Rhys's Redemption

by Anne McAllister

  He looked the way Rhys felt.

  Mariah was pregnant?

  Every time he put those three words in that order, it was like taking a blow to the gut.

  “Tyler, sit up and let Mr.… er… Rhys… sit down. That’s Tyler,” she said to Rhys. “My son. Can I get you some coffee while you wait? Mariah said you’d be going to sleep now, so I don’t know if you’d want any coffee, but…”

  Going to sleep?

  Mariah had told him she was going to have his baby, walked out, and expected he would go to sleep?

  Not bloody likely.

  “No coffee,” he said brusquely. His nerves were already shot. He prowled, he paced.

  A sudden infantile wail sounded in the bedroom.

  Rhys jumped. “What the hell was that!”

  “Oh, that’s just Ashley,” Erica said cheerfully. “Our daughter. Jeff—my husband—is changing her. He had to come to New York for a seminar this week, so we came with him.” As she spoke she poured two mugs of coffee and handed one to Rhys just as if he hadn’t already declined.

  Maybe he looked like he needed fortification. God knew he felt as if he did. He clutched the mug in his hands like a lifeline.

  “Mariah is Ty’s godmother,” Erica went on, “and it’s been ages since she’s seen him and she’d never seen Ashley. So we decided we’d all come and visit. Mariah and Sierra don’t get home often and we miss them a lot. You know how it is with families,” she said brightly.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  Erica blinked.

  Rhys wished to hell Mariah would get out here. How could she do this to him? He rocked on his heels. He ground his teeth. His fingers clenched on the coffee mug as if he were strangling it.

  “You don’t have any family?” Erica sounded as if she pitied him.

  Rhys scowled. He didn’t want anybody’s pity. “I have brothers,” he said curtly.

  “Oh, well, that’s good.” She smiled brightly. “And did you grow up in the city?”

  Rhys raked a hand through his hair. Again he paced from one end of the room to the other, avoiding the piles of clothes and toys and pillows. He did not want to make polite conversation with this woman while Mariah hid out in the bathroom!

  Finally he slapped the mug down on the counter with such force that the coffee spilled. “I’ve got to go. Tell her I need to talk to her,” he bit out. “Tell her to come down.”

  Mariah wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear anything Rhys had to say. She’d hoped that a shower and a handful of soda crackers would have equipped her for dealing with him.

  She was afraid she was out of luck. She concentrated on braiding her hair.

  “He came looking for you,” Erica said, her voice dripping curiosity. “He really wanted you.”

  Mariah could hear the double entendre in her cousin’s voice. Would that it were true, she thought. “I’ll go see him later,” she said. When she felt steadier on her feet, stronger. More capable.

  “He’s a hunk,” Erica said. “Why haven’t you told us about him before?”

  “Nothing to tell,” Mariah said airily.

  “He seems interested.”

  “Not… like that.”

  “Too bad,” Erica said. “Is he gay?”

  Mariah almost choked. “What?”

  “Well, if he isn’t, why isn’t he interested? You’re single, smart, gorgeous, in possession of all your teeth. What more could he want?”

  “He doesn’t even want that much,” Mariah said.

  Erica leaned closer. Mariah could see her cousin’s freckles in the mirror. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind.” She finished braiding her hair and straightened her shoulders. She felt marginally better. Not as if she was going to puke anymore. That was one of the reasons she’d stayed down at Rhys’s— so she wouldn’t be up here puking every morning and giving Erica lots more to speculate about.

  She hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant yet. She’d been waiting to tell Rhys first.

  And now? she asked herself. Now that she’d told him… She still couldn’t bring herself to tell Erica. She would have to answer too many questions. Or she wouldn’t—and she would be subject to way too much scrutiny because of that.

  In either case, it wasn’t something she was ready to talk about. Not now.

  Not yet.

