Harlequin Special Edition November 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2

by Lilian Darcy

  “She wouldn’t stop boarding. She was six months pregnant and she was still saying that a woman’s body was made to cradle and protect the pregnancy, and nothing would go wrong. She was doing halfpipe one day....”

  Lee suddenly flashed back to that time in Colorado last month when they’d eaten hot dogs for lunch, watching the Men’s Superpipe snowboarding. She remembered Mac’s ambivalence, his talk of “risk minimization,” and felt very scared about what was coming next.

  “I was there,” he said. “But I didn’t argue.”

  “You blame yourself for that,” she stated quietly.

  “Sometimes. I keep thinking if I’d...” He sighed and shook his head, the air harsh between his teeth. “But I’d given up by then. Knew if I’d tried to get her to stop she would have gone all out to prove her point even harder. Gone faster. Done bigger tricks. She was like that.” He leaned lower on the rail and watched the lake some more. It was in gray shadow now, and the snow wasn’t far away. “She was so driven and so, so stubborn.”

  A bit like you, his momentary silence seemed to say. “Stubborn” Lee probably agreed with. “Driven,” she wasn’t so sure.

  “But maybe I should have...I don’t know...forced her somehow. Forced her off that mountain.”

  “Wouldn’t she have fought you?”

  “Yeah. She would have. But still...” He paused for a moment, and Lee could feel him revisiting all the scenarios that hadn’t happened, all the actions he hadn’t taken.

  “Anyhow, she had a pretty hard fall,” he went on. “Got straight back on her feet and said she was fine, just bruised. Wouldn’t get herself checked out. Said she could still feel the baby moving, and that everything was okay. I don’t know if she really could feel anything or if it was just wishful thinking. But I wouldn’t let it go and she yelled at me about it, then finally, the next day, we went to the doctor and the baby wasn’t moving. It was—” He didn’t say it. Took a slow breath. “They had to induce labor.”

  “Oh, Mac!” Lee had a lump in her throat. He sounded so broken.

  “And it was a boy, and he was perfect. Tiny. And he could have been all right. He would have been, if she hadn’t gone boarding that day. There’s a chance he could have lived, even after the fall. If she really had felt him moving, maybe if she’d gotten some attention right away, they could have...I mean, they can work miracles in medicine now....” He stopped. “I don’t know. I’ll never know.”

  “Mac...” Lee said again.

  “Mom and Dad have told me over and over not to do this to myself, not to think about those ifs and maybes, and I’m getting a lot better at it. At distracting myself. But sometimes I can’t stop them, in my head.”

  “No, of course.” She wondered about the “distracting myself” part—about making love an hour ago, upstairs. A distraction? “You broke up?” she asked.

  “Of course we did. How could we have survived something like that? Last week, after you told me about the pregnancy, I knew I couldn’t just hit my parents with the news on the phone. It brings up so much stuff for them, as well as for me. They had to sit on the sidelines, watching the whole disaster unfold. And they were grieving, too. They lost a grandchild.”

  “Where is Sloane now?” Lee ached for him, and all she could come out with was these questions, short and practical. She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Still surfing, last time I heard. Based in Hawaii. I don’t hear from her. Well, a couple of phone calls and emails, every once in a while. I don’t want to hear from her, hate when she gets in touch.”

  “Of course.”

  “So if I push you about taking care of yourself, that’s why. If I push you sometimes. If I bulldoze you, or hang over you. If I’m treating this whole pregnancy thing like a big deal, like something complicated, that’s why.”

  “I’m not Sloane.”

  “No, but you’re a professional athlete, effectively, just like she was.”

  “I’m not that driven. I’m not a competitor. I just like to stay active in the fresh air.”

  “What are you going to do about that?”

  “I teach skiing, remember? The season’s almost over now, and the baby’s due at the beginning of fall.”

  “That’s not an answer. You mountain guide in the summer. You teach rock climbing, too.”

  “You think I plan to still be teaching rock climbing when I’m six months pregnant? What have I said that you would make such an assumption?”

  “I’m just asking, Lee.”

  “And I’m telling you. I’m not Sloane.”

  “Do you not think I have the right to ask, in this situation?”

  “You have the right to ask, but not the right to assume.”

  He ignored her. “I had no control over what Sloane did with her body, even though the baby she was carrying was mine as much as it was hers. Even though I knew she was being pigheaded and unrealistic, and her doctor agreed with me.”

  “I’ll listen to the doctor, Mac.”

  But he was beyond hearing her, right now. “And our child died before he was even born. She was so big on living life to the full, and yet our son never got to live life at all, because Sloane had some crazy point to prove, and it was horrible. Really horrible. For a long time. The loss and grief, all mixed up with guilt and anger and denial and recriminations, including my parents telling me to be more careful about who I dated next time. I need to know how you feel about that stuff, what your plans are. I have a right to ask.”

  He turned to her with those blazing eyes and she felt as if he was so far ahead of her, emotionally, that she didn’t know how to catch up. He’d stripped himself raw, talking about this, and in return she wanted to protect herself, shrink back into herself and not face the challenge.

  And yet she had to.

  It was vital for both of them.

  Vital for all three of them.

