Luck of the Draw (A Betting on Romance Novel Book 1) (45 page)

“It
was
awfully surreal,” Nana agreed as she took a selection from the tray and popped it in her mouth. “Just once I wish she could have let me figure it out for myself.”

Lydia shrugged and bobbed her dissolving candy. “It’s a gift.”

“But, I thought it was Randy’s,” Kate mumbled before she had the sense to censor herself.

“
Randy’s?”
Nana nearly choked on her ham and cheese roll up. “Couldn’t possibly be his.”

“Definitely not Randy’s,” Ruth agreed.

This was getting out of hand. “I think I know what’s possible and what’s not possible. You forget I already have one child.” She jumped up, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Liam! I almost forgot! He’s still in the car. If he wakes up alone, he’ll have a fit!”

“Don’t worry,” Ruth said as she calmly swiped port wine cheese onto a cracker. “Rachel said she’d take him for a few hours.”

“Rachel... knows?”

“Oh, heavens, no, she doesn’t know,” Ruth assured her. “We just said we needed a hand tonight and she agreed to help. No questions asked. She’d a good one, that one.”

As if on cue, the doorbell rang. Nana scurried to answer it and talked in hushed tones to what Kate could only assume was Rachel. Moments later, a sleepy Liam stepped through the door and said Auntie Rachel was going to take him to the park and would that be okay?

Kate nodded, not knowing what else to do, and then Liam was swept through the door again.

“I said she could use your car,” Nana said as she sat down. “So she wouldn’t have to transfer the car seat.”

Kate nodded again, her mind in a blur. She sat on the sofa.

They knew
. They all
knew.

“Have a beef roll up. They’re good.” Kate blinked up at the gruff woman
—Claire was it?—who held out the tray of food. “You look like you could use a little red meat right now.”

Kate took a roll-up obediently. “I... I don’t know what to say. Until this morning, I thought it was Randy’s.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “June, your granddaughter needs a drink.”

“She can’t have alcohol!” Lydia interrupted. “It’s bad for the baby!”

“Would you relax? I just meant water or something. She’s not thinking straight. How could it possibly be the dead husband’s? That was months ago!” Claire pointed at Kate with the end of a frilly toothpick. “Have you seen her stomach? She’s not even showing! And we all know baby number two pops almost as soon as the pregnancy test comes back positive...”

“But...” Kate began.

“That’s true,” Ruth cut in. “I remember when she first came how skinny she looked in her little bikini. She would have been at least two months then if it had been her husband’s. Plus, she mixed raw hamburger without gagging. I could never touch raw meat at all for the first trimester with any of my pregnancies. I’d be running for the bathroom every time.”

“But...” Kate tried again.

“Me, either,” Nana interrupted. “Plus, I would be so darn tired. You’re absolutely right. It
must
be Jim’s baby.”

“
But we only slept together once!”
Kate cried as she leapt from the couch.
Make that twice. Okay, technically, three times. But still...

Claire chortled into her on-the-rocks tumbler. “Once is all it takes.”

“But...”

“Walter.”

“James.”

“Anne.”

The ladies spoke in near unison.

“
What?”
Kate turned to her Nana who’d spoken last. “
Mom?
Are you telling me Ma was a mistake?”

Nana blushed as she shrugged. “We always told people she came a month early, but she was actually two weeks past my due date.”

Claire snorted. “It didn’t help you any she was a whopping eight-pounder, either.”

“But...” Kate looked around the group of women. It seemed she was having a singular inability to utter anything but that one word this evening. “Are you all telling me your first-born were all
mistakes?
How is that possible?”

Lydia took Kate’s hand and settled her back on the couch beside her. “Honey, you have to understand. We were teenagers at a time when the world was going crazy. We didn’t know if there’d be a tomorrow
—or if our men would even be here tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, the war and all...” Lydia trailed off meaningfully.

Kate knew she was frowning, but it was difficult to concentrate on calculating when you were being fed a line of bull. “That makes no sense. Nana, you were
born
during World War II.”

“Okay, so war had nothing to do with it,” Lydia allowed. “I just think it makes it sound so much more romantic, don’t you?”

“Makes
what
sound romantic?” Kate asked exasperatedly.

“Not waiting,” Ruth said.

“I imagine it was like it was during the war,” Lydia said. “The urgency and all. It felt like it to me, at any rate.”

“Would you cut it out about the war?” Claire demanded. “We need to get to the point.”

“Which is?” Kate was afraid to ask.

“That we decided we’d do it together,” Ruth said.

“Together.”

“Lose our virginity,” Nana clarified helpfully.

“
Oh God,”
Kate groaned. This was not something she needed to hear.

“Now before you go thinking something scandalous, I have to explain: we didn’t want to be a bunch of silly brides who didn’t know what to expect on their wedding night. I mean, what if our men were duds? We’d be stuck with them for the rest of our lives! So, we agreed that as moral support for each other we’d go all the way on the same night.”

“D-I-Day,”
Lydia cut in meaningfully.

