And that was why she knew it would be dangerous to let him into her bed. Because she didn’t know how to share her body without opening her heart, and she had no intention of letting him into her heart again.
“They won’t mind,” she responded to his question now.
“Because I don’t want to impose—and I definitely don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” he told her.
“You should be more worried about your own comfort,” she said lightly. “It’s not a very big sofa.”
* * *
On their way back to the subway, Caleb stopped outside a Walgreens. Clearly, despite their conversation on Top of the Rock, he didn’t trust her not to dodge the issue all weekend.
Brie halted beside him. “Do we really have to do this now?” she asked warily.
“I only want to buy the test tonight.”
“That’s all?”
“Baby steps,” he promised, then winced.
“Freudian slip?” she guessed.
He nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go buy the test.”
He squeezed her hand reassuringly as they walked into the pharmacy together. In the family planning section, he randomly selected a box from the shelf and turned it around to read the instructions.
Brie took the test out of his hand and exchanged it for a different brand.
He glanced from one to the other, noting the nearly identical promises of “Fast & Accurate Results!”
“Aren’t they all pretty much the same?” he asked.
“Probably,” she acknowledged. “But that’s the same kind I bought last time.”
It took him a moment to realize she meant the last time they’d been in this situation together—and another to understand the deeper meaning of her words. “You think if we get a different test this time, we’ll get a different result?”
“I know it’s silly and superstitious, but I don’t want things to end the same way,” she confided.
Aware that she was referring to the loss of their baby, he didn’t think it was either silly or superstitious. “We’ll get that one,” he agreed.
* * *
Back at the brownstone, Brie easily located an extra pillow and blanket in the linen closet. It was going to be much more difficult, she suspected, for Caleb to squeeze his six-foot-plus frame onto the five-foot sofa. When she made her way back down the stairs, she discovered that he’d changed into a pair of sleep pants that rode low on his hips—and nothing else.
The rest of him was naked.
Gloriously temptingly naked.
She stopped in midstride, her heart pounding hard and fast inside her chest as her gaze moved over his bronzed torso, from his broad shoulders and sculpted pecs to the rippling abs dissected by a thin line of dark hair that arrowed into his waistband.
She managed to unstick her tongue from the roof of her mouth to say: “You should put on a T-shirt or something. It gets cold down here at night.”
A smile teased the corners of his mouth. “How cold does it get in New York in September?”
Not cold enough, apparently, as her cheeks filled with guilty heat when he called her out on the obvious fabrication.
“Well, the sofa’s leather,” she pointed out.
“I’ll be fine,” he assured her.
She wondered again about offering to let him share her bed. She knew he wouldn’t ever take advantage of the proximity, or even make a move without her explicit consent, so the problem wasn’t that she didn’t trust him but that she didn’t trust herself if he was under the covers with her.
“Brie?”
She blinked. “Sorry?”
He tugged the pillow out of her grasp and dropped it onto the arm of the sofa.
“Oh.” She tucked her now empty hands into the front pockets of her jeans.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was just thinking...maybe I should sleep on the sofa.”
“I’m not letting you give up your bed for me,” he said. Then his eyes took on a speculative gleam. “Of course, I wouldn’t object to sharing.”
“Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt,” she reminded him.
Although if she really had bought the T-shirt, she might have insisted he wear it to cover up those mouthwatering muscles.
“As I recall, it was pretty spectacular,” he noted.
Unable to dispute his recollection, she only said, “Good night, Caleb.”
“No good-night kiss?” he asked.
All too aware that one kiss could easily lead to more, she took a step back, away from temptation.
“Lily will be up early,” she told him. “She works at the café on Saturday mornings.”
“I’m accustomed to waking up early, too,” he said.
“Except that morning shows up here three hours earlier than in Nevada. And you’ll probably be jet-lagged.”
“Good point.” He stretched out on the sofa, his head on the pillow at one end, his feet overhanging the other. “And my cue to get some shut-eye.”
She retreated to her bed to do the same, but she tossed and turned for a long time. When she finally did drift off, she dreamed of him—and the future and family she’d once imagined they’d have together.
* * *
Brie slapped a hand on her alarm to silence the annoying buzz.
Just ten more minutes, she promised herself.
But as she rolled over again, her stomach churned.
That’s what she got for eating pizza so close to bedtime.
With a resigned sigh, she pushed back the covers and slid out of bed. After showering and brushing her teeth, she wrapped herself in her robe again and headed downstairs for her morning cup of java.
If she was pregnant, she’d have to cut back on the caffeine, but that wasn’t going to happen today. It might not need to happen at all, though there were no signs from her body that her period was imminent—and she was now five days late.
