“I’m not sick. Just out of sorts.” She wondered if the growing realization that she was falling for the man sitting in the upholstered chair across from her was the reason. “I’m not feeling anything that isn’t normal for this stage of the pregnancy.” Damn. She shouldn’t have said that.
You could practically see the alarm bells going off in his head. “What do you mean? What are you feeling?”
“Relax. I need to put my feet up for a little while, that’s all. That’s why I called in for the night.” She was glossing over details, but if he got overprotective about a potential fall on the ice, she could only imagine how he’d react to hearing she felt crampy, even though she knew it was a perfectly normal feeling.
Thankfully he appeared to accept her excuse. “I’ve kept you up late these past couple nights,” he said.
“I wasn’t exactly begging to go to sleep.” Bits and pieces of memories flashed through her brain, warming her cheeks. She looked over to see Philippe studying her with an amused look.
“You didn’t blush on our first date,” he said.
“I didn’t?”
He shook his head. “No. Every one of my compliments, you took in stride. I remember being impressed that you knew your worth.”
“More, I knew a line when I heard one.”
“But now that we are lovers...”
Jenna blushed over the fact she could feel herself blushing. “There’s an intimacy when you sleep with someone,” she replied. “The compliments have more weight.” She dared not say more.
“I’m glad you believe me sincere now.”
Sincere about what? That he thought her beautiful? That he wanted the best for their child? “You’ve never been anything but honest with me.”
“You make it impossible not to be. I knew when I met you that you would be judging every compliment that came out of my mouth.”
Jenna laughed. “You didn’t do yourself any favors by pretending to work for the hotel.”
“I never pretended anything—I lied by omission. There is a difference.”
“A very small one,” she said. “When our daughter asks, I’m going to make sure she watches out for men like you.”
“I hope so. Men like me are not to be trusted.”
Sometimes they were, thought Jenna, and that made them more dangerous. She reached for her chamomile tea.
Philippe was studying his hands all of a sudden, his thumb massaging the center of his palm. It reminded Jenna of how he’d played with the wineglass the night he proposed. He was working up to something.
“There’s a labor issue brewing at one of my properties. A potential work stoppage. I have to fly back to the corporate offices to oversee negotiations.”
“You’re leaving.” Jenna’s insides crumpled. Fool. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Philippe’s leaving was inevitable. She couldn’t expect him to stay around Nantucket waiting on her forever. “When do you leave?”
“I fly out in the morning,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Jenna said. “You have a business to run. You can’t stick around Nantucket doing nothing forever.” Tomorrow, when he was gone, she would give herself points for keeping the disappointment out of her voice.
“If only I could. I enjoyed spending time with you again. I wish I could stay longer.”
She had enjoyed spending time with him, too. “Seeing as how I didn’t expect you to come to Nantucket at all, I’ll take these last few days as a bonus.”
So this was it. He would fly home and their affair would truly and completely be over. It was a good thing. Distance would ease the hold he had on her emotions.
A lump rose in her throat.
“You could come with me,” he said suddenly.
“Back to France?”
“Why not? When negotiations are finished, we can visit Paris. You’ve never been to Paris, have you?”
Jenna shook her head.
“Then I could show you the city. We could have a second French holiday, so to speak.”
What a wonderful, horrible idea. To what end? Wouldn’t that be like pulling the bandage off slowly? Her stomach twisted at the thought.
“Ma chérie?” She must have frowned, because Philippe was across the space and at her side in a heartbeat, the concern etched on his face making the lump worse. Why couldn’t he be aloof and uncaring? Why did he have to tease her with kindness and eyes that reflected emotions that weren’t there? This whole situation would be so much easier.
“I—I can’t take time from work. I need to save the time for when the baby comes.”
“Oh.” There was disappointment in his voice. “Forgive me. I didn’t stop to think.”
“Plus, you have no idea how long these negotiations will go. I could end up just being in the way.”
“I doubt that.”
“Even so, I think that maybe we should... We should say good...” She pressed a fist to her stomach.
“Jenna?”
Something wasn’t right. That last cramp was stronger. Sharper.
Oh God, no. Please no.
She bolted from the room.
* * *
“Jenna?”
Philippe started down the hall after her. She rushed into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Morning sickness, he decided... That’s what made her run so quickly. He didn’t want to think about what else could make her turn so pale.
He knocked on the bathroom door. “Is everything all right?”
“Can I have a minute?” was the muffled reply.
Definitely morning sickness. Heading back to the living room, he sat back down in his chair. Jenna’s teacups sat on the table untouched. He picked up the nettle tea and inhaled.
“No wonder she’s nauseous,” he said.
Perhaps the nausea was also the reason why she was acting so strangely. He could have sworn that before she bolted from the room Jenna was about to say something about goodbye.
