Special Deliveries: Her Gift, His Baby: Secrets of a Career Girl / For the Baby's Sake / A Very Special Delivery. Carol Marinelli

how much was there just beneath the surface, how much he had just refused to let out.

      ‘Is it Phil?’

      He shook his head and again he got how the patients liked her because she sort of went straight to the really painful bit rather than tiptoeing around it. ‘Justin?’

      ‘If you get famous and they name a perfume after you, it won’t be called Subtle, Penny.’

      ‘No, it will be called Pertinent,’ Penny said. ‘You need to be there for him, Ethan.’ And he nodded, rested his head in his hands, and Penny felt the tension in his shoulders, heard him struggle to keep his voice even as he gave a ragged apology. ‘This was supposed to be about you.’

      ‘How selfish of you.’ Penny smiled.

      ‘I don’t know what to do—I’ve been trying to stay out of it but I can’t. And it’s not just the family stuff and that Gina’s keeping him from his grandparents. The thing is, I know how he feels. It’s like I’m looking at a mini-me. I saw him at the hospital, heard my aunt saying the same things she did to me when my father died—to be brave, be strong. It’s not what he needs to hear right now.’

      ‘You can be there for him.’

      ‘I don’t want to go rushing in and make promises I might not keep,’ Ethan admitted. ‘I’ve never been able to commit myself to anything except work. Penny, I don’t want to let him down.’

      ‘You won’t.’ She saw him blink at the certainty in her voice. ‘I know you won’t let him down, precisely because you haven’t rushed in. Just take your time and you’ll work something out.’

      ‘I don’t know what, though.’ He looked to where she was sitting and pulled her onto his lap, and this time she didn’t resist when he pulled her in for a cuddle. ‘So much for cheering you up.’

      ‘You have, though.’ Penny smiled and he smiled too. ‘Thank you for everything,’ Penny said. ‘Not just the injections but …’ she looked at the man who was still there despite all that had gone on these past weeks ‘… thank you for being my friend through this.’

      ‘A bit more than a friend.’ And to confirm it gave her a kiss. A kiss that seemed at odds with the way she was feeling, because there was this well of happiness filling her at what should have been the saddest of times.

      ‘Are you wearing no knickers again?’ Ethan smiled again and he had possibly the nicest mouth a man could have, and she was looking into his hazel eyes and it hadn’t just been manufactured hormones that had been raging that time. Penny could fully see it now. It had been lust, all the flush of a new romance, the big one, because right now for Penny it was looking like something a lot bigger than lust.

      Something she’d never really felt before—an L word that would probably be as shocking to Ethan as the F word had been to Jasmine, and if that mouth returned to hers now, she might be tempted later to say so, and again it was just too much and too soon.

      ‘You need to go,’ Penny said.

      ‘Do I?’

      ‘Yes,’ Penny said, ‘because I want to go to bed and have sex with you and I want to get up tomorrow and do it again, and then I want you to take me out tomorrow night, but I think I need to think about things properly. I need to work some stuff out.’

      ‘And you can’t do that with me?’

      Penny looked at him and, no, she didn’t want to try to do this with Ethan—her fertility issues were conversations that should be had far later along in a relationship, dark places a couple might visit later that had instead been thrust on them at the beginning.

      ‘It’s a girl thing,’ Penny said, because with or without Ethan in her future she needed to properly know how she felt. And as to the other issue, the L one—well, she didn’t need him by her side to work that out.

      Penny already knew.

      So much for a wild fling—of all the times to go and fall in love with someone.

      ‘I could make love to you on the sofa and then leave,’ Ethan said, cupping her naked bottom and making her laugh.

      ‘I suppose that might be a compromise.’

      He kissed her again, pulled her around on his lap so she was facing him, and his hands were everywhere and so too were hers. ‘I’m crazy about you, Penny.’