The Cowboy’s Mistake

by Jackson, Mary Sue

  Or…maybe they would.

  Trey honestly couldn’t believe how well-made the vest was. He didn’t know much about sewing, but he knew good handiwork when he saw it, and he could tell that the stitching was something special. Plus, there were the embellishments. And if Charity thought it was a good idea, she’d make it work. It would be stressful, he thought, starting up a new business, but Charity didn’t seem to be under any strain. She only seemed…excited.

  That warmed his heart.

  It didn’t matter to Trey, in that moment, that she had disappeared for five days, leaving him to wonder if something terrible had happened to her. All that mattered was that she was happy.

  He wanted to make her happy for the rest of her life.

  That’s what he wanted. He still wasn’t sure he could pull it off. There was still so much to sort through.

  “I think it’s a great idea.”

  “You do?” Charity looked up at him with her big blue eyes. “I mean—of course you do, because it is a good idea.”

  “It is. I think you’ll have people clamoring for your designs in no time.”

  Charity looked thoughtful. “I think it’ll be an even split as to what draws people in. My designs, and knowing that it’s custom work. Nothing feels better than something that was made for you. Everybody wants something unique, anyway.”

  “It sounds like you’ve thought about this quite a bit.”

  “You’re telling me. I couldn’t sleep on the plane at all, I was so excited. I made notes on a napkin. Isn’t that crazy? I thought that only happened in the movies.”

  Trey, for his part, thought that falling this hard for the girl next door only happened in the movies, but here they were.

  “Do you…need any startup money?” He kept his tone casual and cautious. The last thing he wanted to do was upset her. Trey didn’t think he could bear it if she skipped out on visiting Kepler or disappeared again.

  “Not yet.” There was no bitterness or anger in Charity’s voice. “I’ve got enough material to get started.” The way she spoke seemed light and easy... She wasn’t shutting him down completely. Trey grinned, then tried to tamp it down.

  “What are you grinning about?” Now there was a warmth in her voice. He was sure of it.

  “Nothing. Just…proud of you.”

  Charity rolled her eyes, but he saw the flicker of a smile that crossed her face.

  “I am,” he insisted. “This is a killer idea. I’m excited to see how famous you'll get.”

  “I’m not going to get famous,” she said, eyes dancing. “At least not beyond this country.”

  “Want to make a bet? If you have an international website, you’ll be number one by the end of the summer.”

  “Aren’t all websites international?” she joked. “Do you understand the internet?”

  “Ha, ha.” He didn’t mind being teased—not when it made her smile like that.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Charity.” He summoned the rest of his resolve. “Do you…maybe want to grab some dinner?”

  Trey was going out on a limb, and he knew it. But Charity yawned again. Was he imagining the disappointment on her face?

  “I would, but…I can’t. I’m beat. I know it sounds silly, since all I did was sit on a plane…but…”

  “No problem. Maybe another time.” There. He’d played it quite cool. The whole thing hadn’t ended in a fight. “Hey, did I—” This was another thing he’d been worried about. “Did I miss the ultrasound appointment? If I did, it’s fine, I just wondered if I should still plan on coming.”

  Charity’s eyes brightened. “It’s tomorrow at ten,” she said, a hint of nervousness in her voice. “If you still want to come.”

  He looked at her, standing there in the golden afternoon light coming in through the living room window. Aside from this room, right now, Trey had never wanted to be anywhere more than he wanted to be at her side during that first appointment.

  “I really do.” He wanted to pull her in for a hug and resisted the urge, though—did he see her leaning toward him, just a little bit? “How about I pick you up at nine-thirty?”

  Charity considered him. That was probably his luck running out. She’d want to drive herself, probably, to prove that she didn’t need to rely on him.

  “I’d like that,” she said finally.

  “All right,” Trey said, as if he wasn’t stopping himself from jumping up and down and pumping his fist into the air. “Nine thirty it is. I’ll see you then. Rest up, okay? I’m glad you had a good trip.”

  “I am, too.” Charity followed him to the door and closed it gently behind him.

  He was on cloud nine for the rest of the day.

  Thirteen

  Charity tapped her foot against the floor of the truck and stared out the window. Trey stole glances at her when he could, but he mostly kept his eyes on the road.

  This seemed like the most important drive of his entire life.

  But then again, there would be more important drives, wouldn’t there? Such as the drive to the hospital when labor started.

  He couldn’t think that far ahead without getting nervous. For now, they needed to get through this day. This drive.

  “Are you okay?”

  Charity turned toward him, her hair catching the sunlight. She’d put it up in a rather elaborate ponytail. He could smell her hairspray. “I’m good. It’s just…the waiting.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen?”

  “An ultrasound.” She shrugged a little. “I don’t know what the play-by-play is. I’ve never been pregnant before.”

  He gasped. “You haven’t?”

  She laughed out loud, relaxing. “No, Trey. I have not. Sorry to have shocked you while you’re driving.”

  It wasn’t a very long drive to Dr. Rosario’s office, and Trey found himself wishing it could have been a little longer. There was something sweet about the anticipation humming through his truck. After this, everything would be…very real. Not that it wasn’t already real to Charity. Not that it wasn’t on his mind every waking moment. But to see it would be…something else.