  If Rhys had been happy about it… if he’d grinned and whooped and swung her up in his arms the way Mariah’s friend Chloe’s husband, Gibson, had when she’d told him she was expecting their child… well, then Mariah would have been happy to share the news with the world.

  But Rhys hadn’t.

  He’d looked stricken. Aghast.

  Her jaw tightened. She sucked in a careful breath. Oh, Rhys!

  “Go talk to him,” Erica said. “Ask him if he wants to come with us to the Empire State Building.”

  Mariah nearly snorted. She could just imagine what Rhys would say to that!

  “He’s the one you go with all the time, isn’t he?” Erica persisted.

  “Yes.”

  “So he'd probably like to go.”

  “He just got home.”

  “You can ask.”

  “All right,” Mariah said. “I’ll ask.”

  “Ask what?” Jeff, Erica’s husband, came into the room carrying eight-month-old Ashley. He handed the baby to his wife, then dropped a kiss on her mouth. The way they looked at each other was so full of love that Mariah was torn between watching in unabashed envy and turning away for the very same reason.

  She wanted a love like that.

  “Ask Mariah's hunky friend to come with us today,” Erica said.

  “Mariah has a hunky friend?” Jeff’s eyebrows lifted.

  “He’s a friend,” Mariah said firmly.

  “And a hunk,” Erica chimed in. “I know you don’t need a man, Mariah,” she said quickly. “But they are nice to have around.”

  Mariah didn’t have to be told that. She wasn’t quite sure where the family had got the notion that she couldn’t be bothered. Maybe it was because she was thirty-one years old and for the past eight years she had been working her butt off to become a successful journalist for a lifestyle magazine with national circulation, which didn’t leave a lot of time for finding the perfect man.

  But that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested.

  She was. Very.

  She might have a boss who thought she was fantastic and colleagues who admired her. The subjects of her articles, many of whom had been burned by the press before, might have nothing but good things to say about her. Mariah Kelly might be one of the most respected and sought-after chroniclers of the rich and famous in America today, a woman who was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the studious, determined small-town girl she had once been.

  But that didn’t mean her life was perfect the way it was.

  It didn’t mean she wanted to spend the rest of it without a man.

  One man.

  The man. The one she loved.

  Rhys.

  She sucked in a careful breath. She couldn’t put it off forever. She would have to talk to him—and listen to him—sometime.

  Please, God, she said in the silence of her heart, I love him. Make this work.

  He couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands.

  He jammed them in his pockets. He balled them into fists. He cracked his knuckles one after another. He raked his fingers through his hair. He stuffed them into his pockets again and turned to glare at her.

  How the hell could she just sit there on the sofa so calmly while he paced and muttered and tried to fix the mess that had suddenly become his life?

  “I told you how I feel about family.” He knew the words sounded accusing. He couldn’t help it. He was doing his best to not to let the strain show in his voice. Rhys was noted for his calm under pressure—just ask anyone he worked with. He felt as if the top of his head was going to come off now!

  Mariah nodded. �
�I know how you feel about family. What you said, that is. And I… understand. But—”

  “Then how could you—?”

  “It wasn’t just me!” she retorted, not so calm now, her voice rising, too. “I didn’t do this by myself, Rhys!”

  He pounded one fist into the other hand. “Damn it! I know that! I just… Hell!” He shut his eyes and prayed for strength. He didn’t find it. He said a harsh word. And then another.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw Mariah looking at him, stricken. As if he’d just stabbed her.

  He supposed he had. But he’d been stabbed, too. Trapped. Nailed.

  The one thing he’d set off-limits, the very last thing he ever wanted, was here, now, staring him in the face.

  “I wasn’t counting on this,” he muttered what had to be the greatest understatement of his life.

  “And you think I was?”

  “No, of course not! I didn’t say that. It must be just as bad for you as for—”

  “No.” She cut him off.

  He stopped. And stared. “What?”

