“I didn’t know it was that soon.”
“I met with them on Friday. By the time I got home, I had other things on my mind.”
To say the least. These days he had his business partner on his mind more than his business.
Elise’s string of epithets wasn’t quite as colorful as his, but just as effective.
“I’ll call them first thing in the morning,” he said. And between now and then he’d have to think of a way to approach his largest potential client with the news of a potentially dangerous error, at the same time instilling continued confidence in him and B&R.
“They should know that if I hadn’t caught this,” she said, “they’d have been without coverage.”
“Because you are B&R and we look out for our clients, which is why we did see it in time.” He went with her line of thought. It was ethical. And smart.
“I’m coming in tomorrow morning to speak with Angela.”
It was the young woman’s second major mistake in two weeks. And Elise hired, managed and fired all the staff—other than salespeople, who were his responsibility.
“I’ll talk to her,” Joe said, knowing he wasn’t going to be nearly as effective as Elise would be. He wasn’t as fully versed in the particulars of Angela’s job duties as Elise was. But he wanted Elise to relax at home like the doctor ordered.
“I’m not going to stay long, Joe,” she said, her plate empty as she sat back. “I’ll come in midmorning and be gone by lunchtime. I promise.”
Michigan Local momentarily flew out of his mind.
She thought she was going to work. And she absolutely was not. They weren’t risking her life. He studied her cheeks for a long moment, wondering if they were more swollen. He didn’t think so, but then he hadn’t noticed that they were to begin with.
“You’re a grown woman,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “And free to do as you wish.”
“Thank you.”
“However, as your friend and business partner, I’m asking you to please stay home.”
She remained silent, although her look was stony. “I know you, Elise. You get to the office and you don’t shut down. Your brain processes eighteen things at once, you see things that need to be done, things no one else is aware of. And as much as we need you there doing just that, B&R isn’t worth risking on gestational hypertension. The company’s important to us, yes, but if worse came to worst, as long as you’re alive, we could always start another company.”
It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do. There were things pushing at the edges of his conscious mind, things that he sensed were vitally important, but he had yet to realize fully what they were.
Things were changing. He knew that much. He was changing. But how it would all play out, for how long, he had no idea.
There was Elise. And then there were her impending offspring. And in between, an enormous barrier through which he couldn’t see.
He wasn’t any further into understanding himself than that.
“Dr. Braden would catch the condition long before it took my life.”
“What about the babies’ lives?” He stared at her, needing her to look him straight in the eye. “If the condition develops, it could force delivery before those kids are formed enough to survive.”
He was shocked at the tears he saw in her eyes. “What?” he asked, frowning.
“Nothing.” She wiped her eyes, shook her head, as though upset with herself. “These damn tears might be the worst part of this entire process,” she told him. “Pain I can deal with, but I don’t cry.”
He didn’t think it expedient to point out to her that apparently she did.
“There’s nothing wrong with tears,” he told her instead. “They’re a healthy release of tension.”
Like something else he knew—and had been trying adamantly to forget.
“They’re annoying,” she argued. “And a sign of weakness.”
“If you’re trying to sidetrack me, it’s not going to work.” He sat right where he was. “Tell me what made you cry.”
Elise considered him for a long moment. “Just the idea that you care about these babies,” she said slowly. “That anyone besides me really cares about them.”
Stacking her plate on top of his, he carried both to the sink. Started rinsing.
“It’s okay, Joe.” She was just behind him, then beside him, and he hadn’t heard her move. “I’m not insinuating in any way, hoping in any way, that your interest is anything other than avuncular. I knew before I started on this journey that I was going to be doing it alone. I want to do it alone. I just had no idea how much I was going to love them, or how all-consuming a parent’s love for a child actually is. It felt good to know that while I carry around all this worry, someone else is here to share it with me. It felt good, just for the moment, not to be alone.”
“You aren’t alone.” He could guarantee that. He loaded the dishwasher.
Elise wiped off the table. “I know. And I’m grateful.”
“So you’re going to stay home tomorrow, right?”
He waited by the sink, expecting her to say no. It would be just like Elise. And there wouldn’t be one damn thing he could do about it.
“Yes, Joe, I’ll stay home.”
Thank God for small favors.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“AHHH!” Elise shot up in bed just before midnight, clutching her bare calf, rubbing, trying to move toes that were completely stiff, tears running down her face. She’d never felt such sharp, immobilizing pain in her life.
“What is it?” Joe was beside her, his voice urgent.
“My leg.” She fell to her side, her upper body writhing, her leg lying inflexibly against the sheet.
His hands were warm as they grabbed her leg. She concentrated on that contact.
“Bend your toes back and forth.”
“I can’t,” she said, and cried out again when he did it for her. Her calf burned from the inside out, and she was sure the muscle had ripped. And then, as quickly as it had come, the pain was gone, leaving her leg limp and weak.
She needed to pull her nightshirt down farther. She stopped wearing shorts to bed when her waist-line had expanded past the point of tolerating the elastic. But she was afraid to move, to reactivate whatever devil had hold of her body.
