Chapter Twenty

The sun was up and Clover could hear voices coming down the hall from the kitchen. She smoothed her shirt over her flat belly and ran a brush through her hair. The bed was made. The bathroom connected to her bedroom put back to how it had been before. Her overnighter had been repacked and zipped closed. She’d delayed as long as she could. Time to put a smile on and pretend that everything hadn’t just changed. More than that, she had to do it all while lying to her family about the man she wasn’t about to marry and wouldn’t be seeing after today.

Still, she didn’t move toward her closed bedroom door.

A baby. Maybe.

Her period was due in about a week. Until then, there was nothing she could do but wait and worry and…ignore the small bubble of excitement surrounding the boulder of anxiety in her stomach and the dream she’d had last night of a baby with her hair and Sawyer’s hazel eyes. That wasn’t the life for her. She was about new places and new experiences, not a static life behind a white picket fence.

Hustling out of the room before that mental image could take hold, she walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, the telltale smell of smoke announcing that her mother was in the kitchen. God love the woman, but she could burn water, which is why her dad did most of the cooking.

“You’re gonna burn the place down, Laura,” her dad’s voice filtered out of the kitchen, along with the haze of burned bacon–scented air.

“You just got back from the hospital. Don’t make me send you back there, Phillip,” her mom retorted. “Now, go sit in the living room like I told you until everything’s ready.”

The smoke detector let out a long squawk before being silenced as Clover approached the kitchen, listening to the banter that had been a part of her parents’ marriage for as long as she could remember. She hesitated in the doorway. Her brother was at the table, a book open on the table and oblivious to the goings-on around him. Her mom looked harried but happy as she stood in front of the stove waving a tea towel to push the smoke from the pan toward the open back door. Her dad, a little paler than normal with a tired pinch to his eyes, leaned against the half-wall dividing the kitchen from the living room.

“Good thing I didn’t marry you for your cooking,” Phillip said, shaking his head.

Her mom tossed the towel across one shoulder and marched over to her dad. “Nope, you married me because, and I quote, you couldn’t imagine your life without the most beautiful woman you ever met.”

“More like the most maddening,” he said, beaming down at her.

“And you love it.” Laura went up on her toes and kissed Phillip’s cheek. “Now get out of here. Sawyer and I can handle brunch.”

Sawyer?

At that moment, the man in question came strolling out of the walk-in pantry his arms filled with pancake mix, syrup, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar. Some of the sugar must have poofed up from the bag because there was a fine dusting of white across one of his glass lenses. He looked totally out of place and completely ridiculous, and her heart skipped anyway. Damn it. Not the reaction she needed to be having right now.

He spotted her and stopped. Every nerve ending in her body came alive when he looked at her and the bubble of hope that had no right to be inside her expanded just a little.

A baby. Maybe.

Don’t do it, Clover girl.

They didn’t make sense together and a maybe baby wasn’t going to change that. The best thing she could do for her own sanity was remember that this wasn’t a real engagement. It was a job. One that would pay for her trip to Australia and more adventures after that. To imagine anything else would just lead to heartbreak. Even if there was a baby, that couldn’t be the cornerstone to a lasting relationship. She may have spent her life fighting against going down the same path as her mom, but there was no denying that her mom and dad loved each other. Really loved each other. She wouldn’t settle for anything less and she wasn’t cruel enough to raise a child in an environment where its mom and dad didn’t have that.

“Morning,” Sawyer said, crossing to the kitchen island and setting everything down on it. “Please tell me your dad taught you how to make pancakes.”

Despite her black mood, she laughed. “He did.”

“Thank God.” Sawyer winked at her as he started measuring out pancake mix according to the directions on the box. “I was gonna feel really bad if I helped your mom burn down the house.”

Some of the tension ebbed out of her shoulders. Whatever else happened, Sawyer wasn’t going to let this be awkward—at least not at her parents’ house. Later they’d deal with it, but for now they were just two people pretending that everything was as it seemed. She plugged in the large griddle on the island and grabbed a spatula from a drawer. If he could do this, so could she. Together, they just might carry it off.

“Morning, pumpkin,” her dad said, ambling over for a hug and a surreptitious look at the ingredients Sawyer had gathered and how he was mixing them together.

She squeezed her dad as tight as she dared. “I thought we were picking you up in an hour?”

“Well I—”

“Bullied the doctor into letting him out first thing this morning,” Laura cut in. “The damn fool took a taxi home.”

“Don’t listen to a word she says,” her dad said, looking every bit like someone caught with his hand in the cookie jar but denying it anyway. “Dr. Thornson was totally on board with the plan.”