  Instinctively, she flattened her hand against her lower stomach, where there was a growing, living baby she couldn’t yet feel, and took a big breath. “You do. You have every right to ask,” she repeated. “I’m hurting for you, Mac, and I don’t know how to show you that, or what words to use. I don’t know how to tell you I’d never do what she did. But I never would. I never would.” Her voice cracked, and she couldn’t think of how to say it any better.

  The first snowflakes began to fall. She watched them feathering Mac’s bare, dark head. He wasn’t speaking, but just looking at her, trying to read her soul.

  “Is that good enough?” she asked, in a whisper.

  “Good enough?”

  “I don’t know how else to make you believe it. Is this why you’re here? Why you drove forty hours? To make sure I keep our baby safe?”

  “If you want to say it like that. I’m here because it is our baby, not just yours. Sloane always acted like it was hers. And that was even worse after we lost it. She closed up. Her armor was so thick. Fending off the blame. Angry with me. As if that protected her from her own grief and guilt. And then crying on the phone a couple times a year, expecting me to make her feel better. As if I didn’t feel as bad. Or worse.” He shook his head.

  Couldn’t talk about it anymore.

  Lee understood that.

  She felt the hurt in him once more, almost as if it was a pain in her own body. She laid a hand on his shoulder and stepped against him. The snow came faster, settling on them quicker than it could melt. “I won’t shut you out, Mac, I promise. I’ll listen when you talk. I’ll understand if you come on a bit too strong. We’ll navigate this somehow. We’ll have a baby. We won’t have a mess. As far as anyone can, I promise that.”

  “Good.” He pulled her closer and rested his chin on the top of her head. She could hear the scratchiness in his voice, and feel the tension making his muscles quiver. “I promise it, too.�
�

  They stood there in each other’s arms, not talking anymore, just holding each other, until Lee’s ears ached and her hair was thick with droplets of snowmelt.

  Chapter Ten

  Mary Jane arrived home from her spa vacation in Vermont at lunchtime the next day.

  Mac was sitting in the office making calls on his cell phone to friends and contacts at ski schools and management headquarters in the region, while Lee browsed the computer, looking at all the changes Daisy had made to the Spruce Bay website—their reservation system, their restaurant menu, their specials packages and various other things. It all looked great, so much more up-to-date than the tired old place it had been before Mom and Dad retired.

  Lee heard Mary Jane’s car, and then saw it zoom up to a parking spot in front of the office and come to a sudden halt, making a slightly strange noise in its engine before Mary Jane turned it off. She jumped out, grabbed her bags from the trunk, bounced up the steps and flung open the door, looking trim and relaxed and energized, with her brown hair full of golden highlights and swinging around her face. “Hey...I’m back!”

  At which point Lee registered just how at home Mac looked here in the office. He was rocked back in a swivel chair with his feet on the spare desk and one hand cradling the back of his neck, saying into the phone, “So could I come up and take a look around? Like, soon?”

  “Oh,” said Mary Jane, taking him in.

  The running shoes.

  The rolled shirtsleeves.

  And possibly also the olive skin, black eyes and very nice arm muscles, all of which Lee had been very much enjoying since yesterday.

  She pushed back from the computer and came around the main desk to give Mary Jane a hug and take one of her bags. “Um, that’s Mac,” she said a little awkwardly, sticking a thumb in his direction.

  “Good to meet you, Mac,” said Mary Jane, in a very level tone.

  He was still on the phone, listening and saying, “Uh-huh,” at intervals, but he gave her a wave and a nod and a smile.

  “So does he live here or work here?” she murmured.

  “Neither.”

  But Lee couldn’t blame her sister for the question. The whole office exuded an atmosphere of casual—and possibly quite sexy—familiarity between the two of them.

  Yesterday, with the snow thickening in the air around them and beginning to settle on the ground, they’d walked back from the lake hugged close in each other’s arms. He’d said just before they went inside, “I really hit you with all of that, didn’t I? Like, wham, full in the face.”

  “You needed to. I needed to hear it. Thank you.”

  “It probably explains a few things.” He’d spoken slowly. “Couple of times where I might have overreacted.”

  “It does,” she agreed.

  “Are we okay now?”

  “How okay do you mean?”

  “I don’t understand the question,” he said.

  “We kind of broke up yesterday,” she reminded him. “And then this morning we...well, did the usual.”

  “Doesn’t seem like we’re broken up, then, does it?” he suggested. He cupped her butt possessively.

  “No.”

  “Do you want to be broken up?” he asked.

  “No. I like you. I really like being with you. I can think of way worse people to be having a baby with than you.” As a declaration of undying love, it fell possibly just a little short, but she was cautious about stuff like this, and for obvious reasons, so was he.

  Nearly eleven years ago, she’d gotten to within four days of a big wedding to the man who’d just married her sister, and she shuddered to think what would have happened to them all if the wedding had gone ahead. Would Tucker and Daisy have fallen into a hot affair behind her back? Would Lee herself have realized the marriage was a mistake, and run two thousand miles, leaving a huge mess behind her? She’d run two thousand miles anyhow, even without the wedding taking place, because she’d needed a lot of distance in order to regroup.

