Page 51 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He sighed. “Ivy… I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for a while now. I know I haven’t showed you that very well, and I’m sorry. I’d spend the rest of my life making it up to you, if you’d let me.”

She shook her head. “You’re in love with me?”

“Very much so.”

“But… no. You can’t be.”

“You must be able to tell,” he said. “I’ve never felt this way for anyone before, Ivy. I walk around feeling like I’ve been struck by lightning. You must be able to see it all over my face.”

“If I had known that…”

He braced himself, sure that she was about to tell him she would have walked away earlier.

“I never would have left,” she whispered.

Elliot was stunned. “You mean to tell me that would have made you stay?”

“I’m in love with you too,” she told him. “You know that, don’t you? If you think I should know how you feel, then surely you must know how I feel. You know that’s the reason I left when I did.”

He shook his head. He’d had no idea. “You left because you had feelings for me?”

“Feelings I couldn’t control,” she said. “Feelings that scared me.”

“You never told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t take the risk, Elliot. What if I had, and you’d laughed at me? If we were in a different set of circumstances, I could have lived with it, but trying to coparent this baby… I couldn’t let things between us go in that direction. I don’t want any tension. Not between you and me.”

“But there was tension,” he said. “We’ve both had these feelings for each other and felt like we couldn’t talk about them. We’ve both been living with that. And then, when you moved out… I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if you even wanted to talk to me. Of course I should have tried harder to make it work, to figure it out… but you can’t think that things haven’t been more tense than they ever had to be because of the fact that we were too afraid to talk to each other.”

She nodded. “I know that’s right,” she said. “It was a mistake. But Elliot, you have to understand what it’s been like for me. I know your history.”

He closed his eyes. “I’m not that person anymore.”

“It’s so hard to be sure of that.”

“I think I changed the moment I met you,” he told her. “I don’t know exactly what it is you know about my past, Ivy, but I can imagine. I know the kinds of stories that are on the internet about me, and I won’t pretend they aren’t true, because they are. I’ve got a past. But things are different now, because now I have a future. That’s so much more important to me than anything else. If you’re willing to let me try, I will spend the rest of my life proving to you how special you are to me. How important.”

A tear broke loose and tracked its way slowly down her cheek. Elliot scooted closer to her and wiped it away with his thumb.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly. “I had no idea you felt like this, Elliot.”

“I should have told you a long time ago,” he said. “I’m not used to this sort of thing — talking about my feelings like this. I’ve never had any reason to do it before. You’ve given me a reason.”

Ivy held out her hand to him, and he took it.

“There’s nothing I want more than this,” she told him. “There’s nothing I’ve wished for more than this. For the two of us to find our way back to one another — to turn this into a real family. That’s all I’ve wanted, Elliot. Nothing could have made me any happier.”

“You can forgive me for taking this long to realize what I needed to do?”

“Forgiveness isn’t necessary. We’ve both made mistakes here. We’ve both driven ourselves away from each other. This is my fault as much as it is yours. But you’re the one who was courageous enough to say something — to bring us back together. I’m so grateful to you for that. You’ll never know how much it means to me that you had the courage to united us again. It’s something I don’t know if I ever would have been able to do, so it’s entirely thanks to you that this is happening.”

“I want you to move back in with me,” he said. “Both of you.”

Ivy nodded. “I want that too,” she said softly. “I should never have left.”

“Then you’ll do it? You’ll come back to the apartment once you’re out of the hospital?”

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