Pregnant and Incognito

by Pamela Browning

  But to her dismay Conn looked edgy. He looked miffed. While she groped for words that would express her appreciation to him for all he had done for her, and offer her apologies for her sharp retort when he’d asked her if she had anyone else to stay with her, he stood abruptly.

  “I’d better get those steaks going,” he said gruffly. And then, keeping his face a blank mask, Conn walked purposefully out the back door.

  Chapter Eight

  Conn stepped out into the cool dusk and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. His patience was fraying rapidly. After that little scene inside, it seemed to him that he had bitten off more than he could chew. Taking Dana to the doctor, cooking for her, spending the past three nights on her couch, even cutting her toenails, for Pete’s sake! He hadn’t known he was signing on for a long-term stint a few nights ago when he’d stopped by to talk to Dana about flying the hawks. And it wasn’t as if she appreciated it.

  On the other hand, what else could he have done but stick around? As sick as she was, he couldn’t have left her alone. He’d been brought up to accept responsibility and to help others when necessary. It was his mother who had molded that aspect of his character. Gladys was the type who was always going to the aid of sick neighbors, helping out with either food or care. Once she’d even sat up all night with a kid down the block who had measles when his mother couldn’t stay home with him because she had to work third shift or lose her job. And Gladys had dragged herself to work at the mill the next morning, never complaining.

  But, he reminded himself now, that was Gladys. He wasn’t his mother, nor did he want to be.

  And it wasn’t as if Dana didn’t know anyone who could help her, despite her assertions to the contrary. There was that phone conversation he’d interrupted—all very hush-hush. She had friends. Her address book proved it. She knew other people besides him. All this made him want to bail out of this situation ASAP. Unless…

  Unless. There was always the “unless” factor.

  The grill sizzled when he threw the steaks on. He was doing a slow burn, too. Slow, but picking up speed. He told himself that what he needed was to get out of here. What he needed was—

  His freedom back.

  And something else, too. He needed a woman to whom he wasn’t mightily attracted. Dana didn’t qualify.

  The “unless” factor in this case was that he wanted her. How this could be, he couldn’t imagine. His imaginings had taken on forms that he couldn’t have anticipated when he’d first seen her on that path near the mesa when she’d been awkwardly trying to rescue Demelza. Dana had looked so fiery and upset and concerned, and then she’d lit into him with gusto when she’d thought he hadn’t shown the proper concern for the kestrel. He’d countered by treating her to a gruff countenance, and all the while he’d been charmed by her.

  As he continued to be, even though he probably had no right to be thinking about her in the way that he was now unless—there was that word again—unless she wanted him, too.

  It took a while to cook the steaks. He spent the time figuring out a scenario for when he went back inside. He’d talk to Dana calmly and in a matter-of-fact way. It was time that she knew the feelings he was beginning to have for her. After all, the last time he’d fallen in love—with Lindsay—he hadn’t made that final all-important commitment. And then it had been too late.

  “What I want,” Lindsay had told him then, “is happily-ever-after. Babies and a minivan and a vine-covered cottage with a picket fence. You know, the whole works.”

  “The whole works?” he had replied, reaching for her and pulling her close. “I’ll show you some works. Fireworks,” and he’d kissed her passionately. He had loved Lindsay, and she’d loved him. But he hadn’t known how much he loved her until it was too late.

  Lindsay had been tall and beautiful with jet-black hair flowing down her back in a rippling cascade and startling blue eyes that sparkled with laughter. He’d met her at Newsweek where she’d shot the photos for some of his articles. He admired her work and told her so at a cocktail party at which she’d shown negligible interest in him, surrounded as she was by a bevy of slavish admirers. Conn had expected her to be permanently busy when he called to ask her out for a drink the following week, but to his surprise she’d said yes.

  And she had never stopped saying yes. Yes to accompanying him to his loft apartment that night, yes to making love, yes to traveling with him on vacations. But when she had expected him to say yes to a permanent commitment, the relationship had hit a stall. He wasn’t ready, he told her. He needed more time. But, oh, he had been mad about her from the moment he’d first set eyes on her.

  Lindsay possessed all the attributes he’d ever wanted in a wife, but at that time he’d been excited by his career prospects and caught up in his life as a man-about-town in the Big Apple. So he’d waffled and postponed, all the while assuring Lindsay that he would settle down soon.

  Not soon enough, as it happened. After a year or so, Lindsay tired of his promises and accepted a permanent assignment in a troubled outpost of the former Soviet Union. He had begged her not to go, pleaded for more time, but she’d been adamant. Without a ring on her finger, she’d said, she was out of his life.

  Conn had received the phone call on a peaceful Sunday morning in May while he was working his way through the New York Times editorial page and wishing that Lindsay were there to offer help with the crossword puzzle as she had been wont to do. Her bureau chief regretfully informed him that Lindsay had been caught in a rebel ambush on a country road outside the capital and had been severely wounded while shooting pictures of the action.

  Conn flew out on the next plane from New York, but by the time he reached the understaffed and ill-supplied hospital where they’d taken her, Lindsay was dead. He hadn’t been there to hold her hand or deal with the doctors, few of whom spoke English. There hadn’t even been a chance to tell her one last time that he loved her.

