“Hannah was right.”

He pulls back to look at Mara. Her legs are wrapped around his waist, because he picked her up the second he got home and she used the p-word. There’s something lodged in Liam’s fist—ah, yes. The test.

She showed him the second he got home, wagging it under his nose. There’s probably pee on it, and he should probably find it disgusting, but . . .

Yeah. No.

“Hannah? About what?”

“About your reaction.” Mara presses a kiss to Liam’s cheek, then grins, then disentangles herself from his arms. A steady, nimble descent. “She said you were going to buffer for fifteen minutes once I told you.”

“When you told me . . . ?”

“About this.” Her fingers splay against her abdomen, and for a split second his brain short-circuits in the best possible way. It’s happening. This is going to happen. This is his life. He doesn’t deserve it, but somehow this is his life, and—

“Wait.” He shakes his head, chasing the other, less pleasant train of thought. “How can Hannah know about the baby?”

“I told her, of course.” Mara smiles again and grabs his hand, pulling him into the kitchen. She also takes the test from him and drops it into the hallway trash bin. It’s not something Liam’s ready for, saying good-bye to the one piece of evidence that yes, this is happening, so he makes a mental note to retrieve it later. In the meantime . . .

“When did you tell her?”

“Earlier this morning. When I found out.”

Earlier this . . .

Liam frowns. Then he scowls. Then a sound comes out of him, and Mara stops in her tracks to look back at him. She’s beautiful and still happy-looking, but also narrow eyed all of a sudden.

“Did you just . . . growl?” she asks.

“No.” Yes. “Did you tell your friends about the baby before telling me?”

“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I had to tell someone.”

“Did you consider . . . me?”

“You were in court. All day.”

“You could have called me.”

“I couldn’t tell you on the phone.” Her hands come to her hips—usually Liam’s cue to let go of an argument.

He does not let go. “You told your friends on the phone.” He sounds sullen.

“It’s totally different. And anyway, Hannah and Sadie have been asking for updates every day since I told them we’d been trying, so.”

“They knew we—” The sound chokes somewhere in his trachea. Liam clears his throat. Twice. “They knew we were trying?”

“Yeah.” Mara blushes a little, and Liam takes a step closer.

This time, it’s his hands on his hips. “What did you tell them?”

“Just . . . you know . . .” The way she hand-waves is very suspicious and reveals something:

Her friends know everything about their sex lives for the last two months.

Every. Single. Thing.

“What about Ian and Erik? Do they know I’m having a baby?”