The Pregnant Colton Bride

by Marie Ferrarella

  She said anything and everything—except for the truth.

  She was behaving like a coward, Mirabella angrily upbraided herself. Hiding didn’t become her, nor was it anything she had ever done before this situation had cropped up. If nothing else, her grandmother deserved better than that.

  So, summoning bits and pieces of her tattered courage, on the following Sunday afternoon, Mirabella drove over to her grandmother’s house. She nearly turned back twice, but somehow, giving herself mental pep talks, she managed to finally get there.

  Standing on the familiar doorstep to her grandmother’s house, Mirabella held her breath and rang the bell. When there was no response, she tried again, wondering if she should have called first to make sure her very active grandmother was home—although, up to this point, her grandmother had always been home. It was one of the rare, stable things in life she felt she could rely on.

  When there was no immediate response to her ringing the doorbell again, Mirabella decided it was an omen. Feeling almost relieved, she was about to turn away when the door opened.

  So much for a hasty retreat.

  Her grandmother looked at her in surprise. “Mirabella, why didn’t you use your key?”

  Mirabella shrugged weekly. “I didn’t want to just barge in on you,” she said.

  Sofia looked at her as if she couldn’t process what her granddaughter was saying.

  “Strangers barge, Mirabella. You are my granddaughter. Granddaughters don’t barge,” she maintained firmly. “Come in, come in,” Sofia urged, all but pulling her inside. “I was just on the phone and I didn’t want to be rude,” she said, explaining why it had taken her so long to come to the door.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Mirabella apologized.

  Sofia waved away the apology. “This woman, you can feel free to interrupt.” And then she smiled broadly, focusing on her granddaughter. “Let me look at you,” Sofia requested, taking her granddaughter’s hands in hers and spreading them to get a better look at the young woman. “You look paler,” she pronounced, releasing her hands.

  Mirabella expected her grandmother to express concern and then question her about her eating habits. Instead, Sofia turned on her heel and led the way back into her kitchen.

  Even before entering the kitchen, Mirabella could detect the enticing aroma of a pie baking in the oven. The very scent of it catapulted her back to her childhood, eagerly waiting for her grandmother to remove the pie from the oven.

  For a moment, it felt as if nothing had changed. Except that everything had changed.

  Gesturing for Mirabella to sit, Sofia took the pie out of the oven and placed it on top of the stove to cool for a moment.

  “How long as it been?” she asked, her back still to Mirabella.

  “How long has what been?” Mirabella asked uneasily, all her thoughts immediately converging on her condition. Was that what her grandmother was asking her about? How long she’d been pregnant? But how would the woman have known?

  “Since I saw you last,” Sofia said, turning around. “It feels like it’s been months and months.”

  Mirabella offered her a smile. “It hasn’t been that long, Nana.”

  Though she rarely sat, choosing to move about her kitchen like an echo in perpetual motion, Sofia sat down at the table and faced her granddaughter.

  “Talk to me,” she coaxed. Her voice was as kind as ever, but there was a slight note of urgency in it.

  Or maybe that was just her guilty conscience, Mirabella thought, creating scenarios that didn’t really exist.

  “I know I should have come by for a visit sooner,” she began, not certain where she was going with her excuse, only knowing she needed to at least attempt to tender some sort of explanation for her prolonged absence.

  “Yes,” Sofia agreed. “You should have.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the stovetop. “Would you like some pie?” she offered.

  Mercifully, Mirabella had begun to actually keep some of the things she ate down, but she didn’t want to risk a possible bout of misplaced morning sickness right now, not while attempting to gently broach the subject to her grandmother.

  So, as tempting as having one of her grandmother’s pies really was, she felt it was safer to pass on having a slice right now.

  “Maybe later,” she demurred.

  To which Sofia responded with, “Hmm,” and made no further effort to push a piece of pie on her. Instead, she sat back in her chair, looking directly at her granddaughter for a long moment as if sorting her thoughts and prioritizing them.

  Finally, leaning over the kitchen table, she took hold of her granddaughter’s hand in hers. “You know you can come to me with anything, yes?” she asked, still looking at her face intently.

  Mirabella drew in her breath, bracing herself just in case. “I know.”

  Sofia shook her head sadly. “And still, you don’t.”

  Panic made a sudden, unexpected appearance, squeezing her heart as well as twisting her stomach. For a moment, her mind went completely blank.

  The next moment, she heard herself protesting, rather unconvincingly, “That’s not true.”

  Sofia fixed her with a penetrating look. “We have never lied to one another, Mirabella. Please don’t start now.”

  There was sadness in the woman’s eyes and Mirabella didn’t know if it was because her grandmother thought she was lying to her, or if there was something even bigger going on.

  “Nana?” she asked uncertainly, waiting for the woman to explain why she thought she was lying.

  “I was on the phone with Maria Montez when you rang the bell,” Sofia began.

  Her grandmother said the woman’s name as if she was familiar with her, Mirabella shook her head. “I’m sorry, Nana. I don’t know who that is.”

