Colored lights imprinted on Lauren’s retinas and the skin of her cheeks numbed as her brain stuttered to a halt. Her knees shook. Tavish hadn’t just called her his wife in front of two hundred Sutter Creek residents, had he? He couldn’t have. In front of her brother? And Mackenzie? Probably Cadie, too...
“Wife?”
“What the hell?”
Andrew and Mackenzie’s shocked responses blended together, answering the question Lauren really hadn’t wanted answered.
Oh, God. Her mind whirred. This called for major damage control. Maybe they could keep the news in the family for the weekend, just until the wedding was done. But splashes of pink clothing surrounded her. Fascination blazed on the other bachelorette party attendees’ faces. Tavish’s holler had reached their ears, all right.
All wrong, more like.
“Tavish?” Mackenzie’s shrill tone stabbed Lauren between the ribs.
“I—uh—” Didn’t seem like his brain was functioning any faster than Lauren’s. But someone had to say something.
“Ex-wife,” she offered weakly.
“As if that’s better. Why did we not know?” Mackenzie let out a loud curse and looked like she couldn’t decide who best deserved her stabby glare. “And you had to announce this now? Stellar timing.”
“Mackenzie—” Tavish started.
She held up a hand. “No. No excuses. I’m going home.” Pushing her way off the dance floor, she was out the door with Andrew on her heels before Lauren could get her legs to move.
Her feet were stuck to the floor, muscles immobile from shame. Heart hammering hard enough it threatened to break a rib, she sent her big-mouthed ex-husband a disbelieving glare. “Tavish.”
“What’s going on?” Cadie materialized at Lauren’s side. “Why did Mackenzie leave? And did you just say ‘wife’?”
“Ex-wife,” she repeated, snapping out the word. “I’m sure Tavish would love to explain given he’s the one who announced it to the entire bar.”
Anger darkened Cadie’s eyes. “Well, someone had better fill me in.”
Tavish’s hand landed on Lauren’s shoulder. “Lauren, I’m sorry, I—”
“Sorry? You’re sorry? Too late!” Snatching the martini glass from Cadie’s hand, she sloshed the blue drink into Tavish’s face.
Eyes closed, he slowly ran his tongue over his lips—oh, how dare he look smoking hot after what he did tonight—and wiped the sleeve of his no-longer-white dress shirt over his cheeks. “Seriously?”
Regret immediately crawled into her stomach. So much for keeping a low profile. “I owe you a drink, Cadie.”
“No, you owe me an explanation! You were married?”
“Yeah, well—”
“And you’re not now?”
“No, we—”
A single sob interrupted Lauren’s attempt to explain. Cadie’s shoulders jerked and her chest visibly shuddered.
Lauren would have been able to handle anger or any of its by-products. But the tears streaking down Cadie’s blotched face made the backs of Lauren’s eyes sting. She followed her sister to their table. She sensed Tavish close behind but couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Anger churned through her belly. At him, yeah. But more at herself.
“Cadie, I should have told you. But you had Sam’s death to deal with, and then Ben arrived, and it never seemed important.”
Her sister’s jaw dropped. “You don’t think you’re important to me?”
“Of course I do, I just didn’t think—”
“You’re more than my sister, Laur. You’re my best friend. Or I thought you were. But friends don’t lie to each other, and you did this morning. Said you weren’t involved.”
She wasn’t going to insult her sister by pulling out a “Technically, we’re not involved anymore.” She’d be connected to Tavish for the rest of her life, though in a far different way than they’d hoped for when they’d promised each other a life of love and respect. Forever in the marriage sense had lasted all of twelve days. Forever in the parenting sense would be starting in around mid-February, give or take.
She should just blurt that out, too. A cherry on tonight’s fricking drama cake.
But no. There was a sacredness to telling a man he was going to be a father. No matter her ire, she wouldn’t take away what would hopefully be a poignant moment for him.
Unless he deserts you again...
She shoved the thought from her mind. She’d worry about that after the wedding. First, she had to fix things with her sister. Mackenzie and Andrew, too. She sent Cadie a pleading look. “You have enough to worry about without taking on my problems.”
“I’m not fragile. I would have been there for you, just like you have for me.” Cadie started to back up.
