Read Online She's Having a Baby by Marie Ferrarella - Free Book Online

cup of hot water she’d already poured. “You look like the black-coffee type.”
    â€œBlack like my soul?”
    Quade had no idea where the words had come from, only that, once spoken, they mirrored what he was feeling. Like his soul was this deep, black hole. Just as it had been before his late wife, Ellen, had come into it.
    â€œI wasn’t going to go that far,” she told him.
    Taking the French toast out of the pan and sliding it onto a plate, she sprinkled a tablespoon of confectioners’ sugar over the thick slice. She placed the plate next to his coffee, along with a container of maple syrup witha dancing bee on the label. “So, where’s this new job you’re starting today?”
    Normally, he didn’t eat breakfast, just as he’d told her. But the French toast did look good. More than that, it smelled good. Almost as good as she did. Picking up a fork, he sank it into the toast, preferring not to drench the offering in syrup but to enjoy the light sugar taste unobstructed.
    â€œIs that the rate of exchange?” he asked.
    She had no idea what he was talking about. “Excuse me?”
    â€œYou said you wouldn’t charge me three dollars for coffee,” he reminded her. “I just want to know if questions are what you settled on in exchange for breakfast.”
    Taking his first bite, he found that the offering nearly melted on his tongue. And that he was hungry despite what he’d thought.
    â€œNot questions,” MacKenzie corrected smoothly with a soft smile as she made eye contact with him. “Answers.”
    He raised one muscular shoulder and let it drop again. She watched in rapt fascination. Up to this point, she’d thought that men who had builds like that were digitally enhanced as they made their way across the entertainment screen.
    â€œMy mistake.”
    â€œYou haven’t answered me.”
    Quade raised his eyes, if not his head. “No, I haven’t.”
    After bringing over her tea, MacKenzie sat down on the stool beside his. The breakfast bar was what hadbeen the deciding factor when she’d rented the apartment. She’d fallen in love with it. The bar and the fact that the apartments in the complex all formed an oval, overlooking a very small, very Spanish-looking courtyard. It gave the complex a communal feeling while existing in the middle of a bustling city that reportedly never slept and wasn’t always known as the friendliest of places to an outsider.
    The man was nothing if not evasive, she thought. Despite her leading questions, she hadn’t gotten much information out of him. Normally by now, people had given her their life stories. She drew the only conclusion she could from the facts before her.
    â€œAre you a spy?”
    Quade nearly choked on his coffee, managing to swallow at the last minute and not embarrass himself. Her query brought to mind tall, darkly handsome men who were deadly with their hands and attracted impossibly gorgeous women. The image was so far from who and what he was.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œA spy,” she repeated. “One of those people sworn to chew a cyanide tablet rather than divulge what they were working on.”
    She looked normal enough, he thought, but then she’d said that she was an assistant producer and these entertainment types were usually two or three sandwiches shy of a picnic basket.
    He wiped his lips with a napkin. “And, if I’m to follow this analogy, you’re trying to get me to chew on a tablet?”
    How had he leaped from point A to point B? “I’mnot asking you what you’re working on, Quade.” Even his name had spy possibilities, she thought. “Just a general ‘where.’”
    Eyeing her, he took a quick sip of coffee, then set down the cup before returning to the disappearing French toast. “In general, I’m working in New York.”
    She laughed, shaking her head. Maybe she had