Page 80 of Breakaway

“Jase?”

He looked up at Remi. “Yeah?”

“Are you okay? You seem…distracted.”

He forced a smile, his body tight and twitchy. “Yeah. Fine. Go on.”

He tried to listen, he really did, but his thoughts were all over the place and Remi was noticing.Fuck. He had to stop thinking about Brianne. He firmly pushed those thoughts aside and focused on Remi. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She looked around her. “I love this house. Butit’s true. Kyle and Jasmine are entitled to their share of the house. Even though I think they need this place to come home to. At least for a while.”

He nodded and drank some of the wine. Then the words just popped out of his mouth. “You know…you could move in with me.”

He couldn’t believe he was sitting there calmly, steadily looking at Remi, inviting her to move in with him, and his heart wasn’t racing, his gut wasn’t heaving, his neck and shoulders weren’t rock hard with tension.

He’d thought about it earlier and now the idea had slid into his head like a puck gliding into the net, and before he’d even had time to think about it, he’d said it. He wanted Remi to live with him.

She stared at him. “What?”

“You could move in with me.” He reached for her hand. “I want you to live with me.”

She moved her head slowly from side to side, pretty lips parted. “But we hardly know each other. We can’t move in together.”

“We know each other.” He stroked his thumb across the back of her hand. “I love you, Remi. I want to live with you.”

“Are you crazy?”

He remembered the last time they’d had a conversation like this and how heated and angry her question had been. This time her voice was soft, wondering. He grinned. “No, I mean it.”

“Wow.” She blinked at him. “That’s a pretty serious step for a guy who just wants to have fun.”

“It would be fun living with you. I know it.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Jase, there’s more to it than that.”

“I know. I actually thought of it this morning, how much easier everything would be if we lived together. Just think about it. Maybe this thing with Jasmine will blow over. There’s no rush. But you know…even if you don’t have to sell the house…think about it.”

She nodded, her eyes a little dazed. “Okay.”

“Let’s order pizza. I’m starving.”

It took Brianne a week.

She showed up at his apartment the next Saturday, grim-faced and pissed. “Here,” she said, shoving a paper into his hand. “Nine weeks. Now do you believe me?”

He stared down at the note on official medical stationery. It looked…real.

His stomach heaved, his mouthed filled with saliva and he swallowed repeatedly. He could not puke. He could not puke.

“And I brought this too,” she snapped, pulling a plastic baggie out of her purse. She handed it to him too. He looked at the plastic stick inside. “That’s the pregnancy test I took. For the third damn time.” Her lips tightened into a thin line. She glared at him.

He wiped his mouth. The silence stretched out, long and thick.

A million questions backed up in his brain. He closed his eyes.

Jesus. A baby. Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

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