Page 84 of How to Rescue Your Surprise Baby

“Tell me where to put these, before I trip.”

“Well, maybe Iwantyou to trip.”

“Some of them are fragile. If they break, you’ll miss out.”

“Why did you get fragile things if you knew they could break?” But Telos was already closing the distance between them, picking up one box at a time and arranging them on his coffee table.

“Open them, and you’ll see.”

Slowly, he uncovered Mav’s face—all serious, with those amber eyes and full lips, and some scruff like he hadn’t had time to shave. Telos’ heart skipped a beat.

“You didn’t even text,” he grumbled, hating that he sounded petulant.

Mav’s lips twitched. “You didn’t text, either.”

“Yeah, well, I thought you were courting me!”

“I was all over Utah looking for presents. For you.”

Telos perked up, looking more closely at the boxes on the table. “Oh?”

Mav had wrapped the gifts in different kinds of wrapping paper—all dinosaurs, actually. Some of the wrapping paper had bright cartoon triceratops, and some had realistic-looking T-rexes. There were several kinds of pterodactyls on the wrapping paper, too, from lifelike sketches to pterodactyls in comic strips, and they were all so different that Telos could only stare.

“Where did you get paper like this?” he asked suspiciously. “Did you pay someone to collect them for you?”

Mav looked flatly at him. “No.I must’ve visited thirty gift shops up and down the state. Hadley helped pick up a couple of the smaller gifts.”

Telos’ eyebrows shot up. “Thirty?”

“There’s a bunch of dinosaur museums in Utah,” Mav said casually. Almost too casually.

Telos glanced up, only to find Mav carefully setting the last gift in the middle of the table. Then Mav hovered around, instead of leaving.

“You want me to open them now,” Telos deduced.

“Well, you can open them anytime you want. They’re all yours. Except for the ones with the green bows. Those are for Estie.”

Telos’ eyebrows were going to merge with his hairline. “Green bows for my baby?”

“Dinosaurs are often associated with the color green. And you want her to be a dino queen.” And now Mav just looked determined.

“Aww, you were listening to what I said.” Telos couldn’t help grinning. He sat cross-legged in front of the table and ripped open the first gift.

In there was a magnet shaped like a dinosaur bone, with a joke printed on it.

Q: What kind of dinosaur makes the best cops?

A: Tricera-cops.

Telos snorted.

“I thought you might like that,” Mav said, looking pleased.

“Maybe.” Telos set it aside and opened the next box. It contained a set of enamel dinosaur pins, showcasing a variety of species—T-rex, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus, pterodactyl, and a few others.

The third box contained some fake currency with dinosaurs printed on the different notes.

The fourth box had a set of gold cufflinks in the shape of pterodactyls.

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