  “I said, no.” And she shook her head to make the point. “It isn’t bad. It isn’t,” she repeated. “I admit I was shocked when I found out. Stunned, even. And dismayed— because it wasn’t the way I’d thought about becoming pregnant.” She smiled a little wistfully. “But I’m over that. I’m fine. I want this baby.” She sounded absolutely resolute about that.

  “You want it?” Pardon him if he sounded incredulous. “You’re a career woman. You have a job!”

  “Lots of women have jobs. And children. So will I.”

  “You never said you wanted kids!”

  “You never asked,” she replied.

  He gaped at her. Then he shook his head, disbelieving. “It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.” He gave her a hard, narrow look, wondering if he’d ever known her at all. She’d never, in the three years he’d known her, given the slightest indication that she was interested in marriage and family. That was why he’d liked her so damn much!

  Well, that and because she was fun to be with, a good conversationalist, an intent listener and a compassionate, loving person.

  He felt duped. Tricked.

  “Did you…?” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to voice the accusation.

  She heard it anyway. Fire flashed in her normally gentle eyes. “No, I did not plan it! And if you even for one second think I did—” she wasn’t calm at all now; she was seething “—you can go to hell!” She strode toward the door, chin high, back ramrod-straight.

  He went after her, grabbing her arm and spinning her around. Suddenly they were bare inches apart, so close he could feel the heat of her breath against his cheek, so near that when her breasts heaved in indignation they nearly touched his chest.

  And he remembered what it had been like when they had touched him. Remembered their softness, her softness.

  He dropped her arm and stepped back, gathering his wits, striving for sanity. “I didn’t think you had,” he said heavily. “Not… really. I’m just…” he shoved his fingers through his hair again, spiking it into tufts “…I’m just… beat. It’s… not something I was expecting.”

  She started to say something, but he held up his hand so she wouldn’t interrupt. He needed to finish. “It’s not that I didn’t think about it… about what happened, I mean. I just never thought… about that.”

  Stupid as it was, he hadn’t.

  Maybe because all the women he’d had sex with since Sarah had died—and there hadn’t been that many—had come “prepared.” They’d known the score and had been looking for a good time as much as he had. They hadn’t been looking for a family. Pregnancy had never been an option.

  He looked at Mariah, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was standing with her arms folded across her breasts, staring out the window toward the street. His eyes moved down in an almost reluctant attempt to discern any slight bulge. He couldn’t see any, but he didn’t remember Sarah showing at nine weeks either.

  She’d only had the tiniest roundness when she’d… when she’d died.

  His throat grew tight and ached. Something seemed to be throbbing at the back of his eyes. It hurt.

  He hurt.

  And at the same time he forced himself into a kind of detachment. A calm. The calm he’d managed after Sarah died, the sense of walking around in a glass bubble, disconnected from everything and everyone. Distant. Uninvolved.

  It was the only way he could cope.

  He took a breath, swallowed past the lump. He wet his lips. Then he said with quiet firmness, “I don’t want to be married.”

  She flicked him a glance. “No one’s asking you.”

  He blinked. Then, “You told me,” he accused her.

  She lifted her shoulders negligently. “Because you had a right to know. That’s all. If you don’t want anything to do with the baby—” she seemed to come down on the word with both feet “—or me, it’s all right.”

  “It’s damned well not all right! The whole thing is not all right! You’re pregnant!” So much for calm and detachment.

  “Yes. And I’m going to be a mother. I’m going to love being a mother.” She shot him a defiant look, then her eyes softened. “But I’m not forcing you to be a father, Rhys.”

  He snorted bitterly. “According to you, that’s already been accomplished.”

  “Only biologically.”

  That was enough. More than enough.

  Rhys drew a shaky breath. His fingers tightened into fists as he steadied himself. “I’ll give you money. I’ll help financially. You won’t want for a thing. The… baby—” he almost couldn’t get his mouth around the word, but he did because he didn’t want her to see how much it bothered him “—won’t. But that’s it. That’s all I can do. All I will do. Understand?”

