Tempted By The Royal. Michelle Celmer
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She was tired—physically and mentally exhausted. Was that normal in the first few months of pregnancy? Or were the erratic hours at the restaurant taking an additional toll on her body?
She’d had to drag herself out of bed this morning, and she’d turned the shower spray to cool to jolt herself awake. What she’d told Eric was true—she’d never been at her best in the mornings, but she wasn’t usually so grumpy.
Even when she’d been in high school and had to get up for classes in the morning, she often worked late to help her dad. When she was a teen, he’d been strict about keeping her away from the bar, but when the last customer was gone and the door was locked at the end of the night, she would come out of the kitchen to help him with the clean-up of the restaurant and the close-out of the register and anything else that needed to be done.
She’d loved that time of night, the quiet camaraderie they’d shared. Just thinking about it now, she felt an aching emptiness inside. Her father had been gone for almost ten years now, but there still wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about him and how much she missed him.
He’d been in her thoughts even more than usual recently, and she wondered if that was because she so desperately wanted to tell someone about the baby she carried. She knew her father would have been disappointed about the circumstances of her pregnancy, but he would have been thrilled about the child. Family had always been the most important part of life to James Shea, with even the bar running a distance second.
When his wife bailed on him after fifteen years of marriage, he’d raised his daughters alone, and he’d raised them with love and compassion. If he’d had one regret, it was that Maureen had cut all ties when she’d walked out. He felt it was important for children to have the love of both parents, and he always lamented the fact that he couldn’t give that to his daughters.
He wouldn’t approve of Molly’s decision not to tell Eric about her pregnancy, of that she had no doubt. Not that she wasn’t ever going to tell him, she reminded that nagging voice in the back of her mind, just that she needed some more time to assimilate what she’d learned about her baby’s father before she told him he was going to be a father.
She thought about how her dad would react to that bit of information.
“You always were my princess,” he would have said with a smile. “And now you’ll have the title to prove it.”
Because he would also assume that, being pregnant with Eric’s baby, she would marry him—whether or not it was what either of them wanted. Yes, family was important to James Shea, and so was responsibility, as he’d proven when he married Molly’s mother after learning that she was carrying his child.
But that was thirty-one years ago, and even if Eric offered marriage as a solution, she knew it wasn’t one she could accept. It certainly wasn’t a solution that had worked for her parents. Not that they hadn’t tried—at least for a while. But in the end, Maureen Shea had woke up one morning and, looking around, decided she didn’t like what her life had become and walked away from everything.
Molly didn’t think she would ever understand how a woman could walk away from her child like that—cutting all ties and never looking back. Instinctively, her hand went to her still-flat tummy. Though her baby was just starting to be, she was already overwhelmed with love for her child and she vowed silently but vehemently to always be there for her baby.
Which meant that she had to start giving serious consideration to the day-to-day practicalities of parenthood. In particular, she needed to consider what was she going to do when she had a child of her own—could she continue to serve customers with a playpen behind the bar? And even if that worked for the first several months, she couldn’t keep a toddler confined to a mesh-cage for a six-hour shift any more than she could allow him free rein to crawl around the restaurant.
But what other option did she have?
Sell.
The answer popped into her head from nowhere—or maybe it had been lurking in the back of her mind since Abbey had first spoken of the possibility after their father died.
Her sister had broached the subject a few more times since then, but Molly had always balked. Shea’s was their legacy, the only thing they had left that was their father’s.
And even if they sold the bar, even if they found a buyer, what would she do after? Who would hire her? She had no real skills, no experience, and now she had a baby on the way.
You could write.
This time the voice in head sounded suspiciously like her grandmother’s, and the words were a familiar refrain.
Even as a child, she’d had stories in her head. Her father had enjoyed the fanciful tales she’d spun and appreciated that her narratives entertained his customers; her grandmother had always insisted that Molly was a born storyteller. Molly only knew that there were characters and scenes constantly spinning around in her mind and she had a drawerful of notebooks in which she’d jotted down those ideas in an attempt to clear them from her mind.
But while she might occasionally fantasize about being a writer, she didn’t have any illusions that she could simply decide to make that kind of career change and expect to pay the bills. So what could she do?
She felt the sting of tears in her eyes as the questions came at her from all directions. Questions without apparent answers. Problems without any solutions.
She sat on a stool and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and wished again that her father was here. Since he’d passed away, she’d been the mature and responsible one—the one everyone else turned to for help, the shoulder that others cried on. For once—just once—she wanted a shoulder to cry on, strong arms to wrap around her, someone she could count on and believe in and—
She shook her head, furiously pushing aside the image of Eric Santiago that managed to steal into her mind. How could she even think about leaning on him when he was the one who’d started her world spinning out of control? She couldn’t. No way, no how.
Molly would handle this current predicament as she’d handled everything else in her life since her father died—on her own.
Eric managed to stay away from the restaurant and the temptation of Molly for three days. On day four, he decided he wanted to go out for lunch, and found himself driving toward Shea’s. She was right in saying that they didn’t know one another very well, but what he found more interesting than this assertion was her determination to keep him at a distance so that she wouldn’t get to know him.
This time when he entered the restaurant, he saw Molly not standing behind the bar but seated at it, talking to another woman beside her. He wasn’t going to interrupt, but it was almost as if she was as attuned to his presence as he was to hers, because she looked up and her eyes met his.
He smiled, and she smiled back, albeit tentatively.
As if cluing in to the silent exchange, the woman seated beside Molly looked up. The two women looked enough alike that he would have guessed they were sisters, though he hadn’t known that she had a sister, which again proved her point that there was a lot they didn’t know about one another.
Molly was wearing slim-fitting jeans and a sleeveless blouse with tiny little flowers embroidered on the collar. Practical yet feminine, he thought, and so perfectly suited to Molly. Her sister was wearing a dress with a criss-cross tie down the back that drew attention to her curves and strappy sandals with pencil-thin heels. Her hair wasn’t as long or as dark as Molly’s and was streaked with lighter strands.
His gaze moved back to Molly, noting the hair that was pulled away from her face in a ponytail, the deep blue eyes surrounded by thick dark lashes, full lips that were slicked with clear gloss, and he felt the now-familiar stir of desire low in his belly.
“Just in the neighborhood?” Molly asked.
“Just