it out.”
“I’m not going to end up like you,” Wren said. “I... I can’t say that I hate him anymore, but I also don’t really want to marry him.”
She imagined the bleakness that had been on his face that last time they were together. She had cared about that. About the pain he was experiencing.
“He is hurting,” Wren said. “I just don’t really know why.”
“That’s what you have to find out.”
“I don’t know how to talk to him. Every time we do talk, it... Well, it’s exactly what just happened—we fight. Or we have sex. Fighting or sex. Those are the two options.”
“Would either one be so bad in this situation?”
“I probably shouldn’t have sex with him again.”
“Honey, the horse has bolted from the barn, and is in the pasture with the stallion, and is already knocked up.”
“I meant emotionally, for emotional reasons.”
“Right, right,” Emerson said, waving her hand.
“You still think I should have sex with him?”
“You seem to want to. And it sure makes men act nicer,” Emerson said. “Anyway. As established, I make bad decisions on that score.” An impish grin crossed her face. “But I don’t regret them.”
“I don’t know if I regret this. I don’t know what I regret.”
Wren wanted the baby. She was sure of that. It was all the other things she couldn’t quite figure out, including how she felt about Creed. That she couldn’t quite navigate.
But if Emerson was right, if there was a thorn in Creed’s paw, so to speak, then Wren was going to have to approach him differently.
She might not know all she needed to know about him, but she knew him well enough to know she was going to have to come in with a plan. A counteroffer. He wasn’t simply going to accept her no. She was going to have to come up with an arrangement that would make him happy.
And in order to do that, she was going to have to identify that thorn.
And she couldn’t identify the thorn without talking to him.
That was the problem.
She didn’t especially know how to talk to Creed.
She knew how to fight with him. She knew how to fuck him.
She wasn’t sure she knew how to do anything else.
But they were going to have to figure it out.
For the sake of the baby, if for nothing else.
She realized that for the first time in a very long time, her thoughts weren’t consumed with the winery. The winery was something she loved, but not something she had built with her own hands.
She found herself suddenly much more concerned with her life, her future.
And even in the midst of all the turmoil, that was an interesting development indeed.
Seven
Creed knew he had basically lost his mind earlier, but he didn’t regret it.
In fact, he was making plans to call his lawyer. He was going to do whatever he had to do to get his way. That was when Wren showed up on his doorstep.
She looked strange. Because she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and she looked smaller somehow, and yet resolute.
It was the resoluteness that concerned him.
“I’m sorry I left things the way they were earlier,” she said, breezing into his house without an invitation.
She wandered into his living room, sat on his couch.
When she had come before, she had been in his bedroom, his bathroom and his kitchen for a cup of coffee before she had run out in the early hours of the morning.
Not his living room. But there she was, sitting on the couch like a satisfied, domesticated feline. Except he had the feeling that nothing about Wren was particularly domestic.
“What exactly are you here for?”
“Not to agree to your demands. Sorry. But it’s ridiculous to think that we have to get married just because we’re having a baby.”
“Is it?”
“It is to me. I’m pretty much one hundred percent not here for it.”
“That’s a shame. Because I’m one hundred percent...” He frowned. “Here for it? What the hell does that even mean?”
“Why?”
She was glaring at him with jewel-bright eyes, and it was the determination there that worried him.
“What do you mean ‘why’? I told you earlier. It’s because I’m not going to take a back seat to raising my child.”
“Why? I mean, you don’t even know the kid.”
“Neither do you, and you’re sure that you want it.”
“Sure. But I’m...you know, carrying it. I sense the miracle of life and whatever,” she said, some of the wind taken out of her sails.
“No, if you can be certain then I can be