had ever been with anyone else.
They held on to each other, panting, until she moved off his lap and sat back down on the passenger seat to pull on her panties and jeans. He tried to think of something to say that would lighten the mood and make her realize that having sex wasn’t that big of a deal.
Instead, he suddenly realized that something had gone wrong. Really wrong.
The condom had broken, a big gaping hole right in the middle of the latex.
And the reservoir tip was completely empty.
Sam couldn’t believe it. Dianna’s first time making love and the condom had busted. He wasn’t sure what was going on in her head right about now, but he had a feeling she wouldn’t be too thrilled to find out that she was wet with more than just her own arousal.
The station tested the men for VD every six months and he’d just gotten back his latest clean report, so he knew he wasn’t going to give her anything. And because she was a virgin—or had been a virgin until tonight, anyway—he knew he was safe.
What were the odds that she would get pregnant? Low, right? One of the older guys on the crew had been trying unsuccessfully to get his wife pregnant for months.
Before she could see the damage, he quickly removed the busted condom and shoved it into his pocket. Everything would be okay. There was no point in freaking her out for no reason.
That first incredibly hot date turned into another, then another, until all of Sam’s free nights when he wasn’t out on a mountain somewhere were spent with Dianna.
At first, they mostly made love, with small breaks to eat, but it didn’t take too long for him to want to be more than a physical part of her life.
He’d never felt the urge to learn much about the girls he was dating, never wanted to know what they liked to eat for breakfast, never cared about their dreams or aspirations. But even though he refused to look too far into the future, he couldn’t deny that the way he felt about Dianna was just plain different.
During the day she worked part-time at the downtown library along with taking business classes at the local junior college. He teased her about hiding such big brains behind such a knockout body, but he was incredibly proud of her. It wasn’t hard to guess why she pushed herself so hard, even though they’d never really talked about it: She didn’t want to end up like her mother, getting stuck in a trailer park with a baby at eighteen and no skills or money to fall back on.
And then, one night, he woke up and realized she wasn’t in bed. He found her sitting at his kitchen table poring over paperwork. At first he thought it was homework, but when he got close enough to read the small print, he realized they were state documents.
“Guardianship forms and instructions? What’s all this about?”
She’d been a virgin, so he knew she couldn’t have a kid stashed away somewhere.
Dianna rubbed a hand over her eyes. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
It was an off-the-cuff response, but somehow, in that moment, they both knew he meant far more than he’d originally intended. In the far back of Sam’s mind, a warning light began blinking, pictures of his parents’ crap-ass marriage flashing before his eyes. But it was easy to shut that door, to tell himself that he and Dianna were merely having a good time together, that they were miles away from ever getting married.
“I have a sister,” she finally said, explaining that her younger sister, April, had been sent away at four. “I won’t stop until I get April out of the foster system and home with me.”
Sam knew firsthand how important siblings were. The more your parents dropped the ball, the more you needed a brother or sister to hold things together. Connor was his real family. So he got that even though she hadn’t seen her sister in six years, April meant just as much to Dianna.
He joined the battle that night, wanting to help her try to push through the reams of bureaucratic red tape that stood in her way. And when all she heard from the state was, “You don’t have enough money or a job or a real home for your sister,” when they claimed April was better off in the foster system living with a “stable” family, he