He exited the store five minutes later carrying a large paper bag, which he slid into the backseat. I could hear the clink of bottles, so I knew my Irishman had purchased the items to get him blissfully inebriated. And of course, I couldn’t let the moment go. “Let me guess. No condoms?” I asked.
His eyes were stormy as he glared at me. “If you were smart, you’d shut up for the rest of the ride home.”
“Why?” I challenged with the tip of my chin. “Are you going to hit me?”
I only thought Devlin was mad before my flippant comment. His face drew up into a cold stone statue as his green eyes blazed. He leaned towards me, backing me up against the seat. “How the fuck are you going to say something like that to me?”
I was reminded in an instant of everything that had happened with Darcy and his mother. Immediately I knew I had crossed the line. I gulped, licked my lips and shrank against the seat. “I’m sorry,” I said, because it was the only thing I could say.
“You’re goddamned right you are,” he snapped before he gunned the car out of the parking lot. I didn’t say anything else till we got to the apartment garage, where he remained seated in the running car, staring ahead, as he waited for me to exit. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“Aren’t you coming upstairs?” I finally asked.
His jaw clenched. “No.”
“Devlin, if it’s about what I said–”
“Go upstairs, Coralie,” he practically hissed between clenched teeth. “Now.”
His anger intimidated me. My voice was small when I asked, “Where are you going?”
He took a deep breath before he turned to face me. “We need a little space to think.”
Since he was already mad, I figured my next comment couldn’t make things worse. “So you’re going to run away again?”
His jaw clenched. “If you’re so worried about people running away from you, maybe you should stop pushing them away.”
“Dev, I said that I was sorry–”
“And I said to go upstairs,” he cut me off with his cold, clear command. “Now.”
We stared at each other for long seconds in the car before I finally gathered my purse and exited. He peeled out of the parking lot, leaving behind the smell of burning rubber. Since I was already choking on the acidic taste of remorse, the smell instantly made me gag. I barely made it to trash receptacle beside the elevators before I lost my dinner. After days of feeling queasy, the stress had finally taken its toll. Apparently the stress of being turned into a brood mare was enough to finally tip me over the edge. If the men in my life had my way, I’d likely be pregnant by the end of the year.
It made me heave even more violently into the trashcan. Pregnant. I couldn’t imagine.
Me.
With a baby.
How ridiculous.
I couldn’t even imagine being pregnant. Months on end of having one’s body hijacked, to be stretched out and run through the wringer, with stretch marks, backaches, and hemorrhoids; vomiting for months on end…
Slowly I stood upright, staring down at the trashcan. Though I had vomited twice, I still felt queasy. I’d been stressed before, but it had never made me physically sick before. And it was pretty clear that I was physically sick.
As I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I wondered suddenly if our argument was a moot point.
What if I was already pregnant with Masters Baby #1 and I didn’t even know it?
That was how it worked, wasn’t it? Thirty days, that was all it took. Just one little oopsie and everything could change–and I wouldn’t even know it until it was too late.
The thought dogged me all the way upstairs to our apartment. Our apartment, I thought with a sneer. What a load of crap. It was his apartment and I was just bunking there. It had never been our apartment. It had been his apartment, his bachelor pad: his lair. Was it possible that we conceived a baby in the same bed where he had fucked countless women before me?
The thought sent me running to the bathroom the minute I stepped inside the door. As I sprawled on the pristine tile next to a sparkling white commode, leaning against it, my body–and my mind–in turmoil, I began to do the math in my head. I had begun sleeping with Devlin a month before, and I had yet to get my period, even though I had started a new pack of pills.
It wasn’t the first time in the year I had been taking them that I’d been late, starting a period after I began a new pack. I had just started the second week of active pills that Sunday, so that meant I was nearly twenty days late.
How the fuck did this happen without me noticing? Oh right. My life had been tossed like a salad from the moment I met Devlin Masters.
Lucy’s good-natured ribbing about my whirlwind romance lingered in my ear. Maybe it was time to cue the llama.
I dragged myself to the bed, where I wilted just like a used rag. I felt hot and miserable and my tummy let me know with every gurgle how displeased it was. I could probably call Devlin, tell him what was going on, and he’d run back to the house to take care of me.
But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to say anything yet. I mean, I really didn’t even know anything yet. And what would I say if I did know, either way? I wasn’t ready for kids, and I was pretty sure I’d never want four. I had too many things I wanted to do for myself first. This clothing line with Darcy was only the tip of the iceberg. I wanted to take over the world, run a business, travel and enjoy my life. I could never see myself waddling around with four tiny ducklings chasing after me. I didn’t know how to relate to babies, or kids in general. I’d never been around many, and what few I had been around (Aubrey, for instance,) had a legion of nannies to manage them.
Hell, I’d never even babysat as a kid.
I gently placed my hand on my stomach. Was there a baby in there now? It was unthinkable. I was only twenty-three, practically a kid myself. I still had so much left to do.
