Free Autumn Adventure (Summer Unplugged #6) by Amy Sparling Page A

Suddenly all I can do is stare at the table and try swallowing the lump in my throat.
    “Baby, what’s wrong?” I feel his warm hand touch mine, his fingers closing over mine so I can’t keep tearing the napkin. “Please talk to me.”
    “I don’t know, I guess…” Words come out of my mouth but they’re just placeholders for what I really want to say. “I don’t know. It’s nothing. Just…forget it.”
    I stab into a hushpuppy with my fork and eat it. If my mouth is full then I can’t talk.
    “Honey, what happened? Why are you suddenly upset? Talk to me.”
    I don’t look up at him because I know if I do, then I’ll see his face and his sincere eyes and that little wrinkle he gets in the middle of his forehead when he’s worried about me. I can’t see any of that because then I might cry and I can’t cry in the middle of freaking Big Al’s Seafood. So I just shake my head and make this little smile and blame it on the pregnancy hormones.
    Jace accepts my excuse even though we both know it’s a lie.

Chapter 13
     
    We’re back on the plane. Headed to Florida. There’s less than a week left of our honeymoon and I said it would be fun to visit the beaches of the east coast since we’ve seen the west coast and we live near the beaches in Texas. Jace agreed and he seems really excited about this destination. He wanted to visit Disney World but as the days go on and my belly gets bigger, so do my ankles. Walking around in the hot sun all day doesn’t seem fun, so I promised him we’d take another trip to Disney World when our kid is older. For now, I just wanted to lounge on a beach.
    I’m pretty sure every beach is better than the beaches in Texas. Our sand is covered in seaweed and the water is muddy brown with the constant warnings of jellyfish posted everywhere. Miami should be fun. A relaxing way to end the summer and our honeymoon.
    I haven’t spoken about the baby naming thing. Although it plagued me on the inside, I shoved the thoughts away, buried them deep in my subconscious and just tried to have fun with Jace. As much fun as it was seeing new hotels and shopping in new stores and eating food at all kinds of places, my body was tired and my mind was driving itself crazy thinking about baby names.
    The name we chose for our son would have to live with him forever. It would need to sound good paired with the last name Adams. It would need to be something that a girl could scribble on her notebook in fifteen years. I smile at the thought of our son having a girlfriend in the future. I bet Jace would teach him how to treat a girl. He wouldn’t be like Ian or any of the other assholes in my past. He’d be a mini version of the greatest man on earth—my husband.
    “What ya smiling about?” Jace nudges me from his seat in the airplane. We’re preparing to land so Christopher had us buckle up. My smile quickly fades as we begin the descent. Even after making several stops in our rented private jet, the feeling of landing always makes my stomach seize up uncomfortably, like when you make the drop on a roller coaster. I grab the armrest and take a deep breath.
    Jace laughs. “Okay, the smile is gone.” The plane makes a deep descent as the landing strip gets nearer and nearer and then Jace’s head bobs as we touch the ground. “Man, I hate that,” he says, reaching over and grabbing my hand. “I don’t know how pilots do it all the time.”
    “Me neither,” I say, feeling a wave of relief wash over me as the plane comes to a stop. We unbuckle our seatbelts and I rush to get to the side door before Jace does, since it’s fun to be the first one out of the plane. It’s become our little contest with each landing we do, and lately I’ve been winning.
    “Don’t think you’re getting out of answering my question,” Jace says into my ear as we step off the plane.
    “What question?”
    “The reason you were smiling back there. It looked like whatever was going on in your head was