Jonah turned all the way around to face me, forcing me to drop my hand. But his free one, the one he wasn’t using to hold up the baby, grabbed mine unexpectedly, and he said, watching me carefully, his voice serious as hell, “She’s not a mistake.”

Now that really did make me smile at him genuinely. “Good. Because I’d kick your ass if you thought she was.”

His laugh was rough as the hand on mine gave one more squeeze before dropping away. He shook his head all the way inside. It was then, as he stopped to open the door for me, Mo balanced in one arm, that he gave me another tight smile that honestly just irritated me. Not toward him, but toward his mom.

He was warning me. I knew it.

Because I knew what dealing with a drama queen was like. At least what it was like for me. Because Grandpa Gus was too much, but I thought it was hilarious and it always amused the hell out of me. Not once had he embarrassed me with how over the top he could be. I had never dreaded it. But based on the look that Jonah was sporting, it didn’t seem like that was the same in this case.

And why didn’t she know where he was? Or why hadn’t he answered her calls? Why didn’t his phone ever ring?

And also, who the fuck flew all the way from what may or may not have been New Zealand on a whim?

I needed to figure this shit out. And also make sure that Sarah, Mrs. Collins, didn’t upset her son too much, because I liked him happy and easygoing. I dealt with enough drama and egos; she wasn’t taking this away from me. At least not if I had anything to say about it.

Jonah waited by my side as I placed my order on the screen to avoid the line, and I didn’t say a word when he batted my elbow away when I started to pull my little wallet out of my back pocket and paid.

He wasn’t hurting for money. Plus, I’d carried giant-ass Mo around inside of me for nine months and four days. It wasn’t my fault Jonah had passed along his size-gigantean genes to her, regardless of what he said about being a skinny little turd back in the day. If he wanted to pay for my food, I wasn’t going to stop him.

Jonah’s hand landed on my lower back with the gentlest of pressure after I filled my drink, steering me toward the corner of the restaurant. I couldn’t help but notice all the men and women who stared at him as we passed by, also noticing that he didn’t pay them any attention. It was like he didn’t see he was the object of any attention.

When I snickered, he glanced at me and tipped his chin up, asking what that noise was for.

I smirked. “Five bucks says someone comes over and gets you confused with a football player.”

He didn’t break his stride as he wrinkled his nose. “American football?”

Reaching over his shoulder, I touched my fingers to the little hand Mo had on his neck, just to get a little taste, and snorted. “If I need to offend you in the future, I know how now. Thanks.”

He faced forward again, shaking his head as he did so, confirming my suspicion that he really was offended by that idea. “Nothing against American football players, but….”

The fact he trailed off said everything, and it just made me snort, catching sight of another person in the restaurant gazing at Jonah like he was trying to figure out where he had seen him before. “Well, if it matters any, I think rugby is a lot more entertaining than football from what I’ve watched. Not that I really know much about it still.”

He stopped walking for a second, giving me a view of his mom at a table possibly five feet away, glaring in our direction with eyes that honestly reminded me a little too much of Grandpa Gus when he was being a shit. Ha.

“American football,” he corrected me.

“American football,” I conceded. “Smart-ass.”

The smile he gave me was one of the smaller ones, and I wondered again what the hell was up his mom’s ass to make him so hesitant. He wasn’t even this bad when he’d first shown up to talk to me, I was pretty sure.

With one last lingering look I wasn’t going to overanalyze, he turned that enormously muscular body forward again and cut the rest of the distance that separated us from his mom and his sister, who was busy hunched over her cell phone, tapping away at the screen. To give Mrs. Collins credit, she stood up, her eyes going wide, and even her mouth opened. I was pretty sure she gasped.

And I was definitely sure that her eyes went glassy instantly as Jonah stopped to the side of the wall where she had been seated at a bench and held Mo up even higher on his chest as he said in that ridiculous, lovely voice, “Mum, this is Mo.” He did that thing where he lowered his forehead until it rested against the much smaller one—her hands grabbing the T-shirt Jonah had on under his open sweater—and he finished in an even deeper, more charged voice, “Mo, this is your grandmother. Your gram-my,” he enunciated carefully.

“Oh, Jonah,” the other woman whispered, her voice pretty damn wobbly. “You could’ve been twins.”

“Hema,” Natia gasped, dropping her phone onto the surface of the counter and standing up too.

The next thing I knew, Mrs. Collins was crying, and his sister looked pretty damn close to it too. There were tears rolling down Jonah’s mom’s cheeks, and she wasn’t even trying to wipe them up. Huh. I guess she wasn’t as awful as she’d seemed. At least not toward Mo, and she was the one who mattered. She didn’t have to like me, but she did have to like her.

The older woman’s fingers came up to cover her mouth for a moment, and in the next, she was holding them in front of the center of her body, her voice just as shaky as it had been before when she sniffed and then asked, “May I hold her?”

The gold-brown eyes on the biggest head around me flicked to my direction, glassy, so damn glassy, but asking.

Hadn’t I made it clear that we let everybody hold her as long as they weren’t shitheads? And didn’t he know that she was half his too? He didn’t have to ask me for permission. I just raised my eyebrows at him like duh.

And as Jonah turned his body just enough so that our girl could get a good look at the woman who had a pretty impressive part in her existence, she still wasn’t able to tear her eyes away from the man holding her. The little fingers she had on his shirt dug in and said, “Da, ba?”

Did she know? I wondered. Did she know somehow that this was her dad?

She looked at Grandpa Gus like he was an eclipse, but she looked at Jonah like he was a once-every-five-hundred-years meteor.

She knew, some part of me recognized. She had to know. Somehow. Some way. She was easygoing but not like this.

“Baby Mo,” the most handsome man I had ever known said quietly, tenderness hugging every syllable. “This is your grandmother, your gran, look, darling. Look.”

He’d called her his darling.

And I was not going to fucking tear up in the middle of Panera over it.

Mo didn’t look anywhere else though. Her little fingers just wrapped themselves even tighter in the shirt her dad was wearing, her body leaning toward him like she was preparing for him to try and hand her off, and she wasn’t about to have it. I watched Jonah swallow hard—a gulp, it was a gulp—and smile this wonky smile before he laughed a watery laugh and hugged her to him, swallowing up this baby in those enormous arms so that the only way I knew there was someone in them was because I had seen her disappear inside the cocoon of muscle he’d created.