“I’m saying this because it’s said breaths are stolen during a passionate kiss. That’s not true, Gavin, because I literally can’t breathe before your lips even touch mine. I try, but I’m unable to. I can’t think when you look at me. You strip my mind bare. You always have, and it’s beautiful and consuming. It’s magical and everything a girl is supposed to feel. It’s said you’re truly in love with someone if your skin tingles from their touch. Mine tingles when I hear your voice; I don’t need you to touch me. I can feel you when you’re not near me. I feel you in my dreams. I felt you when you were a thousand miles away.

“You scared me the moment I saw you, and I think it’s because I knew, I just knew, I was going to fall in love you. I didn’t know our worlds were already intertwined, but my heart somehow knew it belonged to you from the start. I didn’t believe a pain so deep existed while we were apart, but I also didn’t believe a love like ours existed. You’ve shown me it does. You’ve shown me good when there was bad. You’ve given me pleasure above all of my pain. You’ve given me life when I thought I was dead.”

Emily paused, tears streaming down her face in a rush. “It’s also said if you love someone enough, you’ll let them go if all you’re doing is causing them pain. That’s all I’ve ever caused you, Gavin. From the moment we met, I’ve turned your world upside down. And now this. I can’t have you not speaking to your mother because of me. I love you enough to let you go so she can continue to love you.”

Gavin recoiled. Feeling knocked off balance, a flash of pain shot through his chest. He swallowed, inhaling a deep, broken breath as he stared into her eyes. “You can’t leave me,” he said, hearing the desperation shaking in his voice.

“I have to,” she choked out, dying from the fear she saw on his face. “I can’t be the reason your family falls apart.”

“You won’t be,” Lillian’s soft voice hummed through the air, reassuring certainty filling her tone. Emily faced her, blinking her wet eyes in surprise. Head spinning with confusion, she swiped her fingers across her cheeks, her body shaking. “You won’t be the reason our family falls apart because I wouldn’t allow a woman who loves my son as much as you do to walk out of his life.” Stepping closer, Lillian placed a tentative hand on Emily’s shoulder, her eyes spilling over with tears. “I wouldn’t allow you to walk out of our lives. What you were about to give up, though it would’ve hurt my son, was selfless. I once knew a girl who loved a man so much it scared her, too.” Lillian paused, her gaze falling on Chad. The corner of her mouth turned up in a small, sad smile as he made his way toward her. Bringing her eyes back to Emily’s, Lillian shook her head. “It would’ve killed me if I had to give up those stolen breaths before he kissed me. Whether or not the baby you’re carrying is my grandchild, I’d be honored to call you my daughter.”

Emily’s breath caught, her heart pounding so hard she could hear it as Lillian pulled her in for a long hug. Emily cried against the shoulder of the woman who brought life to the man she loved so desperately. Not only was Emily thankful she didn’t have to give up the stolen breaths he took from her, she was thankful that somehow on this cold, snowy night, in the year her life would change in multiple ways, she gained a mother.

Emily closed the penthouse door behind her, smiling when Gavin stood from the couch, holding a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates. She peeled her coat and scarf from her body and tossed them onto the couch as she moved through the living room, toward him. “You do realize those are almost two weeks old, right?” She smiled as she looped her arms around his neck. “And do you ever eat anything healthy?”

With a chocolaty smile, he kissed her. “I do realize they’re almost two weeks old, and no. The unhealthier the better.”

She smacked her lips together, tasting the small bit of chocolate he stamped on them. Considering he had teeth any dentist would be proud to say they worked on, she was surprised he basically lived off of anything coated in sugar. The sweeter, the better. Over the last couple of months, she’d discovered other little things about Gavin that made him who he was. Who she kept falling in love with. Without fail, twice a day, he’d spend at least thirty minutes, sometimes longer, in the shower, filling up the bathroom with hot steam while blasting Breaking Benjamin from a surround sound system built into the walls. Oh, and in his best efforts, he sang along. To her surprise, but without a doubt to her liking, he had a wonderful addiction of sleeping nude. She was a lucky girl who awoke every morning to nothing but rock hard, naked alpha male.

He wasn’t without odd habits either. Emily considered him borderline OCD and possibly in need of therapist intervention. He was a clean freak in the worst possible way. Shit, if he found a crumb from a sandwich she’d eaten, it didn’t take him but a split second to grab some paper towels and Windex and swiftly wipe down the surface. This she’d laugh at, confused, because he had a housekeeper who came to clean four days a week. It was as if he needed the penthouse sparkling before the woman came to do her job.

Needless to say, Emily was attempting to break him of that quirk, easing him into the fact it was indeed okay to leave some laundry piled up in the corner. However, that was a battle she usually lost. Either way, she considered every one of his little quirks and idiosyncrasies ravishingly cute. She couldn’t help but love his many layers.

With a smile, she dropped her purse and a towering stack of mail onto the kitchen island. Gavin followed her and lounged into a chair, watching Emily pull open the refrigerator. Shuffling through the slush pile of invitations to local charity balls, Gavin plucked out his first delivery of Architectural Digest.

“You have a letter here,” Gavin informed her, sliding the envelope across the granite countertop. Opening the magazine, his eyes scanned a luxury Italian villa in Agropoli, straddling the Tyrrhenian Sea. “I also paid off your Visa. I suggest if you’re going to hide your credit card statements in a horrible effort to dissuade me from taking care of your bills, you should come up with a savvier hiding place than your jewelry box.” Sporting a devious smirk, he lifted his shoulder in a casual shrug. “There’s a surprise for you in the lower level compartment. Now we’re both sneaks.”

Pressing her lips together, Emily lifted two guilty brows, but she couldn’t deny he was correct about finding a better spot to hide her bills. Challenge accepted, she yanked the envelope from the counter and popped a kiss onto his sneaky temple. “What did you get me?”

Eyes locked on his magazine, his tone was as cool as a lazy fall breeze. “I’ll pass on that question and let you figure it out for yourself.” With a slight jerk of his head in the direction of the bedroom, those baby blues still glued to the magazine, a smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Go.”

On a sigh and a smile of her own, Emily started for the bedroom. She slid her finger under the lip of the envelope, tearing it open. With a small gasp, she stopped, looking down at the finger that’d been assaulted with a fresh paper cut. She sucked the wound, trying to ease the pain. With the envelope in her uninjured hand, and the burn starting to dissipate, she flipped over the envelope, her heart nearly stopping when her gaze triggered in on the handwriting on the front.

Though it was void of a return address, there was no mistaking Dillon’s scrawl. She swallowed and pulled out the paper, quickly unfolding it. Heart jumping wildly, she scanned a photocopy of an explanation of benefits from her old insurance company. It was a detailed breakdown of her doctor’s visit from a few weeks earlier. Confused, because she specifically remembered giving the receptionist her new insurance information and address, Emily didn’t understand how the paperwork wound up with Dillon. With a blood red marker, he’d circled the words “First trimester fetal sonogram.” At the bottom of the paper, he wrote: