by Beverly Farr
Belatedly, he realized she was still talking. “... I assumed it was Nigel’s of course, but I didn’t know because I couldn’t remember sleeping with him.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand. Are you telling me you never had sex with Nigel?” Surely he would have known if she was a virgin.
She looked at him with her trusting green eyes. “No. I was waiting for my wedding night. Some of us still do, you know.” She smiled wryly.
Now he had two more reasons to feel guilty.
Not only was she a virgin, he’d gotten her pregnant.
She kept talking, calmly stating the facts. “Nigel says he isn’t the father, so that means I had sex with someone else.”
“Kelly, about the baby,” he interrupted. “I need to tell you --”
“No, let me finish,” she insisted.
Under the circumstances, it seemed the least he could do.
She said, “My thinking is, I must have been raped--”
“No!” The word tore from him.
She continued, “because I know I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, and if I was attacked, then that could explain my driving into a tree, couldn’t it? I’ve read the accident report. The roads weren’t slippery, and my brakes were fine. Maybe I was too upset to see clearly, or maybe I was trying to kill my--”
“Don’t even joke about it.”
“I’m not joking. I’m just trying to make sense of the facts. Because one of these days I’ll have to tell my parents something. I have to cancel the wedding and return all the presents. And with the baby coming,...”
Lars caught her by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Kelly. Just shut up and listen. I’m the father of your baby.”
She laughed bitterly. “Nice try. You must be the one with a head injury.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Lars looked as if she’d shot him.
Kelly immediately regretted her laughter. “You can’t be serious,” she said, but as the silence between them lengthened, she said, “You are serious. Are you telling me we actually made love?”
His pale blue eyes blazed. “Yes.”
She and Lars? Together? It was impossible, but then this had been a day of impossibilities. And she’d never known him to lie to her. She scrambled to her feet, to put distance between them. She needed to think clearly. “But when? Where?”
The lines around his mouth lengthened. “That depends on which time you’re talking about.”
Her voice squeaked, “More than once? Good heavens.” She opened her mouth a few times, but couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Good heavens” again. She paced for a moment, then turned and asked the crucial question, “Why?”
He flinched. But when he spoke, his voice was completely expressionless. “You’d had a fight with Nigel. You were angry. I had the feeling you were proving something by sleeping with me.”
That didn’t sound like her at all. Her eyes narrowed. “Had we been drinking?” Neither of them were big drinkers, but she was searching for a logical explanation.
“You’d had a few.”
That could mean anything. But even if she had been drunk, it was impossible to imagine Lars touching her, kissing her, performing the intimacies that had resulted in a baby.
Had she really slept with Lars? Naked and everything? The thought made her skin tingle with embarrassment. “So why did you do it?”
He hesitated before responding coolly, “I’ve always found you attractive, Kelly.”
Attractive? What kind of an answer was that? She cried, “Do you sleep with every woman you find attractive?” She knew that wasn’t fair. Lars didn’t have a playboy reputation. In fact, for years Rawlins Lighting had been his only love.
He watched her carefully. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”
A good idea. And now she was pregnant. “I can’t believe --” she faltered.
This was Lars, the man she considered one of her best friends. Surely there was something more he wasn’t telling her. She wasn’t the kind of girl to get mad at Nigel and then blithely hop in the sack with Lars.
Or was she?
Head pounding, she sat back down on the cement floor. She hugged her legs and rested her head on her knees. “What have I done?” she asked. “What am I going to do?”
Lars spoke quietly. “Well, you’re not going to marry Nigel in three weeks.”
“No, that’s obvious.” She’d already broken up with him that afternoon. There was a meanness about him she’d never noticed before.
But maybe some of that was justified. After all, she had cheated on him, with Lars, of all people. Lars, who’d never made a pass at her, never flirted, never even looked at her in a sexual way. They were friendly, yes, but she’d always thought he found her immature. She thought he put up with her because he didn’t want to risk upsetting her father. And now it seemed they’d slept together. “I can’t believe ...”
“Would you please stop saying that?” Lars said tightly. “It happened.”
She’d offended him. She reached out to touch his arm. “I’m sorry, I never --”
“So am I,” he said tersely. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve made a baby.”
Yes, the baby. The baby was the important factor in this confusion. “I want to do the right thing,” she said slowly, watching his face for his reaction. “We’ll work out some sort of custody.”
“No.”
No? “Does that mean you want me to get an abortion?”
He paled. “No. Absolutely not. But I don’t want to shuttle the baby back and forth like an unwanted parcel.”
She knew his parents had divorced when he was a child. Had he grown up feeling unloved and unwanted? “Are you suggesting we get married?”
He shook his head. “Too late. We already are.”
“Good heavens.” Had the entire world gone mad, or just her? “Next you’re going to tell me you’re secretly an assassin for the CIA.”
He was confused by her jump in logic. “What are you talking about?”
She laughed shrilly. “Why not? And maybe I’m not really Kelly Rawlins. I’m a Martian in disguise.”
