by Deb Kastner
Strong, steady Nick McKenna, with his back straight, his shoulders set and his large, capable hands clasped in his lap. His head was bowed as if in prayer, but his eyes were open.
He’d been by her side a lot in the last few weeks, supporting her emotionally as much as physically in the labor he was providing for the remodel. He’d brought her to the doctor when he thought she was injured, and had even offered to pay for it, not that she was going to let him.
Given the circumstances, it seemed only right that he be one of the first people to know about the baby and share in her joy. The only people she’d told so far had been her family and Dr. Delia, since she was under Delia’s care.
“Nick, I—” she started, and then paused.
His head came up and his striking blue eyes met hers. He smiled softly. “Yeah?”
“I just wanted to tell you—” Vivian tried again, but at that moment Dr. Delia entered the room.
“What have we got going on here?” Delia asked with a pleasant smile and a nod in both their directions.
Heat suffused Vivian’s face and she started to stammer an answer before she realized Delia was asking why she needed to see a doctor and not what might be going on between her and Nick.
Which was nothing.
Nick chuckled under his breath and Vivian wondered if he might have realized where her thoughts had gone, but aloud he said, “Vivian had a bit of a fall at her shop today. Got her foot caught up in some old drywall while we were working on the remodel.”
She noticed that he didn’t say anything about the broken ceiling panel raining down on her head, which had been entirely her fault. She’d been watching Nick work instead of paying attention to where she was going, and when she’d slipped on the drywall, she’d launched the broom handle straight through the ceiling.
She gasped. Come to think of it, she must look like a complete mess. She dabbed at her face with her palms and they came off covered with white powder.
She did not want to see herself in a mirror right now. It was a wonder that Nick and Delia weren’t laughing at her awful appearance.
But instead they were completely serious and obviously concerned for her health, although Delia was no doubt alarmed for an entirely different reason than Nick was.
“The bottom of my foot hurts,” she hastened to say, to clear the situation up before things got messy.
Delia nodded, but she wasn’t looking at Viv’s foot. It was Vivian’s belly under the doctor’s careful scrutiny. Viv didn’t know how Nick could not notice the direction of the doctor’s consideration.
“Nick, do you think you can help her to the examination room?”
For a man Nick’s size, he was incredibly gentle in leading her into the examination room. He hovered over her like a mother goose. He even gave her extra support to get onto the table before he returned to the waiting room.
Dr. Delia closed the door, not noticing when it caught on the door jamb and bounced back open a sliver. “I’ll take a look at that foot, but since you fell, Viv, we probably ought to have a look at the baby, as well. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong, but I believe we should err on the side of safety, just in case.”
A deep, audible gasp sounded from the door. Nick stood gaping, clutching her handbag to his chest as if he was experiencing a heart attack.
“Baby?” Nick strode forward and took her elbow. “What baby? I thought you might need your handbag and the door was open a crack so I—a baby?”
Vivian cringed. This was not how it was supposed to go. Sure, she’d been about to tell him the truth about her pregnancy, but she’d wanted it to be on her own terms.
Delia shot Viv a distressed look. “I’m sorry.”
Viv laughed shakily. “No worries. It’s not common knowledge yet, but it soon will be. It’s not like I can keep Baby G a secret for much longer, anyway. The cat is officially out of the sack. It’s time to share my good news with everyone.”
“What baby?” Nick asked again, staring at Vivian as if she’d grown a second head. In some ways, she had—a tiny one—and a second body, as well. It had been a long day and Vivian was already feeling overwhelmed. She sputtered out a shaky laugh under her breath, mostly from nervousness.
“What is so funny about that?”
Okay, so it was a surprise to him, but he didn’t have to act so shocked about it. She was a woman. Women had babies. And what difference did it make to him, anyway?
“I’m pregnant,” she said in the voice she’d use when explaining something to a child. Nick was kind of acting like one.
“Since when?”
“Excuse me?” Now Viv was downright offended. What business was it of his when her baby had been conceived?
“I mean, how far along are you?” He huffed impatiently and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Almost five months now.”
He didn’t appear scandalized anymore—he looked appalled and slightly horrified. His eyes were huge and brewing a midnight storm.
“You were... And you... And then...” He sputtered to a stop, tapped his cowboy hat against his thigh and threaded his fingers through his thick black hair. He gaped at her midsection. “Oh, man. I can totally see it now. I don’t know how I even...”
He appeared to be holding a conversation with himself. Vivian found it a tiny bit amusing, even given the circumstances.
“I can’t believe... But of course at the picnic...you were sick to your stomach. I don’t know how I didn’t realize that you...”
Vivian met Delia’s gaze over Nick’s shoulder and they exchanged a smile. Throw a baby into the mix and they’d managed to completely confuse the poor, lost male in the room.
“How could you?” Nick’s voice had risen as he spoke but now it had dropped onto a cold, icy plain.
How could she get pregnant?