“I know. I screwed up—”
“Yeah, you did. I naively thought I meant as much to you, that you’d rely on me if you needed me. Obviously not. Relationships need to go two ways, Lauren. It can’t just be you giving all the time.” Cadie grabbed her jacket from the booth. “I need to make sure Mackenzie’s okay.”
Lauren sucked in a breath as her sister spun and retreated. With each of Cadie’s steps, all Lauren’s attempts to shore up her family slowly drained away. Her closeness with her sister, gone. And as soon as her dad found out, he’d probably react the same as Cadie. Protecting her family from more pain—the purpose of having kept the secret—was supposed to have helped them stay together, not push them apart.
* * *
Tavish held a clean dishcloth under the faucet in Mackenzie and Drew’s kitchen. Cleaning the blue cocktail off his face was child’s play compared to cleaning up the mess he’d made by letting his temper get the best of him. He’d spent a good hour trying to convince his sister that the secret coming to light actually meant he and Lauren wouldn’t be sniping at each other for the rest of the weekend. A bald-faced lie, obviously—thirty seconds after Cadie had left the bar, Lauren had stormed out, still looking like she’d have preferred to crack a beer bottle over his head instead of throwing that drink in his face. But the dishonesty was necessary to get Mackenzie to believe that tomorrow’s rehearsal and Saturday’s wedding would go off without a hitch.
Footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor announced Drew’s return from tucking Mackenzie in. Arms crossed over his chest, he hitched a hip on the counter and fixed an impressive serious-ski-patroller look on his face. “When I suggested we start the weekend off with a bang, that’s not what I had in mind.”
Tavish flinched. He’d earned the thinly veiled disgust. Keeping his marriage a secret had been easy enough to do when he never saw Lauren. A change in proximity shouldn’t have altered the parameters that much. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start by telling me Lauren got home safe tonight.”
Damn it, he couldn’t even guarantee that. Wringing out the cloth, he bought himself a few seconds by hanging it over the kitchen faucet and ambling over to one of the bar stools tucked under the kitchen counter. He spun the stool around, straddled it and rested his arms on the wooden back. “She took off before I could talk to her.”
Drew yanked his phone from his pocket and typed out a rapid message. “And Vegas, Fitz? How did you get married without me noticing? I mean, we were drunk a good chunk of the time, but not that drunk.”
No, but on what should have been their last morning, Tavish had left Drew sawing logs in their hotel room to meet Lauren for brunch.
The minute she had smiled with her lips pursed around the rim of her coffee cup, Tavish had known in every particle of his being that he wanted to stare at that smile over the breakfast table for the rest of his life. They hadn’t dated for a decade. But his heart had clung to her, no matter how far he’d traveled.
“Marry me, Pixie,” he’d blurted.
“That’s Dr. Pixie to you,” she’d joked. All the gold had faded from her eyes, leaving them a deep, shocked green. “You’re serious. Tav. Oh.”
He’d counted. One. Two. Three. Four.
On five, she’d crawled onto his lap right in the middle of the hotel restaurant. Her hungry, hands-to-the-face kiss had said “yes” for her.
“Tonight?” he’d asked.
She’d nodded, then disappeared for the rest of the day. And when he’d seen her in the chapel... Holy hell. Straight hair curled into submission and piled on her head. Sky-high stilettos that hadn’t brought her close to his height, though he’d grinned at the effort. And her dress. That scrap of silk still taunted him in his dreams.
As did their promises. For richer, for poorer, to have and to hold.
And her fingers had snapped in his face.
Wait, that’s not right.
Fingers were snapping in his face. Drew’s.
“Dude, what?” Blood pounded in his head. He filled a glass of water and drained half of it.
“Lost you for a minute. Focus. You. My sister. Married.”
“Yeah. You left. We didn’t. We’d intended to come home from our honeymoon and make the announcement in person. But then we got the call about your grandparents’ car accident. After that, everyone was grieving.” She’d floored him with an ultimatum—stay in town or file for divorce—right after the funeral. “Seemed easier to keep it between the two of us.”
Drew’s brow knitted. “So it was just a random Vegas thing?”