He put his arm around her. “Kelly, shh,” he said. “It’s not that bad.”
She pushed him away angrily. “Don’t tell me what to feel. First I find out I’m going to have a baby. Then I find out I’ve been cheating on my fiancé. And now I have a ready-made husband. And I don’t remember any of it. How could so much happen in five days?”
Lars dropped his hands to his sides. “I’ve wondered that myself.”
Lars didn’t sound happy, but then he’d just learned he was going to have a baby, too.
For a minute, they said nothing, each lost in thought. Kelly stood. She held out her hand for Lars. “Come on, husband,” she said wryly, putting emphasis on the last word. “You’ve got some explaining to do.”
“Where are we going?” he asked, as she walked towards the front door.
“For a walk,” she said. “I could use the fresh air, and I think it would be better to hash this out on neutral territory.”
#
Lars held the door open for her as she stepped outside. Maybe she was right, and the fresh air would clear their thoughts.
Kelly’s studio was located on the outskirts of an older residential area in Dallas. They walked along the sidewalk; passing a neighbor’s open garage door. Two teenagers, with radio playing, worked on a truck engine. Other than that, the night air was quiet and still.
He held out his hand, and after hesitating just a second, she took it.
Her hand was soft and warm in his. This was a good sign. In his mind, their situation wasn’t completely unsalvageable if she was willing to hold his hand. “I need to understand those missing days,” she said quietly.
He knew she was struggling to accept what he’d already told her, and he appreciated her willingness to listen. “How much do you remember?”
Kelly was quiet as she thought back. “The end o
f February. Maybe the twenty fifth or sixth? I was working late at my studio. That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up in the hospital.”
Lars knew Kelly slept odd hours, often working through the night and then sleeping all day. That was one of the things she and Nigel had in common.
He watched her face, wondering how much he should tell her. He’d stick to the truth, he decided, but avoid the unnecessarily painful details. “Well, I didn’t see you until Friday night at the club. You were with Brenda and two other of your friends. You told me you had broken your engagement with Nigel.”
Kelly looked at him from the corner of her eyes. “Well that’s one thing in my favor.” she said dryly. “At least I didn’t sleep with you when I was engaged to another man. Did I tell you why we’d split up?”
“Not then, but later you told me he’d been unfaithful.”
Kelly nodded. “I see,” she said finally. “So you gave me a shoulder to cry on.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Her eyes narrowed and she dropped his hand. “Are you saying we did it then?”
“No. We made out at my condo, but that was it.” With hindsight, he knew that was when he should have taken her home. He knew she’d been drinking, and he shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation. But ultimately, he did.
She frowned. “But how did we jump from making out to getting married?”
She’d been the one to bring it up, but he didn’t think she’d believe him. Looking back, he had a difficult time believing it himself. He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d said, “Prove it.”
“How?”
“Marry me.”
“I suggested that we fly to Reno and get married.”
She squeaked, “And I agreed?”
Lars knew he shouldn’t be offended by her reaction. He knew what she felt for him. She never would have agreed to marry him if she hadn’t been distraught.
She shook her head. “Sorry. Obviously I agreed or we wouldn’t be in this mess. Then what happened?”
“We got into Reno early Saturday morning. We got married at a little roadside chapel and went back to the hotel.”
She held up her hand. “Spare me the details. I can guess the rest.”
He’d thought that she was as eager as he, as they’d undressed each other, scattering clothes on the floor. But now, he didn’t know what she had been feeling.
She asked, “Why didn’t we call our parents and let them know?”
“We planned to surprise them when we came back. Remember I still had to go to work on Monday.”
She folded her arms in front of herself defensively. “I’m a little offended that you wouldn’t even take a day off.”
He didn’t rise to the bait.
She persisted, “So if everything was so wonderful, why didn’t we fly back and tell everyone?”
Good question, and he dreaded giving her the answer. He took a deep breath. “Sunday morning, you slept in.” He frowned at the understatement. She’d slept seventeen hours, hardly moving, refusing to wake. Alarmed, he was preparing to call the hotel doctor, when she suddenly awoke and took a shower. She spent more than an hour in the shower, which had surprised him, but he didn’t know if that was normal for her. Later, he’d wondered if she’d been trying to scrub away his touch.
He continued. “When you woke, you came to your senses. You said you still loved Nigel and that sleeping with me was your way to pay him back.”
Her eyes widened. “I did all that out of revenge?”
He remembered her leaning over the bed, methodically slamming her clothes into her suitcase. I’m sorry, Lars. It’s been fun, but we both know this was a mistake. There had been no tears, no excuses, just his beloved Kelly tearing his world apart. He said quietly, “I don’t know what your motives were. I’m just telling you what happened.”
Kelly stood still for a moment, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Oh, Lars, I’m sorry.”
He didn’t want her apologies. “We agreed that you’d file for an uncontested divorce and no one would be the wiser.”
“But then I came home, wrecked my car, and forgot to file.”
