I recognized that the idea was a little bit absurd. Okay, really absurd. I recognized that I was still perhaps reeling from the events of a year ago, more caught up in something that would never happen again—a crazy man trying to kill me like Sean had—than I was in reality.
But I also recognized that it was one thing for those feelings to last a month or so after I’d left Colorado. It was another entirely for them to still be lingering at this point in the game. I’d thought long and hard about this. Adoption just doesn’t feel right for me. I think a sperm donor feels like the best option but I also want to know who the father is.
“You’re not going to say who?” Kelly said, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“I’m keeping this one close to the vest,” I said with a smirk. “I’d like for it to be kind of a surprise.”
“Just don’t surprise me and tell me it’s someone named Trent or Liam.”
I laughed out loud. Liam was hot, but the idea of stealing Kelly’s guy was downright laughable. I loved Kelly, I would never.
But her words did give me the in I needed to start to make something happen.
“No, but speaking of Liam—at some point, can you ask him to give me Burke’s contact info? I need to thank him for what he did a year ago, have never gotten a chance.”
Kelly’s face soured immediately. A part of me worried that she’d already made the connection.
“You know how those guys are with wanting to be contacted—or I should say, not at all,” Kelly said.
That, I was all too familiar with. Liam had felt like the friendliest of all, the one most easily contacted, and it was still an enormous struggle to reach out to him at times.
“I know, and I’m not going to ask him on a date or something. I just want the opportunity to have a thank you call or to write him a note. I mean, for goodness’ sakes, Kelly, he saved our lives! From Sean! It doesn’t get much bigger than that.”
Kelly sighed. I could imagine Liam being annoyed at her request, if not outright suspicious. But if Kelly didn’t know my motivations, how would Liam?
“You’re lucky you’re my best friend, Emily. I’m not sure there’s anyone else I’d even consider, let alone asking. Liam is going to give me a lot of hell for this.”
“So just fuck him nice and all will be good.”
“Emily!”
I took a sip of my margarita, acting like I was too cool to be unsettled by a blunt statement like that.
“Sorry, girl, alcohol makes this girl a bit loose-lipped!”
That was true, but it obviously wasn’t the reason I’d said what I had.
“I just have this terribly awkward vision of us being out on a double-date of sorts, and it would be so uncomfortable,” Kelly said, coming dangerously close to my ideal truth. “I don’t know Burke that well, but I know Liam is always tight-lipped about anything that goes on with his work, so—”
“So just make this one request and I’ll be done with it, and—”
My phone rang. I looked down at it and groaned.
“Mom?”
“Who else?” I said, rolling my eyes.
My mother could not have been more different from me if someone wrote down polar opposite personality traits on a piece of paper. She lived in the chilly frost of New York, which seemed only all too appropriate. I lived in the warmth of Miami. She believed in a traditional family and always wondered why I hadn’t gotten married within a couple of years after graduating college. Even with my recent interest in having a child and a family, I was never one to do things the traditional way.
And, in fact, seeing her name pop up on my phone cemented my desire to do what I was planning to do even more. Consequences be damned, I was going to have a child—even if it happened without the whole naked fun times part.
“I’ll call her later,” I said. “But Kelly, seriously, anything you can do to get Burke’s contact information. It can be a P.O. box that leads to five or six reroutes, I don’t care. Just…do it for me, OK? Think of it as your gift to me for me finally escaping Sean.”
“Oh, right, I should give you a gift for bringing him to Colorado.”
I smiled. It was nice to know we were so far past that that we could laugh about it. Considering how dramatic and terrifying that whole sequence had been, that was not a given by any stretch of the imagination.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not going to make any promises,” she warned. “Liam and I may be very happy together, but we both try very hard not to poke into parts of the other person’s life we don’t belong in. I can’t go poking too hard into whatever he and Burke and anyone else have going on.”
“I know, girl, I’m not asking you to marry us, just for you to let me thank him.”
Kelly finally took a decent-sized gulp of her drink.
“I’m not even sure he’s the kind of guy who’d want to be thanked,” she said. “Whenever I’d ask Liam about his coworkers, he always said Burke was the most dom of the doms, the kind of guy who just wanted to do his job and drive exotic cars. Whatever that meant.”
Noted.
“Sounds naughty.”
Kelly chuckled. She may have become blunter and biting in her language, but I still
