Cole sat up to brush my tears from my cheeks and he dipped his head toward mine. His lips inches from my lips, he confessed, “I love you, Shannon. I want to protect you and keep you safe. I want to be your family and to give you mine so that you never have to feel sad about anyone who is too stupid to realize they’ve let go of something so special their lives will always be a little darker for it.”
I choked back more tears, feeling too much—much too much—all of it building in my chest. I pressed my mouth against his and clung to him, pulling the calm I needed out of him. Finally, when I felt able to speak, I broke the kiss and clasped his face. I stared straight into his eyes and fought every single fear inside me. “I love you too.”
CHAPTER 22
R ae was smirking at Cole and me as we walked over to the table hand in hand. Tony and Simon were wearing similar expressions.
“Managed to drag yourselves out of the love shack, did you?” Rae had practically yelled, and I could feel the curious and amused gazes of the other restaurant patrons burning into me.
“Remind me that I kind of love her,” I said, gritting my teeth.
Cole grunted. “Hard to do when I’m busy trying to remind myself.”
“No!” Rae continued to speak much too loudly as Cole pulled out the seat next to her. “Switch with Simon and Tony. If I sit next to you two I’ll look like someone has rolled me in flour.”
Assuming she was referring to the tans we’d gotten in Italy, I took the seat Cole had offered. “Suck it up.”
She pursed her lips in annoyance. Finally, as Cole settled into the seat next to mine, she said, “There’s something different about you. And I’m not talking about your smarter-than-usual mouth.”
I shrugged. “It’s called happiness.”
Rae’s attention flicked between Cole and me. She gave us a huge beaming, genuine smile at odds with her next words. “Cheesy buggers.”
“So, okay, I really want to find out what you think of my home country.” Tony smiled lazily, but I could see a glitter of excitement in his eyes. “But first I want to tell you something.”
“Tony.” Simon groaned.
“No, no.” His partner narrowed his gaze. “I want to know what they think.”
“About what?” Cole said.
“I want to adopt a child,” Tony announced, his usual air of insouciance gone. “Simon, he no want to because he think I’m crazy. Convince him otherwise.”
Cole relaxed back in his chair, seeming to be unperturbed by what I considered to be huge news. “Okay, well, I will but it all depends.”
“On what?”
“On if you’re crazy or not.”
Simon snorted.
Tony did not look amused. “I am ready to be a papa. I think Sy and I would make wonderful parents.”
“I think you would too,” I found myself opining before I could stop myself. From the moment he’d announced the news, sounding almost as casual as if he’d decided he needed a new car, I’d felt the irritation heating in my blood. I tried to temper it, knowing Tony had a good heart. He smiled at my words, but I cut him off. “But only if you both want it and have thought long and hard about it. A kid isn’t an accessory—something to have because it fits your mood and it’s what people expect. You can’t just return it, Tony, and you can’t ignore it because a child isn’t all you’d hoped it would be for you, and you certainly can’t raise a child in a household where one parent may possibly resent it.”
Everyone sat in stunned silence at my outburst.
Cole reached for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze at the exact same time Simon lifted his glass of water in a toast to me. “Thank you. A voice of reason in the madness.”
Tony shot him a hurt look. “I don’t think it’s an accessory. I want a child.”
“And I’m not ready. I also don’t want to discuss this shit in front of our friends.”
Squirming uncomfortably, I held Cole’s hand tighter as the tension mounted around the dining table.
“Is everyone ready to order?” A waiter suddenly appeared beside us.
Rae snapped open her menu. “Unfortunately we’ve been too busy participating in really fucking awkward dinner table conversation, so we’re not quite ready yet. Give us a couple of minutes.”
The waiter scurried off as quickly as possible.
I shot Cole a look of concern. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”
Cole’s lips twitched. “Would you?”
I looked down at my menu, avoiding eye contact with the warring couple opposite us. “Absolutely not.”
Tony sighed wearily. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable. I got excited about the idea.” He leaned in closer, trying to smile away the troubled look in his eyes. “So, tell me, how you find Lago di Como?”
Before I could answer, Cole’s ringtone sounded from his pocket. He pulled it out and glanced down at the caller ID. He frowned apologetically. “Sorry. I have to take this.” He tapped the screen and held the phone to his ear. “Marco?” Cole tensed.
So did I.
“Shannon and I are on our way.”
We were? Where?
Cole shoved his phone in his pocket and pushed back from the table. “To make this more awkward than it already is, Shannon and I have to leave.” He winced. “Hannah just went into labor.”
* * *
“I would never have guessed any of that. Hannah seemed so cool and together about the pregnancy.”
I was snuggled up next to Cole in the hospital waiting room and he’d just finished telling me a little bit about Hannah’s history. Everyone had turned up at the hospital when she went into labor, but five hours later most of the family had to leave to get sleepy children home to their beds. Marco was with Hannah, who’d finally dilated enough centimeters to be sent to the delivery room. The clock on the wall told me Cole and I had been there for over ten hours. As for Clark and a much-recovered Elodie, they were looking after Sophia, and Dylan was with his mum.
That left an exhausted Cole and me. To stay awake we’d been drinking coffee and chatting until we were hoarse. I discovered why Cole wanted to stay after he told me about his best friend’s history.
Apparently when Hannah was seventeen she’d been on a day out with Cole and Jo when she suddenly collapsed.
“It was awful,” he said, eyes bleak with the memories. “There was all this blood and I didn’t know what it meant. I had my suspicions because what else could it be? But this was Hannah . . . Anyway, she was unconscious, deathly pale, and still as Jo and I waited for the ambulance to come. When they lifted her into the ambulance, I just knew . . .” His eyes were suddenly bright. “She was dying. I felt it in my gut.”
“Oh my God, Cole.” I gripped his arm, shocked.
“They rushed her into surgery. Her heart stopped on the table, but they brought her back. By this point her whole family was at the hospital and they kept asking us questions. I was numb with shock. Hannah and I weren’t really close, but I thought she seemed like a cool girl, a quiet girl who wouldn’t get into trouble, and all I kept thinking was if she came out of it I’d be a better friend. A friend who would have known something was going on with her in the first place. Thankfully she came out of it. She’d been pregnant and didn’t know it. There was a complication and one of her tubes burst, so she was bleeding internally. They performed surgery, she made it through, and they told her that she could still have children. However, the whole thing marked her.” His expression hardened a little. “The kid had been Marco’s. I didn’t discover that little nugget of information until just after he and Hannah rekindled things. She wouldn’t tell anyone in her attempt to protect him. After it happened, things were bad for her at school, she was depressed . . . and I wanted her to have someone. So we grew close. I became her best friend. She still didn’t tell me the truth. I put two and two together much, much later.”