Leaning into his arms, she inhaled the familiar scent of his aftershave and offered up a silent prayer of thanks for some things that didn’t change. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Dad.”

“Me, too, pumpkin.” He gave her a kiss on the top of her head and then wandered out of the kitchen to the worn chair in the living room that he refused to let her mom take to the county landfill.

And so things settled into a comfortable silence with her dad reading the paper while her mom set the table and she and Sawyer made the pancakes. It was the kind of domestic scene that would normally make her feet itch, but today it didn’t—and she refused to question why.

Half an hour later, the syrup had barely been poured on top of her pancakes before her mom went into inquisition mode.

“So this all happened pretty fast,” her mom said, not touching the three pancakes, hash browns, Canadian bacon, regular bacon, and berry assortment on her plate. “I gotta tell you, Clover, your dad and I were very surprised when we heard secondhand about the engagement and then you’ve been avoiding my calls since then and it has us worried.”

Subtle, her mom was not.

“I know, Mom, and I’m sorry about not saying anything but…” She got to the end of her words before her brain had time to think up anything.

“It was my fault,” Sawyer picked up the slack. “I talked her into surprising you, but word snuck out before we had a chance.”

“Uh-huh,” her mom didn’t sound convinced.

“So why the big rush to an engagement? It’s not like you two have known each other for that long,” her dad asked, his mouth half full of pancakes.

Her gut clenched and, reflexively, she put a hand on her belly. “It just sort of happened.”

“It freaked me way out. You see, I’m a big-picture person and marriage has never figured into the plan.” Sawyer picked up the coffee pot and gestured toward her mom’s half-empty cup. “Refill?” After waiting for her mom to nod, he went on. “But my mom had it in her head that it was past time I got married.”

“That sounds familiar,” Bobby muttered, his eyes glued to the science journal laying by his plate. “The parental unit actually thought I was a better hope for grandkids than Jane.”

“You’re in the lab too much,” her mom said with a sigh.

Her dad nodded. “Yeah, we want to make sure you have kids early before one of your experiments turns you into a superhero.”

Clover perked up. This was news. Her family had given up on her doing the whole marriage and kids thing? Okay, maybe her dad had, but mom had never stopped with her little reminders. Sawyer must have sensed the tension stiffening her spine because he reached under the table and took her hand in his before continuing.

“Well, my mom was on a formal campaign and my brother thought it would be funny to put out an ad for someone to act as a buffer between my mom and me,” he said, obviously omitting the timing of that occurrence.

“What?” her mom gasped.

“No, not like that,” Sawyer said in a rush. “Like a personal assistant who could dissuade my mom from trying to twist my arm to go on dates with her wife candidates.”

“Please God, don’t ever let our parents meet,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “Can you two elope or something?”

Sawyer raised his coffee mug in a commiserating salute. “Clover turned out to be the perfect fit and not just for the job. We connected right away. A few pineapple shakes and trips to the flea market later, and I was hooked.”

Her dad’s fork fell with a clank onto his plate, his eyes wide. His face had lost what little color it had. Fear twisting her lungs tight, Clover was out of her seat in seconds rushing to his side. She and her mom got there at the same time.

“Stop your fussing,” he said, waving them off as an embarrassed flush filled his cheeks. “I’m fine.”

Clover’s pulse pounded in her ears as she took a hard look at her dad, but he looked annoyed, not like he was about to have a heart attack for real. She let out a deep breath and slid back into her chair.

“I’ve gotta get this straight. You voluntarily went to the flea market? With Jane? On one of her DIY hell trips?” her dad said, his tone a mix of awe and horror. “And you didn’t run screaming?”

Sawyer nodded, just the right amount of bemused wonder on his face.

“Laura, darling, call off the dogs,” her dad said with a chuckle, sneaking a sip of his wife’s coffee before she could swipe the cup from his grip. “This man’s a goner.”

…

Was he a goner? Almost two hours into the drive back to Harbor City and Sawyer couldn’t shake the question.

He wasn’t, of course. That would be ridiculous. It was an unusual situation, and add to that the fact that the condom broke last night and of course it could appear that way, even if someone didn’t know all of the relevant facts. Like that the whole farce of an engagement was just another fun adventure for her and an efficient way for him to submarine Operation Marry Off Sawyer. Well, not the condom breaking part. That was just the bit of reality to smack both of them upside the heads.

Could she be pregnant? Yeah. Was she? Highly doubtful. It was just the once.

Said every high school-aged parent ever.

Okay, he was not going there.

