Floored - Karla Sorensen Page 0,32

gotten similar treatment.

Which was a sad thing, because carbs were my jam in pregnancy.

I sat back and gave him an appraising look. "I feel okay. Morning sickness tends to hit me in the afternoon, but it's only happened a couple of times. When it did, I kinda thought maybe I hadn't eaten enough or wasn't drinking enough water."

He nodded.

The owner of the cafe ducked under the counter and swept away some of the trash from our table. "Will you loves be needing anything else?"

"I'm fine, thank you," I said, smiling up at her.

"Thanks, Sheila," Jude told her. "Maybe just a bit of privacy while we chat, if you don't mind."

He slid her some cash, and she patted him gently on the shoulder before dashing off to flip the closed sign on the door. "I'm just going to pop over to the market for a few things. Be back in a tick."

As she slid out of the door and jogged down the steps, I watched her tuck the cash Jude had given her into the cup of a vagrant sleeping curled around his dog at the end of the block.

"She's nice."

Jude nodded. "She gave my brother, Lewis, his first kitchen job years ago."

"Is that your only sibling?" I thought of the picture in the flat, the man who looked so much like Jude.

"It is. The pub where we met, I helped him buy it after I started playing. He wanted a place to call his own."

My eyebrows popped up. "That's a generous gift."

Jude shot me a rueful smile, showing just the slightest hint of a dimple in his scruff-covered jaw. "It was. We grew up on a sheep farm, actually. And neither of us particularly warmed to that life, so I thought I'd help him take a different path." He took a sip of his tea. "What about you? Brothers or sisters?" At my immediate, wide smile, Jude laughed. "Is that a loaded question?"

"No. Well, maybe." I set my chin on my hand and took a deep breath. "Claire is my twin sister. Isabel is two years older than us. Molly is two years older than Isabel. Logan, who is actually my half-brother, is the one who raised us from the time I was ten. And his son Emmett, with his wife Paige, is technically my nephew, but he also feels like my brother, because I'm closer in age to him than I am to Logan."

Jude's jaw was all but unhinged by the time I finished. "That's not a family, that's a bloody army."

I laughed. "It's ... chaos. I love it."

"Do they know?" he asked quietly.

The laughter dried up in my throat, an ache welling immediately behind my chest, like he'd turned on a faucet with his words. "Just Claire. I wanted to talk to you first."

"I'm so sorry I reacted the way I did, Lia." He leaned forward and pinned me with those green eyes. So green that I felt that same swirly feeling in my belly that I did when I met him. When he started kissing me in his kitchen before his stupid mouth and my stupid temper ruined the moment. "It's not an excuse, but it was one of those moments where—because I'd never even given it much thought, having kids, you know—my reaction caught even me off guard. If that makes sense," he added.

"It does. I think I suffered from the same problem." I covered my hot cheeks. "I've never told anyone to get fucked in my entire life."

He laughed, a large, booming sound born from somewhere deep in his broad chest. Oh, that sound set off a series of sparks that should have worried me. Lack of chemistry was not our problem.

It was part of why I reacted the way I did in his kitchen, I came to realize later. The flame between us had simmered the entire time I was separate from Jude. All it took was being in the same room, and my skin went incendiary. It's a terribly helpless feeling, if you think about it. When someone has the power to make you feel that way simply by existing, it's deeply unsettling at first. And my reaction to it—that tidal wave crashing over my head—was to draw my weapons as quickly as he'd drawn his.

He folded his big hands on the table. "What do you want to do next, Lia? Where can I help?"

What I wanted to do next was ask him not to say my name like that, all British and