State Secrets

by Linda Lael Miller

  Holly swallowed hard. “Are all the choices mine?” she ventured softly.

  David met her eyes directly. “Actually, no. If you are pregnant, the child is mine, too.”

  At least he didn’t question that. Holly sighed and knotted her hands together in her lap.

  He pried one free and held it tightly. “I’m sorry, Holly,” he said in a voice so low that Holly had to strain to hear him. “I wanted you so badly that I didn’t stop to ask if you were protected.”

  Again Holly sighed. She couldn’t help being struck by his willingness to take responsibility so readily. “I wasn’t taking the pill. I…I wasn’t sleeping with anyone and—”

  “It’s all right, Holly.”

  “It isn’t all right!” she argued sharply. Then, regretting her outburst, she struggled to take control of her emotions again, to lower her voice. “I’m single, David! And as much as I love Toby, raising him alone isn’t easy! How will I manage two children?”

  His thumb stroked the length of her fingers. “You would have the baby, then?”

  She stared at him, her eyes wide. “Of course I would,” she whispered.

  “Thank God,” he muttered, looking away again. Holly saw a touching struggle for composure going on in his face and loved him desperately for it.

  “I’m scared, David,” Holly confessed after a long, painful silence.

  He pulled her close and held her against the hard curve of his shoulder. “Me, too,” he said hoarsely. “Me, too.”

  The marriage proposal that Holly both hoped for and dreaded was evidently not forthcoming. David got up off the couch as Toby came in, blurting out, “Geez, David, your place in fantastic!”

  I would have had to say no anyway, Holly said to herself, searching for comfort within. It’s a good thing he didn’t ask me again. It’s a good thing.

  But if it was such a good thing, another part of Holly wondered, why was it that she had to turn her face away to hide a new crop of despairing tears?

  I can’t panic here, David thought as he pulled a plate of cold pizza from the refrigerator and slid it into the microwave oven. I’ve got to remain calm.

  Toby sat at the table, looking up at him with trust and liking shining in his face. For the millionth time, David thought how much he would like to raise this kid, fly model airplanes with him and root for him at Little League ball games.

  And the other child, the child that might be born—

  He couldn’t think about that child, he didn’t dare. If it turned out that Holly wasn’t pregnant after all, it was going to be the worst disappointment of his life. No, whatever he did, he had to keep his head and go slowly and patiently.

  Patience, hell, David decided. He was going to walk into that living room, get down on his knees and beg Holly Llewellyn to marry him.

  When he got there, she was gone. After a moment of alarm, he heard her in the bathroom, throwing up.

  And he had never loved her more.

  14

  There was no way Holly could wait until Monday to find out whether or not she was going to have a baby, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to put in an appearance at a hospital emergency room, either. Was there such a thing as an emergency pregnancy?

  Holly’s hands tightened on the steering wheel of the car. Beside her, the seat belt drawn across his small body, Toby slept peacefully. He’d fallen asleep at David’s, and David had wanted them both to stay…

  Holly pulled the car to a stop in front of an all-night drugstore and looked back at the huge cylindrical building towering against the night sky. The lights of David’s condo burned like sweet beacons, pulling at her. God, how she’d wanted to stay. How she’d wanted to fall into David’s arms, David’s bed.

  She let her forehead rest against the steering wheel. Even now, it was all she could do not to go back, carrying Toby in her arms as David had carried him down to her car, and ask if he might not have room in his life for two—perhaps two and a half—more people.

  But Holly couldn’t do that, of course. Not until she knew what she truly felt and what she truly wanted. A baby might be the world’s oldest reason for getting married; it was also the world’s worst. And besides, David had not mentioned marriage again.

  Grimly, Holly got out of her car and locked it, then hurried into the drugstore. There, she bought a home pregnancy test.

  At home, she awakened Toby and half ushered, half carried him inside. “We should have stayed at David’s,” he yawned out as he groped his way up the stairs.

  “Right,” Holly said, smiling even though she was ready to cry. The paper bag containing her pregnancy test rattled a little in her hand.

