The Pregnancy Project

“Hey, in case you’ve forgotten, scientists are not known for their six-packs,” he murmured and leaned in, eliminating the space between them. “I worked hard to put on muscle after spending so many years hunched over pages of equations. If someone wants to pay me to take my shirt off, I’m not going to say no.”

All this talk of shedding clothes had set off serious sparks. Did she feel them, too?

She blinked as she looked up at him, her smile slipping a touch. Her tongue darted out to drag across her lips and he followed it pointedly with his gaze, then shifted back to her eyes. The heat in her cheeks mirrored the flare in his gut as he let the moment drag out.

Would wonders never cease? She was feeling it.

Maybe she’d clued in that he was a hot property. Not that he’d let any of his press go to his head. But come on. Women flocked to him. Empirical evidence suggested there was something about his spiky brown hair, horn-rimmed glasses and fit body that they liked.

It was way past time to get his inconvenient attraction to Harper worked out. If he’d read her wrong, they’d laugh about it and go on. He’d prove there was nothing here other than a healthy appreciation for a great woman. The electricity in the atmosphere and the heightened sense of anticipation was nothing more than the product of his imagination.

Without taking his gaze from hers, he reached out and traced the line of her jaw. Not as a friend. Not companionably. But with intent.

“What are you doing?” she asked as a line appeared between her brows. “This isn’t... I mean—we’re not...”

“Haven’t you ever been curious?” he interjected smoothly. “About what it would be like between us?”

“Be like? What what would be like?” Her eyes widened as his meaning must have registered.

There was still time to backpedal if taking things up a notch ended up being the worst idea ever conceived, but that window of opportunity rapidly shrank the longer they stood here in this blanket of awareness.

“I’ve thought about it. A lot,” he continued, since she hadn’t pulled away and hadn’t fled in horror. “No time like the present to find out.”

Before logic could kick in and remind him of all the reasons this could go south, he sank his hands into Harper’s soft red curls, spread his fingers across the back of her head and tipped it up. Slowly—because he wanted to give his body plenty of time to soak in the lesson to be learned here—he lowered his lips to Harper’s and claimed them in a sweet kiss.

Which instantly caught fire. Heat erupted where they’d joined, sensitizing him, claiming him. Harper flowed through him, waking up his blood.

And that’s when he realized his mistake—one kiss and all he’d proven was that he was not done. Not even close.

* * *

Dante was kissing her.

Shock opened Harper’s mouth without her permission and he took it as an invitation, swirling his tongue forward to find hers and oh, my God.

The sensations overwhelmed her and all she could do was cling to his shoulders. She’d meant to push him away. She didn’t do this, not with Dante, not with any man. And then she wasn’t pushing him away because wow.

The chemical reactions firing off inside her body were fascinating, amazing. Unprecedented. She wanted more. That was the most shocking thing of all because normally she avoided this sort of contact.

Her lips tingled as he reshaped them. Little pulls in her abdomen increased the urgency and she leaned into him, her hands drifting from his shoulders to his back. Hard. Strong. He felt good under her palms and she dipped lower, eliciting a groan from deep in his chest. It vibrated her own, teasing her breasts, and that’s when she realized their torsos were touching.

That sculpted chest was pressed up against hers. Dante was kissing her and she was kissing him. In the airport. Oh, God. This was all wrong. What was she doing?

She sprang back, wrenching away, and he followed for a half second until he realized she’d stopped. Hugging the wall behind her and legs shaking, she stared at the man who had been her best friend for a decade. “I’m sorry.”

His big brown eyes watched her from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, which sat slightly askew. Her fingers flexed to fix them automatically, as she’d done a hundred times. But she didn’t.

“For what? I’m the one who kissed you.”

Yes, he had. For God’s sake, why?

Some better questions were why she’d kissed him back. Why it hadn’t felt weird. Why her body felt like it had been twisted in a knot and dipped in a volcano. Why of all men, Dante had jump-started her sex drive.

The problem was, Harper knew exactly why. How was she supposed to explain that she’d completely overreacted due to an influx of hormones that her body didn’t know what to do with? That she’d hopped on a plane to share the most exciting news of her life with her friend?

Somehow, she hadn’t envisioned blurting out I’m pregnant in response to being kissed by the man she’d come to for support.

“I’m the one who didn’t stop you,” she said instead.

“No. You didn’t.”

When he didn’t ask how come she hadn’t, the swirl of uncertainty under her skin pulled the response from her throat anyway. “I was...curious. 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.