Entangled (The Accidental Billionaires #2) - J. S. Scott Page 0,24
pregnant with someone else’s child. I think I was more relaxed being alone. I was nervous, anyway. I had no idea how to take care of a baby.”
“The nurses helped?”
“A lot,” I acknowledged. “They taught me all of the routine stuff, and once I got home with Maya, I got over worrying about hurting her if I did even the slightest thing wrong. But I was still a young first-time mother. I guess some fears never go away. I still get concerned over every cold or case of sniffles she gets.”
“I’m sorry you went through all that alone,” he said hoarsely.
“I lived through it,” I replied. “Oh, this is her first birthday.” I pointed to a picture on the next page.
“God, she looks so much like Brooke when she was little,” he said as he reached out and touched the edge of the picture.
“She looks like you,” I said softly.
“I guess she does,” he said in an awed tone.
“I’m sorry you missed all those years.”
“I’ll make it up to her. To be honest, I’m sure I probably would have lost it when she was a baby. I would have been even more freaked out than you were. I don’t really remember my younger siblings being babies. Mom was still around back then.”
I flipped the page once Aiden had glanced at all the visible photos. “They’re so small that it’s pretty intimidating. But it seems like she’s growing up way too fast now.”
I kept explaining all the pictures he was seeing, and we sat like that for a long time, just looking at Maya’s childhood images.
Finally, I got to the end of the book. “I have some others that I haven’t had time to put into an album yet.”
Aiden took the pictures and put them on the coffee table as he said, “All this was hard on you, Skye. I can understand that now. You were way too young to be alone, much less alone with a baby.”
“I wouldn’t trade what happened for the world,” I assured him. “I love Maya, and I can’t imagine not having her in my life.”
He looked frustrated as he answered, “If I had only gotten that letter. I would have been there.”
I put a hand lightly on his forearm. “I know.”
And honestly, I did know that now. Seeing my daughter with her father made me recognize just how serious Aiden was about family, and how readily he’d always taken on whatever responsibility he felt he needed to shoulder.
If he’d known, he would have been there. I’d just been too disappointed and hurt to realize it when I’d been eighteen.
I glanced at the clock. “I have to go. I need to go close up at the café.”
He looked at me, his expression confused. “Now? It’s late.”
“I always close. All of my staff is part time. Most of them are college students. I don’t have anybody who knows how to close things down.”
“You can’t be there alone,” he said stubbornly. “It’s late, and it’s not safe.”
I stood up. “Aiden, this is Citrus Beach. And it’s not tourist season. It’s pretty quiet after dark.”
He rose. “It’s a big-enough city to have our share of crime.”
He was right. Citrus Beach was growing, and bad things did happen here occasionally. Honestly, I didn’t love being in the café at night after all the employees had departed. There was money to count, and accounting to do. So it made me uneasy. But I’d kind of gotten used to it.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him.
“You’ll be great, because I’m coming with you,” he stated stubbornly. “And tomorrow we’ll look at hiring you a manager. You said you wanted the restaurant to be more. So make it more, but don’t plan on ever being alone there again at night. It’s not safe.”
I wanted to say something. I really did. But the fact that he was actually concerned about me kind of overrode my indignation about him telling me what I could and couldn’t do.
Nobody had ever cared whether I was safe or not.
And the warmth that flooded my body because someone cared felt so damn good.
“You don’t need to go,” I argued weakly.
He swiped his keys from the end table. “I’m going,” he said in a voice that said he wasn’t compromising. “And you better start thinking about what you want the café to be. Maybe we could just close it down while it’s getting remodeled rather than hire right now.”