She peeked into the living room and found Caleb was still sprawled over the sofa, oblivious to the world. She continued down the hall, past the dining room to the kitchen, where her roommates were seated at the little table.
Brie lifted a hand in greeting as she made her way to the Keurig. Moving on autopilot, she selected a pod of her favorite French roast and dropped it into the machine.
“So tell us why there’s a hunky cowboy asleep on the sofa in our living room,” Grace said, when Brie had her coffee in hand.
She feigned surprise. “What? There’s a man in our house?”
“And not in Grace’s bed for a change,” Lily teased.
“Hey!” their friend protested, though not too vigorously.
“Do you think he’s naked beneath that blanket?” Lily asked, her attention preoccupied by their guest.
“I think I wouldn’t mind if the cover slipped a little bit—or fell off completely—so we could find out,” Grace chimed in.
“He’s only half-naked,” Brie told them.
“That’s a shame,” Lily said.
“The bigger shame is that he’s on the sofa and not in your bed,” Grace remarked.
“You know I’m not that kind of girl,” she said demurely.
Lily snorted. “Says the woman who did the walk of shame our very first morning in—”
“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” Grace interjected.
“I didn’t think we were still bound by that rule when what happened in Vegas is now sleeping on our sofa,” Lily remarked.
“An interesting point,” Grace acknowledged. Then she turned to Brie. “Anything you want to say?”
She nodded slowly. “When we were in Vegas, I had unprotected sex with Caleb.”
Grace’s eyes went wide, but she recovered quickly and shook her head in obvio
us disapproval. “Why would you do something so careless?” she demanded.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Brie protested.
“There were condoms in your purse,” Grace reminded her. “I know because I put them there.”
“But only two,” Brie pointed out.
Grace and Lily exchanged surprised looks before shifting their attention back to Brie.
“Are you saying that you used both of them?” Grace asked.
She nodded.
“And then there was a third time?” her friend prompted.
She nodded again, her cheeks flushing.
“Wow,” Lily said, then her expression turned speculative. “Does your sexy cowboy have any brothers?”
“One,” Brie said. “Recently engaged.”
“Damn.”
“Focus,” Grace chided.
Lily nodded. “Right.”
“Wait a minute,” Brie said, as the flow of caffeine through her system finally kick-started her brain. “Aren’t you supposed to be working this morning?”
“Marlene asked me to switch shifts so that she could go to some family thing this afternoon—and you’re trying to distract us from the real issue at hand.”
“I’m not,” she denied, though not very convincingly.
“Is that why he’s here?” Grace asked. “Are you pregnant?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“You need to find out,” Lily said gently.
“I know. I will.”
“Today?” her friend prompted.
She nodded as Caleb shuffled into the kitchen.
His hair was sexily tousled, his jaw shadowed with stubble, and though he was still wearing his pajama bottoms, he’d pulled a T-shirt over his head. Of course, the thin cotton was stretched taut over his muscles so that the overall effect was no less appealing.
“Good morning.” Lily’s murmured words sounded more like a prayer than a greeting.
“Mornin’,” he replied. Then, in a more hopeful tone, “Do I smell coffee?”
Brie retrieved another mug from the cupboard and selected a new pod for the Keurig. It took only half a minute to brew the coffee, but to Brie, it was an eternity as both her roommates stared at Caleb with unabashed curiosity for the duration.
“Thanks,” he said, when she handed him the cup.
“There’s a shower in the bathroom at the top of the stairs,” she said. “I put a couple of towels on the counter for you.”
“Thanks,” he said again, and—taking the hint along with his coffee—headed out of the kitchen again.
“Subtle,” Grace remarked dryly, when he’d gone.
“I wasn’t worried about subtlety, I was worried about getting him out of here before you and Lily hit him with a tag-team interrogation.”
“We don’t do that,” Lily protested.
“Yeah, we do,” Grace countered. “Because we look out for our friends.”
And for that, Brie was grateful.
* * *
Dave had been expecting to hear from Valerie, so he wasn’t really surprised when he looked out the window of his office and saw her little red car zipping up the drive. He pushed his chair away from the desk and headed to the door, to spare his housekeeper a confrontation with the uninvited guest.
He pulled open the door before Valerie could ring the bell.
“You’re a long way from town,” he noted.
“I hoped the drive might help me get over some of my anger,” she told him.
“Did it work?”
“No.” She slapped a piece of paper against his chest.
“What’s this?” Having left his reading glasses on his desk in the office, Dave had to hold the page at arm’s length to read it. “And why are you giving me an itemized receipt from Serenity Spa?”
“Because you owe me three hundred dollars.”
“I’m not paying for your—” his gaze shifted to the page again “—manicure, pedicure and teen facial.”
“Not mine,” she told him. “Ashley’s and Chloe’s.”
