The Baby He Didn't Believe (Second Chance Billionaires #3)

Chapter One

EVAN MAKES COFFEE THE way I like it, which is too strong for anyone else on the planet, and he’s been doing it for a year without once asking if I want it different.

I come downstairs in his old Georgetown shirt and the pajama pants I stole from him on our third date.

Dave is on the couch. Dave is always on the couch, all sixty pounds of golden mutt arranged across the good cushions like someone post-massage who needs everyone to know he’s unavailable.

His tail thumps twice when he sees me, then he closes one eye and goes back to performing relaxation.

“Your dog is useless,” Evan says, handing me the mug. He’s already dressed in khakis and a button-down, because Evan Drake runs a commercial real estate empire that has never heard of a Saturday without a collar.

“My dog is an artist.” I take the coffee. “He commits to a mood and stays with it. You could learn from him.”

“I’ve learned from him. I’ve learned that a seventy-dollar orthopedic dog bed sits untouched in the corner while my couch cushions develop a permanent sag.”

“Our couch. Our cushions. You signed the adoption papers.”

“I signed them under duress. He put both paws on my chest and licked my face. That’s coercion.”

“That’s love, Evan. Dave loved you before I did.”

He grins at me across the kitchen island.

The grin still does what it did in the park a year and a half ago when a dog who’d never jumped on a stranger launched himself at a man in a two-thousand-dollar suit.

Evan hadn’t flinched. He’d crouched in the grass, letting Dave cover him in hair and slobber while I apologized.

He told me Dave had excellent judgment. We sat on that bench for two hours.

Dave slept across both our laps. I didn’t find out Evan was uber wealthy until our third date, by which point I was already in too deep to care.

We eat eggs at the island because neither of us has ever been interested in a formal breakfast. He reads something on his phone about a zoning issue in Arlington.

I read a text from Amy confirming the shower logistics and another from Glynnis asking whether the crab cakes arrived on time.

The morning is good. We’re good. We’re two people sharing a kitchen in harmony.

Evan reaches across the island and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear casually, not looking up from his phone.

The gesture is small and automatic. I measure it against the ones that aren’t automatic, like the conversations he’s been avoiding, and the questions I’ve stopped asking.

We’ve been married a year. Most of it has been easy mornings with real affection, except for one subject we keep stepping over like a crack in the sidewalk.

My mother had mornings like this with my father. She died three years ago. Dad kept making coffee for two for six months before Amy gently started drinking the second cup so he wouldn’t have to throw it out.

I shake the thought off. Today isn’t about grief. Today is Megan’s shower.

THE SHOWER IS AT THE Chesapeake Room at the Waterfront. Glynnis booked it because she books everything in the Drake orbit. She once ran a billionaire’s office. Now she runs the charity circuit with the same brisk authority, minus the billionaire.

Glynnis is my mother-in-law. She was Frank Drake’s executive secretary when they married, which means she entered Evan’s world through the front door and has never forgotten what the lobby looked like.

She catches me near the gift table while Megan opens a box of tiny socks. “When are you giving me one of those,” she says, tilting her head toward the socks.

My lips twitch. “A sock?”

She shakes her head with fond exasperation. “A grandchild, Penelope.”

“Evan will figure it out when Evan figures it out.” I keep my voice easy. I’ve practiced this. “He’s slow, but he gets there.”

Glynnis lets the joke land without pushing. “The crab cakes are from that place in Annapolis,” she says, redirecting. “I had them delivered because Megan’s caterer tried to serve grocery-store puff pastry. I staged an intervention.”

“You staged an intervention with a caterer.” I giggle.

“I staged a rescue operation. There’s a difference.

I saved those women from frozen phyllo.” She smooths a napkin on the gift table and surveys the room with the look of a general who’s satisfied the perimeter is secure.

“Your father called me twice about the wine. He wanted to make sure we were serving a dry white and not that sweet stuff Amy bought for the Fourth of July. He has strong views about wine for a man who drinks bourbon.”

“Dad has thoughts about everything. It’s his only hobby besides military history.”

“I like him,” Glynnis says, and she means it, which surprises me a little. They’ve only interacted at family functions. “He told me at your wedding reception that the table arrangements reminded him of Pickett’s Charge. I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment.”

“It wasn’t.” I grin.

Megan sits in a white chair opening gifts, her hand resting on the curve of her belly between presents. She holds up a onesie with ducks on it. She makes a sound, half delight, half something older, and the room shifts for me.

I look at the onesie. My attention drops to Megan’s hand on her stomach, then to the pile of tiny things on the table, the booties, the bibs, the impossibly small hats, and the wanting hits so hard I have to set down my drink.

I want all of it, the onesie with ducks, the hand on my own stomach, and my child in my arms. Someday, I want to search a tiny face for my mother’s features or my father’s laugh.

