Harlequin Special Edition November 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2

by Lilian Darcy

  He nodded and didn’t push for more detail. “It’s fine. Do it the way you want. Go sooner, even. It’s a big drive. If you want to get there in time to help with the wedding preparations, or whatever. We have part-timers keen to move up to full time. A couple of them would probably help you pack, if it meant getting your job from you faster.”

  “Thanks.” She wasn’t surprised at this. She knew the drill with young instructors hungry for more work. “You mean it about going earlier?”

  “If you want. The junior coaching program is in good hands with Everard. We’ll be sorry to lose you, very sorry, but your plan makes sense.”

  “Thanks,” she repeated. “I’ll miss—well, I’ll miss an awful lot.” And yet in the back of her mind there was the realization that she wasn’t leaving much of a mark. A handful of people would miss her, but the roots she’d put down here didn’t go very deep.

  “You must be pretty fond of your sisters,” Chris was saying.

  She nodded and smiled, and all the things she wasn’t saying out loud bubbled inside her, ready to be said tonight to Mac.

  Mac, who really shouldn’t be the last to know, but somehow it had worked out that way.

  “Let’s go out,” he said to her after they’d both wound up for the day.

  “Out? Really?”

  “Haven’t seen you. Want some quality time.”

  “We usually do our quality time in a horizontal position.”

  “We can get to that later. And we will....” He smiled and reached to touch her, but she stepped away, as if she hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t kiss him and pretend there was nothing on her mind. The burden of her secret grew heavier every hour, and the uncertainty was making her jittery and miserable.

  Should she have forced the conversation sooner? Should she have held off on any action until they’d talked?

  But even without touching him, she wasn’t hiding her reluctance well enough. He went on, “C’mon. I thought we could make it a little fancier than usual, but if you don’t want that, then we’ll sit in a booth at Waterstreet like always. I feel like steak. We can head there right now, have a beer and a meal, be home by seven-thirty.”

  “We could,” she agreed. Where did you go to have a major conversation such as this one? Surely not to a bar? Now that she’d thoroughly made up her mind to tell him tonight, and had run out of good excuses—wasn’t even looking for them anymore—she wanted to bite the bullet.

  “What’s our alternative?” he said. “Those people still invading our space?” He meant the friends of the Narmans.

  He had a point. “They were leaving today, but I don’t know what time,” she said.

  After a day of teaching on a freezing mountain, cereal and cold milk didn’t cut it for an evening meal. They’d been stopping in at the bar for a hearty feed quite often over the past couple months. Everyone knew they were together, because they hadn’t made any attempt at secrecy. When Lee’s friends asked if it was serious, she only shrugged and answered, “Don’t know. Don’t think so. But it’s fun.” She didn’t know what Mac said to his friends, or if they even asked.

  “You’re no fun tonight,” he told her, softening the words by pulling her against him and planting a couple of crooked kisses somewhere in the region of her mouth. This time she couldn’t help kissing him back. He tasted perfect, like always.

  “Sorry,” she said, and steak did sound good. With a heap of sides and possibly dessert. One thing she most definitely wasn’t having so far, despite all the clichés about early pregnancy, was morning sickness. She felt as hungry as a horse and was sleeping like the dead, most nights. “We’ll go to Waterstreet.”

  Seated in a booth just ten minutes later, they ordered sodas to start, each gulping half a glass of cold, sweet liquid without pausing for breath. Lee decided on prime rib, baked potato and salad, with a cup of clam chowder to start, and the soup arrived within a minute or two of their drinks. Mac was eating wings before his steak. “Man, I’m so hungry!”

  “Me, too.”

  “Have some of the wings.”

  “No, the soup is really good. I’ll stick to that.”

  Their steaks arrived as promptly as their appetizers and sodas. Mac had finished his drink, and ordered two beers—their usual kind—without consulting Lee. Gulping a mouthful of soup, she added quickly to the waitress, “And a soda water,” before the girl hurried off again.

  He looked a little surprised and Lee said, “Thirsty,” because she could see a couple of friends about to come past, looking as if they were going to stop and say hello. They’d gone again by the time the beers and soda water arrived.

  Mac pushed one of the beers in her direction, and she pushed it back to him, saying, “That’s for you. I’m just having the soda water.”

  “Hey, I’m the one who should still be nursing my liver, not you.”

  “You won’t have both of them?”

  He shook his head. “They’re way out of date, in Idaho, about how much I drink. One is plenty tonight.”

  “I should have changed the drink order then, not just added to it. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to keep apologizing.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Did it again.”

  “I know, I...” She took a deep breath. “Um, Mac?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Something I have to tell you.”

  Instantly, a look of alarm appeared on his face. Every red-blooded male in America knew that when a woman spoke those words, the outcome wouldn’t be good.

  Just say it, Lee. Put both of us out of our misery.

  “I did a pregnancy test while you were away.”

