by Laura Moore
With a shrug of cashmere, Piper took the bag. Setting the other bag down next to the living room sofa, Dakota followed her into the kitchen. Piper had simply placed the bag on the counter.
“The heating instructions are on the packages,” she said.
Piper looked at her. “You don’t want to do it?”
“No, I really don’t. You don’t either unless you want to see me vomit.”
Piper’s brows rose. “There’s no need to be theatrical,” she said in a miffed tone. “If you’re so sick, you shouldn’t have come. You know I hate cooking.” She dug out the foil containers and slammed them on the counter to underscore her words.
“You were the one who insisted I should be here.”
“I’d have thought better of it if I’d known you were going to be pissy.” She pulled off the plastic covers and shoved the appetizers in the oven.
“The oven should be preheated.”
“Who cares? Mimi will only want to drink, and I’m fasting. I’ve gained a couple of pounds. You should count yourself lucky. You didn’t pack on your usual holiday weight.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Piper shot her a narrow-eyed look. Dakota rarely defied the decades-old prohibition against calling her Mom. But right now she really felt like reminding Piper that for all her facials, scheduled treatments, and exercise classes, she was the mother of a twenty-eight-year-old woman, which made her pretense of being thirty-two biologically impossible.
“You know, Dakota—” The chime of the doorbell cut off whatever Piper intended to say. “Good, they’re here, which means I can start counting the minutes until you all leave. I have a massive headache coming on.”
Dakota hung back as Piper went to greet her sister and niece and perform the standard ritual of cheek presses. No way was she going to be party to that. Waiting until the three of them entered the living room, she smiled grimly as her aunt and cousin caught sight of her, their eyes widening, Carly’s with shock, Mimi’s with malicious pleasure.
“You must have really tied one on last night. You look like something the cat dragged in,” Mimi said.
“No, I’ve had the flu. Happy birthday.” She took a wrapped package out of the bag and gave it to her aunt. It was a beaded clutch she’d found in Sag Harbor a few months back. It was nicer than Mimi deserved, but Dakota couldn’t bring herself to buy ugly and cheap presents. “Carly, I got you something, too.”
She handed her a small box containing a purse-sized perfume atomizer, because Carly’s favorite activity outside of riding her horse was clubbing with her crowd at places like AM in Southampton. This was the real reason Piper didn’t like Carly—she hated running into her niece when on the prowl for a new boy toy.
Carly took the gift with an awkward smile. “Thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“No worry.” Just then a wave of nausea hit her. She sat down abruptly on the sofa.
“What’s the matter?” Carly asked.
“I think the appetizers are ready,” she said faintly.
Out of deference to her—or more likely because she wasn’t interested in eating—Piper kept the assorted hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen. When Carly and Mimi sat down with their plates, Dakota did her best to breathe shallowly.
“I suppose you’ll be going into the city for Genevieve Monaghan’s exhibit,” Mimi said. Not even Mimi could ignore her completely after receiving a birthday present.
The opening was from six to eight on the coming Friday. Dakota had it marked on the wall calendar that hung in her kitchen. She’d been looking forward to attending. But now…well, she still felt so awful and so ridiculously weak, and Max, if he was in town, would undoubtedly be there. Pride dictated that when she saw him next, she look her best, not hollowed out and smudge-eyed. “I’ll have to settle for seeing the show later on. I don’t think my stomach can handle a trip into the city just yet.”
“I hope I don’t catch whatever you have,” Carly said. “I’m competing in Florida next weekend and then heading to Cabo with friends. I can’t afford to get sick.”
As if Dakota could. But it would take too much effort to point out that Carly didn’t have to worry about pesky things like being paid or meeting payroll. Despite having graduated last May, Carly had yet to enter the workforce. There were no signs she intended to, either.
“Don’t worry, Carly. I may look like death warmed over, but the nurse I called at the clinic told me I wouldn’t be contagious after ten days.”
