Making Waves

by Laura Moore

  He waited to speak until she’d straightened. “That’s life, Dakota. Not everything can be planned. Accidents happen. Unexpected events occur. Men and women have sex. And sometimes, even with precautions, pregnancies result. I’ve heard of women on the pill and men who are faithful condom wearers conceiving a child. The question is how you deal with the curveballs that life throws at you.”

  “I’m afraid I’m striking out so far.”

  “I disagree. You may be questioning your actions now, Dakota, but clearly there was an attraction that brought you to this point. I’ve heard the way you speak about Max. There are many things you admire about him. So the sex wasn’t indiscriminate or reckless. Now you’ve found yourself pregnant. But there was never a doubt in your mind that you’d tell Max about the child, right?”

  Dakota shook her head. “No.”

  “Moreover, I know that you’ll give him the opportunity to be a positive presence in your child’s life. What this shows is that you are very far from messing up. Now it’s up to Max to get over his shock and make the necessary adjustments.”

  “It was just sex, Hendrick. At least on Max’s part it was,” she added, remembering how she’d started down the road to imagining a real relationship with him before blowing it all to smithereens with the Christmas tree. “And Max has issues. He lost his sister, Rosie, when he was eighteen. They were twins. I don’t think he’s gotten over it.”

  He was silent as he absorbed the information. “That’s a hard thing to overcome. Most studies focus on the bond between identical twins, but losing a fraternal twin can be harrowing, too, the grief a long and troubled road. I don’t know Max, so anything I say can only be broad conjecture, but as the surviving twin, he may feel he doesn’t deserve the joy that accompanies a new life. But whatever difficulties Max may have adjusting, you can help him with them, Dakota.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Come now, you’re strong and you’re smart. You’ll figure it out. But remember that even if you can’t change Max’s feelings about you and the baby, this child is going to have a very different upbringing from the one you had. One filled with love and support. This baby will have the best of mothers. And hopefully a wonderful and involved father.”

  Shifting in her chair, she threw her arms about him. “Thank you, Hendrick. Thank you for being my friend.”

  “Thank you for being mine, my dear. It’s brought me great happiness.”

  He’d fucked up. The thought screamed at Max as loudly as the wind howling outside his windows. Walking into Dakota’s house last night, seeing her, had been like a one-two punch to the solar plexus; he was still trying to draw an even breath. Still struggling to recognize his world since the moment that woman—Dakota’s aunt—dropped her bomb.

  As he tore along the Long Island Expressway, the weather having grounded all planes, the aunt’s voice, obnoxiously loud and superior, had assaulted his mind, relentless as the wet snow and icy rain pelting his windshield and obscuring his vision. Dakota was pregnant. Pregnant with his child. And she was looking to cash in.

  Guided by the GPS, because there was no way he could have found her Marion Lane address otherwise, he’d pulled up to a house that was basically the size of his garage and barged inside the second she opened the door.

  A part of his brain had registered the blue-and-cream patterned long board suspended over the mantel, the enlarged photos of the local beaches, the colorful pillows, and the plants decorating the Lilliputian space, while the other part was busy adjusting to a Dakota who didn’t look like herself. The first day they’d met at Windhaven, he remembered thinking of her as an Amazon. But gone was her former confidence. In its place was a defensiveness that he’d rashly assumed was guilt; she wouldn’t even meet his eye. More disturbing was her frailty. She’d been waiflike, far too thin beneath her shirt and flannel bottoms, and her face had been drawn, exhaustion a gray wash over her features.

  The changes scared him.

  They scared him as much as the possibility that he could have misjudged her character all along and that she might try to trap him with a baby. Fear became panic, and panic made him stupid. Needing answers, he’d fired questions at her as if she were the stranger she resembled.

  He’d been jolted out of his blindness when she recoiled, wounded by his accusations. And then once again she became the Dakota he knew, standing up for herself as she leveled him with a disgust too profound to be feigned. Even before she finished denouncing him by saying that she regretted ever laying eyes on him, he’d recognized how badly he’d screwed up.

