When she made no move to pick it up, Aggie urged the warm teacup into her hands. “You have that look about you. I can more or less look into a woman’s eyes and know if she’s in the family way or not. Saw more than my share when I was midwifing.” She smiled in response to the uncertain expression on MacKenzie’s face. “I wasn’t always a graphic artist. That’s coming back in style, you know, being a midwife.” And then she added with a measure of certainty, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. Not their business.
“Mine, neither,” Aggie continued, “except that I’ve always been the type who liked to know things about pretty much everyone I come in contact with.” Aggie lowered herself into the chair on the opposite side of the oval kitchen table. Shifting, she made herself comfortable. “Guess you could call me a people junkie.” Her smile widened. “Pick up a lot of things that way, too.” Leaning forward, Aggie looked at her pointedly. “Like did you know that a little bit of ginger in your food helps with morning sickness?”
This was news to her. But then, so was the pregnancy. “Ginger? Like in ginger ale?” She’d heard that seltzer water and crackers helped some women. All it did for her was make matters that much worse.
“No, like in the spice.” Aggie got up and went to the pantry, retrieving a small metal container. She placed it on the table beside the teacup. “Sprinkle it on things. It’ll help settle your stomach.” The smile on Aggie’s lips was motherly as her eyes swept over her guest. “This’ll all be behind you soon enough.”
“Or in front,” MacKenzie quipped, looking down at her very flat belly and picturing it distended and rounded out with a baby. She’d never thought much about having a family, but now the matter had been decided for her.
Aggie nodded at her with approval. “Sense of humor even under the gun. I like that.” Reaching over the table, she patted MacKenzie’s hand. “You’ll survive well, MacKenzie. A sense of humor is what sees us through the worst of times.”
MacKenzie didn’t feel all that humorous right now. Thinking about the future made her feel as if she were staring into a deep, dark abyss. “Is that why you want to become a stand-up comedian?”
Aggie’s eyes sparkled again, as if they were hiding a joke all their own. “That, and because I’m funny. Or so people have told me. And it’s something new,” she philosophized, “I like trying new things and new jobs. Keeps you young.”
MacKenzie liked having things certain, liked knowing what tomorrow was going to bring. The unknown obviously didn’t bother Aggie. Part of MacKenzie wished she could be that adventurous. “Well, something must be working because you really don’t look your age. I thought you were in your fifties.”
The compliment brought a genial smile to Aggie’s lips. “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be very close friends, girl.” Aggie nodded at the cup that was still sitting in its saucer. “Now drink your tea while it’s hot.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Picking up her cup, MacKenzie brought it to her lips and drank.
MacKenzie stayed at Aggie’s a great deal longer than she’d thought she would when she’d first crossed the threshold. By the time MacKenzie returned to her apartment, the dinner she’d brought home with her had become stone cold. What there’d been of her appetite had gotten appeased at the other woman’s table. Aggie had given her a small portion of chicken à la king served over steaming rice. Oddly enough, it had been MacKenzie’s favorite thing to eat as a child and she’d said as much to Aggie, who merely smiled at the information.
The older woman had sprinkled some ginger over the serving, mixing it in before placing the plate before her. Aggie had winked and promised that MacKenzie would be a new woman by morning.
MacKenzie had had her doubts, but had eaten the meal with surprising relish.
Finally home in her own apartment, she gathered up the containers of Chinese food and stored them in her refrigerator. After wiping off the tabletop, she went to bed.
Accustomed to tossing and turning, she dropped off immediately.
It was the doorbell that woke MacKenzie, slicing through dreams until it took on shape and form.
Reluctantly opening her eyes, MacKenzie automatically turned toward the clock on the nightstand. As she did, the thought hit her that she’d forgotten to set her alarm. The doorbell had woken her half an hour before she was due to get up.
She wasn’t sure if that was fortunate or not.
She struggled to rouse herself. Who could be at her door at this hour?
Jeff with a change of heart?
MacKenzie bolted upright, throwing the twisted covers off and hurrying into the matching half robe that had been haphazardly thrown on the edge of the covers. Abandoning the slippers that stood waiting for her feet at the foot of the bed, she groggily stumbled her way to the front door.
“You came,” she cried even before she’d finished swinging it open.
The next second, disappointment drenched her.
Waking from a deep sleep had left the remnants of a dream still hovering in her brain. On the other side of her threshold stood a half-naked Quade. Swallowing, she glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
She’d been right about his abdomen. He did have a washboard stomach. As a matter of fact, he had the kind of stomach that caused washboard manufacturers—if there was such a thing anymore—to flock to his doorstep just for a knee-disintegrating look. A pair of frayed, cutoff jeans were hanging on for dear life along hips that were taut and slim. The very sight of which would have sent scores of men rushing to their local gyms, entertaining wild delusions of imitation.
He looked a little taken aback by her greeting. “Yeah, I did,” he acknowledged, his expression all but saying that he wondered why she sounded so excited by his appearance on her doorstep. “There’s still no running water,” he told her in a tone that seemed the closest thing to an apology he’d ever get.