Piper took a sip of her martini. Vodka apparently worked on her fast. “You’d have done better calling your ob/gyn.”
“What?” Dakota said.
“Yes, Piper, what do you mean?” Mimi asked.
“Come on, don’t you remember how I was when I got knocked up? Exactly like that.” Piper gave an insouciant flick of her wrist in Dakota’s direction.
“I have the flu,” Dakota ground out as Mimi’s gaze shifted, studying her closely, like a bird eyeing an especially tasty worm.
“Oh my God, you’re right.” Her pink-lipsticked smile spread. “You couldn’t keep anything down for weeks, Piper. Once they figured out what was up, and couldn’t convince you to get rid of it, Mother and Father were hoping you’d miscarry.”
Dakota was quite glad when her vomit landed on her aunt’s leather boots.
Three First Response sticks lay on the white porcelain rim of Dakota’s bathroom sink. They were arranged in a neat, regimental row to compensate for the chaos they’d announced three mornings running, making her pregnant, very pregnant, and ultra pregnant.
How had it happened? Okay, she knew how it had happened, but Max had used a condom every time. She wondered if one could have torn. Or how about the morning she’d awoken to find the spent condom near her crotch? When it slipped off Max, could those intrepid sperm have escaped and swum their way to her egg?
The thought was enough to make her pivot, bow over the toilet bowl, and retch yet again.
Straightening, she turned on the faucet and rinsed her mouth, then clutched the sides of the sink and tried to breathe. Tried to think. Not easy when her thoughts were as disorganized as her emotions and when nausea still held her in its tight grip.
She wasn’t on the pill. She’d tried it but hated how it affected her body—the bloating and the headaches—even if it did make her periods more regular. She’d had another reason to go off it as well: not being on the pill actually made sexual relations less complicated for her. While she’d been on the pill there had always seemed to come a point where the guy she was dating would start in about how good it would feel to go “bare.” She’d even heard the line about how a rubber made a dick go numb.
Her solution had been simple. If she wasn’t taking anything, then there’d be no pressure to go without a condom and no need to explain the obvious. Condoms might be annoying; dealing with an STD was a lot more so.
But Max had never raised that awkward and, for her, lust-killing topic. He’d matter-of-factly wrapped himself up every time he entered her. It would be a question of control for him. And of trust. They were remarkably alike in this, his need for control as great as hers, his ability to trust just as shaky.
She looked down at the three sticks so efficiently blasting her theories and illusions to bits.
A baby. She’d wanted a baby, yes, eventually. But even more, she’d longed for family in the most boring and traditional sense of the word, not because she was morally conservative but because she herself had missed having a father’s love, a father’s presence, a father’s name.
And what of her other dreams and plans? How did a baby fit in with running Premier Service? And what of her long-term goal to go into investing?
How much would she have to sacrifice?
She wasn’t going to panic. It was possible the home pregnancy test was faulty. Maybe the flu had done something weird to her body. Okay, that was grasping at straws, but there could be something terribly off, either with her body or with the test’s chemistry
, to cause a false positive.
Her mother didn’t have to be right.
The way to know for certain was to schedule a visit to her gynecologist and have a proper test and exam. If the results were the same, if indeed she was pregnant, then she’d tell Max, though how she’d break the news was anybody’s guess. He deserved to know—just as her baby deserved to have a father.
She would not be her mother.
She’d been so careful, had spent so much of her life, starting as a kid, determined not to be like Piper, yet here she was, through a manufacturing defect or human error—otherwise known as “improper usage”—possibly in the very same situation her mother had faced twenty-nine years ago.
Had her mother been as scared, as completely freaked out?
Dakota hit the light switch, left the bathroom and the worrisome plastic wands predicting a very different future from the one she’d imagined for herself, and went into her bedroom. Standing in front of a full-length mirror she’d found at an antiques store in Wainscott, she slowly peeled her long-sleeved tee up and over her head, then untied the drawstring on her flannel pajama bottoms.
