Page 56 of His Best Friend's Baby

He shook his head. ‘The fridge can wait. There’s something we need to talk about, Pollz.’

‘Oh.’ She could guess. Of course she could. Seth was worried that she was settling in too happily, mixing with his friends and acting as if she was back here for good, part of the Wirralong community.

‘I know the timing’s not great,’ Seth said. ‘But I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day and I’m afraid I can’t wait any longer.’ He came closer, keeping his voice low. He didn’t look angry, but his normally warm hazel eyes held a breath-robbing intensity. ‘We haven’t talked about last night,’ he said. ‘About how we feel about everything now.’

‘No.’ At this very moment, Polly was actually feeling quite scared. And yet, all morning she’d been on top of the world, as if she’d discovered a new, happier version of herself—capable, adaptable, and fitting in. As if shebelonged.

‘I may have got a little carried away,’ she said quietly.

Seth frowned. ‘Carried away last night?’

‘No. Well, I guess, yes—carried away then.’ Her cheeks flamed as she remembered vivid details of how totally carried away she’d been. ‘But today as well. Carried away with having this party and everything.’

‘Polly, the party’s fine. It’s great. I love that you’re doing this.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. But last night you were worried about all these big questions you needed to answer. I wondered if you have a clearer picture now?’

Polly wasn’t sure she had the courage to admit to Seth that she now knew she was totally, crazily in love with him. ‘Maybe those questions were just my way of turning something simple into a huge problem,’ she said. ‘I—I have a habit of doing that. As you probably know.’

Seth smiled now, just a slow, cautious smile, but it gave her a tiny thread of hope.

‘So perhaps we should cut to the chase,’ he said. ‘After all, we have friends waiting outside.’ But a moment later, he frowned. ‘I’m not scaring you, am I?’

‘If I’m honest, the only thing that scares me is that your answers might be different from mine. But I—I certainly know I’m not sorry last night happened.’

‘Heck, no. Neither am I.’ Seth reached for her hands. ‘I’m a mechanic, not a wordsmith, so I’m not great at talking about emotions.’ The muscles in his throat rippled now as he swallowed. ‘But I reckon last night wasn’t just about amazing sex. It opened a window on what our life could be like.’

Lifting her hands to his lips, he pressed gentle kisses to her knuckles, first on one hand and then the other.

She felt her heart begin to race and she drew a quick breath.

‘I’m hoping you might agree thatthisis where you belong, Polly. Here with me.’

All in a rush, her eyes filled with happy tears.Yes, she wanted to shout.Yes, a thousand times yes. Her throat was too tight for speech, though, but somehow she managed to nod.

Seth’s eyes shimmered. ‘I need you here with me,’ he said.

Oh, Seth. Polly swallowed the lump in her throat and somehow found her voice. ‘And I need to be with you. Summer and I both need you.’

He was smiling now. They were both smiling, goofily, loopily, crazily happy.

‘I don’t know what you want to do about America,’ Seth said next. ‘We can deal with that later, but if I have to wait for you, I will. I won’t try to stop you from going, but if you do, I’ll be here when you come back. And this is where Summer’s going to grow up. It’s where you and I are going to grow old. Together.’

‘Oh, Seth.’ It was all Polly could manage.

With a sudden grin, he said, ‘And we could put a whole lot of people out of their misery if you allowed me to deliver an abbreviated version of this to our friends out there.’

Polly had no choice but to hurl herself into his arms and bury her face in his chest.

‘Everything okay in here?’ called Ruth’s voice from the doorway.

*

Perhaps it wasjust as well that Summer was only a one-year-old and had no idea that her birthday party had been usurped by a very different celebration.

The little poppet was happy to bang away on her xylophone while jubilation broke out on the deck. Such wonderful cheers and cries of delight, peppered with comments from a couple of the males along the line of Scotty’s ‘About time, mate’.

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