Free A Little Bit of Déjà Vu by Laurie Kellogg

I’ll pay for outright. That should give them some incentive, don’t you think?”
    She set her iced tea on the coaster. “I’ve put money away for Em’s education from Dan’s life insurance. The airline took good care of us.”
    “Look, Maggie, if my son marries Emma, her schooling should be his responsibility.” Hell, for a few awful moments earlier that evening, Jake had thought she could be his daughter. “I guess Em got her gray eyes and dark hair from her dad, huh?”
    Maggie squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. “You may not remember him, but you met Dan.  He was the copilot on the flight we took back to San Francisco. He recognized you from the Sports Illustrated cover the week you were chosen as the NFL’s first draft pick and asked you for your autograph for his neighbor’s son.”
    Reaching back into his memory, Jake winced inwardly at a renewed stab of jealousy. He’d hated the way the good-looking copilot had teased and flirted with Maggie and how she’d smiled at the lecher.
    She shifted next to him on the sofa. “Do you remember him?”
    “Vaguely,” he lied, propping a foot on the coffee table. “How’d you hook up with him?”
    “After the way my mother treated me, I couldn’t take living with her. So as soon as I graduated, I left home and ran into Dan again at the airport.”
    Perhaps the sparks Jake had detected between her and Bradford had succeeded where his arguments had failed to convince her she’d misinterpreted lust for love. If she’d been that attracted to the man, her feelings for Jake couldn’t have been all that deep.
    Her speedy marriage proved she hadn’t aborted Jake’s baby because she hadn’t been ready for marriage and a family. She simply hadn’t wanted to marry him .
    “You two must’ve gotten serious pretty fast to have had Emma so soon.”
    “I wanted to get as far away from my mother as possible after I left, so I went to the airport with the plan of getting on a standby flight to L.A.”
    “Why Los Angeles?”
    “It was the cheapest place I could go that was too far away for my mother to find me. So meeting Dan again that day was like having my fairy godfather appear. When I told him my situation, he offered to fly me back to New Jersey and let me stay with him until I found a job.”
    “Fairy godfather?” Jake sputtered. “Cut me a break. The guy had a decade and a half on you and wanted to get into your pants. Please don’t tell me you were gullible enough to think he wanted to adopt you.”
    “No.” She chuckled. “I knew exactly what his agenda was. Dan nearly swallowed his tongue when I told him I’d just turned eighteen. He’d assumed I was about as old as you since you’d introduced me as your fiancée.” She rolled her eyes. “You of all people should understand how he could’ve made that mistake.”
    True. She’d seemed awfully mature. “You’re lucky he turned out to be such an honorable guy.”
    “I guess.” She shrugged. “My gut told me he wasn’t the sort of man to force me to do anything I wasn’t ready for.”
    Jake narrowed his gaze. “Meaning—I was?”
    “No, that’s not what I meant.”
    “Sorry.” He sipped his iced tea. “I guess that was just my guilty conscience rearing its ugly head.”
    Had Maggie at least felt a twinge of remorse when she held Emma the first time? It astounded him that the woman who’d been responsible for driving Roxanne over the edge with jealousy was about to become his son’s mother-in-law.
    He couldn’t begin to count the nights he’d dreamed about seeing Maggie again. Except in his fantasies, they didn’t just sit and talk like this. In his most frequent dream, he carried her into the bedroom, brought her to the brink, and left her sobbing her need for him.
    Another scenario had him banging her brains out against the wall and then casting her aside. For the first year of his marriage, he’d repeatedly punished Maggie in his sleep and tortured himself and Roxanne in the