Heart Like Mine A Novel - By Amy Hatvany Page 0,19
walked me to my door and kissed me softly on the lips. The clean but heady musk of his skin dizzied my senses and turned my joints to mush. “Can I see you again?” he whispered, and I nodded eagerly, thrilled by our immediate, easy sense of connection.
After a few weeks, I slept over for the first time at his house. I woke up to the smell of coffee and bacon in the air, my body pleasurably achy from the night before. Hat trick. No doubt. Mental, emotional, and physical. And he cooks! When I opened my eyes, he stood over me with a grin on his handsome face. His dark hair was pressed flat on one side, and his gray eyes twinkled, giving him the look of a mischievous little boy who’d just successfully sneaked several cookies from the jar. “Damn,” he said. “You’re even beautiful when you wake up.”
I crossed my eyes at him and stuck out my tongue, and he laughed. “Let me start the shower for you.” He paused. “Or do you want coffee, first?”
“Coffee always comes first,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows and smiling at him.
“Duly noted,” he said, pretending to pull a pencil from behind his ear and write on an invisible notepad.
My smile widened at his silliness, and I felt that incredibly rare emotional spark in my belly. The spark that said, Oh wow . . . this one’s a keeper. I’d dated my fair share of men over the years, but things tended to end after a certain point, and I suspected it might have something to do with my focus on my career rather than getting married and having children. I found that most men who weren’t anxious to be fathers weren’t anxious for a long-term, committed relationship, either. There might have been exceptions, but I didn’t meet many. This left me with a limited eligible pool of partners from which to choose. Victor appeared to genuinely respect my lifestyle, but I didn’t know how to trust that he wouldn’t end up expecting me to change somehow, too.
“What if he decides he really wants us to have a baby?” I asked Melody not long after I’d spent the night with him. She and I were working together at the Second Chances thrift shop, standing in the back room, sorting through boxes of donated clothes.
“He already told you he doesn’t want any more kids,” Melody said. “You’re such a scaredy-cat.”
“I’m not scared!” I protested as I pulled out a lovely blue Calvin Klein blouse and laid it carefully on the “keep” pile. These were the clothes in good enough condition that women in the program could pick them out and wear them to job interviews. The “sell” pile consisted of more casual outfits and would be steam-cleaned, then priced to sell in the shop.
“Oh please,” Melody said. “You’re totally scared.” I looked at her fondly. She was tall and thin with long, honey-blond hair, brown eyes, and a wide, easy smile. Clad in black leggings and a sage linen tunic, her body moved with a lithe ease as she worked. She also knew me better than anyone—maybe even better than I knew myself. We’d met in our midtwenties when she had just graduated from massage school. In order to make ends meet while she built up a client list, she temped at the same advertising firm where I worked as a recruiter. One afternoon, we ended up sharing a table at a coffee shop near the office and immediately clicked over a mutual fondness for white chocolate mochas and the cute barista behind the counter.
“What do you think?” she had asked me as we sat down together, nodding toward the hunky employee and lifting a single suggestive eyebrow. “Does he look like a single- or double-shot kind of guy?” A decade and countless mochas later, she was my closest friend.
I sighed as I looked away from her in the back room of the thrift store, reaching to pull another handful of clothes out of the box next to me. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” she said with an impish smirk. “You’ve got this quiet, orderly life, and inviting in an emotionally available man like Victor, who has two possibly noisy children in his, is totally freaking you out.” She paused, taking a moment to shake out the floral skirt she was in the process of putting on a hanger. “Come on. What are you really afraid of? Being