  Sofia waved her hand as if that fact was of no real consequence to the crux of this conversation. “Maria is just a woman I know. A woman who likes to talk and be the first to tell people things she believes they would be interested in hearing. Though she tries to cover them with her hair, her ears are very big,” Sofia confided, “so she doesn’t miss anything. To get to the point, Maria has a friend who has a cousin whose daughter works in the same building as you do.” She paused significantly, waiting for the words to sink in.

  The silence stretched out and Mirabella desperately wanted to apologize, to say she knew she’d disappointed her. But just in case she was overthinking this and her grandmother was going to say something entirely different at the conclusion, Mirabella waited, holding her breath.

  Waited until there was no doubt left.

  “Did you think I would stop loving you?” Sofia asked in a quiet voice.

  There were tears glistening in her grandmother’s eyes. Tears that, Mirabella thought guiltily, she had put there.

  “No matter what, you will always be my Mirabella,” Sofia insisted, taking her granddaughter’s hand. “No matter what you have done, you will always be my granddaughter and I will always love you and be there for you. Do you understand this?”

  Mirabella could feel tears gathering in her own eyes. “Oh, Nana, I’m so sorry.”

  “I know you are, darling,” Sofia told her. Getting up, she crossed to Mirabella and gathered her granddaughter in her arms, hugging her. For a small woman, she was surprisingly strong. After a moment, she looked down at her granddaughter and asked, “The father, he won’t marry you?”

  It was on the tip of Mirabella’s tongue to blurt out the whole story, how Kyle had rejected her and then how shortly afterward he had died in a car accident. But what was the point of that? It would only make her grandmother sadder and there was no reason to further burden the woman.

  The hurt she saw in her grandmother’s eyes was already more than she could bear.

  So instead of unburdening herself the way she had done so many times as a child, Mirabella told the older woman what she felt Sofia needed to hear in order for the woman to achieve at least some sort of peace
of mind.

  “He asked me, Nana, but I didn’t want him to feel he had to.” Which was true, although it hadn’t been the baby’s father who had asked her but the person everyone presumed was the baby’s father.

  Sofia looked at her in surprise. “Mirabella, these are very modern times. Men don’t do anything they don’t want to do. There are still some honorable men around, but unfortunately, they are few and far between. If your baby’s father wants to marry you, then let him marry you. Don’t be stubborn, darling. You owe this to the baby you are carrying,” she emphasized, searching Mirabella’s eyes to see if her granddaughter understood.

  After a moment, Mirabella capitulated. “You’re right,” she agreed.

  Sofia rose from her chair and paused to kiss the top of her granddaughter’s head. “Of course I am,” she agreed. “Now will you have that pie?”

  “Yes, please,” Mirabella said with a smile.

  Inside, Mirabella could feel her heart quickening. Now that she had come out and told her grandmother about Zane’s proposal, she couldn’t very well take back what she had said. Her grandmother was going to expect her to get married.

  The problem was that even though Zane had asked her, would he still be willing to go through with it? After all, she had already turned him down. Not once, but twice, in quick succession.

  She could do far worse than marry someone like Zane, even temporarily. He’d already impressed her that he was a good, decent man capable of thinking of someone else even though his own life was in a state of emotional chaos.

  But that didn’t necessarily mean he would be willing to marry her if she told him that she had changed her mind about her answer.

  She looked up at her grandmother as Sofia placed a plate with a warm slice of pie on it in front of her. She couldn’t hurt this woman twice. No matter what, she was going to have to convince Zane Colton that she had changed her mind and was, despite her stand about a loveless marriage, ready to take him up on his generous offer.

  * * *

  Leaving her grandmother’s house several hours later, Mirabella rehearsed what she was going to say to Zane over and over again in her head as she drove home.

  The words, not to mention themes and variations of those words, had echoed countless times in her brain by the time she pulled up in her driveway.

  Walking in, she dropped her purse by the front door and went straight to her landline instead of using her cell phone to call Zane. The last thing she wanted was to have her call suddenly wink in and out, or worse, get dropped in the middle of her rehearsed little speech.

  Her palms felt damp as she pushed the numbers on the keypad to Zane’s home phone.

  She was so nervous, she misdialed the first time and wound up connecting to someone’s fax machine by the sound of the high-pitched noise. Swallowing a mild curse, she pulled herself together and tried again.

  This is for Nana, not for you, she told herself, squelching the urge to hang up before she got through.

  This time, she hit the right numbers.

  She heard Zane’s deep voice against her ear. It sent tiny, warm shock waves all through her.

  “Hello?”

  Mirabella would have known his voice anywhere.

  Her throat all but closed up on her. It took effort and willpower to force the word out. But there was far more than just her reputation at stake. This was about her grandmother’s feelings. No matter what her personal feelings about doing this were, she couldn’t allow herself to let that wonderful woman down any more than she already had.

  “Yes!”

  Chapter 12

  Zane was fairly certain he recognized the voice and knew who was calling, but ever mindful of possible entrapment, either by the sheriff or someone working against him in his own company, he decided to take no chances and asked, “Belle?”

  Idiot. You should have identified yourself first, she thought. She’d gotten so wound up in changing her answer, everything just seemed to have flown out of her head.

