“I can’t remember,” Kate said, frowning, “but it’s on the tip of my tongue …”
“While you’re trying to remember, tell me if you had sexual intercourse with anyone other than your fiancé in the last four years.”
Kate hesitated, resenting the fact that she had to acknowledge Mitchell Wyatt’s existence. “Yes, last month. But what difference does that make?”
“There’s always the possibility that you’re one of the tiny percentage of women the pill doesn’t protect, and the reason you haven’t gotten pregnant before last month is that your fiancé’s sperm isn’t viable.”
Kate suddenly remembered the first part of the migraine medicine’s name. “It was butal-something. That’s the name of the prescription the doctor in St. Maarten gave me.”
Bonnie frowned. “It wasn’t butalbital, was it?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Didn’t he ask you if you were taking birth control pills?”
“He asked me if I was trying to have children, and I said no. Actually, the doctor only spoke French, but the cabdriver spoke some English, so he translated for both of us. The doctor told the cabdriver to tell me I was probably having migraines.”
“Why didn’t you go to a hospital instead of to a local doctor?”
“And spend hours waiting for someone to see me? Bonnie, my head was exploding. I’d been throwing up from the pain on the way down to St. Maarten. I just wanted someone to give me something to stop the pain. I didn’t care what language they spoke. Besides, he wasn’t a witch doctor. His office was in his home, but it was very nice and he had well-dressed patients waiting to see him.”
“Well, something got lost in the cabdriver’s translation, then. He must have asked the cabdriver to find out if you were trying not to have children.”
“What difference does all this make?” Kate said defensively, but she already knew. God help her, she already knew …
“Butalbital is very effective at treating, and preventing, severe headaches. However, it also interferes with the effectiveness of oral contraceptives. When a woman taking birth control pills uses butalbital, she needs to add another form of birth control to protect herself while she’s taking it.”
The room started to spin and Kate bent forward, her arms crossed over her stomach, trying to steady herself.
“Do you know for certain who the father is?”
Kate looked up at Bonnie. In the three weeks following her father’s death she hadn’t wanted to make love; that was part of the reason Evan had been so insistent about taking her away for a Caribbean holiday.
She was pregnant with Mitchell Wyatt’s baby.
A wave of hysteria welled up inside her, combining with dizziness and nausea, and Kate clutched the edge of Bonnie’s desk. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly. “I know who the father is.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
“KATE, IT’S ME!” HOLLY CALLED, LETTING HERSELF IN THE front door of Kate’s house with the key she’d used to look after the cats while Kate was in the islands. Max ran up to greet her, tail wagging.
“A fine watchdog you are,” she teased, absently patting his big head, but she was worried. Kate’s car was in the driveway, the windows covered in a half inch of snow, which meant she’d been home awhile that evening, but she wasn’t answering her phone and the house was dark. Yesterday, she’d found out she was pregnant, and she’d decided to tell Evan about it earlier today, rather than waiting a few days to think things through as Holly had advised. Kate had, however, planned to take Holly’s suggestion about going to Evan’s office and telling him there, where he couldn’t make a scene.
“Kate?”
“In the living room,” Kate called. She turned on a lamp and hastily shoved aside the pillow she’d been clutching to her while she stared numbly into the dark. “I fell asleep,” she lied. “Do you want some coffee?”
“Sure,” Holly said.
“What time is it?” Kate asked
“A little after six.”
Swinging her legs off the sofa, Kate got up and headed for the kitchen with Holly trailing behind. “I have to change clothes and go to work. I should have been at the restaurant two hours ago.”
As she started spooning coffee into the coffeemaker, Holly walked over to the cupboard and took out two mugs. “Did it go okay with Evan today?”
In answer, Kate held out her left hand, which was now devoid of an engagement ring. “I didn’t really expect it to go well,” she said in a carefully expressionless voice as she filled the coffee carafe with water. “After all, I went there to tell him his fiancée was pregnant by another man who he happens to despise. But—”
“But what?” Holly persisted.
Bracing her hands on the sink, Kate let her head fall forward while she watched the water level rise in the carafe. “But I never imagined it could go as badly as it did. He turned pale when I first told him, but then he recovered and even put his arm around me and told me it wasn’t my fault, that Mitchell had made a victim out of both of us. He said we could undo the damage and go on with our lives like it never happened.”
“What went wrong?”
“I told him I wasn’t sure I could go through with an abortion.”
“Then what happened?”
“He completely lost it,” Kate said tonelessly. Belatedly realizing the carafe was overflowing, she turned the water tap off and filled the coffeemaker with fresh water; then she flipped the switch on. “Did you ever wonder how a calm, even-tempered man like Evan could possibly intimidate anyone in court?”
“I’ve wondered why everyone thinks he’s such a good attorney. Turn around and talk to me,” Holly said, putting her hands on Kate’s shoulders and forcing her to turn.
“Well, you don’t have to wonder anymore,” Kate said, swallowing audibly. “This afternoon, I got a dose of what it must be like to be cross-examined by him. He started out making quick, deep cuts with a scalpel about little things I’ve done over the years that he put up with, and then he got out the hacksaw. By the time he was done, he was calling me names and shouting at me so loud that everyone on that floor must have heard him. Finally, he told me to get out and never come back.”
