by Susan Meier
What they had was worth a few months of getting to know each other. Or maybe the answer would be to quit her job?
The first two days of his trip sped by. He called Wednesday morning, and the mere sound of his voice made her breathless. Though he talked about clients, meetings, business dinners and never-ending handshaking, his deep voice reminded her of his whispered endearments during their night together and that conjured the memory of how he tasted, the firmness of his skin, the pleasure of being held in his arms. Before he disconnected the call, he whispered that he missed her and couldn’t wait to see her and she’d all but fainted with happiness.
The next day he didn’t call, but Grace knew he was busy. He also didn’t call on Friday or Saturday.
* * *
Flying back to Pittsburgh Sunday, Danny nervously paced his Gulfstream, fighting a case of doubt and second thoughts about what had happened between him and Grace. In the week that had passed, he hadn’t had a spare minute to think about her, and hadn’t spoken with her except for one quick phone call a few days into the trip. The call had ended too soon and left him longing to see her, but after three days of having no contact, the negatives of the situation came crowding in on him, and there were plenty of them.
First, he didn’t really know her. Second, even if she were the perfect woman, they’d gone too far too fast. Third, they worked together. If they dated it would be all over the office. When they broke up, he would be the object of the same gossip that had nearly ruined his reputation when his marriage ended.
He took a breath and blew it out on a puff. He couldn’t tell if distance was giving him perspective or calling up all his demons. But he did know that he should have thought this through before making love to her.
Worse, he couldn’t properly analyze their situation because he couldn’t recall specifics. All he remembered from their Sunday night and Monday morning together were emotions so intense that he’d found the courage to simply be himself. But with the emotions gone, he couldn’t summon a solid memory of the substance of what had happened between them. He couldn’t remember anything specific she’d said to make him like her—like? Did he say like? He didn’t just like Grace. That Sunday night his feelings had run more along the lines of a breathless longing, uncontrollable desire, and total bewitching. A man in that condition could easily be seduced into seeing traits in a woman that weren’t there and that meant he had made a horrible mistake.
He told himself not to think that way. But the logical side of his brain called him a sap. He’d met Grace two weeks before when she’d come to work for his company, but he didn’t really know her because he didn’t work with new employees. He worked with their bosses. He said hello to new employees in the hall. But otherwise, he ignored them. So he hadn’t “known” her for two weeks. He’d glimpsed her.
Plus, she’d been on her best behavior for Orlando. She had been at the beach house to demonstrate to Orlando that Carson Services employed people in the know. Yes, she’d gone above and beyond the call of duty in her time with Orlando, making him feel comfortable, sharing personal insights—but, really, wasn’t that her job?
Danny took a long breath. Had he fallen in love with a well polished persona she’d pulled out to impress Orlando and simply never disengaged when the basketball star left?
Oh, Lord!
He sat, rubbed his hands down his face and held back a groan. Bits and pieces of their Sunday night dinner conversation flitted through his brain. She’d grown up poor. Could only afford a house that needed remodeling. She wanted to be rich. She’d gone into investing to understand money.
He had money.
Technically he was a shortcut to all her goals.
He swallowed hard. It wasn’t fair to judge her when she wasn’t there to defend herself.
He had to see her. Then he would know. After five minutes of conversation she would either relieve all his fears or prove that he’d gone too fast, told her too much and set himself up for a huge disappointment.
The second his plane taxied to a stop, he pulled out his cell phone and called her, but she didn’t answer. He left a message but she didn’t return his call and Danny’s apprehensions hitched a notch. Not that he thought she should be home, waiting for him, but she knew when he got in. He’d told her he would call. He’d said it at the end of a very emotional phone conversation in which he’d told her that crazy as it sounded, he missed her. She’d breathlessly told him she missed him, too.
Now she wasn’t home?
If he hadn’t given her the time he would be landing, if he hadn’t told her he would be calling, if he hadn’t been so sappy about saying how much he missed her, it wouldn’t seem so strange that she wasn’t home. But, having told her all those things, he had the uncontrollable suspicion that something was wrong.
Unless she’d come to the same conclusions he had. Starting a relationship had been a mistake.
That had to be it.
Relief swamped him. He didn’t want another relationship. Ever. And Grace was too nice a girl to have the kind of fling that ended when their sexual feelings for each other fizzled and they both eagerly walked away.
It was better for it to end now.
Content that not only had Grace nicely disengaged their relationship, but also that he probably wouldn’t run into her in the halls because their positions in the company and the building were so far apart, he went to work happy. But his secretary buzzed him around ten-thirty, telling him Grace was in the outer office, asking if he had time for her.
Sure. Why not? Now that he’d settled everything in his head, he could handle a debriefing. They’d probably both laugh about the mistake.
He tossed his pencil to the stack of papers in front of him. “Send her in.”
He steeled himself, knowing that even though his brain had easily resolved their situation, his body might not so easily agree. Seeing her would undoubtedly evoke lots of physical response, if only because she was beautiful. He remembered that part very, very well.
