Page 68 of Home Run

I debated leaving her, and while the couch looked super comfy, it wasn’t enough for a full night’s sleep. She barely stirred when I scooped her up and carried her through to her bedroom. I hadn’t been here since the day she’d moved in when I’d found her fully dressed in the bath. Just like the rest of the apartment, it looked completely different, and I discovered where all the books she couldn’t fit into the main room had gone.

“Thanks, Tan,” she mumbled as I placed her on the bed and pulled the comforter over her.

“No problem.”

What to Expect When You’re Expectingwas open on her nightstand. I probably should have got up and left her to sleep, but a large yawn had me sitting back on the bed andpropping myself up against one of the seven hundred pillows she kept on it.

“What are you doing?”

“Shh. Just reading,” I replied as she snuck under the crook of my arm. With my other hand, I reached around and placed it on her swollen belly. The bump seemed to have gotten bigger since this morning. “Says right here the baby can suck its thumb.”

“Mmm. That’s nice.”

I glanced down at her, eyes closed with her thick lashes resting on her cheeks. I don’t think I’d ever experienced my heart on the brink of bursting, but I hastened a guess that the tightness in my chest right now was close enough.

“Hey, Mills, you ready to admit you love me yet?”

“No,” she whispered, “but I like that you’re comfy to fall asleep on.”

Yeah, I’d take that.

For now.

FIFTEEN

MILLIE

This baby,I’d decided, was a scheming, cunning pain in my ass.

There’s no way I’d be thinking these thoughts on my own. The ones going around and around in my head.

It had been gradual over the past few weeks, but I could no longer deny it. Reliving my kiss with Tanner had evolved way beyond how his lips felt on mine.

I’d journeyed back to the beginning, the first kiss outside my dorm room, and everything that came after it. His hands stroking along my bare skin, his fingers easing inside me while his tongue teased between my thighs.

All of it.

It was driving me crazy, and not in the blaséI can ignore itway. In the way that I needed to do something about it before it got any worse.

The heat wasn’t helping either. Halloween was in thirty days. The weather was cooler, yet my internal temperature could rival a furnace. Hot had become my new normal, butthinking all my Tanner thoughts was only making me hotter.

If I were sensible, I would ease out ofmybed and away from the softly snoring baseball player whose arm had been wrapped around me most of the night, remove the pajamas I’d fallen asleep wearing, and get into a cold shower. But the baby seemed to have stripped me of all logical thought.

Even the times I’d woken up to pee, I’d returned straight back into Tanner’s warm embrace without thinking twice.

What’s more, I knew I’d just experienced the best night of sleep since I’d gotten pregnant. The sun was waking up later, therefore I was waking up later, but I didn’t need to look at the clock to know I’d not slept this late in a long time.

Usually when I woke, I was too starving and so depleted in energy I could barely make it into the kitchen. The baby screamed at me for sustenance in the form of the smoothie Tanner brought me, and if I didn’t get itstatI’d be close to waging war.

But I’d been awake over an hour now listening to Tanner’s breathing, yet I hadn’t had so much as a hunger pang.

I was perfectly content staring at his forearm draped across the comforter. I stopped short of tracing along the thick corded muscles and soft, light brown hair, over his long fingers and short-clipped nails. I’d never thought of forearms being sexy before, but this one was.

That’s right, an hour staring at a sexyarm. Told you I was going crazy.

It had to be the baby. There was no other explanation.

His grip was loose enough that I could probably turn without disturbing him. So many times I’d been tempted to do just that. Very tempted. I wanted to know what he looked like sleeping, without the smirk or his mouth open and ready to make his usual wisecrack.

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