d gotten the wrong message.
His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. She knew that look. He was about to argue with her and she could not do this right now.
With a strained smile, she touched his arm, like she’d done for years and years, before thinking better of it. “Let’s just forget about it for now. Would you mind getting my bags?”
Ever the gentleman despite the tense circumstances, Dante firmed his mouth and did as she asked, then ushered her into a sleek, red Ferrari. The silence laced with weirdness settled heavily in the car, nearly choking her, as they hurtled down the freeway toward his home in the Hollywood Hills. She scarcely enjoyed the unfolding LA scenery, but what could she say to get everything back to where it was supposed to be?
Dante rolled the Ferrari to a stop at a gated drive, then pointed a clicker at the black wrought-iron gate. It opened, allowing him to drive onto his lush, expansive property, where he parked on the circular drive in front of the sprawling Spanish villa. All without uttering a word.
Which lasted only until they cleared the doorstep. He dropped her bags on the Mexican tile under their feet in the spacious foyer and faced her, brows lowered. “We’ve been friends a long time. Why would that change just because we’re exploring what else might work between us?”
“Because I don’t want to do anything more,” she burst out. “All of this scares me.”
How could she get through the problems at Fyra, pregnancy, birth—good grief, the next eighteen years with a kid—if she didn’t have the friendship that had carried her through the last ten years?
“Come here.”
Before she could blink, he whirled her into a deep hug, the kind she’d welcomed so many times in the past, but it was different now as his strong body aligned with hers.
So different. The tease of his torso against hers set off tingles in places that shouldn’t be tingling over Dante. She tore away, devastated that she couldn’t stay in the circle of his embrace, devastated that things had already changed without her consent.
Hurt sprang into his big brown eyes but he banked it and crossed his arms. “So now I can’t hug you?”
“Sure you can, if you drop twenty pounds of muscle,” she shot back before realizing how that sounded. Quickly, she amended, “I want things like they were before you turned into Dr. Sexy.”
And that wasn’t much better as explanations went. He’d been Dr. Sexy for a long time—what she really meant was before she’d become aware of it. But he had her all flustered.
A brief smile lifted his lips. “I thought you liked that side of me.”
She did. That was the problem.
Dante was one of the few friends she had left who was still the same as he’d always been—she’d thought. She didn’t make friends easily. Cass and Alex, two of the three women she’d built Fyra Cosmetics with, had moved on to new phases in their lives, marrying great men and starting families. Which was amazing, and she didn’t begrudge them their happiness. But Harper felt...left behind.
Which was why she’d decided to have a baby of her own. But minus the husband, who would expect things of Harper she couldn’t fathom giving. Intimacy. Control. A promise of everlasting romantic love that no one could guarantee because it was nothing more than a series of confusing chemical signals in the brain.
Men complicated everything.
“How many friends do I have, Dante? Should be easy for you to count them. No advanced degree required to get to four.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Cass. Alex. Trinity. You. Now imagine that two of those friends have recently gotten married and started families. Everything’s changing around me and I can’t stop it. I need you to stay the same.”
Because she was the one who had already changed things, the one who had gone off and gotten pregnant, and by default, Dante had to be the constant in this equation.
Understanding dawned in his eyes. “You’re scared of things changing.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what I just said.”
Instead of backing off, he leaned in and captured her arms, holding her in place. “You did. I’m just catching up. So it’s not that you mind the idea of me kissing you. You’re just scared of losing our relationship. But I don’t want to lose it, either.”
Those melty chocolate eyes speared hers, and all at once, she didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as if she held the secrets to his universe. Except he’d always looked at her like that and she’d explained it away as affection between friends. But now that he’d veered completely off the friendship track, it made her uncomfortably aware that he’d just had his mouth on her in a very non-friendly way.
“You’re practicing selective hearing.” She shook her head and tried to back up a step so she could breathe. And pick up her luggage, so she could...do something with it. “I do mind the idea of kissing. And everything that goes along with it. Or comes after it.”
“Everything?” he murmured and somehow she was still in his arms. “You mean sex?”
Heat leaped into his expression and that was so much worse than the melty eyes because her body flared to life at the promise of feeling the way it had when he’d kissed her. More. Now.
“Yes.” She squeezed her eyes shut, groaning. “I mean, no. No sex. Geez, what is this conversation we’re having? I came here to visit my friend. How did we start talking about sex?”
“You brought it up,” he reminded her needlessly. “I was just trying to clarify.”
“Sex is not a part of this conversation.”
“What if I want it to be?” he countered softly and his fingers slid up her arms to grasp her shoulders. “Your hearing is bordering