“Yes.” And he’d run off to Boston, not knowing she was hurt. He couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d stayed in Dallas. What if he’d been the one to greet her in the hospital, instead of Nigel? If he’d told her the truth then, could he have convinced her that they were happily married after a whirlwind courtship? And as long as she didn’t remember, she need never have known that she’d changed her mind.
But he would have known. And he couldn’t trap her into staying married to him with a lie.
Kelly’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “You must have been surprised to get my wedding invitation.”
Her smile wrenched his heart, reminding him of what they had shared and what he’d lost. No matter how bad things got, she kept her sense of humor. “That’s putting it mildly.”
#
“Kelly Henderson. Mrs. Lars Henderson.” Kelly addressed her reflection as she brushed her teeth that night, but saying the words didn’t make it seem any more real.
How could she have married Lars? She’d loved Nigel, hadn’t she? After today’s unpleasantness, she wondered if she’d ever really known Nigel, or if she’d merely seen what she wanted to see.
She’d found his accent intriguing. The most commonplace statements seem more clever or romantic when said with a British accent. Nigel also had a fun, creative career as a musician. She’d been enchanted, and hadn’t looked beyond the surface.
That still didn’t explain her sleeping with Lars. She’d always liked him and admired him, but she’d never thought of him as a lover.
Or had she subconsciously? Today she’d been very aware of him physically, reaching out to take his hand, wanting him near her.
But what did he want? How did he feel? Tonight, when he’d told her what had happened that weekend in March, he sounded as if he were making a factual presentation to the Board of Directors. She had no idea how he felt about it, other than his saying he found her attractive. Did he love her or had he offered to marry her because he felt sorry for her? That sounded like the Lars she knew. He probably thought he was being chivalrous.
Who did he think he was, some knight in shining armor, riding to the rescue?
She didn’t want to be rescued; she just wanted to understand what had happened. At least his annoyance that morning made sense now. He thought she was getting married to Nigel while she was still married to him.
Could she have slept with Lars out of revenge? That didn’t mesh with the person she knew she was. She’d never use a friend so callously, or had she? Nothing made sense.
Kelly sat on the edge of her four poster bed. Two days ago, her biggest concerns had been getting Nigel’s wedding ring engraved and sending out an extra invitation to her Aunt Lily whose invitation had been lost in the mail.
Now she had to worry about her unborn child who might grow up with estranged parents. Could she and Lars build a future together? Should they?
She rolled over in bed and hugged her pillow, remembering Lars saying good night tonight. He’d given her a hug like old times, and kissed her forehead. For an instant she’d been tempted to reach up and bring her lips to his, as if a kiss would make everything better.
“Everything is going to be fine,” he’d whispered against her hair. She wanted to believe him, but she was a realist. There were too many unanswered questions.
They still hadn’t decided what they’d tell her mother, whether they’d live together, whether they’d even stay married. But she knew Lars. She trusted him. Together they’d do what was best for the baby.
#
“Oh, don’t mind me, Claire,” Kelly said breezily as she pushed open the door to her father’s office. “I’ll just pop in and tell him I’m here.”
Lars and her father startled and turned with guarded expressions as they saw her.
“Excuse me, I didn’t realize you were in a meeting,” she began, then looked between Lars and her father. Her father looked worried. “You’ve told him,” she accused.
Lars stood straight and looked her in the eye. “He already knew we were married.”
“Since when?” she interrupted, voice rising. Did everyone know everything before she did?
“Since yesterday,” he said calmly. “As for the baby, I told him about that today.”
How could she have ever thought she and Lars were friends? He would always put her father and Rawlins Lighting first. “How could you?” she demanded shrilly.
“Don’t blame Lars,” her father interrupted. “I guessed, and he merely confirmed my suspicions.” He walked over and gave her a big hug. “Sweetheart, don’t worry. I’m thrilled. You know your mother and I have always liked Lars and to think of you two having a baby together, is wonderful.”
Yes, she’d known her father would be pleased. All of a sudden he had Lars as a son-in-law, with a potential grandson on the way. The Rawlins dynasty could continue. She stepped out of his embrace. “So what have the two of you been doing -- planning out my life? Have you named the baby yet? Started the college fund?”
Lars put his hand on her arm. “Kelly, it’s not what you think.”
She pulled her arm free and spun around to face him. “Then you tell me what it is.”
Her father cleared his throat. “I think I’ll leave you two lovebirds together,” he said diplomatically, and left his office, closing the large oak doors behind him.
“Lovebirds?” she repeated, hands on her hips. “What have you been telling him?”
“What else is he supposed to think? Do you really want me to tell him we conceived a baby in the heat of passion and now regret it?”
His words cut through her. She had wanted to know what he was feeling, and now she knew. “Of course not,” she said quickly. “But I thought we were going to talk more before we told my parents.”
“We’re talking now,” he said reasonably.
She gritted her teeth. “No one is going to force me to do anything I don’t want. Not you. Not my father.”