  She found it incredibly scary to think back on herself and Tucker, and how close they’d come to making that mess. To have let somebody that near to her and then to realize it was wrong was...profoundly unsettling. It shook the very foundations of what she knew about herself. And it was most definitely something she did not want to do more than once, because if she stripped herself emotionally again with the wrong man, for the wrong reasons, she wasn’t sure she’d ever get her confidence back.

  “Same back at you, sugar,” Mac had answered cheerfully, in the snow. If he thought her declaration fell short, he wasn’t showing it. Maybe he needed as much caution as she did.

  “Except don’t call me that again,” she’d told him.

  “Not even at a romantic moment like this?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, noted.”

  The rest of the day—and all of the night—had this same mood to it. A little wistful and quiet at times, with a solemn undercurrent because of what he’d shared. But tender, too.

  Funny.

  Easy.

  Close.

  And now Mary Jane had walked right into it, and didn’t know what was going on. “Lee, I’ve only been gone three days,” she said, in the same confidential undertone as before.

  “Yes, well, he drove from Colorado via Idaho, and I didn’t know he was coming till he got here.”

  Her sister read her like a book, and concluded, “But you’re glad he did.”

  “Um, yes,” she admitted. Scarily glad, now that they’d dealt with a few difficult things.

  Mac ended his call. He took his feet off the spare desk and planted them on the floor. “Good to meet you, too, Mary Jane.” He stood up and came over and stuck out his hand, leaning in to hug her and pat her on the back and almost kiss her cheek at the same time—the kind of all-purpose greeting a man gave to a woman he didn’t know that well, or at all, but he had reason to think he was going to become fond of in the future. “Tell her,” he said to Lee.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Tell her why I’m here, what this is about.”

  Lee bristled a little at this, but tried not to let it show. “I’ll get to that in a minute,” she answered brightly.

  Was it her problem? She honestly didn’t know. The legacy of the baby he and Sloane had lost hung heavy over him still, and she understood that. But his words seemed to her like an order, and she didn’t think their talk yesterday and their closeness after it had given him that right.

  He was involved, yes. They were sharing this, were both committed to making this pregnancy work after his terrible experience with Sloane and his lost child, but that didn’t mean he got to dictate the timing and pace on everything.

  And he was acting as if the baby was the only thing that mattered. The announcement he was looking for would go, “Guess what, we’re having a baby,” not, “Guess what, I have a boyfriend,” and it seemed out of balance.

  If they were together, which they seemed to be, then that was a pretty important announcement, too, wasn’t it?

  “Tell me what?” Mary Jane repeated.

  “Want some lunch, you two?” Lee kept the brightness, even though she wasn’t blind to Mac’s frowning.

  “Just say it, Lee,” he growled. “Or if you don’t, I will. Putting it off doesn’t help.”

  Now she was really bristling. “Go ahead, then.”

  But don’t expect me to make it into a double act.

  Apparently, he didn’t read that second bit, although she’d signaled it quite clearly with her eyes.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said.

  Because, you know, it wouldn’t do to squander any unnecessary syllables. Those are in short supply.

  He went on, “That’s why she came east, Mary Jane. For fam
ily support. And I followed her, because I didn’t want her doing this—having the baby—on her own.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence before Mary Jane inhaled sharply. “Oh. Oh, wow! Oh, oh, oh, wow! Lee! Wow! Wow!”

  “You’re overusing that word a little, sis.” Her flippant protest got lost in Mary Jane’s hug, huge and warm.

  “You really are? Having a baby?”

  “I really am.”

  “Wow! How far along?”

  “Nearly three months. Had a bit of a blip, and didn’t realize for a while.”

  “Oh, wow! I am so happy for you!”

  “Thanks.” Half a minute ago, Lee had been angry and defiant. Now she was... What? Happy? Yes?

  About her sister’s reaction, definitely.

  “Oh, wow!”

  “Careful, Mary Jane.” She gave a shaky laugh. “Your limited license for the word wow is seriously about to expire.”

  “Oh, stop!” Mary Jane drew back a little and looked Lee full in the face, with tears in her eyes, and beaming. “I’m not allowed to be happy? This isn’t good news? I’m going to be an aunt!”

  Okay, maybe Lee had some tears in the pipeline, too. “Yes, it’s good news,” she said, and realized it was the first time she’d thought of it that way—as something blessed and wonderful to announce to everybody and be congratulated about.

  She’d made her vow to her baby’s living heartbeat, and she’d made promises to Mac about her commitment and her care, but those had been private things. Serious things. Decisions, not celebrations.

  Telling people was going to be very different.

  Telling Mary Jane was already very different to what Lee had thought it would be. For a start, she hadn’t necessarily thought her sister would be happy, since it was a pretty open secret in the Cherry family that Mary Jane would love a family—a traditional one, starting with a husband and a white wedding and going from there.

  But clearly she was happy—generously, excitedly happy—and it was a revelation. It was fantastic!

  Mac, too, kept insisting that this pregnancy was complicated and momentous and serious, and he was right, it was. But it was also joyous and life-affirming and magical, and neither he nor Lee had really thought about that yet.