Now if he could only get a certain redhead out of his nighttime ones.
Serafina Forte reached for the clean tissue she’d had the foresight to stuff into her suit jacket pocket and wiped her mouth as she got up from the floor beside the toilet. She’d gotten lucky this afternoon. The ladies’ room at the courthouse was empty, and she hadn’t had to worry about being overheard.
A fate she had failed to escape several times over the past few months. A woman could only claim a winter stomach bug or a “touch of food poisoning” so many times.
The only upside to her daily visit to the ladies’ room—and really, what idiot called it morning sickness when her visits could happen at any time?—was that she hadn’t put on much weight. Her body was still changing, though, and she could see that in the fit of her work suits.
A fate that was going to catch up with her before she knew it.
With a sigh, she laid her head against the cool tiles of the wall, grateful she’d chosen the last stall so she could give the misery in her stomach time to settle a bit.
What was she going to do?
The question had been her constant companion for the past two months since she’d discovered her pregnancy and, as of yet, she hadn’t come up with much beyond take it one day at a time.
Perhaps the advice she should have taken was don’t have amazing sex with a man you’ve known five hours as a way to ring in the new year.
It seemed sound and eminently smart now, but was nowhere near as loud as the clanging voice in her head—one that had echoed through her body—on New Year’s Eve. That night, all she wanted to do was get as close to Gavin as possible.
Gavin.
That was all she knew. His name was Gavin, and he was a cop. They’d met at a local bar in Brooklyn and had struck up a conversation so engrossing it had taken a while for them to realize their friends had moved on to another party down the street.
Neither one of them had cared.
They’d agreed to only discuss who they were in broad strokes, which is why she’d only told him she was a lawyer, not an ADA with the city. And all she knew was that he was a cop. Since the NYPD employed roughly 36,000 people, it was a bit of a needle in a haystack.
Even if he’d wanted to get a hold of her, she hadn’t made that easy, fleeing his apartment after a bout of lovemaking that had left her breathless.
And scared.
Because people didn’t feel this way about each other—or have this sort of reaction to one another—that quickly after meeting.
Hadn’t she learned that young?
And hadn’t she been paying the price ever since?
Since that thought only produced profound misery, pregnant or not, Sera shook it off and pondered, yet again, how she could have played this differently.
They’d gone to his apartment, and it had been full of boxes. When she’d teased him on his decorating skills, he’d confirmed that he was moving in a few weeks. It was the perfect segue into a congenial conversation about why he was moving and did he like his building and where was he going?
Only their need for each other had taken over and they’d ended up kissing against said boxes, evaporating any questions she might have asked about where he was moving to.
Which now only left her with one dead end and absolutely zero lines to tug.
She had no last name. No cell phone. No known address.
And she was pregnant with his child.
On a sigh, she pushed off the wall and fixed her skirt. She slipped a breath mint out of the package she’d taken to carrying in her other jacket pocket and smoothed her hair.
Between her crushing workload, her random acts of morning sickness and her endless mooning over Gavin, she’d sort of drifted through her days—and nights. She needed to get her head back in the game.
Today’s case was big, and it meant they could get a solid handful of thugs out of the local drug trade. She’d prepped well, and she had a strong case. It was time to put her focus back on that and off her memories.
Off her worries.
Off her stupidity.
After all, crime in the city didn’t stop. And she’d be damned if she was going to let her current lapse in judgment stop her from her work.
She would figure this out. And while it wasn’t what she’d planned, in a relatively few short months, she’d have a child. One she was already beyond excited to meet. That was her reality, and her child needed to be her full focus.
Not the child’s father.
And not the way she’d become pregnant.
Even if she did look for him every time she walked the neighborhood. She’d even tried going back to their bar a few times, although once she’d realized she was pregnant, she’d switched to club soda instead of her usual wine spritzer as she’d sat alone in the bar, her breath catching in her throat each time the door opened.
But to no avail.
Gavin was a memory, and whether she liked it or not, he was going to stay there.
Their child was her future.
Gathering her things along with her renewed focus, Sera headed for the door and the waiting courtroom. Which made the presence of her boss in the hallway something of a surprise.
“Sera?”