  Trey jumped out of the truck as soon as he parked and went around to open the door for her.

  Charity got out with a little grin. “This is just an ultrasound, Trey. I’m not giving birth or anything.”

  “You’re still a lady,” he drawled, and she laughed again. That—that was it. That was the best feeling in the world, making her laugh.

  Charity signed in at the front desk, and they took two seats together in the waiting room. It wasn’t until he had sat down that he realized it was a rather busy day at the office. There were at least six other people in the chairs around them.

  Well, the secret would be out now. Why else would he be with her waiting to see the doctor?

  Charity seemed to realize this at the same time and snatched up a magazine from one of the stands by the seating. “We should have come in through the back door and asked them to take us directly to a room,” she mumbled out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I’m not embarrassed to have gotten you pregnant.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Could you say that any louder?”

  “I was whispering,” he whispered.

  “Charity?” The nurse called from the door.

  “Oh, thank god,” she said, shooting Trey a look even while a blush spread across her cheeks. “At least we got called back before you could put a notice in the paper.”

  Trey followed her to the back, ignoring how self-conscious he felt back here in the doctor’s office with her. It seemed…intimate. “I did that last week, when you were out of town.”

  Charity didn’t hear him, because she was stepping onto the scale at the nurse’s request. Where was he supposed to stand? He just stood awkwardly to the side, not looking at the scale. That was private information. Though…she was pregnant, so…

  Trey didn’t have any more time to debate this. They were led back to the fourt
h exam room, which was bigger than any of the ones Trey had been in. One step through the door, and he saw why.

  There was an exam table with stirrups sitting next to a hulking machine that he assumed was the ultrasound. And in a holder next to that machine was…a wand.

  The nurse was explaining to Charity what would happen and he pulled himself together enough to start listening mid-sentence. “—so, you can leave your socks and top on. Bottom things off, and drape the sheet over you.” She was a red-haired nurse with her hair in an enormous bun on the top of her head. “We’ll give you a minute to change, and then we’ll be right in.” Then she went out of the room.

  Charity turned to face him. They’d slept together twice, but she looked as shy as the first time he saw her. “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Can you…turn around?”

  He laughed, mostly just to quell his own nerves. “Really? I’ve seen—”

  “I know, Trey. I know you’ve seen. But this is…awkward.”

  “What’s awkward about it?”

  “Taking your pants off and leaving your socks? It’s just not sexy.”

  “I bet you could make it—”

  “Turn around.”

  He obediently turned and faced the wall. Trey heard the tugging of fabric on fabric, and then the flutter of the sheet rising and falling.

  “You can turn around now.”

  Charity had folded her clothes onto a low bench at the side of the room and sat demurely under the sheet on the exam table. She glanced at him, then at the clock on the other side of the room. “This is awkward.”

  “You look gorgeous,” he said. It was the truth.

  “Stop.”

  “All right.”

  “At least…sit down. It’s going to be weird if you’re standing in the middle of the room.”

  There was a cheerful knock at the door, and the nurse and Dr. Rosario swept into the room. “How are you feeling, Charity?” The doctor held a clipboard and wore a big smile. “Everything going all right since the tumble?”

  “Yes,” said Charity.

  “And Trey Cantor,” Dr. Rosario said. “Are you here for support, or…”

  There was a pointed silence. “He’s the father,” said Charity.

  Dr. Rosario did not seem phased by this in the least. “It’s great that you could come. This is an exciting moment.” She rattled off a few other questions, then set the clipboard aside.

  “All right,” she said to Charity. “If you’ll slide down and put your feet up…”

  They made several adjustments, and then Dr. Rosario did something under the sheet. “We’ll get those results back to you in a week or two,” she told Charity, who nodded.

  The nurse dimmed the lights. “All right,” said Dr. Rosario. “Let’s have a look.”

  She picked up the wand from the ultrasound machine and at the moment she slid it under the sheet Trey understood that this was not an ultrasound that they did on the belly, like in the movies. Charity’s face was lit from the glow of the ultrasound machine. She didn’t seem to care at all. Her eyes were glued to the screen.

  The image blurred, then cleared, and Dr. Rosario turned. “Dad, would you like to come stand a little closer so you can see?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yes. Yes, sure.” He stood up, his heart pounding. He had no idea, really, what he was looking at. He went and stood next to the exam table. As if on instinct, Charity reached up and took his hand. He held on tightly.

  “All right,” said Dr. Rosario.

  Trey couldn’t look away from the screen. The edges were surrounded in white, and in the middle, a black pocket opened up. The image seemed to stretch and then settle, and…

  And…

  His eyes had to be deceiving him.

  Trey had never seen an ultrasound before. Not in person. He’d looked it up on the internet, but then he’d fallen asleep after just a few videos. So mostly, what he knew is that there was usually one baby on the screen. This, from what limited research he’d done, looked like more than one. Two bright, glowing beans floating in the dark.

  Dr. Rosario asked Charity a question, but Trey couldn’t hear it over the buzzing in his ears.

  “Seven weeks, then,” said Dr. Rosario.

