by Teresa Hill
“There.” The doctor pointed to a remarkably clear image of a tiny face. “There’s your baby.”
Shannon peered at it as she might something coming at her in the dark at night, as if she wasn’t sure if it was going to hurt her or not. Kate looked troubled, herself, and Ben…well, Ben was just glad it seemed to have all its parts in the right places, given the fact that she hadn’t had any prenatal care.
There was a little blinking light in the middle of its chest, like a cursor on a computer. “What’s that?’
“Heartbeat,” the doctor said.
“Wow.” A beating heart? Who’d have thought he’d ever be looking at one of those?
“It’s…big,” Shannon said. “The baby, I mean.”
“Yes, it is. I think you’re further along than you realized,” the doctor said.
“How far along?”
“Like eight weeks or so from having this baby.”
Shannon’s mouth dropped open and stayed there. Kate gasped.
Ben thought they had a lot of things to figure out and not much time to do it. “Is the baby healthy?”
“Looks great. We drew blood, and we’ll need to see the results of that test before we know for sure. But from my exam and the ultrasound, it looks like you have a healthy baby.”
“Thank God,” Ben whispered.
“Amen to that,” the nurse said, then looked at Shannon. “You, little girl, need to be eating better and getting lots of rest. Having a baby is not easy, especially for someone as young as you. You just remember, this baby is depending on you.”
From the look on Shannon’s face, Ben thought she understood. The baby was suddenly, undeniably real.
“Do you want to know if it’s a girl or a boy?” the doctor asked.
“No.” Then she whispered to Ben, “What am I gonna do?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ben promised her.
Chapter Ten
If they’d been somber going in, it was nothing like when they were coming out.
Shannon looked deflated, like she’d shrunk three sizes, a shell of her former self. Ben supposed being confronted with irrefutable evidence that she was going to have a baby very soon would do that to a young girl.
Kate was scribbling furiously in a tiny notebook.
He thought she was making a list.
A very long list.
He knew she made a lot of those, and he knew why. He wondered if she did.
Ben drove them both back to Kate’s house. Shannon got out of the car and went inside. Kate put away her list, but she hadn’t made any move to go inside.
“I’m going to have to keep her, aren’t I?” she said.
“You could,” he said, as noncommittally as possible.
“She’s eight weeks from giving birth. I can’t kick her out now.”
“Okay,” Ben said.
“Do you agree with everything people say? If I’d said I was going to ship her off to the North Pole, would you have sat there with that blank look on your face and said, ‘Okay’?”
He grinned, because this was the Kate he was comfortable with. A silent, brooding Kate truly worried him. “Part of my training was in counseling. Listening, trying to let people find their own answers in their own way, that sort of thing.”
“So if I’d said I was going to ship her off to the North Pole—”
“You wouldn’t do that, Kate.”
“But if I tried—”
“You wouldn’t.”
She made a sound of disgust. “That’s infuriating!”
“What is? Knowing you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t put a pregnant fifteen-year-old on the streets? Knowing you always try to do the right thing? Yeah, I can see where most people would find that insulting.”
“No, that way you just sit there and accept everything. Let people say what they want and try to go along with it.”
“You want me to try to talk you out of keeping her?”
“No!”
“Want me to try to talk you into attempting to get Joe back?” He sure hoped not.
“No!”
“Then what? Want me to tell you what to do?”
“I always try to tell people what do to. It’s what I do,” she said.
“I know. Why is it so awful that I don’t?”
“Ahh!” she said again, as if she could cheerfully strangle him.
Maybe she really didn’t like him. He had to at least consider the possibility. He could be driving her crazy, and not in a good way.
He fought to keep a grin off his face, because he knew that irritated her, too. “What?”
“I just don’t know how you do it. You never seem to tell anybody what to do, and yet you get people to go along with what you want. I tell people what to do, and they don’t listen. And I’m not even sure now that I should be. I’m thinking, in my whole life, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to tell anybody what to do, because I can’t even manage my own life, all of a sudden. I mean, I don’t think it’s all of a sudden. I think I just figured it out.”
She got really quiet toward the end. And sad. Now she was staring at him, waiting…
“Was there a question in there? Because I’m not sure if I caught it.”
“What if I’ve been doing everything all wrong?”
“I don’t think you have.”
“I was wrong about Joe.”
He shrugged, wishing she wouldn’t keep asking about Joe. He didn’t want to talk about Joe anymore. He didn’t want to give any advice to anyone about Joe.
“What’s really bothering you, Kate? It goes beyond Joe.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You don’t tell anybody anything, and yet you manage to lead people to what they really need to talk about.”
“That’s my job,” he said.
“Oh.”
She got really quiet at that. He’d definitely said something wrong.
“Okay,” she said. “I need to go.”
She reached for the door handle, and he reached for her, wrapping his hand around her arm and pulling her back when she would have gotten out of the car.