His office door opened and she stepped inside. Danny almost groaned at his loss. She was every bit as stunning as he remembered. Her dark hair framed her face and complemented her skin tone. Her little pink suit showed off her great legs. But he wasn’t meant for relationships and she wasn’t meant for affairs. Getting out now while they could get out without too much difficulty was the right thing to do.
“Good morning, Grace.”
She smiled. “Good morning.”
He pointed at the chair in front of his desk, indicating she should sit. “Look, I know what you’re going to say. Being away for a week gave me some perspective, too, and I agree we made a mistake the night we slept together.”
“What?”
Confused, he cocked his head. “I thought you were here to tell me we’d made a mistake.”
Holding the arms of the captain’s chair in front of his desk, she finally sat. “I came in to invite you to dinner.”
He sat back on his chair, knowing this could potentially be one of the worst conversations of his life. “I’m sorry. When you weren’t home last night when I called, I just assumed you’d changed your mind.”
“I was at my mother’s.”
“I called your cell phone.”
She took a breath. “And by the time I realized I’d hadn’t turned it on after I took it off the charger, it was too late for me to call you back.” She took another breath and smiled hopefully. “That’s why I came to your office.”
He picked up his pencil again. Nervously tapped it on the desk. “I’m sorry. Really. But—” This time he took the breath, giving himself a chance to organize his thoughts. “I genuinely believe we shouldn’t have slept together, and I really don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t have relationships with employees.”
He caught her gaze. “I’m sorry.”
<
br /> That seemed to catch her off guard. She blinked several times, but her face didn’t crumble as he expected it would if she were about to cry. To his great relief, her chin lifted. “That’s fine.”
Pleased that she seemed to be taking this well—probably because his point was a valid one—bosses and employees shouldn’t date—he rose. “Do you want the day off or something?”
She swallowed and wouldn’t meet his gaze. She said, “I’m fine,” then turned and walked out of his office.
Danny fell to his seat, feeling like a class-A heel. He had hurt her and she was going to cry.
* * *
Grace managed to get through the day with only one crying spurt in the bathroom right after coming out of Danny’s office. She didn’t see him the next day or the next or at all for the next two weeks. Just when she had accepted that her world hadn’t been destroyed because he didn’t want her or because she’d slept with him, she realized something awful. Her female cycle was as regular as clockwork, so when things didn’t happen on the day they were supposed to happen, she knew something was wrong.
Though she and Danny had used condoms, they weren’t perfect. She bought an early pregnancy test and discovered her intuition had been correct. She had gotten pregnant.
She sat on the bed in the master suite of her little house. The room was awash with warm colors: cognac, paprika, butter-yellow in satin pillows, lush drapes and a smooth silk bedspread. But she didn’t feel any warmth as she stared at the results of the EPT. She had just gotten pregnant by a man who had told her he wanted nothing to do with her.
She swallowed hard and began to pace the honey-yellow hardwood floors of the bedroom she’d scrimped, saved and labored to refinish. Technically she had a great job and a good enough income that she could raise a child alone. Money wasn’t her problem. And neither was becoming a mother. She was twenty-four, ready to be a mom. Excited actually.
Except Danny didn’t want her. She might survive telling him, but she still worked for him. Soon everybody at his company would know she was pregnant. Anybody with a memory could do the math and realize when she’d gotten pregnant and speculate the baby might be Danny’s since they’d spent a weekend together.
He couldn’t run away from this and neither could she.
She took a deep breath, then another, and another, to calm herself.
Everything would be fine if she didn’t panic and handled this properly. She didn’t have to tell Danny right away that she was pregnant. She could wait until enough time had passed that he would see she wasn’t trying to force anything from him. Plus, until her pregnancy was showing, she didn’t have to tell anybody but Danny. In six or seven months the people she worked with wouldn’t necessarily connect her pregnancy with the weekend she and Danny together. They could get out of this with a minimum of fuss.
That made so much sense that Grace easily fell asleep that night, but the next morning she woke up dizzy, still exhausted and with an unholy urge to vomit. On Saturday morning, she did vomit. Sunday morning, she couldn’t get out of bed. Tired, nauseated and dizzy beyond belief, she couldn’t hide her symptoms from anybody. Which meant that by Monday afternoon, everybody would guess something was up, and she had no choice but to tell Danny first thing in the morning that she was pregnant. If she didn’t, he would find out by way of a rumor, and she couldn’t let that happen.
* * *
Grace arrived at work an hour early on Monday. Danny was already in his office but his secretary had not yet arrived. As soon as he was settled, she knocked on the frame of his open door.
He looked up. “Grace?”
“Do you have a minute?”
“Not really, I have a meeting—”
“This won’t take long.” She drank a huge gulp of air and pushed forward because there was no point in dilly-dallying. “I’m pregnant.”
For thirty seconds, Danny sat motionless. Grace felt every breath she drew as the tension in the room increased with each second that passed.
