Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) (25 page)

“Okay!” The technician’s voice was excessively perky for first thing in the morning. “We have a head.” She tapped some keys, and little cursors moved over the screen. It looked like she was measuring. She did the same thing, moving the sensor, pointing out the heart, legs, arms, fingers. “We’re getting a nice look. Baby’s not shy at all. Doctor will want to confirm, but I’m showing twenty-two weeks, two days.”

That adjusted her due date closer by at least a week. Good news—she was already tired of being pregnant. “Can you tell what the sex is?”

“Well, let’s see.” The technician rooted around some more with the sensor. Sometimes, she pressed pretty hard but didn’t seem to care that she was hurting. Carmen could think of a couple of things that would make her care.

“Are you sure you want to know?” Theo had turned away from the screen to look at her. “You don’t want it to be a surprise?”

“It’s a baby, not a Christmas present, Theodore.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Fair enough.” They both turned back to the monitor.

“Okay. Got a good look. Right…there.” The technician held the sensor in place, tapped some keys, and an arrow appeared on the screen.

Carmen squinted but saw nothing.

“I don’t see anything.” Theo echoed her thought.

The technician smirked. “Exactly.”

“So…it’s a girl?” Carmen felt a flare of hostility toward this perky little twat in pink scrubs who was turning an ultrasound into a guessing game.

“Exactly!”

Theo’s hand clenched hard on Carmen’s. Carmen, however, was too pissed at the technician for the information to sink in.

Giggling at her own cleverness, the pink twat struck some more keys. A grainy strip of photographs rolled out of the machine, and she handed it to Theo. Then she wiped off the sensor and handed Carmen a wad of tissues. As she put the machine to rights, she said, “Once you’re dressed, you can go back out to the waiting room. Dr. Heath will want to talk to you to confirm the scan. Congratulations!” Then she bopped out and left Theo and Carmen alone in the dim room.

“Jesus, what an insipid little shit,” Carmen grumbled, swiping the slime off her belly with an angry flourish.

Theo grabbed the wrist of her hand holding the gunked-up tissues. “Carmen, stop. Take a breath. Be in this moment. We’re having a little girl.”

Carmen stopped and took the breath. She had a little girl growing inside her. A daughter.

“Holy shit.”

Theo stood and kissed her belly. Then he met her eyes and grinned. “Exactly.”

~oOo~

That night, they spent a quiet, domestic evening at her cottage, away from her family, cocooned in their mutual bliss. She called her family, and he called his sons, with the news. Her family wanted to meet at the house on Caravel Road to celebrate, which was the thing that they always did when good news was to be had, but Carmen told them to back off. They wanted to be alone together on this night.

She kept picking the black and white photographs off the refrigerator and staring at them. Her child.
Her
child. She had a man and a child. A family of her own.

Her blood fizzed happily.

After a quiet dinner of Chinese takeout and a movie watched while snuggled together on the sofa, Theo, who’d been getting a little restless, went to take a shower. Carmen cleaned up their dinner mess, putting the cartons in the fridge for breakfast. Cold Chinese was probably not the world’s healthiest breakfast, but it was delicious.

She closed the fridge and, again, pulled the photographs down.

She and Theo were making a child. A daughter.

Suffused with an unfamiliar kind of happiness that simply had to be expressed, she stripped out of her leggings and oversized t-shirt, dropped them and her bra to the kitchen floor, and crossed to the bathroom.

She opened the door and then stopped. Through the thickening haze of steam, and the beads of water on the clear glass door, she saw Theo with his forehead on the tile, simply standing there, his hands on the tile at either side of his head, letting the hot water spray over his back.

He didn’t look like a man who shared her happiness.

She opened the shower door and got in. He stood straight immediately, turned, and smiled at her. “Hey. Fancy meeting you here.” That smile was weary, though. Too weary.

“Thought you might like company.”

His smile sharpened, became more real. “Always.” He grabbed her hips and pulled her close, lowering his head to kiss her. She felt him harden against her belly.

Reluctantly, she broke the kiss and stared into his eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Sure. Can’t you tell?” He flexed his hips, pressing his erection on her.

Deciding that the shower was the wrong time and place to attempt a serious conversation, especially while his fingers teased at her nipples and his teeth plucked lightly at her neck, Carmen abandoned the question and wrapped her hands around his gorgeous cock. Leading him thusly, she turned them until the water was out of her way. Then she bent her knees and knelt at his feet.

He groaned and put his hands on her head. “Carmen, you don’t have to…”

“Of course I don’t have to. I want to. I love”—she licked the length of him, root to tip, flicking her tongue sharply over his glans—“blowing you.” His eyes sparked with heat, and his halfhearted protest stopped. She sucked him down as far as she could, loving his hiss of pleasure, and got to work.

She did love blowing him. His cock was lovely, hard as granite, smooth as marble, with one thick, glorious vein that bulged delightfully the closer he got to climax. And he was so very responsive. Most guys she’d been with seemed to feel that behaving as if they were really into it was somehow unmanly, which was bullshit. Carmen wanted to know, to see, to hear, to feel, the effect she was having. And Theo showed her. With his voice and body both, he showed her.