Back to something he could control: this fake engagement/very real and very hot no-strings affair. Had Clover become a distraction? He snuck a peek at her out of the corner of his eye. She was winding a strand of hair around her finger while she gnawed her bottom lip raw and stared out the window at the outer suburbs of Harbor City. Her sunglasses were on, which kept him from seeing the look in her brown eyes, but he didn’t need that to know. She’d been curled up in the passenger seat the entire trip as if she could make herself small enough to disappear. The urge to reach out to her, take her hand at the very least, made him grip the steering wheel tighter because with every mile closer they got to home, the slower he drove. It was beginning to get obvious—especially considering the number of cars whipping around him in their rush to get to the city. He had a deal to prep, a trip to Singapore to get ready for, and yet here he was cruising down the highway at a brisk fifty-five miles per hour.

Was he distracted? Hell yes.

Which is exactly why they’d decided to end the fake engagement early. It made sense, it fit with his big-picture plan for Carlyle Enterprises and for him—it was the only thing that mattered. And the only reason why he was driving five miles under the speed limit instead of his regular fifteen over was because he was in a shitty rental that shook anytime he took it over sixty.

Really.

It sure as hell wasn’t because the conversation was so stellar. Neither of them had said much of anything since piling into the rental and waving good-bye to her parents. Scanning the highway for something to start a conversation, his gaze hit a minivan with more stick figure kids than he could imagine on the back window, a cop pulling over someone going the opposite direction, and a billboard for a discount bridal shop. Yeah, a whole lotta nothing there. Still, he had to try something. They couldn’t end things like this, so he opened his mouth and let go with the first words that popped into his head.

“We could get married.”

He almost swerved off the road, correcting right as the wheels went over the rumble strips on the side of the highway. Where in the hell had that statement come from?

Clover smacked a palm down on the dashboard to brace herself and snorted. “Yeah right.”

“Why not?” he asked, returning the middle finger salute from the driver in the next lane.

She didn’t even turn to look at him, just curled her knees tighter to her chest. “You’re you and I’m me.”

“What does that mean?” His frustration made the question louder than he meant.

Now she did look at him, twisting in her seat and revealing the hard set to her jaw and the swollen redness of her bottom lip. “Tell me what you envision for our married life together.”

His mind went blank. He hadn’t been telling her parents a story at brunch. He’d never planned on getting married. Hudson was the ladies’ man. He was the boring Carlyle brother. The one who went to work. The one who focused on growing Carlyle Enterprises. The one who had absolutely no identity outside of the company—nor had he ever wanted one.

Her lips curled into a tight smile and she returned to her original position, staring out the passenger window. “That’s what I thought.”

Gripping the steering wheel tight enough that his knuckles turned white, he counted to twenty. Another set of cars passed them as his lungs tightened and his pulse began to race. “You might be pregnant.”

“And you think that is the proper foundation for building a life together?” she asked, her voice barely loud enough to be heard over the lawn mower engine making the car go. “A broken condom?”

Fuck. That was the core of it, wasn’t it? He could lie and say yes, but she’d see through him in an instant. And in that moment, he hated himself for it. This wasn’t how his world worked. It wasn’t how this was supposed to go. But the thing was, for the first time in his life since his dad died, he had no fucking clue what happened next and it ate away at him right down to the bone.

“If you are pregnant,” he said, pressing the gas pedal down because he needed to do something—anything—at that moment. “I won’t be a missing part of my child’s life.”

Clover let out a weary sigh and rested her temple against the passenger window. “I’d never want you to be. If I’m pregnant—and that’s a big if—we’ll figure it out from there.”

“Fine,” he ground out as he passed a minivan. “But until we know one way or another we go ahead with the engagement as if it was real.”

“Why?”

He grabbed ahold of the first reason that came to mind. “Because I have you under contract for another two weeks, and I’m not agreeing to early separation. That’s not up for negotiation.”

“The contract, of course.” Maybe she was just tired, but her voice sounded thicker than before. “So we go on pretending to be engaged until we know one way or another in a week or two. But no matter how it turns out, remember that I’m not a white picket fence kind of girl and you sure aren’t the kind of guy to clock out of the office at five every day to go home to your wife and kids.”

Was she wrong? No. They were who they were. Those differences were no big deal when it was all about hot sex and fun, but twenty years down the line? He had no plan for that. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from pushing.

“Look, I’m not saying it would be a perfect marriage, but…” The words died out as some emotion he couldn’t—didn’t want—to identify jacked up his thinking. “Just consider it.”

God knew he would. As Harbor City’s skyline, dotted with Carlyle Enterprises buildings, took shape in the near distance, the idea was already taking root in his head in ways that all of his mother’s schemes to find him the perfect Harbor City socialite wife never had.