Undeniably Yours by Shannon Stacey

doing? Knitting him a blanket?”
    “Him? You think it’s a boy?”
    She sighed. “You totally missed the point.”
    “Okay, look. Your place is—”
    “Mine,” she interrupted. It wasn’t much. Nobody knew that more than she did, but it was hers and she’d be damned if the Kowalskis were going to just bulldoze right over her.
    His crestfallen expression made her feel guilty. “Sorry. Maybe I’m overstepping. If you say I am, I must be. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I mean, don’t I get to do anything before the baby’s actually born?”
    That was so sweet she melted a little on the inside. “This is new to me, too, Kevin, but—”
    “You can’t stay here.”
    “What?” Did he mean while they were doing the tests? “Where am I supposed to go?”
    “The apartment across from mine. Holy shit, it’s cold in this hallway.”
    “Back up, Kevin. I just woke up and your father’s yelling at me because I don’t have a couch and—”
    “Why don’t you have a couch?”
    She sighed. “Because I could only bring things I could get up two flights of stairs by myself.”
    “Nobody helped you move?”
    “No.”
    “That’s why you can’t stay here.”
    “Because I don’t have a couch?”
    “No, because you’re alone with nobody else to help you out. I think I can see my breath, you know.”
    She was going to kick him in the shin. Hard. “I didn’t know anybody when I moved here. I do now, so if I decide to buy a couch I don’t want or need, I’ll call a friend to help me carry it up.”
    “I want you to move out of here and live in the apartment across from mine.”
    Whoa. One hell of an ambush before coffee. “Sure, because you just hand out empty apartments at random.”
    “You’re not random. There are apartments over Jasper’s. Paulie lives in the big one on the second floor. I’ve got one of the two on the third floor. The other one’s empty. And furnished, so all you need is clothes and food.”
    “I can’t do that.” She shoved her hair back away from her face. “I can’t just move into your building, Kevin.”
    “Why not?”
    That stumped her for a few seconds. Because…she just couldn’t. There was Kevin across the hall, for one thing. It was bad enough her new pregnancy hormones seemed to be causing some pretty steamy dreams. Seeing him every day?
    Even thinking straight was beyond her right now. She was supposed to be saving her money for a bus ticket and a new start, not diapers and a minivan. Not thinking about moving into a fully furnished apartment that could end up being a home. Home meant building relationships with people who would want to know where she was and what she was doing. Home meant hovering.
    Albuquerque. That was the dot on the map her eye kept landing on.
    She could still go. There was time to escape the New England winter and start a new life before she even started showing. Sure, it was harder for a pregnant woman to find work, but she’d manage.
    But even as a part of her was mentally leaving town, another part of her recognized those days were over. And the man standing in front of her was a big reason why. The only way she could have disappeared would have been not to tell him and she couldn’t live with that. So now she was stuck.
    She jumped when Leo jerked open the door and waved a discolored cotton swab in Kevin’s direction. “We got lead paint.”
    Her stomach dropped. Lead paint? Weren’t there laws governing that sort of thing in apartment houses?
    But that probably required somebody to report it and the people who rented apartments there were people who didn’t have a lot of residential choices. But lead paint…that was so dangerous for the baby.
    “Jesus, it’s cold out here,” Leo said. “And whose cat’s pissing in the hallway? This place should be condemned.”
    He closed the door on them and Beth would have laughed if there wasn’t a hot ball of shame in the pit of her stomach. The Kowalskis were one