I straighten up and smile at Megan. When she holds up a hand-knit blanket from her mother, I clap along with everyone else. Nobody in this room can see the ache underneath it.

My phone buzzes with a call from Dad. “Penelope, I need Amy. Is Amy there? I can’t find the Chessman footnote, and the entire Battle of Antietam chapter depends on whether Chessman’s field report preceded or followed Burnside’s order.

I swear to God, this university’s archival system was designed by someone who hates historians. ”

“Dad, Amy is at the shower. She’s standing ten feet from me holding a paper plate of crab cakes.”

“Can you put her on? I need the Chessman reference. It’s urgent.”

I shake my head. “It’s a one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old footnote. It can wait two hours.”

“History doesn’t wait, Penelope. That’s the point of history.”

I love my father. He’s eighty-one and a retired Naval Academy professor who has never once understood why the rest of the world doesn’t find footnotes as urgent as he does.

His house in Annapolis is cluttered with books and naval memorabilia, plus a small bundle of sassy dog named Oscar.

For three years, he’s been writing a book about the history of military surrenders, and he’ll probably be working on it for three more.

Amy keeps him fed, researched, and semi-organized.

I keep him connected to the living world.

I catch Amy’s eye across the room and hold up my phone. Amy mouths “Sam?” and I nod.

She sets down her plate and comes over, already shifting into the gear she uses for managing my father, which is patient, cheerful, and utterly impossible to rattle.

“Sam, I’ll pull the Chessman reference when I’m back at the house,” Amy says into my phone.

“It’s in the second archive box, not the digital system.

You’re looking in the wrong place.” She listens.

“No, Sam, I’m not leaving the shower to drive to Annapolis for a footnote.

I’ll be there at three. Try the annotated Burnside.

” She hands the phone back to me. “He’ll call back in twenty minutes. ”

I laugh. “He always does.”

Amy looks at me with sympathy after glancing at Megan. She’s thirty-two, practical in a way that makes other people’s crises feel manageable, and she’s the only person in my life who knows everything I want.

In the car after the shower, Amy drives while I hold a leftover plate of crab cakes in my lap and pretend to check my phone.

“Have you talked to Evan again?” Amy asks. She keeps her tone casual, the same voice she uses when she’s gently correcting my father’s citations, but I know where this is headed.

“About what?”

Amy gives me a look. The look says she’ll wait all the way to Bethesda if she has to.

“I’ll bring it up,” I say. “After the gala next week. The timing hasn’t been right.”

“The timing is never right because you keep waiting for him to make it right, and he’s never going to if he doesn’t know how much you need it.”

I stare at the windshield. The late afternoon has gone overcast, and the trees along Route 2 are that shade of early spring green that makes everything look more alive than it has a right to.

Amy isn’t wrong. She’s rarely wrong, which is both her best and most aggravating quality.

She’s also the only person I’ve told the full truth to.

One night at Dad’s kitchen table, after Evan deflected the adoption conversation for the fourth time, I told her I wanted a baby so badly I could taste it.

She’d poured more wine. “Have you told him in a way he can’t deflect?” I hadn’t answered. The answer was no. Every time I get close to how much it matters, Evan says something reasonable about wanting us to be a couple first, and I retreat. The wanting gets louder. I retreat again.

“I’ll bring it up,” I say again, and Amy lets it go because she knows where the line is. She makes a left toward Bethesda. Turns up the radio. Neither of us says another word.

EVAN IS ON THE COUCH when I get home, laptop open, reading something that makes him frown at the screen, the contractor-is-late frown.

Dave has migrated to the floor, which means Evan needed the couch more than Dave did, and Dave has conceded the territory with his typical grace, which is to say he’s sprawled at Evan’s feet with one ear turned inside out, radiating indifference to all human concerns.

“How was the shower?” Evan asks without looking up.

“It was great. Megan loved everything. Glynnis saved us from frozen puff pastry.”

“That sounds like Mom.” He scrolls. He doesn’t ask what Megan loved, who was there, or what the food was like. The wanting gets bigger every month while he sits on our couch certain there’s no rush, so he has no clue how hard the shower was to get through.

I stand in the kitchen doorway holding leftover crab cakes in a foil container, wearing the dress I picked because it makes me look as though I have my life together.

My husband is reading a development spreadsheet with our dog at his feet.

I love this man. Right now, I also resent him, though he hasn’t done anything wrong except decide what our family looks like without asking me.

“I’m going to put these away,” I say.

“Mmhm.” He doesn’t look up.

I put the crab cakes in the fridge. The counter doesn’t need wiping, but I wipe it anyway. For a second, I stand there and think about Megan’s hand on her belly, the tiny socks, and the room full of women celebrating a future I want with an urgency I can’t seem to make anyone understand.

I go upstairs. Evan stays on the couch. Dave stays at his feet.

He loves me. I know that much. He also thinks we have all the time in the world, and I don’t know how to tell him we don’t.