Asking for Trouble (20 page)
Read Asking for Trouble Online
Authors: Mary Kay McComas
Sydney didn’t look too happy when she leaned toward Tom and whispered, “Is that it? Are we finished? Can we go now?”
Rex and Tom looked at her in confusion and then exchanged baffled glances. The show had to go on.
“The, ah, the first year of marriage is an adjustment for anyone,” Rex said, faltering, leery of Sydney’s odd, stagestruck behavior. “Do you think yours was unusually difficult? Ah, I mean, considering the way things started out for the two of you?”
Sydney shifted her weight uncomfortably, and Tom’s heart went out to her. He released one of Trevor’s hands to take hers and give it a gentle squeeze. He winced with pain when she squeezed back, and at the same time realized that Rex was waiting for his answer.
“Ah, no,” he said disjointedly, sending a perplexed glance at Sydney. “We had adjustments to make. Compromises, you know. We still don’t have everything worked out, but we’ve come a long way.”
There was an ear-piercing screech of electrical sound as Trevor grabbed the microphone off its support and accidentally dropped it on the floor. Rex was quick to right the mike while Tom wrestled with Trevor to keep him on his lap.
“Can we go now, honey?” Sydney whispered again. Tom stared at her with a vapid look of disbelief. She turned to Rex. “Isn’t it time for a commercial?”
“You both had careers when you met,” Rex stated hastily, reading the next question off the TelePrompTer, eager to have the segment finished before anything else went wrong. Turning the focus away from the flustered man and the squirming child, he addressed his next question to the weird and unwieldy woman. “Are you both still working at the jobs you had four years ago, Sydney?”
“No,” she said flatly, and then apparently realizing that the camera was aimed straight at her, she simpered at him.
Over Trevor’s head Tom saw the dumbfounded look on Rex’s face and took pity on him.
“Actually, Rex,” he said, looping his arms around Trevor like a pair of steel bands, “Sydney quit the job she had with the accounting firm and came to work for me.” He grunted with effort, and Trevor cried out in frustration. “She handles all the accounting and taxes ... all the stuff I don’t have a head for.” He chuckled. “Marrying a CPA turned out to be a pretty smart maneuver,” he added, feeling that a little levity would also be a smart maneuver at that moment.
“So you live
and
work together?” Rex asked, clearly thinking Tom to be the crazier of the two adults before him.
“Well, no, not exactly.” Trevor was trying to crawl down his back, so he turned the boy around and placed him firmly on his lap again. “We have separate offices on different floors of the same office building. In fact, we have two separate businesses, but I hired her accounting firm to handle all my paperwork. That way, she’s involved with what I do ... but then she isn’t really. If that makes sense.”
“Of course,” Rex said, positively confused. “That makes for a ... ah ... a unique arrangement.”
“Unique,” Tom repeated, beginning to recognize a situation that they were sure to laugh about sometime in the distant future. “That’s us all right.”
“What kind of material is this?” Sydney asked distractedly, pinching the upholstery of the loveseat. “Did you Scotchguard it or does it have to be dry-cleaned?”
“As I recall, you liked to sail, Sydney,” Rex said, reading the question in a loud, nervous voice. “Is that an activity the two of you enjoy sharing now?”
“Tom?” Sydney whispered, paying no heed to Rex’s question, a note of urgency quivering in her voice. She gave her husband an apologetic smile as her eyes filled with tears, and then she groaned. “Oh, Tom.”
“What?”
She leaned over and spoke softly into his ear.
“Okay,” he said in an extremely calm voice that was inconsistent with the way he stood up suddenly and thrust Trevor into Rex Swann’s arms. “It’s okay, honey, we have plenty of time. Right? We have plenty of time?”
“Plenty of time for what?” Rex asked, watching Sydney shake her head while Trevor ripped the body mike off the lapel of his jacket. “What’s happening?”
“She’s in labor,” Tom announced to the world, remembering what an ordeal Trevor’s birth had been—an event that his wife could barely remember and that, much to his manly chagrin, had left her eager to repeat the experience almost immediately.
She made a noise that sounded very like a lonely coyote in the desert, and her body grew rigid as she fought the pain.
“It’s all right, sweetheart. Try to relax. Take some deep breaths,” he said, taking a few deep breaths of his own.
“Labor? Labor?” Rex questioned, as if he didn’t know what the word meant ... or perhaps couldn’t believe that it was happening live on national television. “She’s in labor?”
Sydney moaned loudly once again, and Rex Swann began to pray, “Oh, dear Lord.”
Mary Kay McComas is an acclaimed romance novelist and the author of twenty-one short contemporary romances, five novellas, and three novels. McComas has received several honors and awards for her work, including the Washington Romance Writers’ Outstanding Achievement Award and two Career Achievement Awards from
Romantic Times
(one for Best New Author and another for Innovative Series Romance).
Born in Spokane, Washington, the third child of six siblings, McComas graduated with a bachelor of science degree in nursing. She worked for ten years as an intensive care nurse. After marrying her husband and having their first child, the family moved to the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia, and McComas soon retired from nursing to raise her family, which included three more children.
Throughout her childhood and into college, McComas battled undiagnosed dyslexia. As a result, she was an infrequent reader in her youth and early adulthood. It wasn’t until after the birth of her youngest son that McComas began reading for pleasure—books hand-picked by her older sister for their humor. Gradually, she branched out with her own choices, reading widely, until one book changed her life. “Eventually I bought IT. You know ... that one novel that even a dyslexic amateur can tell is poorly written, with no plot and horrible characters,” she explains. “I told my voracious-reader husband, ‘I can do better than this!’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’”
McComas’s first book landed her an agent, who helped sell four of McComas’s stories and secured the author a four-book contract within a year. McComas published her first book,
Devine Design
, in 1988, and followed it with seven more paperback novels.
A favorite of both fans and reviewers, McComas has been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award eight times and has been a Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist twice, once for Best Short Contemporary Fiction and once for Best Novella. Over the course of her “third career,” as McComas refers to it, she has expanded her scope beyond contemporary romances. She frequently contributes to Nora Robert’s J. D. Robb anthologies and her paranormal novellas have garnered continuous praise.
McComas continues to live in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Her four grown children live nearby. Read more about Mary Kay at marykaymccomas.com.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1991 by Mary Kay McComas
cover design by Juliana Lee
978-1-4532-8618-0
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
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