“That hypocrite! Don’t think for a minute he’s been faithful to you for the past four years. There have been plenty of rumors about him.”
Turning away, Kate reached for the sugar bowl and two spoons. “Those were just rumors. I’m the one who’s guilty and dirty, not him.”
“Am I right that he would have been willing to continue ‘putting up with you’ if you’d agreed to have an abortion?”
“Yep. Definitely,” Kate replied, trying to be flippant and sounding haunted instead. “In fact, at times I had the feeling he actually thought an abortion would be a suitable form of payback—Mitchell’s baby in return for the insult to Evan’s and my pride.”
“He doesn’t care about your pride. This is about the Bartlett pride. I’ll bet he’d have been a lot less affronted if you’d gotten knocked up by someone he regarded as his social equal.”
Kate almost, but not quite, smiled at that.
“I’ve told you for years that Evan has two sides—”
“Don’t,” Kate said, turning back to the counter. “I despise the way he treated me, and I wouldn’t go back to him after today if he begged me to, but he was crushed. I wounded him in Anguilla when I told him what I’d done, but today I devastated him.”
In silence, they sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. Kate gave Holly a mug of it and handed her the sugar bowl; then she picked up her own mug and started for the bedroom. “I hate to leave you here, but I have to get dressed and go to work.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve been working until midnight every night since you got back from Anguilla.”
“I was off two nights ago for our movie night.”
“That was Sunday, and the restaurant was closed. The restaurant can run itself for one night.”
“I know,” Holly said, smiling a little and patting Kate’s back. “Now, let’s go in the living room. You can call the restaurant, and I’ll pick out a movie and we’ll have a sleepover.”
Holly decided on Pretty Woman, because it was lighthearted and frivolous. “I cannot have this baby!” Kate whispered from the sofa behind her. She was asleep by the time Holly started the movie and looked around.
“Come on, Max,” Holly whispered. “I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use something stronger than coffee. Let’s raid the wine rack.”
With that in mind, Holly started back toward the kitchen; then she jumped in nervous shock when someone knocked at the front door just as she walked past it. Hoping it would be Evan, preferably on his knees, Holly opened the door; then she stepped back in nervous surprise. Standing on the porch was an unsmiling gray-haired man in his early sixties wearing full clerical regalia of black suit and white collar. “My God!” she said to the priest, her shock turning to annoyance. “What is with you right-to-life people, anyway? Are you plugged into every OB in the city? Go away! She can make up her own mind.”
“You must be Holly,” the priest said, smiling slightly.
“Please don’t creep me out. Just leave your literature on the porch, and I’ll see that she gets it,” Holly said, starting to close the door.
He put his hand on the door to stop her. “I’m Father Donovan, Kate’s uncle. Kate came by the rectory late this afternoon when I was out. My housekeeper said she seemed upset. She hasn’t answered my phone calls. Now, may I come in?”
Embarrassed but resolute, Holly stepped back, opened the door, and whispered, “She’s sleeping right now, and she’s upset. I don’t want her to wake up. You can come into the kitchen if you want to wait around for a while.”
Holly closed the kitchen’s swinging door behind them and kept her voice low. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you. I take it that Kate’s pregnant?”
Holly’s background had left her with little respect for organized religion and even less for clerics. “You’ll have to discuss that with her, Father Donovan,” she said, refusing to be intimidated by his collar. The wine rack was in the corner on the counter, and she pulled out a bottle of red wine and began uncorking it, trying to remember whether it was Baptists or Catholics who disapproved of drinking alcohol. “I’m going to drown my sorrows for Kate in a large glass of wine,” she warned him. “I hope you don’t object,” she added in a tone that conveyed that she didn’t care whether he objected or not.
“Are you planning to drink the whole bottle yourself?”
“I might. Why?”
When he didn’t answer, she turned around and found herself looking straight into eyes as green as Kate’s, eyes that were filled with amused curiosity. “If you aren’t planning to drink the whole bottle yourself,” he said, “I thought perhaps we could sit here and enjoy a glass together while we wait for Kate to wake up.”
“Yes, of course,” Holly said, feeling confused and rude. “But I’m not going to tell you about Kate’s—little problem. If she wants to confess it to a priest, that’s up to her.”
“I’m not here as her confessor,” he remarked. “I’m here as her uncle.”
“You’re a priest. You’re going to tell her she has to have that—that bastard’s baby.”
As she poured wine into two glasses, Holly waited for him to deny it. “That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?” she challenged bitterly as she handed him a glass of wine and sat down across the table from him.
“Assuming Kate came to see me today to tell me she’s pregnant, then the answer to your question is that Kate already knew what I was going to tell her. Which, in turn, makes me think that’s what she wanted to hear. What surprises me is that she’s been involved with a man you think is a bastard. She’s usually an excellent judge of people.”
Holly took a sip of her wine, considering that. “Not this time.”