“What did you do?” She was lying in the middle of the bed, not quite facedown.
“You had a charley horse.” Joe’s voice was calm, reassuring. “If you’d played sports, you’d be painfully familiar with them.”
“You’ve had them before?” Her lips brushed the sheet as she spoke. She wasn’t as afraid of pain if she moved now. It was the man who’d saved her from that momentary hell that she now feared.
Or rather, her sudden reaction to him there, in her bedroom, on her mattress. Again.
“More times than I can count,” he told her, and it took her a second to realize he was still talking about leg cramps. “They aren’t serious, but while they last they’re excruciating. The muscles tighten up and you just have to move them the right way to get them to loosen up. For calves, bending toes back and forth usually does it.”
“But I wasn’t playing a sport.”
“You were standing on the hard tile of the kitchen floor most of the day, carrying around twenty pounds more than your limbs are used to supporting. That’ll do it.”
She nodded into the mattress, holding her breath until he left—now that he surely would be doing so.
His hand came down on her other leg—started moving across the muscles, kneading them gently and she sucked in air. “Just to make sure you don’t get one in this leg as soon as you go back to sleep,” he said, his voice slightly different. Softer. Huskier.
She lay completely still, her leg muscles softening into his touch, her lower stomach tightening. Think leg, she told herself. Relax. No more cramps. The furnace came on in the old house with a thud, and Elise jumped, jerking her leg, and Joe’s hand slid down
her ankle to her foot. He kept it there, massaging her arch and then all five toes.
With tingles speeding through her body, she almost bit into the mattress to keep herself from moaning. Could he tell her insides were squirming with desire again?
Her breasts, swollen and voluptuous, ached to be suckled.
Without a word Joe moved farther up her body, methodically finding every muscle, working each one firmly but gently—over her kneecaps, up her thigh and then around to her hamstrings. Elise bit her lip as long as she could, tried to put herself back in anatomy class, mentally going through each muscle group with him, but it had been too long since she’d met that undergraduate science requirement.
Her loud sigh shocked and then embarrassed her. He didn’t miss a beat, as though he hadn’t heard.
His fingers moved higher, working the top of her thigh, and she could think of nothing but her butt, tightening in anticipation, wondering if he’d massage her there, too. Glutes, they were called, she remembered. Would he touch them?
He passed over her butt to her lower back. But stopped before he’d really begun.
“Let’s get you straightened out and moved up to your pillow,” he said as he slid his hands under her arms to half lift her up the bed. Still mostly on her side, a requirement of her growing belly, Elise settled into her pillow, closed her eyes, willed herself to relax.
And all the while she traveled her body with him, inch by provocative inch, reveling in his current movement, predicting the next. When he moved up once more, just beneath her shoulder blades, would his fingers curve around her sides, touching her breasts?
Please, God. They were aching with need, her nipples budded against the mattress and pillow she was clutching.
Pulling lightly on her exposed arm, he worked her shoulder blade, and then did as much as he could with the other one, passing up to her neck and shoulders.
Elise could feel the knots he found, did her best to breathe into them, accepted the chills that passed through her—and prayed that he’d either stop or touch her more intimately.
Five minutes later, she was on the brink of begging.
“Turn over and I’ll get the front of your shoulders and your other side.”
She rolled onto her back. He continued to rub. Closing her eyes, Elise moved her hand the briefest space and found his thigh, and moved it a bit more, around to his penis.
It was fully engorged.
He kept right on palpating muscles, up and down her free arm, her hands and each finger.
She held on.
He didn’t acknowledge the grip.
But when he set her hand back down on the mattress beside her, his fingers found the edge of her nightshirt and pulled it up.
He was going to kiss her breasts. She just knew it. And couldn’t wait.
The nightshirt stopped around her rib cage. Joe leaned over, not enough to pull out of her grasp, and she heard the click of the lotion container she kept on her nightstand just before the coolness of the liquid spread across her stomach. With a reverence she’d not expected possible, Joe’s hands moved across her stretched skin again and again, lubricating, caressing.
She should have been embarrassed by her size. Instead, she felt the irresistible need to spread her legs.
And right then, from deep inside her, came the tiniest punch.
“What was that?” Joe jumped back out of her reach, snapping his hand away.
With a smile, Elise took hold of the hand he had in the air, brought it back down to her exposed stomach. “It’s one of your nieces or nephews,” she said.
No fatherhood. Only unclehood. She understood that. Was okay with it.
“It is?” He returned the other hand to her stomach, as well. “Will he or she do it again?”
“One or the other of them is at it pretty much all the time now,” she told him softly. “But usually it’s so faint I hardly notice. I’m told it will get much stronger as my pregnancy progresses.”
“Tell him to do it again.” Joe waited.
“Typical kids, they don’t listen to their mama.”
Joe’s gaze raised to hers, held there. “Not this mama.” His voice was almost a whisper. “No kid would dare ignore you, Elise.”