  “What is it?” asked Charity.

  Dr. Rosario, with her free hand, pointed up at the screen. “They’ll develop more in the weeks to come, and more and more, but what we’re looking at here is Baby A.”

  “Baby A?”

  “…and here is Baby B.”

  There was a ringing silence, a heavy silence, and then Charity drew in a sharp breath. “Twins?”

  “Identical twins.” Dr. Rosario gave her a reassuring smile, her teeth flashing white in the dark of the room. But then the smile faded as she concentrated on the screen.

  He realized after a moment that Charity was holding her breath. He squeezed her hand. “Breathe,” he whispered, and she took in a big, shuddering breath.

  Twins. He couldn’t believe it. Twins.

  Nothing in his life had given him a roadmap to process this. He could only stare at the screen as Dr. Rosario took picture after picture, moving the wand beneath the sheet. Different angles, again and again. The ultrasound machine spit out one photo from its printer, then another. The nurse hovered in the background, watching as intently as he was.

  “Is…everything all right?”

  Charity’s voice split the silence, and all at once Trey realized how quiet Dr. Rosario had been. Was something wrong? She was normally warm and talkative.

  Dr. Rosario turned away from the machine and looked at Charity. The picture on the screen bobbed and distorted a bit. “In any situation with twins, we consider the pregnancy to be higher risk,” she said in an even tone. “It’ll mean more monitoring.”

  “What are you not saying?” Charity’s voice trembled a little.

  “Let’s look at it together.” More moving of the wand, and then the picture cleared again. “What we’re seeing here is that your babies are sharing one placenta, but they’ve both got individual amniotic sacs. That’s what we call monochorionic-diamniotic twins.”

  “Is that a problem?” Charity asked.

  “It’s common in identical twins,” Dr. Rosario said. “About sixty or seventy percent of the time, we see twins sharing a placenta but with individual sacs. That in itself isn’t abnormal. But it will mean we’ll need to monitor the pregnancy more carefully, since there’s a risk of twin to twin transfusion as the pregnancy develops.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We can discuss this in more detail at another appointment.” Dr. Rosario took a few more pictures, and the machine printed them out. “So that you understand every detail. But for now, what I’ll just say that in cases where there’s no placental barrier, it means that there’s a greater likelihood that the twins will have crossover in their circulatory systems. One outcome of that is one twin transferring too much blood to the other.”

  Charity put her hand to her mouth.

  “All right,” Dr. Rosario said. “All finished.”

  She withdrew the wand, put it back in the holder, and helped Charity to sit up. The nurse slowly brought up the lights.

  The first thing Dr. Rosario did was wrap Charity in a hug. “Congratulations to both of you. This is such exciting news!”

  Charity looked skeptical. “Are you sure? Because if there’s a problem, if—if that transfusion thing happens, I don’t know if—”

  Dr. Rosario took her hand. Trey held tightly to the one he was already holding. He had no desire to let go. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Dr. Rosario said. “In the meantime, we’ll monitor everything very carefully so that we always know what’s going on. Why don’t you have the receptionist make an appointment for Friday so we can go over everything?”

  “That…that sounds good,” said Charity, glancing up at Trey. The look, he knew immediately, was a question. Was he free to come to that appointment also?

  “I�
�ll be there, too,” he said.

  “Great.” Dr. Rosario patted Charity’s knee and stood up. The nurse stepped forward, holding a small, shiny piece of paper. “And here’s a photo for your memory book.” She handed it to Trey, who looked down at the very beginnings of his child. His children.

  This…this meant something different than a single pregnancy. It was more delicate now. More fragile. Charity and the babies would need to be cared for.

  And he was determined to do it.

  “Trey,” Charity said as Dr. Rosario went out, followed closely by the nurse. “Do you think it’ll work out?”

  “I know it will,” he said, his heart filling with hope. “I just know it.”

  Fourteen

  Charity swung between a pure hope that nothing at all would go wrong with the pregnancy and a breathtaking fear that everything had already gone wrong. She felt both invincible and fragile at the same time. If there was one thing she detested, it was feeling fragile. She’d left that behind a long time ago. Probably, if she was honest about it, she’d left that aching wound behind at horse camp, where everybody was too busy becoming excellent horsewomen to dwell on old embarrassments.

  “We should get some food,” Trey said as they climbed into the truck. Her stomach growled.

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Good.” He flashed her a confident grin, and it chased away the worst of that nagging fear.

  Lunch was likely a good idea, anyway. Charity and Trey had had things to discuss before, but now they’d been doubled. Literally.

  At the hole-in-the-wall lunch place in a strip mall a couple of miles down the road from the doctor’s office, Trey pulled out Charity’s chair for her and guided her into her seat with his hand on her shoulder.

  “What are you doing? I’m not injured. Just pregnant.” She stood up again. “Anyway, I’m headed to the bathroom.”

  “You can never be too sure.” Trey sounded like he was joking, but his face told a different story. He swung his keys around his hand once, then hooked them to the coat loop on the outside of the booth before he got in on his side. He’d normally keep them in his pocket, but on this pair of pants the pockets had begun to wear through and he didn’t relish getting stabbed in the thigh by the keys.