  And now he had to fix it somehow.

  —

  He drove to her house first, frustration giving way to worry when his repeated knocks on her door went unanswered. He kept picturing her drawn features, her shadowed eyes. She was clearly unwell and she might be carrying his baby, and he? He’d seen that and yet been an ass. A total ass. Again.

  Climbing back into his car, he drove east. In the parking area for the Montauk Point lighthouse, he spotted her Land Cruiser, and blew out a deep breath. Pulling up next to it, he turned off the ignition and sat for a moment, aware of the racing of his heart, his jitters worse than before any game he’d played or deal he’d negotiated.

  She was the only person braving the wind and cold. An ache filled him that he was responsible for sending her here.

  “It’s freezing out here,” he said by way of greeting when he reached her side. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, because before he’d have reached out and hauled her close to share his body warmth. He didn’t have the right anymore.

  At the sound of his voice, she jerked and then stiffened. Her gaze slid sideways, glancing at him briefly, then returned to study the waves slamming into the rocks below. “Feel free to leave.”

  He ignored her suggestion, letting the punishing wind whistle in his ears and scrape at his skin. At least she’d dressed for the weather in a blue parka, a beige knit cap, and a matching scarf.

  “How’d you find me?” she asked after a minute.

  He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “You told me you come here sometimes.” From the corner of his eye he saw her lips purse—whether in pleasure or in annoyance or simply because it was cold as hell, he had no clue. “How long have you been out here?”

  “A while. Why?”

  “Your nose is red.” And it was dripping, making her look like a lost and lonely kid, and making his insides twist with remorse. “Your cheeks are, too.” And why the hell was he talking about her wind-chapped face? The thought had him saying abruptly, “There was a woman I was with a few months back, shortly before I met you. She didn’t like it when I broke it off. In retaliation she tried to blackmail me.”

  He felt the weight of her searching gaze, but pride and embarrassment kept his own fixed on the waves crashing, retreating, and crashing again.

  “Even if I held a grudge against you for the way things ended between us, I wouldn’t do that. Ever.”

  He swallowed and turned his head. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Yeah, I know that now. But last night—” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall in a heavy shrug. “Anyway, I’m sorry for what I said. Really sorry.”

  She looked out at the sea again, and the silence stretched as long as the horizon.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” he repeated, not sure if he’d heard her correctly or even what she meant.

  “Okay, I forgive you.”

  He pressed his lips together, rocked by emotion. So this was what forgiveness felt like.

  When he spoke, his voice was strangely hoarse. “Listen, can we go somewhere to talk? We need to figure things out.”

  —

  Dakota drove to John’s Pancake House with Max’s shiny black Range Rover in her rearview mirror. With the cold weather, the diner was less crowded than usual. She led Max to a booth in the corner, the most private spot.

  “Hey, Dakota, long time no see,” said
Dan, a waiter who’d been working at John’s for as long as Dakota had been coming for her after-surfing stack. He set down two glasses of water and menus. “Heard you were laid low with a nasty bug. Feelin’ better?”

  “A bit, thanks,” Dakota said, her cheeks warming. Apparently the news that her nasty bug was actually a determined sperm hadn’t reached Montauk. She’d give it until midweek.

  “Coffee and the regular?”

  “The regular” was a large stack of blueberry pancakes swimming in maple syrup. God, what she would give to be able to devour one with her usual appetite. “Um, no. I’m going to change it up a bit today. I’ll just have toast—can you make it dry? And I’ll take mint tea, please.”

  “That’s all you want?” Max asked.

  “Yup. Still feeling a little off,” she replied, handing Dan back the menu and ignoring Max’s frown. Was he finally putting two and two together? She couldn’t imagine that he, a single guy in his mid-thirties, had ever spared a thought for a pregnant woman’s morning sickness.

  Welcome to her world.