He would ask her to explain when she returned. They were enjoying each other’s company too much to simply end things. He would be able to return to Nantucket in a few weeks, once his business was completed. In fact, he would no doubt be back several times over the course of her pregnancy. They still had financial and legal issues to hammer out, and naturally he would want to track how her pregnancy was going. As far as he was concerned, they could enjoy each other’s company indefinitely. There was no reason for her to make their goodbye sound so permanent.
Why was she, then?
Back in France, when they were first doing their dance of attraction, she used to back away whenever the chemistry became too intense. Hide behind a wall of mistrust. There was no need to mistrust him now, though. And yet here it felt as though she was throwing up another wall.
Why did he feel he was missing something? Something important. An answer that was just out of reach?
The afghan she’d been using lay on the floor where it fell when she left the room. He bent over to pick it up. As he folded the soft pink material, he smelled the faint scent of jasmine. Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply. Beautiful. No one wore jasmine like Jenna. The flower belonged to her. He wondered if he’d ever be able to smell the summer nights again without thinking of her.
In the distance, he heard a door followed by the sound of Jenna’s footsteps as she walked into the room.
“Philippe?”
The tremor in her voice knocked him from his reverie. Opening his eyes, he found Jenna hovering in the doorway, her face paler than he’d ever seen. Even her lips were white.
His stomach dropped.
“I think we need to go to the hospital,” she told him.
CHAPTER TEN
MAYBE A WIZARD put a curse on his family during the Middle Ages, or had the powers above decided the d’Usay family had spent enough ti
me on the planet and therefore anyone attached to the name needed to go? Or had he simply done something horrible in a previous life and therefore needed to suffer punishment in this one?
Jenna was bleeding. “Not a lot,” she said, but her voice had been tight and lacked conviction.
Bleeding meant miscarriage.
Philippe broke the speed laws driving them to the emergency room. There, he was forced aside while an overly chipper nurse shooed him from the room.
“We need to get her changed and then do an exam,” the nurse told him. “We’ll come get you as soon as we’re done.”
Now, with the tests and exams finished, he returned to find Jenna lying alone in the dim light. It was midmorning, or so the clock on the wall told him. He sat by her side and held her hand while the monitor beeped out her vital signs with soft regularity.
She looked like a pale angel. Soft and delicate. The hospital gown didn’t suit her—the colors were too muted. She was brighter than that.
Felix had not looked like an angel in his hospital bed. The last few weeks, his brother had looked like Nosferatu, all tight white skin and teeth.
Mama, however. She would have looked like an angel. He knew without having been there, because Mama had always insisted on looking her best.
She would have been jealous of how beautiful Jenna looked.
Jenna wasn’t dying, he reminded himself.
But their child might be.
He brushed a curl from her forehead, forcing a smile when she turned her head to look at him with large, frightened eyes. “The doctor come back yet?”
“Not yet. She’s on her way, the nurse outside said.” His voice was surprisingly calm, considering his insides felt ready to shatter. How he hated this feeling. The hollow feeling that felt as though someone cut your insides from your heart to your stomach.
The shadow he’d spent so many years trying avoid gripped his shoulder and held on fast. This was why you didn’t get involved. This was why you avoided falling in love. Because people you loved died, leaving you cold and hollow inside. Leaving you alone.
What had made him think he could escape the pain?
Jenna’s lower lip trembled. “I’m scared,” she said. They both were. “I’ve been lying here listing all the logical reasons for spotting, but it doesn’t help. All I keep thinking is what if...”
“Shh. Don’t say it.” If they swallowed the word, perhaps it would disappear. Pressing his forehead to hers, he whispered the refrain again as if reciting a prayer. “Don’t say it.” His hands squeezed hers as tightly as possible, their viselike grips grounding one another. In his mind’s eye, Philippe saw all the events he might never see—first steps, dances, smiles—and he prayed he was overreacting.
A knock on the door interrupted them. Looking up, he saw a woman no bigger than a girl with a gray topknot. “I am Dr. Bhattacharya,” she said, her voice soft and singsong. “How are we feeling?”
Horrible, Philippe started to say.
“Nervous,” Jenna replied.
“Not surprising. I have good news, though. Your exams came back with no signs of irregularities. The cervix is intact, the uterus looks in good shape and the bleeding seems to have stopped as well.”
“Oh thank God.” Jenna let out a sigh of relief that Philippe could feel reverberating through her body. He wasn’t quite as ready to relax. There was more that the doctor was leaving out.
“Your blood work did show that your progesterone level is low. There’s a good chance that’s what caused the bleeding. I’m going to prescribe a progesterone shot to see if we can boost your levels and keep this from happening again.”
“But everything’s going to be all right,” Jenna said. “I’m not miscarrying.”
“Obviously, with bleeding in early pregnancy, there’s always a chance of miscarriage,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “I’m going to recommend that your ob-gyn monitors you closely just in case. But, looking at all the tests, I’m feeling good about the progesterone solving the problem.”
Relief tore through him. Was it possible to lose one’s breath from happiness, because he felt like all the air had rushed from his lungs in a single whoosh.