“You could take care of it,” the angel on my shoulder whispered, always the practical voice of reason. For once in the past month I agreed with her. This could only change my life if I let it. I was a woman of the twenty-first century. I got to plan my family and manage my reproductive choices for myself.
“But what about Devlin?” the annoying devil on my shoulder asked. This wouldn’t be just any baby. That would be Devlin Masters’ baby, a baby he so clearly wanted. An accident like this would fit neatly into his five-year plan.
I shook my head, which only made me even dizzier. This was all absolutely absurd. I was on birth control. There was no way I was pregnant.
Okay, fine. Maybe there was, like, less than a one-percent chance I might be pregnant. Birth control wasn’t foolproof. Certain things affected its effectiveness, like skipping a pill or simply not taking the pill at the same time every single day.
I hadn’t technically missed a day, but I definitely had a more haphazard schedule in Vegas, where each and every one of my routines were scrubbed in lieu of having sex at any opportunity with my sexy escort. I could probably count how many times we’d done the dirty deed over how many times I actually took my pill on time, sometimes taking the pill at night rather than in the morning.
Exactly how many hours constituted a missed dose? That thought sent me running back to the toilet.
I was miserable by the time dawn peeked through the window the next morning, where I roused to discover that Devlin had not made it home yet. I checked my phone but there were no messages. He had made absolutely zero contact.
It all made me feel even worse as I dragged myself from the bed to get ready for work.
Whether it was from nerves or other things, I was miserable as I forced myself through my morning routine. I ached all over; I was both dizzy and queasy, so much so that I couldn’t even swig any juice. Worse, I had been zapped of all energy. I felt as though I was trudging through mud just to walk across the room.
Is this what I had to look forward to for the next nine months?
I shook my head. I still wasn’t su
re if I was– … if there was anything wrong with me. I still couldn’t say the word, even internally. It was all too much. Too many changes, too quickly. I was newly married to man I barely knew. I was virtually displaced from the only home I’d ever really known. Now… a baby?
I shook my head again. Nope. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even think about it.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it either, particularly when I pulled my package of birth control pills out of the drawer in the bathroom. I stared at the little plastic square that still contained half of the pills that remained for the rest of June and into July. I didn’t know what kind of damage these pills could do if I was somehow already pregnant, but suddenly it was all I could think about. I took a deep breath before I closed the package and stuffed it back in the drawer without withdrawing any pills. I’d have to talk to a doctor, clearly.
I muscled through the rest of my morning ritual and headed to work.
Devlin wasn’t in his office when I arrived. From his empty parking space, I deduced that he wasn’t at the store at all. I decided not to think about that either. Since it was month’s end, and we were taking off Friday for Lucy’s wedding, I had a lot to get done.
But even with this workload, I couldn’t stop thinking about Devlin and the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, miniscule, barest, vaguest, less-than-one-percent-iest chance that I might, indeed, be carrying his child. Every time I glanced at my silent phone, or paused over my waste basket just in case I couldn’t keep water down, I was reminded, yet again, about my predicament.
Oliver didn’t make things any better when he appeared at my office around noon, popping his head in to say, as if absolutely nothing had ever changed, “Want to grab some Thai food for lunch?”
I instantly grimaced. The thought of spicy food made my stomach instantly rebel. “No, thanks.”
He smiled even more jovially as he closed the door behind him and walked to my desk. “Come on. Your hubby’s out of town. Why eat alone if you don’t have to?”
My eyes shot to him. “What did you say?”
He sat on the corner of my desk. “I said, ‘why eat alone–”
“I heard that,” I snapped. Then, even though it physically pained me to do so, “Devlin’s out of town?”
Oliver chuckled. “Yeah. He’s consulting with some designer in Las Vegas. You didn’t know?”
I looked back at my computer. Vegas meant Darcy, which only meant one thing. Devlin had gotten so angry with me he’d gone to visit his sister, and since she was, in fact, the designer he always wanted to pitch to Father, he could conveniently dismiss his absence as business. “I’m too busy for lunch, Oliver. You’ll have to find someone else to eat with today.”
Though my comment was dismissive, he didn’t budge an inch. “You okay, CC?” he asked softly. “You look like hell.”
“Thank you so much,” I replied without looking at him.
“Seriously. You need to eat or something. You look absolutely pallid.”
Or something. “I’m fine,” I insisted, though I could feel my chin tremble as I said it. That was new, too. And I hated it.
I hated absolutely all of it.
I especially hated that my new husband was nearly three hundred miles away, forcing me to experience all these horrible things alone.
Maybe I’ll just get my tubes tied, I thought to myself. Whether I was… whether there was something wrong with me or not, I’d just get myself fixed. Spayed, I thought with a smirk. Like a pound puppy.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the angel on my shoulder said. “You’re a show dog. Bred to breed.”
I waited until after Oliver left to call Devlin. He surprised me by picking up on the second ring. “Hello, Coralie.”
Just the way he said my name made my whole body tremble. Despite it all, I missed him and I wanted him.
I loved him.
“Oliver tells me you went to Vegas,” I said softly.