By trusting the wrong man, a man to whom she shouldn’t have given her heart. By believing a lie. By letting her faith slide and—
“How could you come into a dangerous construction site with no thought to your safety? You could have been seriously hurt. Your baby—”
Vivian stared at him, her mouth agape. She was having trouble following the conversation, but apparently Nick’s concern wasn’t how she’d gotten pregnant so much as why she had shown up to help with the construction of her shop.
Well, that was an easy question to answer. Being pregnant was neither here nor there. She wasn’t totally incapacitated. Women worked until their ninth month. What century did he think they were living in?
“I was taking ownership,” she explained defensively. “I’m not going to leave all the work to you. It’s my business, after all. At the end of the day, I’m the one responsible for how it turns out. It’s my job to oversee the renovation.”
Nick snorted and shook his head. “You can supervise from a distance. You don’t have to be constantly on-site for that. You’re pregnant. Very. Pregnant.”
It seemed to Vivian that Nick was blurting out the obvious, and he was repeating himself. But to what end?
To insult her? To get her dander up? Because he was certainly succeeding if that was his aim.
“Yes, well, that much is true,” Delia inserted, laying a calming hand on Nick’s forearm and herding him toward the doorway. “Which is why I’m going to have to ask you to return to the waiting room. I need to do an ultrasound to check on Baby G. I think we might need to x-ray Viv’s foot as well, just to be on the safe side on that issue. We’re going to cover all our bases. Do you mind giving us some privacy, Nick?”
Vivian thought that Nick looked like he minded—very much. He paused long enough for her to fear that he’d refuse to leave the room. Thankfully, after a moment, he met her eyes. His gaze slid from there down to her belly before he huffed and puffed and charged out of the room, slamming
the door behind him.
“Men, huh?” Delia said with a chuckle as she helped Vivian lie back on the examination table. “You can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.”
Vivian nodded in agreement. Although frankly, at the moment, shooting Nick didn’t seem an entirely unreasonable idea.
“Nick is a good one at heart, though,” Delia continued. “He really seems to care for you.”
Vivian felt like Delia had shocked her with a cattle prod. The last thing Vivian needed was for Delia or anyone else to get the wrong idea about her relationship with Nick—if one could even call what they had a relationship. It was a business arrangement, nothing more.
“Yeah. About that—” Vivian mumbled, but Delia didn’t appear to hear her.
“Let’s take a look at Baby G. We might even be able to tell if it’s a boy or girl. What do you think, Viv? Do you want to know?”
Vivian sighed. There was a lot she wanted to know, and the sex of her baby was only one of many questions she had. She’d never been so confused in her life.
But she could get an answer to this question.
She took a deep breath and nodded.
Chapter Four
Despite the way Nick suddenly treated her like she was made of fine china, Vivian and Nick—mostly Nick, to Vivian’s exasperation—had spent the next two weekends conquering the enormous pile of debris that was the inside of her shop. Together, they gingerly moved through her building and systematically tossed the rotting wood, broken drywall and most of the eclectic collection of abandoned storage items into a pile outside the back door.
All except the rusty tricycle.
She just couldn’t let that one go. The paint was faded and flaking and some of the spokes were bent. The streamers on the handlebars had seen better days and the little bell didn’t work at all. A sensible person would recognize it as the junk it was. Vivian knew she ought to toss it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. She had no idea whether it was even possible to fix the poor, abandoned toy, but she had to try.
For her son.
She laid a hand over her swelling stomach.
Her son. She pictured a blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy riding on his restored tricycle, zooming around on the front concreted driveway of a quaint little cottage, pedaling as fast as he could and ringing the bell with wild abandon.
No, she wasn’t going to give up on the tricycle, any more than she was going to give up on the pathetic little shop that would take more work than it was probably worth.
And now it was yet another Monday. She considered Mondays a brand-new start of another week, as yet unwritten, and another opportunity to move forward with her life.
As she approached the back entrance to her shop, she was still dwelling on happy thoughts of her baby and his little red trike and she didn’t immediately comprehend that something was amiss. But when she reached to put her key in the lock, she realized the door was already open a crack, creaking softly back and forth in the breeze.
Hadn’t she locked up when they’d left late Saturday afternoon?
She was fairly certain she had, though her mind had admittedly been full of myriad details regarding what was next on her miles-long to-do list. Had she been so caught up in her thoughts that she forgot to do something that was second nature to her?
Even if it was possible that she’d walked out the door without locking it behind her, she would have closed it, at least. She was one hundred percent certain about that. Who left their door wide-open when they left for the night?
Even a ditzy blonde didn’t do that.
A chill rose up her spine. Had someone been in the shop when she wasn’t there?
She froze, forgetting to breathe. Could she have been robbed? Had a thief broken in through the back door in order to steal from her?
She clapped a hand over her mouth and snickered at her own silliness.
A thief?