“No. No way. We honestly thought we could make a go of it. But neither of us wanted a part-time marriage, with me gone most of the year.”
“How did you not think of that beforehand?”
Being condescended to like a kindergarten student was the opposite of awesome, but Drew deserved answers. Finally releasing the valve on his secrets was a welcome relief, too.
“We’d agreed to switch up who was working at any given time. Me taking contracts in between her working stints in overseas areas.” Tavish shook his head. “When your grandparents died, she backpedaled from buying plane tickets and researching humanitarian missions to calling Frank Martin about committing to a future partnership. I told her I couldn’t give up my job. And she gave her ring back.”
Tavish rubbed that same ring, twisted and disguised as one of the links on his bracelet. Entwined with his own band. A constant reminder he couldn’t be trusted with someone else’s heart.
Drew’s gaze flattened. “You both should have compromised. Especially you. Marriage surpasses everything.”
Easy for Drew to say. Tavish agreed that most of the time, marriage ranked above all else. But he didn’t believe it was right for either him or Lauren to change the utter fabric of their personalities for the sake of staying together. “With my assignments, I can’t settle in one place.”
The other man drummed his fingers on the table. “Selfish.”
“Documenting refugee crises is selfish?”
“It is if you’re putting your job before my sister.”
Tavish took a breath. He rubbed at his breastbone. No. Our split was for the best. As a kid, he’d lain awake for too many nights listening to his mother sobbing in the kitchen after one of his father’s few-and-far-between phone calls. He had loved Lauren too much to want to subject her to an equally miserable marriage.
Had loved. Right. Try “still loved.”
And probably always would.
* * *
Crack. Plop.
Thwoop. Crack.
Plop.
Oh, no, no, no. Lauren hated waking up to the sounds of club hitting ball, had purposely not bought a house near the golf course to avoid the torture. She’d cursed her childhood-bedroom view of the eighth tee of the Sutter Creek Golf Club many a time as a teenager. Unless she’d fallen asleep at her dad’s...
Rolling over, she blinked. Nope, the sunlight streaming in through the skylight placed her firmly in her lakeside house.
And threatened to split her head. How the hell did she feel hungover without having had anything to drink? Oh, wait. A scant two hours of sleep would do it.
And the neighbor currently preventing her from sleeping away last night’s humiliation was lucky she was the one person in Montana who didn’t own a hunting rifle.
Thwoop. Crack.
Dragging herself over to her open window—it sounded like she was almost on top of the noise—she spotted the perpetrator.
Tavish oozed a weekend-sexy “Exercise is nice and all, but I’m better made for putting down this driver and sliding between your sheets” aura. He stood on the middle level of her tiered deck with a driver grasped in both hands. His gray athletic shorts sat low on his hips, right below that delectable, lick-worthy ridge of muscle that arrowed toward his groin. An ancient University of Montana ball cap sat backward over his tawny hair. His T-shirt hung out of the back of his waistband. With each swing the balls easily hit the middle of the six-hundred-yard-wide lake.
Squinting against the bright sunshine and the resulting jab to her retinas, she didn’t call the knee-jerk “You’re breaking the law, idiot!” out the open window, instead taking a moment to lean on the sill and stare at the view. He’d woken her up, so it was only fair she steal the opportunity to appreciate that admirable expanse of sexy torso. His tattoo rippled as he aimed and knocked a ball far enough into Moosehorn Lake to make a pro green.
Her stomach flipped, ending the pleasure.
Morning sickness? Fury?
Both.
At least fifty percent of her wanted him to follow his golf balls to the murky lake bottom and not return.
The other half was going to relish looking at him. A blessed distraction from the mammoth task of convincing her family to forgive her. And as much as Tavish’s announcement had been the catalyst for last night’s fiasco, she was at fault. She’d lied by omission to protect her family, not to hurt them. Talk about backfiring. Why hadn’t she been honest? Not the day after her grandparents’ funeral, but some point in the past year. At least then she would have been able to control the way they found out.
After brushing her teeth and scrounging a pregnancy-safe painkiller from her bathroom cabinet, she pulled sweatpants and a dilapidated Colorado Avalanche T-shirt from her closet and headed out to confront Tavish. He’d make an excellent patsy on whom to pawn her self-loathing.
