“We can argue about this inside.”
She didn’t want to argue at all.
“Adele, I’m freezing my balls off out here.”
Even though she wasn’t sympathetic to his frozen balls, she took a step back, and Zach followed her inside.
“Hello, ladies,” he said, looking behind her.
With her nurse’s costume in one hand, Adele turned and shut the door. Her three friends stood in the middle of the living room, their arms folded beneath their breasts as they eyed Zach. Adele walked around him and set her bag on the chair. “Zach, these are my very good friends. This is Lucy Rothschild-McIntyre. She writes mystery novels.” Next she pointed to Clare. “This is Clare Vaughan. She writes historical romance novels, and this is Maddie Jones. She writes true crime.”
“Adele’s told me about you ladies, and it’s my pleasure to meet you in person.” He unbuttoned his coat and shrugged out of it as if he intended to stay for a while. Beneath the coat he wore a white-and-blue-striped dress shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s. “Cold enough for y’all?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not bad.”
Maddie tilted her head to one side and looked at him. “It’s been colder.”
“I haven’t been in a good snowstorm since I lived in Denver. Never thought I’d miss it, but I do.” He smiled and the sudden infusion of testosterone in the room messed with her friends’ usually level heads. The tension eased, and they smiled back at Zach. As Adele hung his coat in the closet, they asked about his trip and about flying in through the snow.
Then Maddie got down to business. “Adele’s pregnant. What are your plans?” she asked as if she was Adele’s father.
Zach smiled. “That’s between me and Adele.”
Maddie nodded and gathered her things to go. On her way out she put one hand on Adele’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Do you have the stun pen I gave you?”
Adele frowned. “Somewhere.”
“Get it and the Mace.” She looked at Zach. “If he gets out of line, zap him.”
Adele knew that Maddie was kidding—mostly.
Lucy filed out next. “If you need anything, call.”
“I will.”
Then it was Clare’s turn. “I love you.”
“I know.” She hugged her good-bye. “I love you, too.” She waved one last time to her friends, then shut the door behind them and moved back into the living room. Zach stood by the fireplace looking at the photos on the mantel.
“I wasn’t running away, Zach. I always planned on going back to Cedar Creek.”
“When?” He set down a picture frame and looked at her.
“I don’t know for sure.”
“You don’t think you should have talked to me before you left? You don’t think you should have mentioned your plans?”
“Maybe.” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “But I just wanted to get away and think. I’m confused and scared, and I don’t know what to do or what I’m doing. I’m thirty-five, and this has never happened to me.” She swallowed back tears when all she really wanted to do was lay her head on Zach’s chest and cry. Of course that was impossible. “I feel so stupid, but I did everything short of abstinence not to get pregnant. I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t know how this happened.”
He looked at her across the room, and said, “I believe you.”
Finally. But it wasn’t much comfort.
“I should have known better. I did know better, but I was too wrapped up in being an ass. I’m sorry.”
The apology shocked her, and her poor deluded heart read too much meaning in it. “Well,” she said and crossed her arms over her heart. “You should be.”
“And believe it or not, I didn’t come here to fight.”
She frowned. Could have fooled her. “You came here to see if I ended the pregnancy.”
“While that did enter my head, that’s not the reason I’m here either.”
“Then why are you here?” She dropped her hands to her sides. “And couldn’t you have used the phone?”
“Yeah, I could have, but there is something I need to tell you, and you should hear it in person and not over the phone.” He moved across the room toward her. “You said that in order for a man to be faithful, he has to love his wife. I’ve been thinking about that, and you’re right. Devon didn’t care who I was with, and I didn’t love her.” He paused and looked into her eyes. He took a deep breath and said, “It’s different with you. I love you, Adele. That’s what I’ve come all this way to tell you. I love you.”
She looked up into his face, and her heart squeezed like a sponge.
“When you told me you were pregnant, I thought the bottom dropped out of my life, but I was wrong. When I went to your sister’s to see you yesterday and you weren’t there, that’s when the bottom really fell out of my life.” He placed his warm hands on her cheeks. “I can’t imagine you not in my life.” He lowered his face to hers and spoke against her mouth. “I don’t want to imagine you not in my life.”
“I love you, Zach,” she whispered, just before he kissed her, tender and sweet and filled with blistering heat. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, deeper, hotter until he lifted his head. His breath rushed fast and hot, and he pulled her against his chest.