  “He has a hot tub,” Toby argued sleepily. “Right in his bedroom.”

  “That clinches it,” Holly teased. “A man with a hot tub in his bedroom is a person to be reckoned with.”

  A hot tub in his bedroom, she reflected as she went into the kitchen to check the answering machine and have one last cup of coffee. Or was it to put off taking that drugstore test and finding out whether or not she really was pregnant?

  She poured a cup of cold coffee and put it in the microwave to heat. There was one message on the machine, from Elaine, if it could be called a message. Her friend sounded cryptic and excited and hesitant, all at once, but she hadn’t really said anything.

  With a sigh, Holly took her coffee from the microwave, was instantly nauseated by the smell of it and poured it down the sink. Then, resolutely, she snatched up the innocuous little bag that seemed to contain her, Toby’s and David’s fate, and she marched up the stairs.

  “The test was positive,” Elaine echoed with a sigh, her hands clenched tight around her coffee cup. “Well, Holly, clue me in—is that awful news or are we talking balloons and noisemakers here?”

  Throughout the long, lonely Sunday just past, Holly had agonized over that very question. And she hadn’t been able to come up with a clear answer. “I feel panicstricken,” she confessed. “I also feel like shouting for joy.”

  “Have you told David?”

  Holly had reached for the telphone a thousand times on Sunday, for her car keys a thousand more. But in the end, she had not been able to face David. She was too afraid of leaning on him, too afraid of needing him for the wrong reasons. And too afraid, when she could bring herself to face it, that he would either reject her outright or offer to marry her for the sake of the baby.

  “No,” she said finally.

  “I won’t give you the he-has-a-right-to-know speech, Holly,” Elaine replied, her voice gentle. “I don’t think you need that right now.”

  “I’ve given it to myself a hundred times.” She paused and assessed her friend. “You have something to tell me, don’t you?” she prompted, remembering the brief, disjointed message Elaine had left on the machine over the weekend.

  Elaine’s pretty face seemed a little drawn. “This is a lousy time to bring it up, but yes, I do have something to tell you. I’ve been offered a fantastic job, Holly—an editorial position with a regional magazine.”

  Holly knew what was coming then, and though she would hate losing Elaine, she couldn’t help being happy for her. It was the kind of job her friend had always wanted, the kind of job she had been trained for. “That’s wonderful, Elaine,” she said softly.

  Elaine’s wide green eyes lifted to Holly’s face. “You’re not angry?”

  “You were the best assistant anybody could have hoped to have, Elaine. But you’ve outgrown this job. It’s time for a change.”

  “I’ll stay until the new book is indexed,” Elaine offered, and though she was smiling, there were tears shimmering in her eyes.

  “No need. I can do that myself. You just go out there and set local publishing on its ear!”

  Elaine laughed and sniffled, both at the same time. “To think I dreaded this so much. Poor Roy—I cried and fretted all weekend, I was so sure you would be upset. That offer couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

  Holly sighe
d. “I’m not sure I agree, Elaine. The truth is, I think it might be time for my life to take on a new direction, too.”

  Elaine’s eyes widened. “What are you saying, Holly?”

  “I seem to be making the decision even as we talk, but thinking about it, I realize that I’ve wanted to make several changes for a very long time. I hate traveling so much, for one thing, having to leave Toby behind, and, well, cookbooks aren’t much of a challenge anymore. I’d like to find out if I can write something different, Elaine. Something completely different.”

  “Such as?” Elaine prodded with a genuine interest that touched Holly and gave her courage.

  “Maybe a novel,” she blurted out bravely.

  “Wow!” Elaine beamed. “And I thought you were going to resign yourself to motherhood!”

  “Motherhood is wonderful, Toby has already proven that beyond any shadow of a doubt. But I know I need something more. Is that terrible?”

  “Of course it isn’t terrible. But,” Elaine paused, turning her coffee mug in an idle circle, “I’m still old-fashioned enough to think that kids need a father as well as a mother. Holly, are you going to marry David?”

