Diamond O’Connell lay in her bed in Cormack’s house, curled up on her side. Buddy was wrapped around her, one arm tucked under her head, the other heavy on her shoulder and arm. It felt good. Not good enough to wipe away the terror of the past few days, but better than she ever thought she’d be able to feel again.

His arm moved, and she felt his hand caress down her chest toward her abdomen. At first she thought he was trying to entice her. That would have been his style, she thought. He had always been driven by his sexual attraction to her. Truth be told, she had always been the same with him, so she had trouble faulting him—though she also knew that she wasn’t ready yet. Not after what she’d been through.

She was about to warn him off, gently, when his hand’s southerly journey stopped. He rested his palm on her belly, rubbing gently in a circle. The gentleness of his touch felt wonderfully intimate, and it took a moment before she realized what he was doing.

He’s rubbing the baby.

The thought made her heart throb. Could it be that he was genuinely happy about the prospect of being a father? It seemed almost impossible. She’d known that he was a certain type of man when she had taken up with him, and she was too streetwise to believe that people change. Not really.

And yet there was always a chance, she was beginning to think, that she’d been wrong about him. That possibility brought with it a flood of contradictory emotions. She was thrilled at the notion that she might actually have a love and a partner in her life, but the thought of relying on someone—counting on them as she set expectations for what her life would be—terrified her. She had spent her life relying solely on herself, never expecting anything from anyone else. She loved Mack, and they had developed a comfortable level of interaction and trust, but it had never risen to the level of reliance on her part, and she suspected it never would. Particularly now that she had a better understanding of how dangerous and illicit his business was, she would never put her future in his hands.

Now, for just a moment, she felt as though there might be something more to life than a lonely existence of self-protection. And the rational, protective part of her brain rebelled against such a notion.

She rolled over and looked Buddy in the eyes. They were so close together that his face was a blur.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re going to help my father, aren’t you,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and she could see how uncomfortable he was with the fact that she knew his mind so well.