Page 91 of Seven of Hearts

Her lips twitched. “Maybe he knows you’re pressed up against me. Or maybe he can hear both of our heartbeats.”

“You know what I think?” I gently pinched her bicep to keep the skin tight, inserted the needle, and pressed the injection button. “I think he’s in there cheering you on because you’re doing something really hard that’s gonna keep both of you safe.”

Leah sucked in a sharp breath and whimpered at the bite of pain.

I held the needle steady as the flow of insulin finished. “Are you dizzy?”

Leah nodded.

“Just stay like that and rest. We don’t have anywhere to be right now,” I said as I dropped the needle into the sharps container and put the cap back on the pen. “There’s no hurry. You took that like a champ.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

I laughed, because I had no idea why she was thanking me. Me and my faulty condom had gotten us into this mess.

“For being the best baby daddy,” she said.

Maybe life being messy wasn’t always a bad thing. Maybe it didn’t have to be perfect. Maybe we could just feel our way through and figure it out. Maybe mistakes weren’t bad. Maybe they were just detours that took us to a better, more perfect destination.

To that perfect, messy love.

26

LEAH

“I’m not lifting anything more than three pounds, just like I promised,” I lied into the phone as I hefted a box full of ceramic dishes onto the kitchen counter in the cottage.

What Logan didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Besides, I was trying to exercise more.

At the moment, Logan and I bounced between three houses. My apartment, Kristin’s house, and the new house. All of them were home in one way or another, so we had started calling our new house “the cottage.”

It felt right.

It was the perfect description of the homey, beach vibes that permeated the house. I loved all the colors, though I knew I would eventually repaint all the rooms something different. I loved the rattan shades and seashells on the windows. I loved the cabinet knobs that were shaped like ships and mermaids.

“What was that?” he asked on the other end of the line.

I peeled my phone out from between my shoulder and ear and put the call on speaker. I wielded the box cutter and sliced through the tape. The dishes rattled as I lifted them out, one-by-one, and slid them into the freshly cleaned cabinet.

As soon as we got the keys to the house the day before, Kristin was over with a hotel’s worth of cleaning supplies. She and Logan scrubbed the house from top to bottom, and yelled at me if I so much as looked at a bottle of surface cleaner or a dust rag.

“What was what?” I countered as I grabbed a stack of bowls and lifted them over my head.

“That sounds like dishes. You didn’t lift the box of dishes, did you? Those boxes were at least twenty pounds each.”

My silence was answer enough.

“Leah,” Logan groaned. “You promised me . . .”

“I’ll be fine,” I said as I emptied the last of the box, sliced through it and flattened it, then added it to the pile of discarded cardboard.

“But I won’t,” Logan said. “You’re going to give me an aneurysm. I’ve barely been gone for two hours and you’re already doing the thing I asked you not to do.”

“What are you gonna do? Punish me?” I teased in a seductive rasp.

Logan let out a different kind of groan this time. “I’m coming back over.”

I laughed. “No. Finish your work. You have things you need to get done too.”

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