AudreyI knew that I shouldn’t have eaten so much, but I really had been starving when Jesse asked if I had eaten lunch. I definitely shouldn’t have eaten so many fried, heavy foods, especially not when I had been so careful about my diet over the past couple of months in France. But I was hungry, and French fries had just sounded way too good to pass up.Now, though, I was feeling queasy again. The last thing I wanted was to bolt for the restroom to get sick. The lies about why I was really back here just kept coming, and although Jesse believed me for now, I didn’t think it would take much for him to put two and two together and realize why I was really here. He was a perceptive guy, and he knew me all too well.I tried to play it cool as he kept asking me questions about Paris and getting kicked out of the Academy. This, I hadn’t planned on. I had thought, somehow, that he would be so happy that I was back that he wouldn’t care so much about why. I’d known before I went to see him

JesseThere was a smile on my face when I woke up on Sunday morning, and it only grew as I rolled over and found Audrey still in bed beside me. It was the first time that I could remember waking up happy in the two months since she had left. Audrey was still asleep, and her beauty took my breath away. She looked relaxed and peaceful, comfortable. She had the blanket pulled up under her cheek, her arm curled around the pillow.She looked just as perfect as I remembered her. I never wanted to let her go again; I wanted her there next to me every morning when I woke up.I forced myself not to think that far ahead into the future. That was a recipe for disappointment. Eventually, she was probably going to want to head back to Paris and try to get herself back into the Academy. Or into some other dance troupe; there had to be more out there who would leap at the opportunity to have her. She was incredible, and I didn’t believe that some gaffe, even if it had been on stage, was enough to kn

AudreyI breathed a sigh of relief as I closed the front door behind me. I hated that I’d had to rush out of Jesse’s place like that. He had no idea how much I wanted to have breakfast with him and then tumble back into bed until work dragged him off again. I had woken up that morning with a smile on my face for the first time in so long. Even though he wasn’t right there next to me in bed, I felt like I was surrounded by his presence. That presence let me know that everything was going to be okay.The trouble was, I still hadn’t told him that I was pregnant, and I wasn’t sure how long I could manage to hide that from him while I was there in his presence. I could already see the concern on his face, could see the way that he was trying to puzzle things out. He knew that it wasn’t food poisoning that was making me feel this way.It was only a matter of time before he figured out just what it was. I needed to tell him first.It seemed like the more I psyched myself up to tell him, the

JesseWith the way that Audrey had rushed out of my place on Sunday morning, claiming that she had to get home to help her mom, I had been worried that I had somehow messed things up between us already, after just one night. I couldn’t put my finger on anything that I might have done, but I could tell that there was a lot going on in her head at the moment.She still wasn’t sharing any of it with me, but she had swung by the shop on Sunday evening as Chance and I were closing up and had come home with me. We had spent every night together since then, but curiously enough, the more mornings that I woke up beside her, the more I felt those dreams from the first morning, those hopes for domestic bliss, slipping further and further away from me.Mainly because she still wasn’t telling me what the hell was going on. I didn’t think that she had told me the whole story for why she had left Paris, and she definitely wasn’t explaining her health issues or any of the rest of it. I knew that the

AudreyJoe wrinkled his nose. “Sounds pretty gross,” he said. “She’s refusing to see a doctor about it?”“She says she’s got an appointment, but I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t understand why she scheduled it for so far out.”“Maybe she’s just hoping it will be out of her system before she has to see a doctor,” Joe suggested. “Does she even have health insurance over here?”“I hadn’t thought about that,” I admitted. That could be it. She had just lost her job in France, and she probably didn’t know what she was going to do for money. Her family had never exactly been rich. Most families in Aberdeen weren’t any better than comfortably middle class, and doctor visits could be expensive.I wanted to believe that was the case. If it was, though, I wished that she would just talk to me about it. We could have figured something out. Nothing, especially not some amount of money, was worth her poor health and unhappiness.“Or maybe she’s doing drugs,” Chance piped up.I stared blankl