Thank you, he said silently. To whom, he didn’t know. All he knew was they’d been given a reprieve.
“There is one more test,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. She smiled at them both. “We’d like to do an ultrasound to check the baby’s heartbeat.”
“C-can we hear it at this point?” Jenna looked at him with excitement in her eyes. “It’s not too early?”
“Shouldn’t be,” the doctor replied.
A few minutes later, a machine had rolled in and Dr. Bhattacharya was tracing Jenna’s stomach with a wand and describing what she saw. Philippe was speechless. There, on the monitor, was his child. Tiny and hard to visualize, but more beautiful than anything he could imagine. That was, until...
“Here you go,” Dr. Bhattacharya said.
Jenna gasped. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “That’s our baby.”
It sounded like soft rapid hoof beats. Their child’s heart beat strong and sure. She was a fighter.
Like her mother. Philippe gazed at the woman beside him, awe in his heart. “C’est beau,” he said. “Perfect.”
“...you or the baby are at risk.”
The doctor’s words ripped him from the moment. “What did you say about risk?”
“She was talking about precautions in general,” Jenna said.
“I was saying that her doctor will want to monitor her closely throughout her pregnancy to make sure neither she or the baby are at risk.”
“You’re saying there still could be a problem then?” Worse, Jenna could be in danger as well?
“It’s just a precaution, Philippe. I’m sure they monitor pregnancies all the time.”
“We do,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “We don’t want to take anything for granted.”
“No,” Philippe replied. “You don’t.” Hadn’t he, though? He sat back and studied the hand in his. In all his worry, he’d assumed Jenna would be all right.
What would he have done if he lost her? What would his world be like?
Dark, that’s what it would be. A world devoid of color and warmth.
He couldn’t let that happen. The d’Usay bad luck stopped here. Stopped now. Philippe wasn’t going to lose Jenna or his child. There was only one solution: keep them close and do everything in his control to keep them safe. Starting now.
* * *
“I don’t know about you, but I could use a few dozen hours of sleep.” Jenna sank her head against the headrest of Philippe’s rental car. Exhausted didn’t begin to cover how tired she felt. “Soon as I get back to the house, I’m going to scarf down some food and take a nap.”
“You will not scarf. You will have a healthy breakfast. If there is a possibility of risk, it will not be because of poor diet.”
“Yes, Mother.” She smiled as she said it. “Seriously, you don’t have to warn me twice. I’m aiming for a picture-perfect pregnancy from here on in. The next time I visit the hospital in a rush, I want it to be because my water broke.”
She ran a hand over her stomach. While she’d wanted the baby, she hadn’t known how deeply that desire went until she saw the blood. Then she knew with every fiber of her being. “You hear that, baby? No more scaring your father and me, or you’ll be grounded.”
“Then we are in agreement. We both want to do everything possible to keep you and the baby safe.”
“You are preaching to the choir. Although I feel better having talked to Dr. Bhattacharya. She knows her stuff, don’t you think?”
Philippe shrugged. “She was competent.”
“Well, I liked her,” she replied. Philippe had been in this weird, hard-to-please mode since they left the hospital, where everything on the island bothered h
im. She was cutting him some slack because of the stress they’d been under.
Sunshine was beginning to breach the horizon, its orange and yellow colors mixing with fading gray. “How long were we at the hospital, anyway? The clock was behind my head and I couldn’t see my... Oh my God, your flight. What time do you need to catch it?”
“Do not worry about the flight—I will reschedule.”
“Thank you.” In the midst of the chaos, she’d forgotten Philippe was planning to leave her. The two of them had been about to say goodbye, in fact, when the cramping hit.
Dragging out their goodbyes for another few hours might be postponing the inevitable, but Jenna was grateful anyway. “I hope it won’t cause too many problems.”
“They will have to deal. You and the baby come first.”
Jenna was so exhausted from the ordeal that she closed her eyes and pretended the words meant more than they did.
“You really are tired,” she heard Philippe say. “Once you have a few hours sleep, you can pack and we’ll head to my hotel.”
She pried open an eye. “Pack? For what?”
“The flight. Don’t worry about packing a lot. Just the essentials will do for now. I’ll have someone handle the rest.”
“Whoa, back up there, cowboy.” She opened her other eye and turned so she had a full view of his profile. “Where is it you think I’m going?”
“To Arles, of course.”
“What?” She shook her head. “No, I said last night that I couldn’t go to France with you, remember?”
“Yes, but...things are different now.”
They’d reached her driveway. Unbuckling his seat belt, Philippe turned so he too was studying her. He had one elbow propped on the wheel and the other on the seat back. If he leaned forward, he could pin her in place, Jenna noted. “We both agreed we were going to do everything possible to keep the baby healthy,” he said.
“Healthy, yes, but I was talking about more fruits and vegetables, not flying across the world for a vacation.”
“Not vacation,” he replied. “To live.”
Jenna looked at him and counted to three. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
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