He chuckled humorlessly. “I’ll just bet. How long did it take him to pounce on that little opportunity?”
“He invited me to lunch. I declined,” I added, just so he’d know. He said nothing for a long moment, so I kept talking. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to Vegas, Dev?”
“Spur of the moment decision,” he answered. “I didn’t know myself until I hit the Interstate.”
“But why leave at all? I don’t understand.”
He sighed. “I told you. We need some time to think.”
“So you just run away to Las Vegas? How does that fix anything, Devlin?” Again, he said nothing. “We don’t need to think. We need to talk. We’re in this marriage together. You don’t get to keep making these decisions on your own. As your wife, I want to be your partner, not your subordinate.”
“And yet you can’t seem to trust me,” he pointed out. “I thought you understood the kind of man I was, but I’ve done nothing but jump through your hoops since we got back to Los Angeles.”
“Ditto,” I snapped. “I’m the one who has given up my home to move into your place. I virtually gave up my job to you, when you were the one to take over expanding our sizes. And now you want me to give up my body to have a horde of children we never even discussed before? It’s the only thing I have left, Dev.”
“You have me,” he said softly. “I thought we could handle anything. Apparently you don’t agree.”
“Don’t twist my words around, Devlin,” I said. “It’s more than that and you know it. You expect me to just follow along silently, blindly trusting you with every decision, and if I don’t, you treat it like it’s some deal-breaker.”
“It is a deal-breaker, Coralie.”
A vice closed around my heart. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that a marriage without trust is dead, and you can’t bring yourself to trust me. Where does that leave us?”
“How is my not wanting to turn my vagina into a clown car some demonstration of my not trusting you?”
He sighed, as if put upon to spell it out for me. “What I say to your father has more to do with his expectations than mine, Coralie. Don’t you know that by now?”
“So you’re playing him,” I said.
“Yes,” he admitted, openly with no remorse. It only confused me further.
“So you don’t want four kids?”
“Until I met you I never even knew I wanted to get married, much less have any kids at all,” he admitted at last. “And we’ve got plenty of time to figure all that out. But whether we have twenty kids or none at all, the most important part was that we would be together. I needed you to trust that we would be okay either way.”
“Of course I trust that,” I said.
“Do you?” he challenged softly. “Seems to me that you spend an awful lot of time looking behind at what you’ve lost, instead of forward to what you might gain. You see each and every step forward as a threat, simply because you don’t have control over it. As long as you’re holding onto you, Coralie, you’ll never truly be able to believe in and fight for us.”
I opened my mouth. Here was where I told him that I was late for my period, that I might be pregnant, that we might be having a baby whether we were ready for it or not. But my throat closed and no words escaped at all. Now that I knew he had simply talked about having kids quickly for my father’s sake, I no longer knew if my possible oopsie would be greeted with excitement, like it was good news.
It was entirely possible he’d be just as freaked out as I was.
“I’m coming back on Friday,” he continued. “I’m bringing Darcy to meet your father. She has several designs ready, and I’ve already lined up some models.”
I nodded, though I so didn’t care by that point. My lifelong goal to get my kinds of clothes into Cabot’s came a distant second to the only question that really mattered. “And what about us, Dev?”
He answered softly but firmly. “That’s really up to you, isn’t it? You’re absolutely right. You are my wife, not my subordina
te. By that same respect I am your husband, not your enemy. You can’t keep treating me like one.” Before I could argue the point, he pressed on. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to justify your existence, Coralie, to be so dirt poor you have to play someone else’s game just to survive. I’ve spent my whole life playing that game, trying to prove to the world that I fucking matter, especially to people like you and your father and Oliver,” he added hatefully. “Frankly I’m tired of fighting to join your club. I’m not wasting another ounce of energy proving anything to anyone, especially my bride, who should know me better than anybody.”
“Then why don’t I?” I asked.
“You know,” he mused, “I keep asking myself that same question. Goodbye, Coralie.”
The call ended before I could ask how final that goodbye actually was.
CHAPTER NINE
The rest of that Wednesday afternoon truly did feel like crawling over a hump. I felt even more miserable after the call ended. Never one to miss an opportunity, Oliver made it a point to come to my office almost every twenty minutes for this reason or that. It all wore even harder on me. By four o’clock I was done in by all the stress and all the worry.
“Let me drive you home,” Oliver offered and I shook my head while I gathered my things.
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
I made it exactly three steps from my desk before I swooned. I would have collapsed had Oliver not sprung across the room to catch me. “You are not fine,” he said as he helped me into a chair. “Let me call the doctor.”
“No!” His eyes met mine, surprised by the sharpness of my answer. I took a deep, steadying breath. “It’s just the flu. I’m sure I’ll be okay. I just need to go home and get some rest.”
Oliver nodded. “Fine. But I’m driving you.”
“Oliver…¸” I started, but he wrapped a strong arm around me to help me to my feet.
“I wasn’t asking permission, CC. You can barely walk across the room, there’s no way you can drive. And I’m not going to answer to your father or your husband if you bang up your car, or worse.”
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