I draw the first full breath I’ve been able to manage since I looked up to see him, and start to laugh. Because trailer talk was so not what I expected to come out of his mouth.
“Seriously?” I demand. “That’s what you want to say to me?”
His mouth opens. And closes. And opens again.
“Uh,” he says. “Uh. Not really.”
We’re facing each other. Standing maybe six feet apart, a chunk of that space taken up by my belly.
I’m still trying to pull myself back together. I’d like to say I just tripped on Bernadette’s steps, but honestly? I got a little weak-kneed from surprise and relief when I saw him. And then? When he pulled me into his arms? I pretty much dropped straight into a hard-core flashback of that night. His big body pressing me into the wall, him turning me, holding my hands over my head so he could line up his iron-hard erection against my ass. Him bending me over the couch, telling me he wasn’t going to come until I did, no matter how long I needed.
Whoops. Here come the weak knees again.
He doesn’t seem to be able to pull himself out of his stunned moment, either. We’re just staring at each other. I can’t be sure what he’s thinking, but I’m thinking about how once I say it out loud—“it’s yours”—everything’s going to change.
It’s how I felt when the doctor came back into the exam room and said, I have the results of your blood test. I knew, just from looking at her face, that the next words out of her mouth would change everything. Once she tells me, I thought, there’s no going back.
There’s no going back.
There never was.
I say it quickly, like ripping off a band-aid.
“I’m pregnant. And it’s yours.”
And then, quick, because he looks like he’s going to pass out, “Don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out.” He gives a short, pained laugh. “I mean, I’m sort of freaking out, but I’m—I’m… it’s just a lot to absorb.”
“I know the feeling,” I say wryly. “That’s how I was when I found out.”
His eyes are darting back and forth like his mind’s going a million miles per hour, which it probably is.
I’ve changed everything for him, just like the doctor’s words did for me.
But finding him—or really, stumbling into him, because it’s pretty obvious even Clark had no idea what he was setting in motion—changes everything again. Suddenly this baby has a dad, and I’d given up on that whole possibility.
Except it’s also possible it changes nothing.
I wish he would say something. Even something angry.
It occurs to me he might doubt my story.
“If it helps,” I tell him, “I’m happy to do a paternity test. There’s a safe way, where they do this thing with fetal blood cells in my bloodstream. I don’t actually expect you to take my word for anything. We knew each other, what, an hour?”
He nods distractedly. He’s—not angry, I don’t think. His expression is just sort of frozen and confused. Understandably.
“How…?” he asks. “You said you had an IUD.”
“Yeah. I, um, had some weird bleeding, and I went to the doctor, and my IUD had ejected. It’s pretty rare, but it happens. I never had periods with the IUD, so I didn’t notice anything was weird. They did a pregnancy test and then an ultrasound… And voilà—there I was, more than three months pregnant. I weighed my options, which—it took some soul searching. But I made my choice, and…” I gesture to my belly. “Here I am.”
Kane looks like he’s about to interrupt, so I quickly add, “I tried to find you.” I realize I haven’t said that yet, and it’s super important to me that he know that. “I did all these ridiculous searches, like ‘hot guy with streaky hair, Bellagio.’ I don’t know what the hell I thought that would cough up, but needless to say, it didn’t work. I also did a reverse image search on your shirt. That was basically the only thing I could think of that might work. The Bigfoot shirt,” I explain.
He unbuttons the long-sleeved flannel shirt he’s wearing and shows me the t-shirt underneath.
I smile. “Yeah. That one.”
He rakes a hand through his hair—longish, gold-streaked, and—I remember—soft as silk. “So. You’re pregnant. And it’s mine. Wow. Um, wow.”
I can’t help it; I smile again. He’s a lot dorkier than I remember. The guy who picked me up in Vegas was a smooth operator. I couldn’t have imagined him going to pieces like this. He would have been wholly and totally in control of the whole conversation.
But this guy—he’s just staring at me with an expression I can’t quite read. It’s not anger or even fear. It’s almost like… reverence. Like I’ve done something marvelous.
And that can’t be right, can it?
That makes less than no sense.
“Did you know?” he asks. “That I would be here?”
I shake my head. “I knew Clark had brothers. I even looked at the site, but I didn’t—I didn’t look closely. Because there was no reason to think that the guy I’d given my business card to one night in a hotel would turn out to be the brother of the guy I…” I stop.
I’ve never figured out what to call it exactly. In my head, sometimes I say fucked, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Yeah, there were moments when it felt like that, in the best possible way. But there were also a lot of moments when it felt like something else. Like when he told me he wouldn’t come until I did, but also that I should take my time, there was no rush.
Jesus…
When he caught me on the Airstream steps, he smelled just like he had that night, when apparently I’d imprinted on him for my permanent scent preferences. Boy-next-door Ivory soap and grocery store apple-scented shampoo and Old Spice deodorant and the tang of male sweat under it, calling out to me in whatever musk language sweat uses to talk to our lizard brains.
I wanted to lick him, bottle him, anything to have more of it.
And he’s even more gorgeous than I remembered. The gold-streaked hair, the pale blue eyes, and a body that was made for sex—lean enough to be mobile and built enough to feel like sin under my palms. He’s wearing a pair of perfectly worn jeans, that t-shirt of his, and a now-open flannel. I’m a sucker for that not-quite-a-cowboy, not-quite-a-preppie look.
Mmm.
So.
I have this small problem.
Pregnancy has made me exceptionally, obsessively, insatiably horny.
“Marigold?” he asks. Does he sense my untethered lust?
“Call me Mari,” I say, snapping myself back to the moment at hand.
“Look,” he says. “I’m sorry I got you in this situation.”
“We got me in this situation,” I correct.
“I should have used a condom.” He winces. “Sorry,” he says, aiming the word right at my belly, as if he’s apologizing directly to the baby for negating it. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I just meant, I didn’t do the responsible thing that night. And I’d like to. Now. I’m here, and I can help with this. We can do it together, whatever you need.”
My insides are jumping around, and not just because there’s a teeny person hanging out in there, although the baby is kicking like a Rockette. I don’t know what to think or feel. Part of me is so hugely relieved, I can’t even breathe.
The other half of me is scared out of my mind. Until now, I knew what my options were, even if I didn’t love them.
Now? Things are much more complicated. Legally, Kane could prevent me from arranging an adoption. I gave him that power when I told him he was the dad, when I decided to be totally honest with him.
He could want to raise the baby himself.
And I have no idea, yet, how to feel about that possibility.
Before I came to Rush Creek, I called several references to see if the Wilders were decent people to work for, and no one had anything but glowing praise about the family or the business. Unless Kane is secretly an evil seed, I think I’m probably safe.
Still. Fundamentally, I don’t know this guy from Adam. The only thing that connects us is the fact that our DNA is all intertwined and growing a person in my lower abdomen.
Okay, maybe that’s not an “only” kind of thing.
And also, maybe it’s not our only connection. Maybe one night of insane sex isn’t the same as years of getting-to-know-you, but it is a connection.
Like the kind a power cord makes with an outlet.
Regardless, there’s no going back. No matter what the nature of our connection is—or will become—I’m not planning to start it off with any kind of deception or dishonesty, which means I have to lay my own stuff on the table.
“Um,” I say. “Here’s the thing. I was…”
My turn to wince.
“Before this, before I chanced on finding you—I was planning to choose adoption.”