She pulled her sliding door open. The metallic scrape made her head pound with fresh enthusiasm. She held her hand against her forehead to combat the dizziness.
Tavish turned, but stayed on the deck a level below her, arms loose at his sides, golf club in his right hand. Dropping the driver to the planking, he quickly pulled his shirt out of his shorts and over his head.
The sun made her orbital bones ache. The decking chilled her bare feet. And the look of utter misery on Tavish’s face dulled the temptation to project any self-directed anger toward him.
Why, why, why did she become such a sucker whenever undiluted emotion crossed the absurdly beautiful planes of his face? Only one way to protect herself from her own weakness—evasion.
“Shh,” she pleaded. “Pretty sure my headache just got classified as category five.”
“Sorry, sweetheart.” His lips twisted in regret. He picked his club back up and spun it like a top, catching the shaft before it could clatter to the deck. “Did you drink last night?”
“No.”
“So why the headache?”
She winced at the stiffness in her neck as she sat on the top of the three-stair set between decks and curled her bare toes around the middle step. “Barely slept.”
“That why you bailed on me for our morning paddle?”
“Oh, crap...” She screwed up her face in apology. “Our plans slipped my mind when the night got eventful.”
The guilty flush in his cheeks deepened from pink to crimson. “If I could rewind, I would, Laur.”
“I know.” She tried to dig out a sympathetic expression. Wasn’t sure if she managed one, but he smiled back, at least. “This is going to affect you as much as it does me. It’s too bad...” The first positive thought of the day struck, warmed her. “No. It was bound to come out at some point. I guess now was better than five, ten years in the future. Our families would have been even angrier had we kept the secret longer. So why not yesterday?”
Tavish’s mouth gaped for a few seconds. “Oh, the wedding. Us working together. Take your pick.”
“Good points. And don’t get me wrong—I’m upset. My sister is beyond pissed at me. A good chunk of the town witnessed the likely candidate for the most embarrassing moment of my life. But at the same time, I feel—” she surprised herself with the word that came to mind “—free.”
Tavish palmed the top of his frayed-around-the-edges maroon ball cap. “Free? How?”
“My slate’s clean. No more lies. No more secrets.” Her conscience poked at her. Okay, one. Maybe it was wrong to wait, even for two more days... “So...my deck. Golfing. Interesting—and illegal—choice.”
His fist pulsed a few times around the grip of his club. “When you didn’t show up for our paddle, I figured you were avoiding me. I needed to be able to pretend I was here for some other reason than to beg your forgiveness.”
Lauren’s mouth turned sandy. “Beg?”
“On figurative knees.” He shifted his feet. “Real ones, if it’ll make the difference.”
A replay of what Tavish had done to her the last time he’d been in front of her on his knees cut through the throbbing in her head. Heat blasted her cheeks. “Not necessary. I believe you.”
“Huh. I wasn’t expecting you to be so agreeable.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time—” she sighed “—the whole year, really, feeling sorry for myself, feeling you gave up on me. I assumed my family would do the same if they learned the truth. And because of my dishonesty, well, I wouldn’t blame them if they did.”
He opened his mouth, protest written in his eyes.
She held up a hand. “But feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to fix anything. I need to earn their forgiveness. Try to put things back to normal so that Andrew and Mackenzie can have a stellar wedding.”
He cocked an eyebrow, too playful for comfort. “You sure you don’t want me to beg?”
She bit her lip. “Nothing good happens when you beg me for things, Tavish.”
“Yeah?” He reached forward with the driver, dragged the cool metal head along the top of her bare foot.
“Yeah. It usually ends up with me losing my dignity.”
“Your clothes, maybe. But not your dignity.”
His sensual tone dragged along her skin, delved into the needy parts of her core. A strangled gurgle escaped her. “Okay, if I’m going to forgive you and we’re going to make sense of this, that has to stop. No innuendos, no remembering the past, no pretending anything about our relationship worked. You’re leaving.”
He gave a nod, blanked the hints of sexual promise from his face. “That is what I do.”
“I’m staying.” She had to adhere to that decision more than ever. Her child—their child—would need stability.
“That is what you do.” He spoke church-quiet. Church-serious.