Blinking, she realized that Quade was carrying a large towel besides the small toiletry kit that undoubtedly housed soap and shaving paraphernalia. There was the makings of a seven o’clock shadow on his face, and he was a man in search of a bathroom to make his own.
Quade nodded toward the rear of the apartment. “I was wondering…”
He looked really uncomfortable, she realized. MacKenzie had a feeling that it had taken a great deal for him to approach her. It took no great student of human nature to guess that he wasn’t the kind who liked asking for favors. Probably because he didn’t like being in anyone’s debt, no matter how trivial it was.
MacKenzie stepped back, opening the door wider. “Sure. Come on in.”
He crossed the threshold, then looked back at her. She was trying to hide the disappointment skewering through her. “You weren’t expecting me, were you?”
She pressed her lips together, debating lying, then shook her head. “No.”
“Then that greeting—”
She cut him off before he could ask any questions. She wanted the matter closed. “Was for someone else.” To her surprise, she saw what looked like a smattering of a smile curving his mouth. She was tempted to touch it, just to see if she wasn’t hallucinating and that he was actually standing there. She kept her hands at her sides. “What?”
His smile was soft, sexy. “Looks like I’m not the only one who can be closemouthed if the situation calls for it.”
Quade watched her pull together the ends of her robe. Not that the movement did anything to hide the body beneath. The material was close to translucent, covering a sexy, abbreviated nightgown made of material that almost matched the outer cover. Both stopped tantalizingly across her upper thighs.
For a short woman, she gave the illusion of having long legs. Long, shapely legs that invited the eye to travel farther and the mind to fantasize.
Neither of which he had time for, Quade reminded himself. There was a new frontier to cross and the threads, such as they were, of a life to finally begin to pick up. “I’m not stopping you from taking your shower, am I?”
She glanced at the clock in the kitchen. “I’m not due to get up for about another fifteen minutes,” she assured him.
He received the message loud and clear. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She was finally coming around. It was hard standing so close to him and his naked chest and not being acutely aware of all her senses, even the ones that had been dormant. “You didn’t. I had to get up to answer the door anyway.”
Quade paused, frowning, playing the line over in his mind. “That makes no sense.”
She shrugged and the robe slipped off her shoulder, along with the strap of the nightgown. She tugged both up again.
“Sounded better in my head,” she confessed. “You take your shower. I’ll make coffee for you.”
As he began to leave again, her phrasing caught his attention. “You don’t drink coffee?”
“Tea,” she told him.
He didn’t want her putting herself out for him. Didn’t want that kind of give-and-take relationship between them. It was bad enough that he was forced to use her bathroom.
“Then don’t bother yourself with the coffee. I’m in a hurry anyway. I like giving myself a lot of time when I’m heading somewhere new.”
“Starting a new job?” she guessed.
He had no time to withstand the onslaught of questions he knew was coming, even if he had no one to blame but himself for opening up the floodgates.
Quade tossed a “Yes” in his wake as he hurried off to make use of her bathroom.
She tried not to notice just how low slung the waist-band of his cutoffs actually was and that it threatened to slip down even farther with each movement.
She was so busy trying not to notice, it took her a few minutes to realize that her first stop this morning hadn’t been to commune with the porcelain bowl and that her stomach was not lodged in her throat first thing, the way it had been for the last couple of weeks.
The lack of nausea hadn’t registered itself with her brain until after she’d taken out the box of tea bags for herself.
She stopped, stunned. Waiting for a delayed wave. It didn’t come.
“Son of a gun, it really does work,” she muttered, pleased. The ginger actually worked. Aggie had been right, bless her.
MacKenzie smiled as she took in a deep breath and held it for a moment before releasing it again. It was nice to be able to greet the morning feeling like a human being again instead of something even the cat wouldn’t drag in.
“Thanks again.”
The deep baritone voice seeped into her consciousness a beat after the words were uttered. MacKenzie turned around from the stove where she was preparing breakfast, a real breakfast for a change. French toast with a dusting of confectioners’ sugar.
Quade was standing a few feet away from her, poised to leave. Droplets of water were still evident in his hair and a few were on his chest, bearing silent testimony to the shower he’d just taken. She noted with just the smallest pang that the sexy stubble was gone, but he still wore the cutoffs. The damp towel was slung over his bare shoulder and he had something bunched up in his hand.
Underwear?
Did that mean he was going commando beneath those threadbare shorts of his? Her breath abruptly halted its journey through her lungs.
MacKenzie struggled to keep her mind from going there, but it was too late. She was experiencing a definite reaction around her stomach akin to a cross between an earthquake and a tidal wave.
Delayed morning sickness?
No, this felt more like something was flip-flopping at the pit of her stomach. Probably terrifying the baby, she thought.
It took her a second, maybe two, but she finally found her tongue. MacKenzie did her best to force an easy smile to her lips. “Look, why don’t you stay for breakfast?” She saw the protest rising to his lips and beat him to it using logic. She figured he might like that. “Anything you use to cook your own, you won’t be able to wash and there’s no water to use for your coffee.”