“Okay, let’s back up,” he said. “Just so there’s no confusion about this point. I’m not working here.”
“Sure you are. You and I are trying to help Shannon, and that’s work to you.”
“But not with you. You’re not work.”
“You’re with me because of Shannon. We’re both trying to help Shannon.”
Ben didn’t really see that he had any choice in the matter.
He decided he had to kiss her.
He’d been wanting to for a long, long time, and it seemed the only way to convince her that his interest in her had nothing to do with his job.
“Kate?” he said very softly, putting his hand on her cheek and turning her face to his. “I’m not working right now.”
“But—”
He didn’t let her get another word out. He covered her mouth with his, and let his lips linger on hers. His hand tangled in her hair, and she kept trying to talk, halfhearted efforts he ignored, except they were so like her, he wanted to laugh.
Leave it to Kate to think she could talk herself into making sense of a kiss, to be trying to analyze it while it was still going on.
He pulled away, laughing softly, and she looked furious.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Come on, Kate. You know what I was doing. I like you. You know that. You’ve known it from the first ten minutes we spent together.”
“That is not what we’re doing. We’re trying to help this girl. We’re working together,” she insisted.
“I told you. I’m not working right now.”
“But…but—”
No doubt about it. He’d have to kiss her again.
Kate had a million protests in mind, but didn’t utter a single one.
Not this time.
This time, she just sat there and let him kiss her, let herself think that it was nic
e to be kissed by him. She hadn’t kissed another man in years, and maybe that’s what it was. Maybe just that he was someone different, the first new man she’d kissed in a long time.
Maybe that was why she wanted to sit here and just…feel.
It felt good.
Very, very good.
Like she couldn’t move, good. Like she didn’t want to. That good. She’d just stay there and try to not even breathe, and maybe if she did, he’d keep on doing it.
There were men who kissed like they were going to devour a woman whole, whether she wanted them to or not, and then there were men, like him, who kissed a woman softly, sweetly, tantalizingly, like a whisper that kept saying, Come closer. Closer. Closer still. Kisses that made a woman feel like she’d never be able to get close enough. That she’d always be moving toward a man, never away. Like she could crawl into his arms and then maybe inside his body completely and still it wouldn’t be close enough.
Kate wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have crawled into Ben Taylor’s lap at some point. She didn’t think he’d done it himself, and when he finally pulled away and she opened her eyes, she was practically in his lap, and he looked very, very pleased with himself.
She was mortified.
Terrified.
Completely baffled.
And had a grip on his shirt as though she’d never let go. Her breathing was shallow and fast. Her heart was pounding as if something like a tornado had picked her up and spun her around, dropped her off in a parallel universe.
Looking at his face, she wondered just who in the world this man was.
She hadn’t even known him until three days ago.
Kate shook her head to try to clear it. It didn’t work.
“If you laugh, I swear, I’m going to smack you,” she said, because he was getting ready to. She could tell. She knew that, after just three days. She’d known it in two.
His lips were twitching. He was fighting it and losing.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned.
“Okay. Don’t hurt me.”
“And don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not. I’m enjoying you. Very much. Don’t look at me like that’s a bad thing.”
“I’m sure it is.” Somehow it had to be.
“Oh, Kate. Did you forget completely how to enjoy life?”
“That’s what you’re doing? Enjoying life?”
“I’m enjoying this. Being with you. Knowing that you’re a completely free woman right now and that I like you, and that just about anything could happen between us.”
She puzzled over that. Anything? “I just got out of a five-year engagement.”
“I remember.”
“I can’t do this!” she said.
“Why not?”
“It was two days ago!”
“So?”
“I have to figure out what went wrong, to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Of course she did. That’s what a rational, careful, thinking woman would do, and Kate was all of those things. She was almost sure of it. Three days ago, she would have been absolutely sure, but now she wasn’t, because he was kissing her and she liked it and didn’t want it to end!
“You know what happened, Kate,” he claimed.
Only then did she realized that she was still sitting on his lap, in his car, in her driveway, for anyone to see! She let go of his shirt, pushed away from him and slid onto her own seat with every bit of dignity she could muster, which wasn’t much.
“Oh, right. I know. Well, if I know, then I’m sure you know, too. So why don’t you tell me what happened with my engagement.”
“You didn’t love him,” Ben said, maddeningly calm and sure of himself. “And you’re not upset he’s gone. You’re relieved, because you know deep down it was the right thing. You’re not supposed to be with Joe.”
“I am not relieved,” she claimed. “I’m upset.”
“You’re upset because you picked the wrong guy five years ago and then refused to see it, because staying with him was easier than admitting you made a mistake.”
Kate’s mouth dropped open in outrage. It was a terrible thing to say, made even worse by the fact that she feared it was true and that she’d only been saved from making a huge mistake with Joe by him falling for someone else.
What if she had married him? It would have been a disaster. A much bigger one than staying engaged to the wrong man for years.