Father Donovan took a sip of his wine. “He must have had some quality that appealed to her?”
“He’s a heartless pig,” Holly declared angrily, and took another sip of wine. “But a heartless pig with a lot of looks and charm.”
“I see. Poor Kate. She’s gone with the same young man for four years. I take it the heartless pig we’re talking about isn’t him?”
“No, that heartless pig broke their engagement today and dumped her. She met the heartless pig who got her pregnant in Anguilla a few weeks ago. Don’t ask me to tell you anything more.”
“I won’t.”
Holly drank more of her wine, her thoughts on Kate; then she lifted her gaze to the man with Kate’s eyes and said in a wretched voice, “I can’t believe the things he did to her, and all to get even with Evan …”
“Evan is the heartless pig who dumped her today?”
“Yes. Mitchell Wyatt is the one who used her and broke her heart. I’m the one who coached her about how to treat him when she saw him the last time, and he broke her heart all over again.”
“You meant well. It’s not your fault.”
Holly drank a little more wine and bit her lip. “It’s partly my fault that she had anything to do with him in the first place. Evan took her down to Anguilla and left her there alone, and I told her she should have a fling, and that’s what she did.”
Father Donovan took another sip of wine. “I’m sure Kate made that choice on her own.”
“Oh, no, she didn’t!” Holly said angrily. “She met Mitchell Wyatt in a restaurant one afternoon when she accidentally spilled a Bloody Mary on his shirt. He knew she was Evan’s girlfriend, but he pretended not to …”
“… What a heartbreaking story,” Father Donovan declared sincerely an hour later, after Holly finished apprising him of every minute detail, culminating in Kate’s confrontation with Wyatt at the Children’s Hospital benefit.
A second bottle of wine was on the table between them, along with a tissue box from which Holly had periodically removed a tissue to dab at her eyes. “I could kill him with my bare hands,” she said ferociously.
“So could I,” Father Donovan declared.
Holly looked at him with new respect. “Really?”
“That was a figure of speech.”
“What are we going to do now?” she asked, spreading her hands on the table, palms up. “She has that huge restaurant to run, and she doesn’t have anyone who cares about her anymore.”
Father Donovan looked at her in surprise. “She has you, Holly,” he said with a smile, “and you’re loyal and brave and strong. And she has me. We’ll get her through this. And when it’s all said and done, she’ll have a baby to love and to love her back, and we’ll share him with her.”
In the doorway, Kate paused and looked from Holly to her uncle. “Hi, Uncle Jamie.”
Standing up, he opened his arms to her and said tenderly, “Hello, Mary Kate.”
Kate fled into his familiar embrace.
Chapter Forty
ON A BALMY JUNE MORNING, WHEN SHE WAS ALMOST four months pregnant, Kate hurried beneath the decorative burgundy awnings of the front windows of Donovan’s on her way into work, and she caught sight of her reflection in the glass. With a sense of grim fascination, she kept walking and studying her unfamiliar outline in the glass. Her head was bent; her shoulders were hunched forward as if she had to plow her way through the lunchtime crowd in order to keep moving; her hair was a mass of untamed curls pulled up in
to a ponytail because that was easiest; and her pregnancy was showing. Mitchell Wyatt’s son was making his presence known.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the window glass was noticeably grimy.
She pushed through the heavy brass-trimmed oak door, looked around for the maître d’, took in the general condition of things, and worriedly glanced at her watch. It was 11:15; fifteen minutes before Donovan’s opened for lunch. By now, all the tables should have been covered with snowy-white linen tablecloths and decked out with sparkling crystal, gleaming china chargers with a gold D in the center, and ornamental brass lanterns. As she walked toward the lounge, Kate counted ten tables that weren’t set, and she noticed that the patterned burgundy carpet didn’t look freshly vacuumed.
The lounge was separated from the dining rooms by a richly carved mahogany wall with stained-glass panels. The room occupied the entire right-hand corner of the building, its shuttered windows looking out onto the street at the front and along the side. During the day, the shutters were left open so people who were eating and drinking at the tables could enjoy the street scene. At dark, the shutters were closed, and the atmosphere inside became a candlelit, upscale “hideaway” with a jazz quartet providing music next to a small dance floor.
The remaining two walls were taken up by the bar itself, an L-shaped mahogany replica of an old-world bar, with dark green marble counters, brass foot rails, and a carved wood canopy above burgundy leather barstools. The beveled mirror on the two back walls was all but obscured by tiers of crystal glasses and Donovan’s famous selection of spirits from all over the world.
The entire original Irish pub of Kate’s youth had occupied about half the area of the current lounge. Normally, being in the lounge evoked nostalgia in Kate. Today, however, she felt a rush of frustrated annoyance when she took a look inside and saw Frank O’Halloran rushing back and forth from one end of the bar to the other, setting out bowls of imported nuts and pulling out trays of fruit from the refrigerators under the bar.
Two bartenders normally manned the bar for weekday lunches, with the number increasing to three on Monday through Wednesday nights, and then to four for the Thursday-, Friday-, and Saturday-night crowds.
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