Page 1 of Needing You

1

KATE

Will, I’m pregnant.

I never said those words out loud. I never gazed into Will’s dark-brown eyes and told him he was about to be a father. But over the last fifteen years, I’d imagined it so many times that sometimes I had to remind myself that the conversation hadn’t actually happened.

I’d picture the joy that would have lit up his boyish smile and the sweet promises he would have uttered under the wide oak tree where we liked to steal time together back then. I’d picture it so clearly that it would feel real. But it wasn’t.

Instead, I’d caved to my parents’ misguided belief that nothing good would come from telling the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks about my “little problem.” I let them send me away to my grandmother’s house in Georgia to have the baby, with the intention of giving him up for adoption as soon as he was born.

“Mom,” Jackson called as he let himself into our tiny two-bedroom apartment above Granite Springs Bakery. “You home?”

“In here,” I called back, letting out a calming breath as I stared at my reflection in my bathroom mirror.

I heard him dump his stuff in the living room and dig around in the pantry for a snack. Jackson was always ravenous when he came home from practice. The older he got, the harder it was to make sure there was enough food in the house to support his mind-boggling appetite. I’d always heard teenage boys could eat, butman. This kid was something else.

But I wouldn’t trade him—or the life we’d built together, just the two of us—for anything.

“How was practice?” I called, dragging my brush through my hair with deliberate strokes.

“Awesome,” my son replied as he bounded through my open bedroom door and launched himself onto my bed. He started rattling off stories about the passes he’d caught and the tackles he’d dodged, a wide grin on his face as he stared up at my ceiling while he spoke.

After a few minutes of this, I suddenly realized my comforter was in serious danger of reeking likeboy.I spun around, wrinkling my nose and waving my hairbrush at him. “Jackson William Preston, get your sweaty butt off my bed.”

Old habits died hard. I might be a diner waitress single-handedly supporting myself and my fifteen-year-old, but that wasn’t how I’d been raised. My family had old money that stemmed all the way back to the Colorado Gold Rush and resulted in a long history of wealth and power. And maids. And sterile living spaces. In fact, my father had become the mayor of Grand City, which was why there was no way they would’ve allowed for the scandal of their teenage daughter getting pregnant.

“Sorry,” Jackson said with a laugh, rolling to his feet and sighing dramatically. Dirt streaked his face and arms, and he lowered his nose toward his shoulder and sniffed. “Yeah, I stink.”

“You sure do.”

He tossed his head to get his side-swept hair out of his eyes. “Anyway, practice was great. Coach said I’ll probably make varsity.”

“See? I knew you could do it.” I tried to play it cool, clamping down on the urge to gush over him in a way that was sure to make him squirm.

Jackson shifted his feet, feeling it anyway. “I know, thanks. Can I go over to Chase’s house? We’re just gonna hang there.”

I pursed my lips to fight my smile. “Sureyou are.”

“We are. I promise.”

Truthfully, Iwassure he would. And Jackson having plans with his friend this afternoon was actually good news for me. I needed to go to Walker’s Brewery and face Will. It’d been two weeks since we’d run into each other at his brother’s engagement party, and I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.

“That’s fine. Just be home by curfew.”

He grinned and took off. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Shower first!” I called after him, chuckling as the bathroom door slammed shut in response.

With a sigh, I faced the long mirror in the corner of my small bedroom. I’d gone through my entire—limited—wardrobe before finally deciding to wear a simple white button-down blouse tucked into a pair of jeans. I hadn’t wanted to look like I was trying too hard, butugh. When I’d seen Will at his family’s brewery during that party—for the first time in ten years—it’d left my blood thrumming through my veins like the obsessed teen I once was.

He’d stood beside my chair that night, all long and lean, with his tight shirt showing me that his body had gotten even better with age. He’d been close enough that I could smell his clean and spicy scent that somehow hadn’t changed even after all these years. It brought memories crashing through me from a time when we were caught up in the forbidden love story of a lifetime and had naively thought our future together could be as bright as the summer sun.

We were wrong, of course, but the anticipation of seeing him again today had that same unrealistic and dreamlike excitement flowing through me. I looked down at my hands, annoyed to find them slightly shaking. I clenched them at my sides, then heaved out a deep breath.

This was dumb, really. I shouldn’t be excited to see Will. When I’d seen him ten years ago, it’d been from a distance. And it’d been horrible. Thankfully, he hadn’t seen me. He hadn’t been able to see how heartbroken I was when I stood there ready to introduce him to his son, only to find that the man on the other side of that bar wasn’t the man I thought he was.

But that was then. Now, Will was back, and he was back for good. Whether he’d changed for the better was yet to be seen, but it didn’t matter. No one in this town—not his well-known family or any of his friends—knew he was Jackson’s father. There was no way we could all exist in this tiny town without Will doing the mental math and figuring it out, so with a resigned sigh, off I went to have one of the hardest conversations I’d probably ever have.

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