“I really hate it when you do that,” she told Ben, this man she’d known for three whole days, versus Joe, whom she’d known for more than five years.
How had he gotten so far inside her head in three days? How had their lives become so caught up in each other’s? How could she think she liked him so much? He made her crazy most of the time. Crazy, not in a good way.
“When I do what?” he asked.
“Tell the truth,” she admitted. “Big ones. Big, personal, private truths.
He grinned, just a bit. “Bad habit of mine.”
They sat there in silence for a moment, Kate completely perplexed.
“I used to know exactly what I wanted,” she said quietly, with no heat at all. “At least, I thought I did.”
“You will again.”
He said it like a promise, as if he had complete faith in her, when she had none in herself. It was the most terrifying thing, not trusting herself.
He sat there looking completely calm, completely sure of himself and so inviting, it was all she could do not to crawl back into his arms and beg him to hold her. He’d do it if she asked. She knew it and didn’t think she’d ever been so tempted in her entire life.
By the thought of a funny, irritating, kindhearted rock of a man holding her?
He reached out and touched her face, so softly. Ran his thumb down her cheek, toyed with her chin, came close enough to kiss her, but ended up doing nothing but nuzzling his cheek gently against hers and whispering in her ear.
“You’ll figure it out,” he promised.
Kate got out of the car and ran to the house.
She’d hoped for a few moments alone, but that wasn’t going to happen.
She walked into her own house to find both her sisters, her brother’s fiancée, Gwen, and Shannon all in her living room, yacking about something. Probably her, judging by the way they shut up the minute they spotted her.
“Hi,” Kim called out with what she was sure was fake cheerfulness. “Gwen came by to meet Shannon.”
“Hi, Gwen.”
“Hi.”
She was the last woman in the world Kate would have expected her brother to fall for, but fall for her, he had. She’d never really expected him to settle down, either, and he’d proven her wrong about that, too. The only thing about the whole idea that drove Kate crazy was that he’d found Gwen in the middle of losing their mother. That at a time when the rest of them had been miserable, her brother had found a kind of happiness Kate had begun to think would completely elude her.
It wasn’t very nice of her. She wanted her brother to be happy. She’d just been so unhappy herself the last few months.
“Everything okay?” Kim asked.
“Sure,” Kate lied.
“You don’t look like everything’s okay,” Kim suggested.
“No, it’s just… Well…” She was still in that parallel universe, it seemed. Still a bit dazed and not sure what had happened.
“Do you feel all right?” Gwen was coming toward her, ready to do that hand-on-the-forehead, mom-thing. As if that could diagnose just about anything. Her whole family seemed to think so.
Kate’s mother had done that, too.
She’d really like to have her mother back right now.
Tears threatened once again.
“Dammit,” Kate muttered.
Instantly she was surrounded by her sisters and Gwen, all fussing over her like she was some weak, fragile thing. It was so irritating. She’d never allow herself to be weak, and there was no use being fragile. The world was tough, and it
didn’t care if a woman was fragile. It tore into her all the same. So there was no point in it.
“What happened?” Kim asked.
“He…he…he kissed me!”
“Joe?” Kathie looked stunned. “Joe kissed you.”
“No. Ben!”
“Ben?” Gwen asked. “Who’s Ben?”
“The priest,” Kim said.
“He’s not a priest. He’s just a…well, he is and he isn’t,” Kate said, fumbling badly. “It’s okay that he kissed me. I mean…it’s not okay.”
“You mean, he like…attacked you?” Gwen asked.
“No!” Kate cried out. “I mean…he’s not that kind of priest.”
“You mean…a fake one? He impersonates a priest?”
“No. I’m explaining it all wrong.” But then, how could she explain it right? She didn’t understand it herself.
Then she glanced up and saw Shannon. Shannon who didn’t look quite so ghoulish today. Her face wasn’t as pale as usual, her lips not as red, and she was wearing a cotton shirt that was merely gray, not black. Kate hadn’t really noticed the change before. She’d been too caught up trying not to look pregnant at Dr. Russell’s office and trying not to look like a couple with Ben, so that maybe some of the gossip would die down. She was expecting Joe to call any minute and scream at her about making him feel bad for loving someone else when she was having the priest’s illegitimate baby.
Shannon was laughing, much in the same way Ben did.
“What?” Kate asked.
“I thought my life was messed up, but you…” Shannon said. “You’re helping me just so you can pick up a priest?”
“I’m not picking him up. He’s picking me up. Or…he’s trying to. I’m just there,” she said, claiming the innocent-bystander defense for what had to be the first time in her life. She hadn’t exactly been an innocent bystander when she climbed into his lap a moment ago. “I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what I’m doing, but we’re both trying to help you, and believe me, you need help.”
She finally closed her mouth and realized everyone in the room was staring at her as though she’d grown three heads or something.
“What?” she said.
“You,” Kim said. “You said that you don’t know what you’re doing.”