Quade quietly and neatly shot her reasons down one by one, telling himself it had been a mistake to come here. He had done it with great reluctance, but he couldn’t very well show up his first day on the job looking like a hermit who had come out of hiding, even if that was the way he felt inside. And if he was going to use her water to shave, he might as well use it to shower, as well, and try to feel a little more human about the experience that lay ahead of him.
But he drew the line at anything more. “I don’t really eat breakfast and from what I can see, there’s a Star-bucks or something similar located practically every twenty feet in this city.”
MacKenzie looked at him, unfazed. She was not one to give up easily. Living with three brothers had taught her that.
“Difference is, I won’t charge you three dollars and change for a cup,” she told him, already filling the one she’d taken out for him. She pushed the cup and saucer along the counter, moving it right in front of him. “You take it black, don’t you?”
Well, since it was there, staring him in the face, he might as well drink it. He didn’t believe in wasting things. “How did you know?”
She smiled, putting a tea bag into the cup of hot water she’d already poured. “You look like the black-coffee type.”
“Black like my soul?”
Quade had no idea where the words had come from, only that, once spoken, they mirrored what he was feeling. Like his soul was this deep, black hole. Just as it had been before his late wife, Ellen, had come into it.
“I wasn’t going to go that far,” she told him.
Taking the French toast out of the pan and sliding it onto a plate, she sprinkled a tablespoon of confectioners’ sugar over the thick slice. She placed the plate next to his coffee, along with a container of maple syrup with a dancing bee on the label. “So, where’s this new job you’re starting today?”
Normally, he didn’t eat breakfast, just as he’d told her. But the French toast did look good. More than that, it smelled good. Almost as good as she did. Picking up a fork, he sank it into the toast, preferring not to drench the offering in syrup but to enjoy the light sugar taste unobstructed.
“Is that the rate of exchange?” he asked.
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Excuse me?”
“You said you wouldn’t charge me three dollars for coffee,” he reminded her. “I just want to know if questions are what you settled on in exchange for breakfast.”
Taking his first bite, he found that the offering nearly melted on his tongue. And that he was hungry despite what he’d thought.
“Not questions,” MacKenzie corrected smoothly with a soft smile as she made eye contact with him. “Answers.”
He raised one muscular shoulder and let it drop again. She watched in rapt fascination. Up to this point, she’d thought that men who had builds like that were digitally enhanced as they made their way across the entertainment screen.
“My mistake.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
Quade raised his eyes, if not his head. “No, I haven’t.”
After bringing over her tea, MacKenzie sat down on the stool beside his. The breakfast bar was what had been the deciding factor when she’d rented the apartment. She’d fallen in love with it. The bar and the fact that the apartments in the complex all formed an oval, overlooking a very small, very Spanish-looking courtyard. It gave the complex a communal feeling while existing in the middle of a bustling city that reportedly never slept and wasn’t always known as the friendliest of places to an outsider.
The man was nothing if not evasive, she thought. Despite her leading questions, she hadn’t gotten much information out of him. Normally by now, people had given her their life stories. She drew the only conclusion she could from the facts before her.
“Are you a spy?”
Quade nearly choked on his coffee, managing to swallow at the last minute and not embarrass himself. Her query brought to mind tall, darkly handsome men who were deadly
with their hands and attracted impossibly gorgeous women. The image was so far from who and what he was.
“What?”
“A spy,” she repeated. “One of those people sworn to chew a cyanide tablet rather than divulge what they were working on.”
She looked normal enough, he thought, but then she’d said that she was an assistant producer and these entertainment types were usually two or three sandwiches shy of a picnic basket.
He wiped his lips with a napkin. “And, if I’m to follow this analogy, you’re trying to get me to chew on a tablet?”
How had he leaped from point A to point B? “I’m not asking you what you’re working on, Quade.” Even his name had spy possibilities, she thought. “Just a general ‘where.’”
Eyeing her, he took a quick sip of coffee, then set down the cup before returning to the disappearing French toast. “In general, I’m working in New York.”
She laughed, shaking her head. Maybe she had been right about him. He was certainly slippery enough to be a spy. “A little less general than that.”
He’d made use of her shower and she was feeding him, not that he’d asked for the latter. But he supposed he owed her something. Besides, it was no secret what he was doing. It was just that he was an exceptionally private man. More so now that Ellen was gone. “I’m a research physician at Wiley Memorial Research Laboratories.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “You’re a doctor?” She’d never seen a doctor who looked like that. Her guess would have been physical-fitness trainer. Or spy, she thought with a grin.
“Research physician,” Quade repeated. “I never practiced.”
“You wouldn’t have to.” She set down her empty cup. “You look like the type who’d get it right the first time.”
God, she was flirting, she realized suddenly. In her nightgown. Never mind that it was covered with an apron, she was still wearing a nightgown. What was wrong with her?
Abruptly, MacKenzie slid off the stool, making sure to hang onto the hem of her robe as she disembarked. “Um, I’ve got to go get ready before I’m late for the studio,” she murmured, avoiding his eyes. “Let yourself out when you’re finished.”
She’s Having a Baby Page 5
