He shrugged, making Mason giggle when he bounced slightly in Dylan’s arms. Bouncing the baby around more on purpose, he said, “Countless. Why do you ask?”
She looked between him and her son, her expression still wary…but also more than a little stunned, too. “I’m just surprised you said yes to me so quickly. Because I really do need to write this cover story about you. So if you’re only planning to mess around with me for a laugh—”
“I promise I’m not messing around with you. Not in the slightest.” He hoped that one day she’d look back on this conversation and realize that he’d been serious about her and her son even then. “You were right when you said I’d like the angle you’re going to take for the story. No one needs to read another story about the fastest way to hoist a spinnaker. But a story about a sailor’s heart? That’s what it’s really all about, whether you’re taking a Sunfish out on a Saturday afternoon or you’re racing an eight-million-dollar yacht for the World Cup.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for my question to come out like that.” He could see how tired she was now that she’d let her defenses down just a little bit. “Not when I really am grateful that you’re available to do the interview. I just need to be sure that you’re really on board with this.”
She didn’t need to say anything more for him to understand immediately that she’d been screwed over before and had a hard time trusting people when they gave her their word. Probably, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to guess, by the guy who had gotten her pregnant.
“I’m not a fan of phones,” he told her. “And I don’t much care for anything that falls under the category of running a business. But when it comes to giving my word to people? I was raised to stand by it. And I do, Grace. No matter what.”
For a few moments she stared at him as if she wasn’t sure whether it was safe to believe what he’d just said, before finally turning to head toward his desk again. By the time she returned from writing her address on the pad of paper, she was all business as she reached for Mason.
“We’ll get out of your hair now. See you Friday.”
It was nearly impossible to keep from dragging her against him for a kiss so that he could see her beautiful skin flush again. But just as he knew not to head a sailboat up into the wind before it was blowing hard enough to point him toward his true destination, he also knew better than to move too fast with Grace.
Not when something told him a far better plan would be to let both of them anticipate that kiss for the next several days, instead.
CHAPTER THREE
Thunder and lightning rocked the sky outside Grace’s apartment on Friday afternoon as she waited for Dylan to come pick them up. Mason had crawled over to the window and was clapping with glee every time the lightning flashed and thunder boomed.
Grace lifted him so that he could get a better view of the storm, one that felt way too close to the storm that had been raging inside of her for the past three days. Dylan had deftly maneuvered her into agreeing to do the interview at his childhood home, of all places. While it wasn’t at all unusual for a big name to call the shots with a journalist, the fact that she’d taken one look at Dylan and had wanted him in a way she’d never wanted another man had her worried.
Very worried, given that the one time she’d let the line blur between her job and her personal life had been a huge mistake.
She hugged Mason tighter as she mentally erased the word mistake. She would willingly have made a thousand mistakes all over again to have him here with her. But even though the two of them had made it through both her solo pregnancy and single parenting for the first ten months of his life, that didn’t mean she needed to make another, similar mistake with Dylan.
Richard Bentley had asked Grace out during their interview a year and a half ago. No one that charming or full of compliments had ever looked in her direction before. So while she knew she shouldn’t mix work with pleasure, he’d been too persuasive and determined for her to resist. Especially in the wake of her father’s death only six months earlier. All she’d wanted to do was just forget for a little while.
Her first date with Richard had been on a private rooftop just outside of Washington, D.C. The restaurant with its white tablecloths had been so fancy that she would have felt terribly out of place in her simple black dress and shoes if they hadn’t been in a completely private part of the restaurant. By the end of the evening, her head was spinning with bubbly and what had seemed at the time like the most romantic date she’d ever had. She never usually slept with a guy on the first date, but looking back, Grace couldn’t deny that she’d felt as though she’d owed Richard for the fairy-tale evening.
On their second date, he’d taken her out on the sailboat, and though the trip hadn’t gone as well as dinner under the stars, she hadn’t considered ending that date with only a kiss good night, either. Every date they had was the same: He’d take her somewhere private that knocked her socks off and then she’d invite him in for the night. By the time she’d realized that something didn’t seem quite right—Why did he never take her out where strangers could see them together? Why did he always have an excuse about being too busy to see her or talk during the week? Why did he say he wanted to keep their relationship between just the two of them for a little while longer?—she’d also missed her period.
Richard hadn’t been at all pleased to learn just weeks later that she was pregnant.