  An awkward silence fell. “You know that he gave me a ring at Christmas, I suppose,” Holly ventured after a time.

  Elaine all but smirked. “I guessed as much. After all, I was the one who hid his packages in the tree so you wouldn’t fly mad and send them back in the next mail.” She paused, then frowned, her eyes on Holly’s left hand. “But I don’t see a diamond.”

  “I gave it back,” Holly confessed brokenly. “I was so angry with him, so hurt over that whole deception. And then Craig’s arrest—”

  “You’ve dealt with all that now?”

  Holly sighed. “I thought I had. I love David so much, Elaine. I think I have from the first. And the more I saw him, the less those things seemed to matter.”

  “So what’s the problem now?”

  “There are several problems, actually. I don’t know whether David even wants to marry me now. And I’m wondering how much of my—my caring for him is really caring and how much is panic at the idea of having a baby all by myself.”

  Elaine looked exasperated. “The solution is simple, Holly. You need time to think, time to get your head together, as the kids say. I mean, with all that’s happened to you in the past few months, how can you expect to have a handle on everything?”

  Holly tangled her fingers in her hair as if to pull it out by the roots. “Think! How can I think, Elaine? That man sends me into fits of confusion every time I see him.”

  “Then don’t see him for a while,” Elaine said flatly. “Call a time-out. Give yourself a chance to catch your breath.”

  “That might be easier said than done,” Holly fretted, lifting her own coffee cup to her mouth. She felt her stomach leap at the smell and set the cup back down without taking a sip.

  Her grimace made Elaine grin. “Everything is easier said than done,” she agreed, patting Holly’s hand. “But what the hell?”

  “Yeah,” Holly replied with a wry arch of one eyebrow. “What the hell?”

  The two women spent the rest of that day determining what had to be done to wrap up Holly’s lucrative career as a cookbook author. There was one more set of classes to teach at the department store and the manuscript on Middle Eastern cooking had to be edited and then indexed. The newspaper column could be stopped with a month’s notice.

  Elaine had already gone home, taking a copy of the new manuscript with her, when the telephone rang. Holly drew a deep breath and answered it with a hello meant to sound cheerful. Except it came out a little hollow.

  “Did you see your doctor?” David demanded without preamble, his voice gentle but gruff with weariness.

  Holly closed her eyes a moment, stung by David’s tone. He was hoping that she would say she wasn’t pregnant, that he would be let off the hook. “Not yet,” she said. “I have an appointment tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re certainly casual about this, I’ll say that for you!” David snapped. “I’ve been sweating blood ever since Saturday and you say you ‘have an appointment tomorrow’!”

  A tear slid down Holly’s cheek. So much for never crying over David Goddard again. “I’m not being ‘casual,’ David, believe me,” she managed to say. “I bought one of those home tests.”

  “And?”

  “And—” Holly drew a deep breath to steady herself “—and it was positive.”

  There was a shattering silence at the other end of the line. “Are those things conclusive?” David finally asked, and there was no anger in his tone, but there was no happiness, either.

  “I don’t know,” Holly admitted wearily. “I’ve never used one before.”

  “Very funny,” came the ragged response.

  “I wasn’t joking, David.”

  He sighed; in her mind, Holly could see him leaning back in his chair, his thumb and forefinger to his temples. “I’d like to go with you tomorrow,” he said finally, and still there was nothing in his voice to tell Holly what he was thinking.

  She thought she knew that all too well. He was probably castigating himself for getting involved with a woman who didn’t have enough sense to use birth control. “That won’t be necessary, David,” she said coldly, hanging up in his ear.

  The telephone immediately rang again.

  “Don’t hang up on me, Holly,” David warned. “I hate it.”

  Holly didn’t hang up, but she did begin to cry, helplessly and with all the attendant noise. “Please, David…don’t insist on going to the doctor’s office with me… I couldn’t bear it…”

  “Holly.” The word was a reprimand, but it was unbelievably gentle.

  “I mean it, David!” Holly wailed. “I can’t think clearly when you’re around… I…”

  He spoiled the intangible comfort he had just offered by swearing in a brutal undertone and then snapping, “Neither of us was thinking clearly from the beginning! Why start now, Holly?”