  “Yes, it’s me,” Mirabella said.

  “What were you saying yes to?” Zane asked.

  Mirabella already felt like a fool, but she’d called him, so she had to explain what she was talking about—and why she would be disturbing his Sunday evening this way. And then it suddenly occurred to her, in the midst of all this, that she might very well be throwing a monkey wrench into his plans for that evening. What if he was with someone? In that case, he wasn’t going to take this call kindly, never mind what she was agreeing to—if she could still agree to it and he hadn’t changed his mind.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have called, Mirabella thought, having second thoughts.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” she asked abruptly.

  “Are you all right, Belle?” Zane asked her, concerned. “You seem a little...scattered,” he finally said for lack of a better word.

  Scattered was the last word he would have used to describe her in the past. Mirabella hadn’t even come off that way in the beginning stages of her pregnancy, when she kept running off to the ladies’ room right in the middle of things. All in all, she was the most centered, the most focused person that he knew.

  “Sorry,” she apologized quietly.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he told her. “Just tell me what’s going on. You’re not experiencing any sort of an emergency, are you?”

  Zane had no idea how to clearly phrase what he was actually asking without sounding as if he was getting too personal. He didn’t feel he was really on that sort of footing with her, despite the years they had worked together.

  Mirabella thought of her grandmother and of what she was about to do in order for the woman to be able to hold her head up again. To her, the situation was an emergency, but it wasn’t the kind she knew he meant. She was just employing emergency measures in order to repair her reputation for her grandmother’s sake.

  “Only in the very broadest sense,” Mirabella admitted. She knew that couldn’t have cleared up anything for Zane, so she tried again. “I know it’s been a couple of days since you made that generous gesture, but if the offer to marry you is still on the table, then my answer is yes.”

  She held her breath, waiting for Zane’s response, hoping she hadn’t destroyed her chances by attempting to stick to her principles, especially in light of the fact that she had allowed most of her principles to crumble to pieces by winding up in this condition in the first place.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she heard Zane ask, “What changed your mind?”

  Her heart sank. She’d let her one opportunity slip through her fingers. Zane was drawing this out, possibly out of curiosity, possibly to pay her back for rejecting him—men didn’t take rejection well, she knew that firsthand. The bottom line was he wasn’t telling her the offer was still good, that yes, they could get married.

  Well, what did she expect? Mirabella angrily chastised herself. The offer had been too good to be true in the first place. She would have never dreamed he would have gone to such lengths to help her. But instead of jumping at it like a normal person, she had turned him down.

  Still, he had asked her a question just now and because of what he had been willing to do for her, he did deserve an answer.

  “My grandmother,” she told him.

  He took his time, as if he was stitching together her answers and trying to make sense of them. “She told you to marry me?”

  “No,” Mirabella said quickly, not wanting him to think her grandmother was some sort of an aged gold digger. “She doesn’t even know you’re the one who proposed to me. Up until today, she didn’t even know I was pregnant—at least, I didn’t think she knew because I hadn’t told her and I hadn’t been to visit her for two months,” she added even more quickly. This wasn’t coming out right. In her hurry to get everything on the table, allowing him to have all the facts, it was coming out a jumbled mess.

  She wasn’t accustomed to tripping over her own tongue, she thought in frustration.

/>   From the way Mirabella had talked, he’d gotten the impression that, aside from estranged parents, she had no other family.

  “I didn’t realize you still had a grandmother. I take it the two of you aren’t close.” He’d made the assumption based on what she’d just told him, that she hadn’t visited the woman in a while.

  “No, that’s just it,” Mirabella contradicted, “we are. I didn’t go to see her in those two months because I just didn’t know how to break the news to her that I was pregnant.”

  Maybe he was missing something. “Most grandmothers want to become great-grandmothers,” Zane said. “I hear it’s a competitive thing. Yours doesn’t?” he guessed, thinking there had to be a reason for her grandmother’s negative attitude.

  “Oh, she wants to be one very much.” Mirabella sighed. “What she doesn’t want is a pregnant, unmarried granddaughter.”

  The light went off in his head. Now it was beginning to make sense. “I see.”

  There was nothing in Zane’s voice to tell her whether he did or not, or what he thought about the matter. But, since he wasn’t terminating the call, she continued talking, hoping maybe he’d still be willing to go through this marriage charade.

  “My grandmother more or less raised me when my parents’ marriage began disintegrating. She was always warm and loving and she made me feel safe, especially when all hell was breaking loose on the home front.” Mirabella paused for a second, wanting to phrase this just right. She didn’t want him thinking her grandmother was this judgmental, shriveled up old lady. “My grandmother is also somewhat old-fashioned by today’s standards.”

  Zane was beginning to see the light. “No babies before marriage,” he guessed.

  “No anything before marriage,” Mirabella corrected philosophically.

  “Oh.” He found himself feeling sorry for Mirabella—again. “So how did she take the news?” He wanted to know. “About the baby?”

  Mirabella could feel tears stinging her eyes again. She blinked them away. There was no point in crying over this. What was done was done.