  His grief was exceeded only by his regrets. If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t kept putting off his commitment to her, they would have been married and she never would have taken that eastern European assignment.

  He had gone slightly crazy in the months afterward, getting wrecked at parties, descending into long periods of depression, which was why he’d flown into a rage over story credits at Newsweek and subsequently resigned. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been out of his mind with grief. Afterward, his friend Steve had helped out with an offer to come to Arizona for a visit so he could renew his interest in falconry. Subsequently Martin had offered him the job at the Probe. With his friends’ help, Conn had made his way slowly back from the hell that his life had been after he lost Lindsay. There had been no women since. It was almost four years since she’d died.

  Yet now there was this woman, Dana. She was as different from Lindsay as it was possible to be. Even so, for the first time since Lindsay, he felt that same excitement, that same curiosity about another human being with whom he felt a certain rapport. There had sprung up between them an undeniable electricity that neither of them had acknowledged in so many words.

  The corners of his mouth quirked upward as he thought about Dana’s embarrassment when he’d cut her toenails for her. It was funny, the way she’d hugged that pillow to her chest for comfort while he did what had to be done.

  He had never shirked from doing what had to be done. It was time, he thought, for a confrontation of sorts. He slid the steaks onto a platter and went inside.

  He was taken aback to see that there were candles on the table. Dana had positioned the philodendron from the kitchen windowsill in the middle of the kitchen table and put some kind of lacy doily under it. A glass of wine awaited him beside his place mat.

  “Conn?”

  She appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, the hollows and planes of her face gilded by flickering candlelight. “I mixed the green beans with some canned mushrooms from the pantry. I hope you don’t mind.” He saw that
she had lit a fire in the fireplace.

  Already thrown off balance by the unexpected ambiance, he merely stared at Dana. He was dazzled by the look of her, the sweet voluptuousness of her softly rounded body beneath the long, flowing thing she’d put on—a robe of some sort, but not the worn chenille one she usually wore. She’d brushed her hair back behind her ears so that it curled gently along her neck, and she wore makeup. Not just lipstick, but something that enhanced her eyes and made them look even larger than they were.

  She took the platter with the steaks from him. “I’ll deal with this while you wash up.”

  He looked down at his hands and realized they were grubby from handling the charcoal earlier. He went over to the kitchen sink and ran the water noisily, telling himself that he was a grown man who was accustomed to the manipulations of women, that he shouldn’t be thrown off course by candlelight and eye shadow, that he was entitled to ask questions and have them answered.

  Dana went to the CD player she kept on one of the kitchen shelves.

  “What kind of music shall we have? Any preference?”

  He found his voice. “Whatever you like.” She selected a disk from the stack on the top shelf and slid it into the player. The soft strains of Celtic music filled the air.

  She had sat down at the table and was unfolding her napkin. She gazed at him expectantly.

  He walked across the room and sat across the table from her. She passed the steak platter over to him, and he transferred one of the steaks to his plate.

  “I can’t eat such a large steak,” she said. The hoarseness of her voice, which had been brought on by the flu, was overwhelmingly sexy.

  “How about half?”

  “That’s good.”

  He cut the other steak in two and lifted it with the fork to put it on her plate.

  “Thanks,” she said, and proceeded to describe how she’d mixed the mushrooms with the beans, why she’d decided to do it in the first place, how pleased she had been to find a can of mushrooms on the pantry shelf behind the stewed tomatoes, and so on. He didn’t know how anyone could get so much conversational mileage out of a side dish, and he didn’t want to hear any of it.

  “Dana,” he said. Something in his tone must have caught her attention because she stopped talking and shot him a startled look.

  “Conn, before you say anything else, please understand that I’m sorry for biting your head off earlier. I wanted to make amends and this—” she gestured at the plant, the wine on the table, the vegetables “—this was the only way I knew how to do it.” Her gaze was plaintive, beseeching.

  Damn! He didn’t know how to deal with this. With her. His relationship skills were rusty to say the least. That is, if he’d had any to begin with, and he wasn’t sure he had.

  He chose his words carefully. “It’s all very nice,” he said. “It’s just…” He stopped talking, unsure how to proceed.

  Her gaze met his levelly. “Just what?”

  “That I’ve been living here with you for several days and I hardly know you any better than I did before.”

  “Conn, I don’t blame you for being angry. Since I’ve been pregnant, my emotions have been on a roller-coaster ride, and I apologize if I—”

  “That’s not what I mean. Well, not exactly. Don’t you understand that I care that something might happen to you? You don’t seem to have anyone who checks on you regularly.”

  “But I do,” Dana said softly. “I have you.”

  “Well, what if I didn’t? What if I’m not here?”

  “I have a phone now. That should set your mind at ease.”

  “It does somewhat. Not completely, though. Would you please pass the salt?” It struck him as slightly incongruous that they were attempting to continue with dinner even though the conversation—if you could call it that—had swerved into what had by tacit agreement become forbidden territory.

  She handed him the salt. He polished off a few more pieces of steak, all the while waiting for her to say something.

