Falling For Zoe (The Camerons of Tide's Way #1) by Skye Taylor Page B

something?” She reached out and grasped Zoe’s hands and squeezed. “I feel like we’re sort of like sisters. You know? So, that would make me sort of like an aunt. Right?”
    Zoe hesitated, thinking of Jake’s reaction, but then saw the first hint of disappointment in Ava’s eyes. Ava felt rejected by her own mother, and Zoe wasn’t going to let her feel rejected again. Not if she could help it. She returned the pressure of Ava’s hands firmly.
    “Oh, Ava! That would be so much fun. I love having you for a friend, and a woman can never have enough sisters. Molly will be so lucky to have an honorary aunt living right next door. As long as it’s okay with your father.”
    WOULD JAKE BE okay with it? Zoe wouldn’t blame him if he wasn’t enthusiastic about his very impressionable teenage daughter hanging out with an unwed mother-to-be. Zoe wasn’t exactly the kind of role model a conscientious father would choose for a girl he was having a hard enough time just acknowledging was becoming a young woman. Zoe would understand if he did his best to discourage it. But it would hurt.
    She stood in the dark, gazing out her bedroom window at Jake’s house, wishing she’d told Jake about her pregnancy earlier instead of trying so hard to hide it. All the reasons she’d had for not wanting him to find out before seemed stupid now. After all, they were just friends, so why should it matter to him personally if she was pregnant?
    But as friends, she should have been the one to tell him, not Ava. Wearing oversized shirts and not saying something when she’d had the chance seemed so dumb in retrospect, because she’d known he’d find out eventually. She couldn’t hide it forever. And now she might have jeopardized the friendship that had grown so quickly between them. Trust was so important, yet so terribly fragile.
    If only she hadn’t fallen in love with him. That’s why she’d been reluctant to say anything. She hadn’t meant to fall in love, but it was like trying to un-ring a bell. And in spite of all evidence to the contrary, she’d continued to hope he might feel a spark of attraction in return.
    Except that men didn’t fall in love with women who were carrying another man’s baby. Zoe wiped angrily at the tears that had begun to dribble down her face.
    “But I should have told him,” she whispered into the darkness of her lonely bedroom.

Chapter 14
    “DADDY? I KNOW Mom was already pregnant, but was that the only reason you got married? I mean, you were going to get married anyway. Right?”
    Jake had just come down from tucking the twins into bed and found Ava curled up on the couch with a paperback novel in one hand, a can of soda in the other, and the dog sprawled beside her. Her question stopped him in his tracks.
    “We talked about it. We talked about getting married after we graduated college, that is. But then you happened.” He moved to the chair across from the couch and sank into it. Where is Ava going with this question?
    “So, you would never walk out on a woman you’d gotten pregnant, right?”
    Jake’s heart began to thud in painful apprehension. “I cared about your mother very much. I would never have walked out on her, pregnant or otherwise.”
    “But if you hadn’t loved her, would you still have gotten married?”
    “Of course I would have offered to marry her. Why all the questions?”
    “And you definitely wouldn’t tell her to just go get an abortion. Right?”
    “What is all this about?” Jake’s heart clenched painfully. Was his baby pregnant? Had everything Zoe told him been wrong? Had Travis worn Ava’s resistance down, and then told her to get lost once he’d had his way with her? When was the last time he’d seen Travis, anyway? The facts were adding up, and Jake didn’t like the sum. “Ava, are you pregnant?”
    Ava gaped at him. Then a look of indignation flashed across her face. “Daddy!”
    “Well, are you?” He had to know. He didn’t want to know,