Finally he very quietly said, “Get out.”
“We need to talk about this.”
“Talk about this? Oh, no! I won’t give credence to your scheme by even gracing you with ten minutes to try to convince me you’re pregnant!”
“Scheme?”
“Don’t play innocent with me. Telling the man who broke up with you that you’re pregnant is the oldest trick in the book. If you think I’m falling for it, you’re insane.”
Grace hadn’t expected this would be an easy conversation, but for some reason or another she had expected it to be fair. The Danny she remembered from the beach house might have been shocked, but he would have at least given her a chance to talk.
“I’m not insane. I am pregnant.”
“I told you to get out.”
“This isn’t going to go away because you don’t believe me.”
“Grace, I said leave.”
His voice was hard and cold and his office fell deadly silent. Knowing there was no talking to him in that state and hoping that after she gave him a few hours for her announcement to sink in he might be more amenable to discussing it, Grace did as he asked. She left his office with her head high, controlling the tears that welled behind her eyelids.
The insult of his reaction tightened her chest and she marched straight to her desk. She yanked open the side drawer, withdrew her purse and walked out of the building as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do. When she got into her car, she dropped her head to her steering wheel and let the tears fall.
Eventually it would be obvious she hadn’t lied. But having Danny call her a schemer was the absolute worst experience she’d ever had.
Partially because he believed it. He believed she would trick him.
Grace’s cheeks heated from a sudden rush of indignation.
It was as if he didn’t know her at all—or she didn’t know him at all.
Or maybe they didn’t know each other.
She started her car and headed home. She needed the day to recover from that scene, but also as sick as she was she couldn’t go back to work until she and Danny had talked this out. Pretty soon everybody would guess what had happened. If nothing else, they had to do damage control. There were lots of decisions that had to be made. So when she got home she would call her supervisor, explain she’d gotten sick and that she might be out a few days. Then she and Danny would resolve this away from the office.
Because she had written down his home number and cell number when he left the message on her answering machine the Sunday night he’d returned from his business trip, Grace called both his house and his cell that night.
He didn’t answer.
She gave him forty-eight hours and called Thursday morning before he would leave for work. Again, no answer.
A little more nervous now, she gave him another forty-eight hours and called Saturday morning. No answer.
She called Monday night. No answer.
And she got the message. He wasn’t going to pick up her calls.
But by that time she had something a little more serious to handle. She couldn’t get well. Amazed that she’d even been able to go to work the Monday of her encounter with Danny, she spent her days in bed, until, desperate for help and advice, she told her mother that she was pregnant and sicker than she believed was normal. They made a quick gynecologist appointment and her doctor told her that she was simply enduring extreme morning sickness.
Too worried about her baby to risk the stress of dealing with Danny, Grace put off calling him. Her life settled into a simple routine of forcing herself out of bed, at least to the couch in her living room, but that was as far as she got, and watching TV all day, as her mother fussed over her.
Knowing the bonus she’d received for her weekend with Orlando would support her
through her pregnancy if she were frugal, she quit her job. Swearing her immediate supervisor to secrecy in their final phone conversation, she confided that she was pregnant and having troubles, though she didn’t name the baby’s father. And she slid out of Carson Services as if she’d never been there.
She nearly called Danny in March, right before the baby was born, but, again, didn’t have the strength to handle the complexities of their situation. Even though he would be forced to believe she hadn’t lied, he might still see her as a cheat. Someone who had tricked him. She didn’t know how to explain that she hadn’t, and after nine months of “morning sickness” she didn’t give a damn. A man who behaved the way he had wasn’t her perfect partner. His money didn’t make him the special prize he seemed to believe he was. It was smarter to focus on the joy of becoming a mother, the joy of having a child, than to think about a guy so hurt by his divorce that he couldn’t believe anything anyone told him.
When Sarah was born everything suddenly changed. No longer sick and now responsible for a child, Grace focused on finding a job. Happily she found one that paid nearly double what she’d been making at Carson Services. Because her parents had moved into her house to help while she was pregnant, she surprised them by buying the little bungalow down the street. Her mother wanted to baby-sit while Grace worked. Her dad could keep up both lawns. And the mortgage on the new house for her parents was small.
Busy and happy, Grace didn’t really think about Danny and before she knew it, it was September and Sarah was six months old. Everything from baby-sitting to pediatrician appointments was taken care of. Everyone in her little family was very happy.
And Grace wondered why she would want to tell Danny at all.
But holding Sarah that night she realized that this situation wasn’t about her and Danny anymore. It was about Sarah. Every little girl had a right to know her daddy.
* * *
The following Saturday evening, Grace found herself craning her neck, straining to read the small sophisticated street signs in the development that contained Danny’s house. It hadn’t been hard to find his address. Convincing herself to get in the car and drive over had been harder. Ultimately she’d come to terms with it not for Danny’s sake, but for Sarah’s. If Grace didn’t at least give Danny the chance to be a dad, then she was no better than he was.