  He expected an argument. He expected condemnation. He expected her to tell him what a selfish bastard he was. He wouldn’t deny it.

  But she didn’t argue and she didn’t condemn. She just went to the door, then turned and met his gaze directly. “Your choice, Rhys,” she said quietly. “Your loss.”

  They went to the World Trade Center.

  It was taller than the Empire State Building, Mariah told them. If you were going to go up to the top of a skyscraper, she said and her voice didn’t even waver, you might as well go for the tallest one around.

  You could almost look right down on the Statue of Liberty from the World Trade Center, she explained. You could see Battery Park and get a view straight up the island of Manhattan from its southern tip. And afterwards you could go right on over to the Museum of the American Indian if you wanted to, or see Saint Paul’s church or the Fraunces Tavern or spend the rest of the afternoon at South Street Seaport. She said it all with calm disinterest, as if she didn’t really care which they chose.

  “You don’t have to convince us,” Jeff said cheerfully. “We’ll go wherever you tell us to go.”

  “The World Trade Center,” Mariah decreed. Not the Empire State Building.

  She couldn’t have borne it.

  If there had been Oscars for real-life acting, she deserved one. Not just for an afternoon of sightseeing when she wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but for having stayed composed while Rhys exploded, for not having shattered— well, not much—too.

  But she’d managed it. It wouldn’t have done any good to rant at him, to argue with him, to cajole. She would never cajole a man into wanting her—or their child. He had to want her because he wanted her—and the baby.

  And she knew he would.

  She hoped he would.

  She prayed he would.

  It would just take a little time.

  She’d walked out dry-eyed and steady. And she’d gone right on being dry-eyed and steady all day long, even though Erica had bemoaned Rhys’s not coming with them.

  “He was too tired,” Mariah explained.

  And even though her cousin asked pointed questions abo
ut him the rest of the afternoon, she remained that way.

  “He’s a firefighter. He’s gone a lot. I don’t know,” she said to the rest of the questions. “I don’t know.”

  And eventually both Erica and Jeff became so enthralled with everything she showed them, and Tyler asked so many questions and was so busy darting here and there, and Ashley was busy demanding the attention that eight-month-old babies required, that no one noticed that sometimes Mariah’s smile slipped and sometimes she knotted her fingers to stop them trembling, and that although the World Trade Center had a spectacular view up the length of Manhattan—“complete with the Empire State Building,” Jeff said, “which is even better than going up in it”—in fact Mariah couldn’t bring herself to look at it.

  She stared at Staten Island instead.

  And even then she didn’t let herself remember the day she and Rhys had taken the ferry over there and back. She couldn’t think about Rhys.

  If she did, her emotions would go into overdrive. She would worry. She would fret. And she couldn’t do anything about any of it.

  It was hard to pay attention to the view.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Tyler,” she told Erica and Jeff finally when they were torn between looking at the view or looking after their child. “Come on, buddy, let’s give your mom and dad a break.”

  It was the best thing she could have done.

  Tyler was a perfect distraction. He asked a thousand questions, not one of them about Rhys.

  “How did they get that statue out there in the middle of that island?” he wanted to know, pointing at the Statue of Liberty. “Did a man carve it there? How do they build skyscrapers? Have they got basements? How do ferryboats run? Do they have rubber bands inside them like the ones Daddy makes for me to use in the bathtub? How come that boat’s got big tall sails? Why don’t they make all buildings as big as this one? Why don’t you live in a building this big, M’riah?”

  He barely gave Mariah a chance to catch her breath between the answers. Just as well. She didn’t want to think.

  But she couldn’t help it. She wondered if her child would be this inquisitive. Would it be eager and bouncy like Tyler or easygoing and placid like baby Ashley? Would it have her brown hair or the midnight-black of a man who said he didn’t want a child at all?