Free For Her Son's Sake by Katherine Garbera - Baby Business 03 - For Her Son's Sake Page A

had been popping up at uncomfortable times. But he’d been wrong. So damned wrong.
    “I’m making a hash of this.”
    “You are. But I think it’s safe to say that our situation is odd to begin with. Our pasts are so entwined that it’s hard to separate that and think of a future where we could be anything other than strained friends.”
    “Is that what you think?” he asked.
    “I really don’t know what to think. I haven’t slept with a man since Helio and I am feeling more chaotic than I’d like to. One minute I want to cry, the next I want to yell, and tied up in that—in the middle—is you. Kell Montrose. The man who took everything I built in the last four years and tore it to the ground.”
    Her words were stark and honest. She didn’t cower or hide or pretend that this wasn’t one of the craziest things that either of them had ever found themselves facing.
    “Fair enough. I’m the same way. I suck at relationships and have no idea how to act now.”
    “There isn’t an etiquette book for this,” she said. “There’s no right or wrong way to behave.”
    “There is, though. Women have an unspoken checklist in their heads and a guy is left guessing what it is and how he should act,” he said.
    “Do you want to stay?” she asked again.
    He looked at her sitting at the head of her bed with one leg curled underneath her, her hair tangled around her shoulders and a faded Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt on, and felt his answer in his gut.
    “Yes.”
    * * *
    She let out the breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Then she moved around on her bed and pulled back the covers, opening them toward him as she slid underneath them.
    He hesitated again and she wondered why. He’d said he didn’t know how to react, and she remembered the things she knew about his upbringing. The comments her sisters had made about how bitter Thomas Montrose had always been and how his influence on his grandsons had left them broken. It was clear to her that Kell hadn’t grown up surrounded by people who loved and cared for him. The stories of old Thomas had painted him as a bitter man.
    She tried to steel her heart because she wanted to fix him. She was a fixer. Part of it she could attribute to being the oldest and always having to protect her younger sisters. But she knew a bigger factor was that she liked working on someone else’s problems because it made it easier to ignore her own.
    She knew that there had to be something more going on in her psyche. How else could she explain that the first man she’d been interested in since her husband’s death was the one man she knew there was no chance of forever with?
    They might have had fun tonight, and the sex had blown her mind, but she didn’t kid herself that it would ever be more than a short-term affair. She guessed a part of her felt like justifying it by saying he was broken. Because he’d never known love. That was so much easier than admitting that she was broken, too.
    He put his clothes on the padded bench at the end of the bed and then slid into bed next to her. He punched the pillows on his side of the bed and moved around before settling down. The television still played quietly in the corner.
    He turned his head on the pillow to face her. She was lying next to him in what she thought of as the death pose: feet crossed at the ankles and her hands folded together over her stomach.
    “Mind if I put on SportsCenter?” he asked.
    Just like that, the tension she’d felt disappeared. Maybe she was reading too much emotion into the situation because she was a girl. But he was a guy. And nothing made her feel more normal than his request to watch sports.
    “Sure.”
    He grabbed the remote, fiddled with the channels and then put it back down once he’d found his station. Then he lifted his arm and looked over at her. “Cuddle?”
    It was the last thing she’d expected from him and she hesitated for a second. Hugging him in her bed in the middle of