  He cursed under his breath. The alarmed expression kicked up several notches. She didn’t even need to say the word positive. It was obvious. He looked as stunned as she’d felt. “Damn, I don’t believe this!” He looked like a single man in his thirties who had a great job offer waiting in the wings, who wasn’t ready to settle down, and who suddenly saw suburbia staring at him out of his girlfriend’s eyes.

  Was that all it was?

  All? It’s enough, isn’t it?

  She thought she saw something else lurking in the depths of his eyes, or in the way his body had gone so still and tight, but she didn’t know what it was, or if it was really even there. He muttered something. Curse words? She wasn’t sure. The shock in his face didn’t surprise her, but a feeling of aloneness and disappointment stirred within her. Maybe, irrationally, she’d craved something different.

  Like what? She didn’t even know.

  “I’m...sorry, Mac.”

  “Will you stop that?” he hissed at her.

  What had she expected? What had she wanted? He was no more shocked, and no more ready for this, than she was. It had hit both of them like a bolt from the blue, only the bolts had come several days apart.

  Someone else was coming over to their booth, an instructor named Adam who embodied all Lee’s reasons for avoiding short-term flings with young, athletic, hard-living males.

  Is Mac one of those? Is that what his reaction’s about?

  “I’ve had some time to think,” she told him quickly.

  “I haven’t. I can’t believe this....”

  “I know, which is why you can relax and stop looking like that, because I’ve thought it all through.”

  “Yeah?” He almost looked as if he was about to laugh, but cynically or even bitterly, not because this was in any way funny.

  “This is not going to wreck your life,” she said.

  “Mac, my man! How’s it hangin’?”

  “Good, Adam, great.” He and Adam did a bit of arm-punching and fist-bumping, with such an exaggerated attitude of male bonding that Lee knew on Mac’s part it couldn’t possibly be sincere. “Listen, b
ud, we’re in the middle of something,” he quickly said.

  “No problem. Catch you later. We’re over there.”

  “Right. Great... Let’s get out of here,” he muttered to Lee as soon as Adam had gone. “We can’t— We need air. Or no interruptions. I’m not doing it like this. It’s too— Let’s just go.” He stood up, flung some bills on the table to settle the tab and watched as she stood up, too. Neither of them had quite finished, but her appetite had vanished, and she thought his probably had, just as thoroughly.

  Out in the snow, she asked him, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Your place. I’m not talking about this in the middle of the street.” But he did, adding after half a minute of silence, “Did you suspect? I mean, you did a test. While I was away. Without a word before that. Were you...? I mean, I presume you were late or something. Having symptoms. Nausea and sore breasts. Did you wait for me to go to Idaho, so that you could do it in secret?”

  “No.” She swore mildly, but with force. “I haven’t had a lot of symptoms yet, and I haven’t tried to hide anything, Mac.”

  She was shocked that he seemed angry about this, as if it was all her fault. As if the word fault was even relevant. She didn’t think it was, and she’d never thought of him as the kind of man who might cast blame.

  “It didn’t occur to me I could be pregnant until a few days ago, after you’d already left,” she said. “There was all that travel. I lost track of dates. I’m not feeling sick or anything. Tired, I guess. But then I work hard. And we don’t sleep enough.” She gave him a sideways glance, but he ignored the innuendo.

  “How far along are you?”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks. You’re right, my breasts are a little sore.”

  “A few weeks? No one’s a few weeks. They count it from your last period. So when was that?”

  She couldn’t tell him. Mid-January? It had been pretty light.

  “A doctor’s going to want to know, to work out your due date.”

  “Well, it’s going to have to be a rough estimate,” she retorted, because the thing about the doctor sounded like an accusation.

  “You should cut back on classes,” Mac said. “You should talk to Chris.”

  “I have talked to Chris, and—”

  “Good. One thing we agree on.”

  “What don’t we agree on?”

  Another short silence. “Let’s not talk yet.”

  “You said that before, and then you started hitting me with questions.”

  “Okay, no more questions till we’re home.” He used the word casually, but it was wrong. They weren’t living together. They’d never talked about it. Well...never? Never wasn’t a long time, in this case. They’d known each other less than three months.

  After a few minutes they came in sight of the Narman residence, which Lee was glad to find largely in darkness. The weekend visitors had left.

  The visitors had left a door open. She saw a length of drape billowing through one of the French doors that led to the big deck that overlooked the slopes, and told Mac, “We’re going to have to check the house. They haven’t closed it up properly. Or else someone’s broken in. They can’t have set the alarm or it’d have gone off, with that door left open.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. I really can’t leave it.”

  “I guess not. It’s pretty obvious with that fabric blowing through. Anyone could have seen it.”

  “I hope nobody has.”

  As she unlocked the main door, he stood beside her, moving restlessly as if impatient to get this started. Inside, it was quickly apparent that the visitors hadn’t cleaned up. There were empty take-out containers and pizza boxes strewn through the rooms, as well as dirty crockery and glassware, trails of crumbs and candy wrappers, wet towels on bathroom floors, sticky spills in the kitchen that hadn’t been mopped up.