  “David!”

  “You should have stayed here the other night, Holly,” he went on, quietly cruel. “What the hell? We could have made love until dawn. After all, the damage has been done!”

  Damage. The word sliced through Holly like a knife. How could he call their baby, their precious child “damage”? “I hate you, David Goddard,” she hissed into the receiver, keeping her voice down only because Toby might be near enough to hear. “Do you hear me? I hate you and I never want to see you again!”

  The silence was charged. Holly braced herself for David’s answer, but in the end, he gave none. There was a soft click and the line went dead.

  In the morning, Holly kept her appointment with her doctor and was told for a certainty that she was pregnant. The baby would be born, she was blithely informed, in late September or early October.

  Holly stumbled out of her doctor’s office, vitamin prescriptions in hand, stricken by a combination of joy and despair. David was waiting beside the elevator doors.

  “Well?” he asked simply, his voice hoarse. Holly was too distracted to even attempt to read the expression in his navy blue eyes. She nodded, her throat too thick to permit speech.

  “When?” he prompted, not unkindly.

  “Fall,” she croaked.

  The elevator arrived and David ushered Holly inside. But she didn’t look at him, and as far as she could tell, he didn’t look at her, either. How could this be? They had made this baby together, in passion so intense that Holly ached to remember it, and now they had nothing to say to each other. Nothing at all.

  Out on the busy streets, people were rushing by, it seemed to Holly, in a colorful, threatening blur. Where had she left her car? Had she even brought the car?

  No. She’d taken the bus. She remembered now. She had definitely taken the bus.

  She tried in vain to recall which stop to wait at for another. Considering that she had lived in Spokane all her life and taken buses into virtually every part of i
t since the age of eleven, it was annoying to forget the routes and schedules now.

  David’s hand was strong on her elbow. “Come on,” he said gruffly.

  Holly looked at him with dazed, tear-blurred eyes. “Where are we going?”

  “My place.”

  That snapped her out of it. She wrenched her arm free and went rigid. “Why, David? To do more ‘damage’?”

  Pain moved deep in his eyes, but was overcome so quickly that she thought she’d imagined it. “To talk,” he said firmly, and his hand again closed around her arm.

  “I don’t want to talk to you, David. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I just want to lie on my bed and cry.”

  The statement seemed to wound him; he looked away, scanning cloud-dappled blue skies for a moment. “All right,” he said after a long time. “All right. But, please, let me get you a cab.”

  It seemed the least he could do, after fathering a baby he didn’t want. “Thank you,” Holly replied woodenly.

  But when she reached her house, high on the South Hill, she did not lie down on her bed and cry. Elaine was there, working on the manuscript, and Madge was cleaning furiously. Both of them were trying so hard to be subtle that Holly forgot her misery for the time being and burst out laughing.

  “Yes!” she yelled, spreading her hands wide of a body that would soon swell to pearlike proportions. “I’m pregnant!”

  Faced with the certainty, her friends did not seem to know whether to celebrate or commiserate. Thinking it enough that she wasn’t flying apart in pieces, Holly gave them no clue. She simply sat down at her desk and turned on her computer and began working on the last of the cooking columns she was required, by contract with the local newspaper, to write.

  For the next two weeks, Holly lived in a frenetic kind of limbo, working day and night, praying that David wouldn’t call or come by and leaping every time the telephone or doorbell rang.

  David didn’t call, though. And he didn’t come by. Holly was resigned to the fact that, despite his earlier claims to love and want her, she was going to have this baby alone. And raise it alone.

  The fates seemed to respect her secret grief, however, and even to aid her in holding up the front she maintained for Elaine and Madge and Toby. Everything went well; Holly’s agent accepted her decision to switch from sure-thing cookbooks to novels that might or might not sell, the newspaper was gracious, though they said their readers would miss her columns, and the department-store people didn’t give her any flak, either, beyond reminding her that her contract called for one more set of lessons to be taught.