She stared at her naked reflection, shifting to view her body at a different angle. In a new light. It was hard to reconcile what she saw with what those three sticks pronounced. She didn’t look pregnant; she looked hollowed out, half starved from nearly two weeks of an unwilling fast.
She cupped her breasts, testing. They hurt. But so did her entire body. Her hands traveled down to her abdomen. She spread her fingers, her pinkies brushing her hipbones. If anything, the space seemed like an empty cradle rather than one nurturing a life.
But if there was a baby, had her being so sick harmed it? Was it all right?
Grabbing her chenille robe from where it lay at the foot of her bed, she wrapped it tightly about her and then walked over to her bedside table. Picking up her phone, she scrolled through her contact list and pressed the dial button.
“Dr. Davis’s office,” the receptionist answered.
“Yes, this is Dakota Hale. I’d like to make an appointment for a pregnancy test and an examination….Yes, I can come on Monday morning.”
—
All day at the office—during the investment committee meeting where Max had presented his proposal to invest in a start-up tech company that specialized in cloud data; during the follow-up calls he’d made to the limited partners; during a business lunch with Chris Steffen, who suddenly and deludedly believed he could renegotiate the terms of his compensation as Chiron’s CEO; even while he stared out his office windows at the wintry mix of rain and ice pelting and then running down the length of the glass in long, slushy streaks—an internal debate waged in Max’s mind. Should he skip the opening reception for Genevieve Monaghan’s exhibition or suck it up and get the inevitable encounter with Dakota over and done?
He couldn’t believe he’d called her from a club on New Year’s Eve. His excuse? He’d been drunk off his ass and no longer able to curb his yearning to hear her voice. Since the morning she’d ended things, she’d consumed his thoughts. He was unaccustomed to a woman mattering or her absence bothering him so much. Before, he’d always been able to fill the void by finding another woman or sealing a new deal.
But with Dakota it was different. He kept imagining how it might be if he could turn back time. Could he somehow change things and get her back? That question, that foolish fantasy, fueled that night by brain-cell-destroying quantities of cocktails and glasses of champagne, had had him pulling out his cell while he sat at a table with Andy Reynolds, Lewis Brant, Glenn Howard, their dates, and some redhead he’d picked up two bars ago. A woman who had a grating, nasal voice…nothing like Dakota’s.
He remembered how Dakota would cry, “Yes! Yes!” and “Oh God, Max, that feels so good!” in her throaty rasp while she clung to him, how it would make his balls squeeze tight and his hips drive faster with the need to come inside her.
When she’d answered the phone with a husky “Hello?” his mouth had gone dry. Even in his shit-faced state, he’d registered her disoriented tone and knew he’d woken her. But he hadn’t cared because he wanted to hear her voice and talk to her again so badly. Only, as drunk as he’d been, he’d had no idea what to say once he actually had her on the line. Could only mumble some incoherent crap while a deep longing rose inside him.
He should be grateful the woman—the redhead—had interrupted him before he blurted out to Dakota how often he thought about her. Even so, the abbreviated conversation in which he’d said God knows what had gone on long enough for Max to feel like an idiot now. A pathetic idiot who kept wondering what would have happened if he’d been able to keep his shit together about the damned Christmas tree.
An idiot who kept thinking how much he’d like to be with her…which made him as big a fool as Chris Steffen.
Obviously he wasn’t going to get back together with Dakota. Once he was back in the groove, he’d find a few women to meet his needs, and life would return to normal. Part and parcel of returning to normal was getting this first post-split encounter with Dakota over and done.
Besides, he had to go to the gallery reception. He valued Alex Miller’s friendship too much to be a no-show at a major event in Gen’s career. His internal debate at an end, he pressed the intercom and asked his assistant, Fred, to arrange for a town car to drive him.