  Dana looked uncomfortable. “I have a friend I check in with from time to time. Someone in Chicago.”

  Chicago? That was where this Philip person lived, the one who had written to her. His ears perked up, but she didn’t look as if she wanted to say anything more about it.

  “That’s good,” he said, and paused in case she felt like elaborating. Dana picked at her food, looking distinctly upset. “Look,” he said doggedly, “I’m sure you think I’m overstepping my bounds, but what I’m saying here is that I don’t know what I’m dealing with. What’s worrying me is that I’m beginning to have feelings for you. And I don’t know if it’s okay for me to have them. I don’t know if you’re free, Dana.”

  Her expression changed from one of bewilderment to sudden comprehension. A faint flush spread slowly across her cheeks. “You’re the one who told me that we’re all captive in some way,” she said.

  “I said it, sure. But I’m not talking about that now. To put it bluntly, what I want to know is if there’s another man in the picture. Because if there is, I’ll bundle up those feelings and put them away.”

  “Conn, I can’t talk about this,” she said in a strangled tone. She started to get up from the table, but Conn caught one of her hands and pulled her back down again.

  “So there is someone,” he said. “Who is it?” But he was asking himself, who could it be besides the father of her baby?

  She closed her eyes, opened them again. “You’re wrong. There isn’t anyone.”

  He called on the skills of persistence that had enabled him to succeed as an investigative reporter. “You’re going to have someone’s baby,” he said doggedly. “Whose is it?”

  “It’s not important. It doesn’t matter. Not to you or to me.” She pulled her hand away but didn’t move to get up again. She rested her hand on her belly, reminding him all over again why he had initiated this discussion.

  It also reminded him that she wasn’t one of his usual interview subjects. She was his friend, not a quarry to be run down in the course of his job.

  He looked away, making himself back off. “God, Dana,” he said. “You don’t make this easy.”

  His head snapped back around when she spoke. “Easy?” she said. “When was life ever easy?” She got up again, and this time he didn’t stop her. He merely watched her as she moved to the sink and rinsed off her plate and silverware.

  He stood and began to clear the table.

  “I’ll do that,” she said.

  “We’ll both do it,” he told her firmly, and he carried the rest of the dishes over to her as she rinsed them and then put them in the dishwasher. By this time he knew where she kept the plastic wrap and the aluminum foil, and he wrapped the rest of the steak in foil and put plastic wrap on the dish with the beans and mushrooms. She flipped the switch over to start the dishwasher and began wiping the counter with a sponge.

  “You know, I’ve been planning to leave tonight. Go back to my own place.”

  “You’re free to go,” she said carefully. “No cages here, no ties.”

  “I know that.”

  She glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. It was one of her most winsome expressions.

  “If you—”

  He had no idea how she intended to respond, because in that moment he heard a rush of water under the sink and before two seconds had elapsed, a veritable Niagara was shooting out the bottom of the cabinet door.

  “It’s the dishwasher,” he shouted. “Turn it off!”

  She reached out, flicked the switch back to the off position, and the dishwasher motor stopped. But greasy water continued to pour out from under the sink.

  He opened the cabinet door and saw immediately that the problem was in the drainpipe from the dishwasher, which fed into the sink drain. The pipe was made of rusty metal and there was a gaping hole in it from which water still dripped.

  Dana brought several towels, and because she couldn’t bend over very well, he blotted up the water.
He explained rapidly what he thought had happened: the drainpipe had been almost rusted through, and now that the dishwasher was in use every day, it hadn’t been able to withstand the pressure from the draining water and had given way.

  “So the problem’s not serious,” she said.

  “Not at all. I can fix it.” He found a bucket in the kitchen closet and got down on his knees before removing drenched boxes of detergent and cleanser from the cabinet below the sink. He reached underneath the sink to check out the pipe. It had a hole in it big enough for three fingers.

  “I’ll call Billy Wayne Sprockett tomorrow,” she said.

  “No, you won’t. Anyway, Billy Wayne’s going to be with me first thing in the morning up at Shale Flats. I’ll stop by afterward to replace the pipe, but for now I’ll slide this bucket underneath to catch drips. And the dishes will have to wait to be washed.” He positioned the bucket under the leak and rose to his feet before rinsing his hands off in the sink. Dana handed him a dish towel.

  “We have dessert,” she said apologetically. “I almost forgot about it.” She pulled a plate across the counter. “Have some?”

  She’d baked a yellow cake topped with toasted coconut frosting. He took one of the pieces and bit into it. “This is good,” he said. “I like a woman who knows her way around a coconut.”

  She stared at the piece of cake in her hand and, after a moment’s thought, set it aside. Her eyes met his. “I’m ready to tell you about what happened to me. Some of it, anyway. If you want to listen.” Her flicker of a smile didn’t disguise her tension.

  He hadn’t expected an explanation, but by this time he was eager to hear it. “We could sit in front of the fire,” he suggested.

  “Okay.” He followed her into the living room. She sat on the couch—he wondered if she had put away the little address book that he’d so carefully replaced there—and tucked her feet up under the afghan. He sat down beside her. She seemed slightly nervous, and he waited for her to start talking. She didn’t, at least not right away.