  Her anger had been swept away in the morning wind upon her hearing Max’s story of being targeted for blackmail. Yet a sadness lingered. His confession underscored once again how different they were. Now here they were, seated together at a booth, attempting to figure out how to proceed if Monday’s visit to the doctor confirmed a baby was growing inside her. Was the effort doomed? Probably, but at least they were trying.

  Dan’s attention had shifted to Max. “And for you?”

  Max glanced at the menu then looked at her. “Just coffee.” He handed the menu back.

  “Coming right up.”

  Once Dan was out of earshot, Max said, “So you’ve been pretty sick, huh?”

  She wished she hadn’t shrugged out of her parka. It would have offered some camouflage. Then again, he’d seen her last night. “Yeah. At first I had a cold, then it morphed into what I thought was a stomach flu. Only it didn’t stop.”

  His expression turned grim. “So can you eat anything?”

  She fiddled with the napkin. “Saltines and dry toast. Chicken broth. Sometimes applesauce.”

  “And you’ve been like this for how long?”

  Forever—at least it seemed like it. “It started four days or so before Christmas.” She frowned. “Maybe longer.”

  His expression incredulous, he leaned forward. “And you didn’t go to a doctor?”

  “I didn’t really think about it being anything other than a flu,” she said defensively. No way was she going to bring up her irregular periods with him. “But then on New Year’s Day I had to go to my mother’s. It turns out she had exactly the same symptoms when she was pregnant with me. Unfortunately, my aunt Mimi and my cousin Carly were at the house when Piper decided to turn amateur sleuth. The next day I bought one of those in-home tests. I got the one with three sticks and I used them on three consecutive days, just to be sure,” she admitted sheepishly. “They were all positive, so then I called my doctor—”

  “Here you go. One mint tea, one dry toast, and one coffee.” Dan set two mugs and a plate with two golden slices on the wood table. “Enjoy.”

  “Thanks, Dan.” She hoped he hadn’t caught too much of what she’d said. She sat with her arms folded across her middle until Dan had gone behind the counter and into the kitchen before saying to Max, “So don’t even begin to act as if I’ve in any way been negligent or irresponsible.”

  He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I just—I don’t like that you’ve been so sick.”

  She gave a short laugh. “Join the club.”

  Lifting his mug, he took a slow sip of his coffee, then set it down, his eyes never leaving her. It was as if he were sizing up some complex problem.

  She scowled. Breaking off a corner of her toast, she brought it to her mouth, chewing tentatively. She swallowed.

  “I want to go to the doctor with you.”

  “What?” And then she coughed and coughed some more, the toast caught in her throat, scratching it. Wildly she waved Max away when he made to rise. Despite everything going on, he was still Max; she worried she might still be susceptible to his touch. A thump to her back might be her undoing. She took a gulp of water and closed her eyes in relief when her throat cleared.

  “What did you say?” she asked, praying she’d misheard.

  “You said the appointment’s on Monday. I want to be there.”

  Damn him for remembering details like that. “No.” She shook her head.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because—because—” She scrambled for an excuse. “It’s personal.”

  “Yeah, it is personal. And if it turns out the home kit was right and you’re pregnant, then it concerns me personally, too, doesn’t it?”

  It struck her that he was no longer questioning whether he was the father of the baby. In the wake of his revelation concerning the woman who’d tried to blackmail him—and what a scheming bitch she must have been—that he believed her was huge. She wanted him to trust her.

  “And if you’re not pregnant,” Max continued doggedly, “then we have to get you to another doctor and figure out what the hell is wrong with you. What time is the appointment?”

  “Nine-thirty. But surely you need to be back in New York—at the office—on Monday. I’ll tell you everything that…” Her voice trailed off, turning into a heavy sigh as he pulled out his cellphone.

  Resigned, she watched as he swiped, scrolled, frowned, scrolled some more, swiped again, and then began tapping out a rapid message. She assumed the lucky recipient was his assistant, Fred, who was going to be very busy rescheduling Max’s Monday.