So here he was scouring the gallery, the space composed of several large rooms, searching for a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired beauty, straining to catch a note of her throaty voice or the low timbre of her laugh.
Where was she?
Everyone else in New York seemed to be here. While the gallery walls were filled with fields of color and luminous detail, the space in between was dominated by black, the New York art scene’s color of choice when it came to clothing. It only took a quick glance at the Japanese and French designs they were wearing, along with the horn-rims and wire-framed glasses and bold, clunky jewelry, and hearing the names Monet and Diebenkorn and Homer being used to describe the land and seascapes surrounding them, to know that he was passing curators for MOMA, the Met, and the Whitney as well as the directors of every modern art gallery worth its salt, and probably every art critic attached to every major news source.
Max paused in front of one of the largest seascapes. It showed a sky of a bright, brilliant blue, clouds white and full, and strong, high waves that raced toward a diagonal stretch of beach. From the bright colors one might think the painting depicted a summer scene. Gen Monaghan’s talent lay in revealing the fierceness of the wind that propelled the waves, whipping them until they crashed onto the land. Not even the brilliance of the sun’s rays could defeat the bite of the wind or the chill of the angry sea. The painting spoke of the fierce beauty of the Atlantic, a force that could not be tamed. Using only oil and canvas, Gen had captured what it was like to stand on that empty stretch of sand, to feel the stinging spray coming off those rough waves, to hear the heavy roar of ocean pounding the land and be humbled by its awesome power.
He glanced at the price sheet he’d picked up when he entered the gallery. The painting was expensive. No surprise there. Anyone could see that Gen Monaghan was a major talent, and this was a New York City gallery. Because he had a hunch Gen’s work would only appreciate in value, the painting would be a good investment. That wasn’t why he was buying it, however. He wanted Gen’s painting for the stark beauty of the composition, the brilliance of its execution, and the fact that when he looked at it, he couldn’t help but think of Dakota and her fearlessness when she rode waves as wild as those depicted.
He looked around the crowded room again, willing her to appear. He wanted to share his impression of the painting and watch her face when she studied it, knowing she’d grasp its visual poetry. And he wanted to see her expression when he told her he planned to buy it, and be the beneficiary of her wide smile of approval. He wanted her to be there when he made the purchase. It was only fair, since she’d chosen every
other object and decoration at Windhaven.
She wasn’t anywhere in the gallery, damn it.
But he saw Gen. Helpfully, she wasn’t wearing black; rather, she had on an emerald-green dress that emphasized her slender frame. She and Alex were talking to a group not far from where a bartender was busy filling glasses. He wove his way to them.
“Hello, Gen. Congratulations on an amazing show,” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek.
“Oh, Max! I’m so glad you made it!” Gen said.
“Yes, Max. Thank you for coming,” Alex said extending his hand to clasp Max’s shoulder.
Despite all the hotshot art people crowding the rooms, Alex and Gen seemed genuinely grateful for his presence. He’d done right to come. “How could I have stayed away? The paintings are incredible. I’m particularly taken with Series Number Five.”
Gen’s smile lit her face. “That’s one of my favorites—I’m so glad you like it.”
“As am I,” a woman with a sleek gray cap of hair and round, oversized glasses said. “I’m Alicia Kendall. I’ve been showing Genevieve’s work for—how long?”
“Pretty much forever,” Gen said.
“And now we’re in a space that can really do justice to your larger works, like Series Number Five.”
“I’d like to buy it,” Max said.
Gen gave a surprised laugh. “Why, Max, that’s wonderful of you.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I just know that I want it.”
Alicia Kendall’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses. “Then you shall have it.”
He nodded. “Good. You’ll need a check or a wire transfer from me?”
“First let me go put a red sticker next to the painting. The Getty’s contemporary art curator was making noises about Number Five. I’d like to teach him the cost of dithering. I’ll come back and we can complete the transaction and fill out the necessary forms in the office.”