She wasn’t thinking about her kids. Her entire world was filled with the man sharing her bed.
As though he could read her mind, he lowered his mouth to hers.
The kiss was tentative, lips sealed, yet oh so erotic.
Scooting her hips to his thigh, bringing her lower body in as much contact with his as she could, Elise ran her tongue along the seam of his lips.
“We can’t,” he groaned.
“Yes, we can.” She had to. “I’ll bet my blood pressure’s scaling the charts right about now.” She found his penis again, stroked it. “I’ve got this tension tying me up so tightly I can hardly breathe.”
He held his head inches from hers. “Elise—”
“You’ll help me, won’t you, Joe?”
She knew he wanted her—the evidence was impossible to hide. But he was frowning.
“Nothing’s changed between us, I know that,” she whispered. “I’m fine with that. You and me, like this, isn’t permanent. It can’t be. We have too much at stake to risk breaking up with each other. It’s just for now, Joe.”
Still he hesitated. Said nothing. She badly needed to know what he was thinking, but could hardly read his expression in the dim light. And desperation grew.
“I’ve only got six days until twenty weeks,” she said more loudly, trying a chuckle that ended up more of a moan. “Please don’t take too long to make up your mind here.”
Her hand stilled.
JOE KNEW HE WAS SUNK. A strong man, he was capable of many things, but turning down Elise on the few occasions she asked things of him had never been one of them.
Taking the ends of her nightshirt, he raised it slowly, exposing breasts that had grown larger in the two weeks since he’d last seen them.
Grown larger without him. He had an instant when he felt as though he’d been robbed, and then the only thing he felt was a compelling need to find physical oneness with this woman. Now.
He massaged her breasts one at a time, cupping them in both hands, tending to them as he had to the rest of her body, honoring them, honoring her. And when it started to sound as though she was strangling, he bent, supping at first one nipple and then the other, arousing her, arousing himself.
Acting purely on instinct, he moved lower, kissing her stomach, caressing it. Who’d have thought the hard mass could be such a turn-on? “I’ve never made love to an obviously pregnant woman before.”
“I was obviously pregnant two weeks ago.”
He chuckled. Elise was rarely without comeback. He’d always liked that about her.
“I’m not sure what to do—how to go about this.”
“Me, neither, though I know I’m dying to be touched down there.”
Her knees were bent, her legs open. Joe found her with his fingers, faintly at first, drawing one finger around her before finding her core.
She’d found him again, too, and was mimicking his every move. Whatever he did to her, she did to him. His breathing became heavier. He considered the possibilities. And ten minutes later, they came together, their bodies connected, entwined, though he’d never put his hardness inside her.
They both fell asleep, Joe’s fingers still holding her intimately.
ELISE ROLLED OVER when JOE left her bed in the morning, pretty sure he’d kissed her temple before he’d done so. Either that or she’d just dreamed he had. That gave her five to fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom before he hit the shower—depending on how deeply he dozed while his coffee brewed. She’d just close her eyes for another minute or two…
The bathroom door opening woke her more than half an hour later. Crawling out of bed, she made it to the door in time to see his naked back as he entered his room. He still had to put on his shirt and tie. She could make it to the
bathroom and brush her teeth in time to say goodbye.
Not that she’d ever seen him to the door before. She wouldn’t do so today, either, if not for the fact that he was going to be handling the reprimand of one of her employees.
He was talking to someone when she came out. Judging by the professional tone, she didn’t think it was Samantha or Darin.
“I understand.” He was holding his cell to his ear, and he turned his back when she appeared, still in her nightshirt, in the kitchen doorway.
“I understand,” he said again, head bent as he rubbed the back of his neck. He might understand, but he apparently didn’t like what he was hearing.
In dress slacks, a white shirt and black-and-white-striped tie, he was the picture of the stereotypical business executive, standing in her kitchen. While she was wearing a nightshirt.
She’d never lived with a man she’d had sex with. Wasn’t sure of the protocol. But knew that whatever it was, it didn’t apply here. Sex for her and Joe was not an ongoing thing. It was an aberration. A favor between friends.
“I appreciate that,” Joe said now, staring out the window over the kitchen sink.
She sat at the table, stretching her nightshirt down over her knees.
“Keep us in mind if it doesn’t work out.”
Her heart sank. They’d lost a deal. Or a potential one. And she was afraid she knew which one.
“Tell me that wasn’t Michigan Local.”
Carefully, too deliberately, Joe clasped his phone back into the holder on his belt.
“It was. I’m going to work. See you tonight.”
He took his keys out of his pocket and without so much as a wave in her direction, strode from her house.
IT WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED if she’d been at work, Joe thought. Even before they were born, children required all you had to give and then some. All you had to give was never enough.
He didn’t feel calm—or kind—on the drive into the office. Six months of work down the drain. The biggest client he would have ever signed had just that morning gone with his competitor. They’d all had a late dinner the night before.
While he’d been in bed with his pregnant partner.
Merry Christmas, Babies Page 17