“Who the hell is Chloe?”
“Your daughter’s best friend. I booked the spa appointments for them to distract Ashley from the fact that she was uninvited for dinner last night.”
“I didn’t uninvite her—I told her I had to reschedule.”
“You told her at the last minute,” Valerie railed. “And after she’d been looking forward to it all week.”
“The short notice was unfortunate,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t realize myself until yesterday morning that Caleb wasn’t going to be here.”
“So?”
“So the purpose of the family meal was for Ashley to meet the family.”
“Whether or not your youngest son was available, you are her family. Her father,” Valerie pointed out. “She wants to get to know you.”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of that thirteen years ago when you decided to keep your pregnancy a secret from me,” he shot back.
“And what would you have done if I’d told you thirteen years ago?” she demanded.
He huffed out a breath, frustrated and angry that he didn’t have a ready response to her perfectly reasonable question. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted.
“Well, I do,” she told him. “You would have reminded me that the night we spent together was a mistake, that you were still in love with and grieving for your wife, and that the last thing you wanted or needed was to further upset the lives of your children—who were still mourning the loss of their mother—by adding another child into the mix. Especially one who was nothing more than the product of an ill-advised one-night stand with Jesse Blake’s daughter.”
Dave scrubbed a hand over his face, unable to deny that everything she’d said was probably true. He wanted to believe that he would have responded differently, but the truth was, he never would have offered to marry her. There was no way he could have put a ring on her finger, even to ensure the legitimacy of their child, because he had still been in love with his wife. And he’d been swamped by guilt that he’d let himself find even a small measure of comfort in the arms of another woman, however temporarily.
“I’ll reschedule,” he told Valerie now.
“When?” she demanded, obviously unwilling to let him off the hook with nothing more than a vague promise.
“Next Saturday. I really can’t do it any sooner,” he said, before she had a chance to object. “I’m out of town at a cattle auction the beginning of the week.”
“Fine,” she relented. “But this is your only warning—if you cancel again, you’re buying her a pony.”
Chapter Nine
“Are Grace and Lily gone?” Caleb asked, venturing downstairs again after he’d showered and dressed.
“Yes, they went to the local farmers market,” Brie confirmed.
He noticed that she’d used the time that he was in the shower to dry her hair and change her clothes, and she was dressed now in a pair of slim-fitting capri pants with a sleeveless top with layers of ruffles. Apparently she’d been telling the truth about leaving the denim and flannel in Haven, and though he missed the girl from his past, he was equally enamored of this sexy city slicker.
“Good.” He pulled out the pregnancy test that he’d stuffed into his back pocket and offered it to her.
“You want to get right to it, huh? No conversation? No foreplay?”
“No more stalling,” he told her. “We need to know what the situation is so we can decide what we want to do.”
“You’re right.” She took the box and disappeared into the powder room.
While Brie was figuring out the test, Caleb paced in the hall, waiting and wondering.
Hoping.
Was it selfish to want a child with the woman he loved?
Was it foolish to think that a baby could somehow fix whatever was broken between them?
Were they any more prepared to be parents now than they’d been seven years earlier?
Sure, they were both older—and already married, but they were also living separate lives in two different states. And part of the reason he’d decided to fly to New York rather than making a phone call was his desire to get a glimpse of her life here. To know what he was competing against.
Based on what he’d seen of the Big Apple so far, he could acknowledge that it had a certain appeal. But he still believed, in his heart, that the biggest draw for Brie hadn’t been the university or the conveniences of city living but the distance from Haven. Now he just needed to find a way to bridge that distance—and convince her that she wanted to, too.
That their relationship was worth it.
When she finally came out of the bathroom again, he guided her into the living room. The pillow and blanket he’d used the night before were neatly folded at one end of the sofa, and they sat side by side in the middle. She’d put the test stick back in the box, probably so that neither of them would be tempted or able to peek until the requisite time had elapsed, and set the box on the coffee table now.
“How long do we have to wait?” he asked.
“Three minutes,” she said, opening the timer app on her phone to begin the countdown.
Three minutes didn’t seem like very long, but after the first ten seconds, he was desperate to break the silence.
“So...how about those Yankees?” he said.
“You really want to talk about baseball now?” she asked dubiously.
“I figured we should talk about something rather than watching the seconds tick off the clock.”
She nodded. “Okay. I like the Yankees. I was even at their home opener this year.”
“How’d that happen?”
“The dad of one of my students works for a company with a luxury suite. On Jersey Day at school, he saw me wearing a Rodriguez shirt and invited me to the game.”
“You’re a Rodriguez fan?”
“No,” she admitted, a sheepish smile curving her lips. “It was Lily’s jersey.”
One Night with the Cowboy Page 10