  Finished, he returned his cell to his pocket. “There. I can take you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  At 5:00 A.M. on Monday, with the world outside still dark, Max’s study was illuminated by the glow of his PC. He was drafting the exit strategy for a California robotics company the Summit Group had invested in three years ago. He’d already been up for an hour, talking on the phone with Dieter Fischer, the CEO of the German company that was set to acquire AB1 and its nifty prototypes for $800 million.

  Over the Thanksgiving weekend in Idaho, Bob Elders, Summit’s managing director, had exhorted his partners to start the calendar year with a bang to make potential investors come running. Bob was determined to raise the firm’s rankings. If this deal went through, Max had just fired the starting gun.

  After he’d sent the draft to Bob, Summit’s general counsel, Roger Cohen, and his team, he spent another hour going through emails and memos. Chris Steffen’s took the lion’s share of his time. It started out fine, addressing the expected topics: the rollout of Zephyr3, ways to evergreen its patent, and Chris’s strategies for extending patent protection for other drugs in Chiron’s cache by reformulating them or creating combination therapies.

  Then Chris decided to veer sharply from the predictable CEO route and head off into batshit-crazy territory, devoting the rest of the email to his continued sense of “betrayal,” bemoaning Max’s unwillingness to renegotiate his compensation package. He once again trotted out the claim that he’d been led to believe the terms of his equity stake would be 10 percent, not 7 percent.

  This was utter bull, as Max had told him over lunch the previous week. Chris had been more than okay with a 7 percent comp because in return he was getting a very hefty salary, with nice perks thrown in. For a man who liked instant gratification, the well-padded salary had been enough.

  Wall Street wasn’t for the meek and mild. Successful pharma companies weren’t steered by wimps. But Chris, with his oversized ego, was taking the “Greed is good” mantra and mainlining it.

  Max typed his reply, responding to the business strategies and ignoring Chris’s whining. As he signed off, Max wished that there’d been a way to keep Mark Kauffman, Chiron’s former CEO, in place. Chris was proving to be a huge time suck.

  Especially as
Max had more important things to think about, like what the hell he was going to do if Dakota was carrying his baby.

  He showered, shaved, and dressed quickly, so as to have time to check the global stocks. Emerging markets were tanking, oil was cheaper than Coca-Cola, and Europe was a mess. Didn’t mean there wasn’t money to be made; he just needed to dig a little farther off the beaten path to find that nugget. He shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and went to the window. Today the ocean was a pewter gray, mirroring the clouds above.

  He thought of Dakota at Montauk Point, staring at the endless angry sea. She’d been standing with her hands splayed over her stomach. What had she been thinking and deciding as she faced the headwinds and the water crashing below? Had she shared those thoughts with the baby? Would she do so with him?

  He left for Dakota’s at eight-thirty. The drive across East Hampton was only about five and a half miles, and even with the Monday morning rush of people driving to work and parents getting kids off to school, he made the trip in under fifteen minutes. A nice change from the madness that was Manhattan at this hour.

  When he knocked on the door, she answered, her hair damp at the ends and her face drawn.

  “You’re early. It only takes five minutes to get to the doctor’s office.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Were you sick again?”

  She frowned. “You used to have much smoother lines. I tried to eat something this morning. I thought it was a good idea. My stomach didn’t. Come in. I’ll be ready in a second.”

  The house in daylight was as tiny as it had been the other night. And just as neat. Dakota had her laptop open on the island that separated the living room from the kitchen. A textbook on investment analysis was next to it. Catching up on homework? he wondered.

  He circled the living room, taking note of the books, magazines, pictures, and photos, telling himself he needed to learn as much about the private Dakota as he could. In a number of the framed pictures he recognized a younger, grinning Lauren Payne, Rae in some others. She had a faithful and long-standing circle of friends; she read a lot of fiction, everything from mystery to romance, and had a ton of books devoted to the Hamptons. Her decor was colorful but it wasn’t girly. He could be okay hanging out here if it came to that.