“God, I love fucking your mouth. I love the…
ah, God
…way those perfect lips wrap around me.” His hips began to flex with more speed and force, and she felt his hands tangle and tighten in her hair. She unwound a hand from his base and took hold, just a shade to the rough side of gentle, of his balls. He jerked violently, his back slamming against the wall. “Fuck, Carm, oh fuck. Don’t stop. Just like that. I need it, I need it now.”

She stopped and stood, and he gaped at her, breathless and dazed with need. “Fuck me, Theo.” She turned her back to him and bent over, adjusting her position so that the shower spray wouldn’t hit her in the face. She put her hands on the tile and waited, looking back over her shoulder at him. “I want my Rough Rider.”

At first, he only stared, blinking. But then he grabbed her hip with one hand and fed himself into her with the other. She cried out as he went deep, striking her g-spot with almost painful force. With his hands clawed into her hips and his feet framing hers on the shower floor, he pounded into her, yanking her back, hitting her deepest core and making her let loose a wild grunt with each brutal thrust.

Every nerve in her body seemed to be more sensitive with the pregnancy; nowhere was that more true than where Theo was now. The sensation of him hitting her spot was so intense it nearly surpassed pleasure. Grunting, gasping, unable to gain enough breath to speak, she wasn’t sure she could stop him if she needed to—and she wasn’t sure if she needed to. She knew her body was taut and resistant, guarding against the intensity, but she didn’t think he’d noticed. He certainly hadn’t slowed down or backed off. His own grunts echoed fiercely off the tile and glass walls.

Just at the point when she was sure pleasure was gone and had left only intensity, when she had decided that what they were doing was a mistake she’d made and now had to endure, everything changed; her body relaxed suddenly, and pleasure returned in a rush so powerful, Carmen shrieked. In the span of a thrust, what she felt flipped from pain to orgasm, and she came until she could no longer keep her feet. Coming off his own roaring release, Theo caught her as her knees buckled, before she collapsed to the floor.

He pulled her tightly to his chest, his strong arms around her, his face tucked to her shoulder. His panting breaths warmed her wet skin. “Are you okay?”

She answered when she finally had the breath to do so. “I have no fucking idea. That was…
God
. I don’t even know.”

He turned the water off and opened the door. He grabbed a towel and wrapped her up in it, turning her toward him, then closed them back into the warm shower. “Did I hurt you?” He kissed her cheek. “I hate how often I’ve asked you that question.”

She rested her head on his still-heaving chest. “Do you not like the way we fuck?”

“I worry that we get so rough. Especially now, with the baby.”

“Teresa.”

“Hmm?” With her ear on his chest, the hummed question vibrated deeply, sensually. Even that sound made her tingle.

She leaned her head back so she could see his face. “I want to call her Teresa, after my mother.” She pronounced it as her mother had:
Ter-EH-za
.

“Teresa.” He pronounced it as she had, then smiled and kissed her. “That’s beautiful. Can we name her after my mother, too? Her name was Joy. What do you think of Teresa Joy?”

“I think that’s perfect.” And apt, as well.

~oOo~

Carmen woke the next morning cozy and at peace. Sun streamed in from the loft window that looked out over the sea. She loved that best of all, the way the world woke her with it, gently, as the sun came up from the horizon to start its work.

She opened her eyes and saw a wall of chest and golden curls. With a deep, easy breath, she snuggled closer to Theo.

“There’s no sleeping in around here, huh?” He moved his hand as he spoke, and Carmen realized he’d been caressing her belly. The touch made her feel content.

“Sorry. I like the dawn.”

He groaned and moved his hand from her belly to her back, bringing her closer. “We need to talk, my love.”

She knew they did. He’d been with her more than a week, and still they had not discussed anything about the future.

Except the naming of their child.

But the future was huge and terrifying, full of questions that had no obvious answers. She knew them all; they’d run through her head in a constant litany since he’d arrived. Where would they live? Whose life would change most? Would they even live together? The only question that had a clear answer was that they would be forever joined by the child she carried. They would have a little girl, whether they found answers for the rest or not.

She shook her head. She’d had only a week of being happy in this cocoon, only a week of knowing what happiness like this was, and she knew that the talk they needed to have would smother it all until it was dead. She just
knew
it. That was how her life worked—it gave her a glimpse, a taste, of what she wanted, then shoved her onto the road that took her away from it.

“I’m not ready. Not yet. We have time.”

He brushed her hair from her face. “Carmen, we don’t. We have big decisions to make.”
 

“Please? Please not yet.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Of course I am.” She pushed away from him and sat up. So much for cozy cuddling. “No matter what, everything changes. I know the questions that need answers. One of us has to tear our life apart. Or not, and then we tear
us
apart. I’m not ready to deal with any of that.”

He lay where he was, quietly, until, finally, Carmen turned and looked back over her shoulder at him. He looked gorgeous and golden in the winter morning sun. He was watching her, and when their eyes met, he said, “Okay. But I have a favor to ask, then.”