“Come home. Live with me,” he said next to her ear. “Marry me, Adele, and not because you’re pregnant. Not because I feel responsible or because you’re scared. Marry me because I love you and you love me and we should be together.”
She pulled back and looked up at him. Into his hooded brown eyes. A tear spilled from her lashes and she swallowed past the ache in her chest. “Yes,” she said. “And not because I’m scared and pregnant, but because I love you.”
He brushed her tear away with his thumb. “When you first came back to town, I thought that maybe you’d come back for a reason.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “I admit, I thought the reason was purely sexual.”
“I came back to help my sister.”
“You came back to help me.” He gave her a soft kiss that calmed her worries and soothed her heart.
He had helped her, too. He’d helped break the curse, but she figured it was best not to mention it. “You helped me, and you helped Sherilyn. You put Harris’s furniture together.”
“The furniture was an excuse to be with you.”
She wrapped her arms around his chest and pressed herself against his big warm body. “I started to fall in love with you the day you gave me the tool belt.”
“Ah, you were dazzled by the shiny tools.”
She nodded. “You have dazzling tools.”
He laughed. “I remember the day I saw you standing under my portico. You looked like you’d seen a ghost, but you were beautiful.”
“Ah, you were dazzled by my lack of sleep and crazy hair.”
“I’ve always been dazzled by your crazy hair.” He rubbed his hands up and down her back and somehow got her sweater over her head. “Before that day, you were just a memory. A memory of a beautiful girl I knew in college who picked me to make love to her for her first time.” He looked into her face and tossed her sweater on the floor. “I thank God you walked out of my memory and into my life.”
She reached for the button on his shirt. “What about Tiffany?”
“She’ll be fine. I think she’s looking forward to having a couple of brothers.”
Adele’s fingers stilled on the last button and she glanced up. “Brothers!”
He pulled his shirt out of his jeans and looked down at her bare abdomen. “How are the boys?”
“Girls. The girls are making me nauseous in the morning.”
“Sorry about that.” He shucked the shirt from his arms and pulled her bare belly against his hot skin. He smiled, then lowered his brows. “Your breasts are bigger.”
“They hurt.”
“Sorry about that.” But he didn’t look all that sorry.
She shook her head. “Tw
ins. You not only get me pregnant, but you get me pregnant with twins.”
“Yeah,” he said through a smile, but this time he didn’t bother saying he was sorry about that.
She ran her hands up his sides and over the hard planes of his chest. Who would have thought that she’d find love in the last place she expected? With the man who’d once broken her heart to pieces. Who would have thought Zach Zemaitis would be the man to break the curse she’d been living under?
Not Adele. He’d given her his heart and saved her from a lifetime of bad dates. He’d given her two babies growing beneath her own heart, and she would never be at all sorry about that.
Epilogue
Devon eyed the associate from women’s apparel parading around in the new Covington sheath dress. That dress should have been hers, but she’d been body-slammed by the New York socialite. Who would have thought that those girls from the Hamptons knew moves like that?
Devon looked into the case of Maisonette and low-luster pearls. How had she gone from the shoe department at Walmart to the jewelry department at Sears? How was that fair? It just reminded her of all the lovely jewelry she’d once owned. Sears was just a different version of the same Walmart hell.
She stared down at the Black Hills gold that was just so wrong on so many different levels. Sears loved green, pink, and Black Hills gold, when really, if you couldn’t afford platinum, why bother?
A few days ago they’d received a shipment of necklaces. All made from the different-colored golds and personalized with the likes of Foxy Lady, and Hot Momma, Nicole, and Veronica. Anyone with an ounce of class knew that wearing personalized anything was vulgar and had socialist undertones.
Just as she reached for an interesting ruby pendant, the jewelry case wavered and shimmered into nothing. The walls of Sears evaporated, and her skin tingled as she once again stood among clouds wearing her Chanel bouclé suit and Mikimoto pearls. She looked up as Mrs. Highbarger suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“It’s a good thing you stayed put this time. I wasn’t in the mood to waste time looking for you. I have important things to do.”
Devon wasn’t certain, but it hadn’t seemed like she’d been in Sears all that long.
Seven months now, her old teacher informed her without speaking. “You’ve earned another gift.”
She was shocked and a little confused. “Is what’s-her-name pregnant?”