“And because we both have to live with whatever happens here—” she waved a finger back and forth between her chest and Tavish’s “—we need to recognize there’s no way we can go back to any part of what we had.”
“Oh, I recognize that but good.” His sardonic tone spread to his eyes, darkening the violet to thunderstorm gray. The identical shade his irises turned post-sex.
Her brain surged with discomfiting flashes of sneaking kisses down hidden trails the summer he’d graduated, of lounging in their king-sized honeymoon bed, of the weight of her wedding ring on her finger.
She rubbed her temples for a few seconds, then pressed her fingers to her eyelids, but failed to clear her head.
He stared at her, spun his golf club again. “Now what?”
“Now I wait four hours until I can take another Tylenol.”
The sound of a vial of pills being shaken prompted her to open her eyes.
Tavish held out a travel-size container of generic acetaminophen.
She shook her head. “I’ve already had my limit. Uh, you always carry around painkillers?”
“No. Your brother and I had a long talk last night, after which I reacquainted myself with Johnnie Walker.”
“We make quite the pair.”
“Yeah, we do.” Tavish’s eyes shone just enough to betray his vulnerability.
Unbearable. She threw up her hands. “What did I just say?”
“You said no more lies.”
Her headache stopped her from shaking her head. “No, I said we can’t go back.”
“Sure. Doesn’t mean I don’t wish we could.”
“Don’t wish. Don’t.” She’d wasted a heap of good wishes on Tavish Fitzgerald. Birthday candles. The first star to appear on countless clear summer evenings. Coins thrown backward over her shoulder into the grizzly-bear-shaped fountain in the town square.
Wishes only resulted in a lighter change purse and a whole lot of shame. She’d almost given up her dream of the clinic for him. She’d convinced herself that her mother would have been okay with the change in plans for the sake of Lauren finding love with the man she’d wanted almost as long as she’d wanted to be a doctor. She could at least thank Tavish for his timing. At least he’d showed his true inability-to-stick colors before she’d burned bridges with Frank Martin.
He let his club clatter to the ground and shoved his hands into his pockets. “You can’t tell me you never wonder, Lauren.”
“No, I can’t.” Pulse racing, she twisted her hands. She didn’t need to wonder. She knew. Knew his lips could coax a moan from her mouth and his hands could drive her body into a frenzy. The craving to let him swirled in her belly.
Ignore it, ignore it.
But how?
With a blur of limbs and lips and lust, Lauren stood and pressed herself into him, trying to kiss him out of her system. She melted into his magnetic heat. And he wasn’t resisting. His lips caressed hers with a fervent thirst. His fingers grasped her hips with enough force to leave marks.
Her hands roamed his back. Took in the texture of cotton and tight muscle. Creeping her fingers up the warm skin of his neck, she wove them into the short waves at his nape, knocking off his ball cap.
She stretched onto her toes and he held her secure. Physically secure, anyway. Emotionally, she was slipping from her stable footing.
His fingers slid under the elastic of her sweats, teased her lower back at the edge of her panties.
Common sense, Lauren. Do not set yourself up for another broken heart.
She tore her reluctant-to-be-torn-away lips from his and backed up. What was she thinking? If they were going to have any chance at a functioning coparent relationship, she needed to keep her hands to herself.
And more than that, she needed to tell him. For him to understand just how stupid it would be for them to have sex again, he needed to know all the variables.
“Tavish...” She swallowed.
“Yeah?” He smiled, a feral flash of straight white teeth. His chest rose and fell rapidly.
Taking a step backward, she settled on a stair edge. “Come sit for a second.”
His face screwed up in confusion. “Huh?”
Nausea panged in her stomach. Ack, not now. “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay...” He eased down next to her on the stair and reached for her knee, but dropped his hand to his side before making contact.
She swallowed the saliva flooding her mouth. “I—Oh, crap.” Running for the deck railing, she hung over the edge and heaved what little was left of her dinner from last night into the huckleberry and Oregon grape plants covering the ground below.
“You sure you didn’t drink last night?” Tavish was at her side in a second, gripping her shoulders with unyielding hands as she crossed her arms on the railing and buried her face in her elbow.
“Positive. I can’t drink. I’m pregnant.”