She must not be getting enough beauty sleep. Her imagination was running away from her. First of all, she’d be hard-pressed to find any thief within fifty miles of this town. Serendipity’s police department hadn’t arrested more than an occasional teenage shoplifter in years. Life in the small town was so safe that folks left their houses and cars unlocked and didn’t give it a second thought.
Besides, what would anyone want to steal from this broken-down old storefront? There hadn’t been anything but garbage to rob before she’d bought the place and there wasn’t anything now. Nick hadn’t brought in any of his heavy-duty tools yet, and as for his regular tools, he took them with him when he went home for the day. If someone had gone to the effort of breaking in, they were welcome to help themselves to the leftover pile of trash.
The answer struck her like lightning.
Nick must have unlocked the door.
He’d probably stopped in to take measurements or something and had forgotten to lock up behind him. She didn’t work Sundays, but she knew Nick sometimes did. He was assisting her in addition to the work on his ranch and helping out with the construction of the senior center, so he had to squeeze in time for the shop whenever he could. As a result, she’d given him a key along with full run of her shop, so he could go in and out as he pleased. She was grateful to him for taking on so much extra responsibility—far beyond what her measly three-hundred-dollar auction bid really merited. He still teased her about the concept of opening a spa, but it was good-natured now, and she believed it was just part of his playful nature rather than a dig or criticism aimed at her. And when it came to the work, he never complained, and it looked as if he would be staying until the completion of the remodel.
Come to think of it, she’d have to thank him when she saw him next.
My, how he would laugh when she told him about her encounter with the invisible, imaginary robbers. Another strike against her in the ditzy-blonde category. She even surprised herself sometimes. She chuckled and swung the door open, shaking her head at her folly.
She gasped and stopped cold, a chill running down her spine as she realized that the nothing she’d imagined was really something.
Just as quickly, the chill passed and fury flared back up in its place, one nerve at a time all the way from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head. Her breath snagged in her throat and she blinked back the sting of angry tears.
There weren’t any thieves in the building, but there was something—two somethings, as a matter of fact. And they were making a great deal of noise, not to mention an enormous, smelly mess in a building that was already a walking disaster area to begin with.
Cows.
Two furry black-and-white-spotted baby cows with twitching ears and wet pink noses.
Vivian’s thoughts were so clouded that seeing red wasn’t just a figure of speech.
Nick.
Was this his sick idea of a joke?
Vivian wasn’t laughing.
She didn’t pause to consider that it might have been anyone else besides the cynical, blue-eyed cowboy. He was a cattle rancher after all, so he would have no problem getting ahold of a couple of calves. If she wasn’t mistaken, that was his ranch’s brand. And while he’d been very supportive of her—literally, physically supportive, hovering around her like he thought he’d be needed to prop her up or stop her from falling at any moment ever since he found out about the baby—he’d continued to tease her about her plans to open up a salon and spa in Serendipity.
She had thought it had graduated into gentle banter, with no real condemnation behind it anymore. But apparently she’d thought wrong.
And he had a key to the place.
A second ago, before she’d entered the building, that thought had been comforting. Now it was downright infuriating.
She ignored the stab of personal betrayal she felt. She refused to give him the power t
o hurt her. He didn’t get to do that. She would never let a man have power over her in that way ever again.
And here she’d thought he was starting to come around, that he was warming up to her ideas. That he’d actually planned to help her get her business up and running. There were moments she’d even believed he was enthused by the project, or at least by the remodeling part of it.
Apparently she’d been wrong. So very wrong.
How could he?
How could he possibly imagine that this prank was funny, putting two live, dirty, stinking animals inside her shop?
Okay, so privately she had to admit the calves were a teensy bit cute, with their huge, blinking brown eyes, twitching ears and flicking tails. But the stench stung her eyes and she had to cover her nose and mouth just to breathe. She could only be thankful she’d chosen to wear a scarf today.
There were cow patties everywhere she stepped—and she wasn’t wearing her riding boots. Why would she be? She hadn’t expected to encounter livestock today.
She sighed, wondering how long the calves had been there. How could two little cows make so much of a mess? Or had Nick toted in some extra manure just for kicks? She wouldn’t put it past him.
Sputtering and grumbling under her breath, she mentally listed all the ways she could calculate Nick’s demise. Then she fished her cell phone out of her purse and punched in his number, her poor phone taking the brunt of her anger.
Nick was on speed dial, more’s the pity. It was second on the list, right underneath Alexis. His number would be deleted as soon as he came and cleaned up his mess. She pacified herself by imagining how good it would feel to press that delete key and see his scruffy face disappear from her contacts list for good.
Just like he’d go away. And she wouldn’t be at all sad to see him walk out the door. Or at least not much. There was still a part of her—
“Nick?” she demanded when he picked up on the first ring.
“Viv? What is it?” He managed to sound genuinely concerned, the jerk. “I can tell something’s wrong by the tone of your voice.”