“Yes, with twin boys.”
Twin boys. “Yes!” She pumped her fist in the air. “There is a God.”
Of course there’s a God. And He hears you.
Oops.
As one, the two of them moved up the invisible escalator, and she asked, “What’s going on?”
“See for yourself.”
They stopped, the clouds cleared, and Devon looked down into a backyard garden. What’s-her-name wore a long white dress and a wreath of roses in her wild hair. Zach stood behind her wearing a dark blue suit. His arms were wrapped around her sides and his hands were on her huge pregnant belly. He looked happy. Happier than she’d ever seen him off the football field. Happier than he’d ever been with her. This wasn’t how the curse was supposed to work. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that she had to slave away in Sears for all eternity selling cubic zirconia and faux pearls, and he got to be happy with what’s-her-name.
“Are they married then?”
“Just today.”
Anger and hatred swirled and coalesced within her chest. This could not happen. She would not let this happen. “I’ve earned another gift?”
“Yes. Use it wisely.”
She put her fingers to her lips and contemplated what to do next. Everything she’d tried so far had backfired. She needed something good. Something foolproof. Something…
Within the cloudy vision, Tiffany walked across the yard toward her father. Devon’s heart swelled with pride and love. Her baby was getting so grown-up. She wore a light pink silk dress, and her hair was piled up on her head and circled with pink roses. She looked beautiful and just like Devon at that age.
Zach said something that made Tiffany laugh, and she playfully punched him in the arm. Then she bent forward, cupped her hands around her mouth, and spoke to her new stepmomma’s belly.
“What’s your next gift?” Mrs. Highbarger asked.
She opened her mouth and closed it. She hated Zach for not loving her the way he loved his new wife. She hated what’s-her-name more…but Tiffany looked happy. Really happy. “I don’t know.”
“We don’t have eternity. What are you going to do?”
She blinked at the image several times. More than she wanted to get back at Zach and his new wife, she wanted her child to be happy. She opened her mouth and heard herself say, “I guess I’m not going to do anything.” Even if it meant going back to Sears and wearing a personalized Foxy Lady necklace for eternity.
Mrs. Highbarger smiled. “Finally.”
“Finally what?”
The teacher took a step back through heavy gold doors that suddenly appeared. The doors whooshed closed and the gray mist formed solid walls. Even though Devon knew the drill, she was terrified as her skin tingled and she looked down at herself as her beautiful Chanel suit warped and shimmered. “Where am I this time?” she called out. The suit dissolved and in its place she wore a Carolina Herrera black cocktail dress made of silk. Christian Louboutin pumps appeared on her feet.
She looked around and gasped. Gucci. Fendi. Louis Vuitton. She raised a shaky hand to her lips as she recognized the sights and smells. “Saks Fifth Avenue,” she whispered. The flagship store. If she could have, she would have wept.
Finally, Devon Hamilton-Zemaitis had died and gone to heaven.
About the Author
With the publication of New York Times bestselling author RACHEL GIBSON’s first book, readers discovered one of contemporary romance's freshest voices. Four of her novels were named among the Top Ten Favorite Books of the Year by Romance Writers of America. She has won numerous awards, including Borders Bestselling Romantic Comedy, National Reader’s Choice, and the RITA® Award for the Best Single Title Contemporary Romance of the Year.
Readers can write to Rachel Gibson at P.O. Box
4124, Boise, Idaho 83711-4124, or visit her website at www.rachelgibson.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Books by Rachel Gibson
JUST KISS ME
I DO!
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT YOU
BLUE BY YOU
RUN TO YOU
CRAZY SWEET FINE
CRAZY ON YOU
RESCUE ME
ANY MAN OF MINE
TRUE LOVE AND OTHER DISASTERS
NOT ANOTHER BAD DATE
NOTHING BUT TROUBLE
TANGLED UP IN YOU
I’M IN NO MOOD FOR LOVE
SEX, LIES, AND ONLINE DATING
THE TROUBLE WITH VALENTINE’S DAY
DAISY’S BACK IN TOWN
SEE JANE SCORE
LOLA CARLYLE REVEALS ALL
TRUE CONFESSIONS
IT MUST BE LOVE
TRULY MADLY YOURS
SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NOT ANOTHER BAD DATE. Copyright © 2008 by Rachel Gibson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written
permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition © April 2008 ISBN: 9780061795879
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