  “Leave it,” Mac told her, as she walked around, assessing the damage and the work.

  “I don’t think anything’s actually broken or stained,” she said. “And there’s no sign of a break-in.” She went over to the open door, pulled the billowing drape back inside, and closed and locked it. “It’s freezing in here, even with the heating on. That door’s been open for hours.”

  “Leave it. We’re trying to talk about something important, and you’re thinking about stains and security. Enough interruptions.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  His voice gentled. “And enough damned apologies!”

  “Yeah, okay, I don’t know why I keep doing that.”

  “You said you’ve decided what you’re going to do.” The words he’d chosen seemed to distance him from the whole issue. From the idea of a baby. From any thought of a new kind of link between them. There was a hardness to them and a woodenness that she couldn’t read, but it seemed likely that she’d been right to think he wouldn’t want to be involved.

  She took her cue from his attitude and made her voice cool and firm. “I’m going back east.” Because, really, what was the alternative? Stay here to create some messy arrangement of custody and access to a child who was still seven months away from being born? When she and Mac had said nothing, ever, about a future together? “To my family. Aspen isn’t a town where I’d want to be bringing up a child on my own.”

  He didn’t say a word. She looked at him and his face was like granite. She couldn’t read it at all. He reached out and picked up a pizza box from a side table, and then another one from the arm of a couch. So they were cleaning up, after all? She was just about to start on it, too, when he asked neutrally, “So when are you planning to leave?”

  “As soon as I’m ready.”

  “What, tonight?” It was sarcastic and steely.

  “No, not tonight. Of course not tonight, Mac! Do we need to make this hostile? If you want something different, then spell it out!”

  “Spell it out?” he muttered. “Hell!”

  “Yes,” she agreed, although she didn’t know quite what she was agreeing to. That this was difficult and not fun. That when it came to serious stuff, they had nothing to draw on, no blueprint, no rules.

  “So, when?”

  “Maybe Friday.” She’d been thinking about it since Chris had given her the go-ahead to be flexible, and figured Friday was the best she could manage. Now that she was leaving, now that she’d realized what a small dent she’d made in this place and how few ties she had, she was impatient about it.

  She kept thinking about Daisy and Mary Jane and how great it would be to have them in her life again, not just occasionally at Thanksgiving or Christmas, if she went for a visit or if they came here, but day to day.

  Grabbing a coffee together.

  Watching the same TV shows, in the same time zone.

  Yelling at each other over some sister thing, then laughing with their next breath.

  Daisy and Tucker were about to get married. Maybe there’d soon be a tiny cousin for this baby inside her, who wasn’t yet real. Wouldn’t that be great?

  The ties of family were tugging on Lee in a way they hadn’t tugged in years.

  “Friday,” Mac echoed. He muttered half to himself, “That’s probably when I’ll hear about the job....”

  “If I can get everything done by then.”

  “This isn’t happening.” He seemed lost, standing there with the pizza boxes in his hands. His whole being seemed focused on some private darkness that she didn’t understand. “This just is not happening.”

  “Well, it is.” She gently took them from him, added another one to the pile and he didn’t protest. “Are you saying I should be handling it differently?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m not saying anything. I’m telling you to take it seriously.”

  “I am. We’ve known each other eleve
n weeks, Mac.”

  “Yeah. I know. Yeah.” He focused on her movement. “You really are going to clean up?”

  “You were the one who started picking up boxes. And it’s Tuesday night. I have a lot to do in two days.”

  “I guess you do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  This time, he didn’t object to the apology. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I won’t stay to help. I just need some time.”

  Chapter Seven

  Upstate New York, April

  “We never ended it,” Mac said.

  “I left and you didn’t stop me. We never said anything about it not ending.” Lee hugged her robe tighter around her, wishing she was dressed. It was ten-thirty in the morning. Wearing a robe at this hour had stopped feeling comforting and pretty sexy with Mac around, the way it had felt at first. Now it felt frumpish and lazy, and it put her at a disadvantage when he looked so good and so relaxed in his shirt and jeans. “We said goodbye.”

  Goodbye had been pretty horrible, in fact. They hadn’t had a private moment together after he left the messy Narman residence that Tuesday night. She’d been so busy packing her possessions, in between teaching a reduced load of classes on the slopes, deciding which things to ship east, which to take with her when she drove, and which to give away or throw away or sell.

  Her mugs, what should she do with her mugs? In the end, she’d packed them all in bubble wrap, put them in boxes and brought them with her, on the backseat of her car. The mugs weren’t important. She had no idea what was important right now.

  She’d avoided Mac and he must have been avoiding her, she thought, because it was almost spooky the way their paths failed to cross. Then on Thursday evening, when everything was done and Alyssa had already moved into the janitor’s apartment—Lee planned to spend her last night in Aspen in one of the Narman bedrooms upstairs—she went to the ski school office to collect some final paperwork and say some goodbyes, and there he was.

  It seemed as good a time as any. What were they supposed to do? Create a special occasion for it? That would be more horrible than anything.