“D-I-Day?” Kate echoed doubtfully.

“
Do-It-Day
,” the ladies said together.

“And we did!” Lydia said happily, her eyes going soft and dreamy.

“Six weeks later rabbits were dropping like flies, if you know what I mean,” Claire cut in.

“Is that why you all got married the same summer?” Kate asked, comprehension finally dawning. She turned to Lydia. “You did, too, didn’t you? Get married then? But you never...”

“No, we never did have any children,” Lydia cut in with a bittersweet smile. “But I was so scared I
might
be pregnant, I convinced my Stu we should get married just in case! And I already knew he was a keeper—if you know what I mean!”

Kate looked around at the group. She had more in common with these women that she would have ever imagined. Except they had taken charge of their lives and Kate’s was a runaway train. There was another difference, too. In their day, an unplanned pregnancy meant one solution: marriage.

Things weren’t that simple any more.

“The thing is,” she began, “Jim doesn’t know yet and... I don’t know that I’m ready to tell him.”

“You’ll start showing soon,” Claire advised around a mouthful of roast beef. “Mark my words. It doesn’t matter how many sit-ups you do, you’ll start showing. You need to tell him sooner or later.”

“I know... I mean, that’s not the point.” Kate frowned. “Telling him isn’t the solution.”

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Ruth said. “He can’t make this right if he doesn’t know.”

“I know that. It’s just... what do you mean ‘make this right?’ What do you expect him to do? Marry me?” She laughed then, a short, choked sound.

Four sets of eyes blinked at Kate over their bifocal lenses.

“You do, don’t you? You expect that once he hears I’m having his baby he’ll ask me to marry him and everything will be fine, don’t you?”

“Well... yes,” Nana said.

Kate stood and set her untouched hors d’oeuvre on the coffee table. “It doesn’t work like that nowadays.” She was shaking, she realized numbly. She needed air. She didn’t even want to tell them he’d already proposed without even knowing the baby was his.

Ruth stood, too. “James is a good boy, Kate. He won’t shirk his responsibility.”

Kate’s mouth gaped, she knew, but she was too upset now to worry about it as tears of frustration burned the back of her eyes. “You don’t get it. I don’t
want
Jim to marry me because I’m having his baby! I want him to marry me
because he loves me!”
She stopped then, her hand flying to her mouth. “I didn’t mean that! What I meant was—”

“You’re having his love child!” Lydia clapped her hands gleefully, a reaction that seemed bizarrely inappropriate to Kate. “This is wonderful!”

Wonderful? What was wonderful about carrying the unwanted child of a man—

Kate caught herself short.
Unwanted?
Dear heaven, nothing could be farther from the truth! Since she’d learned she was carrying Jim’s child, she couldn’t think of anything more exciting.

It thrilled her. Amazed her.

This child had been conceived in passion. In joy. In wonder.

In lies.

Kate sat heavily on the edge of a chair and hung her head in her hands. He’d asked her point blank,
you’re covered?
And she’d said,
yes.

“Kate?” Nana asked. “What’s wrong?”

Kate looked at the group of concerned faces before her. “What’s wrong? You even have to ask? I’m about to have the unplanned baby of a man who has no idea this is coming and you even have to
ask?
”

“He must have known there were risks, as it were,” Ruth said. “It’s not as if you young folks don’t learn these things.”

“Yes, he knew there were risks,” Kate murmured feebly.

“Didn’t you take precautions?” Claire demanded. “It’s not as if you don’t have access to contraception these days.”

“No,” Kate murmured even more feebly, “we didn’t. I... I didn’t think we needed to.”

“I’m shocked!” Ruth spoke now. “I thought Jim was more responsible than that!”

“He is.
He was!”
Kate was beyond embarrassed, but she couldn’t let Jim’s own grandmother think ill of him. “I... I implied I was on the pill.”

“
You what?!”
It was her own Nana who turned on her now.

“I thought I was already pregnant, all right?! He... I... Anyway, it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time!”

“I guess you were wrong about that,” Claire mumbled.

Nana shot her friend a quelling look.

“I know this is a mess. I know it is. But it’s
my
mess.” Kate stood on legs more than a little shaky now. “You all mean well, but you can’t fix this. I’ll figure it out.
On my own.”

“He’ll do the right thing,” Lydia murmured encouragingly as Kate walked to the door. “I know he will. It’ll work out.”

Kate didn’t have the heart or will to contradict her. She didn’t want Jim to ‘do the right thing.’ She knew with utter certainty that he would propose again the moment he knew she was carrying his child. And that was the problem. She’d just be another responsibility he’d ‘take care of,’ because that’s what Jim did. It was the kind of man he was. But it wouldn’t be a marriage. At least, not any Kate wanted a part of.

“I’m going for a walk,” she said dully.

The ladies nodded in unison, for once, blessedly silent.

HOW COULD SHE HAVE BEEN SO
STUPID?
How could she have been so out of touch with her own body not to have realized she wasn’t pregnant but
ovulating?

Kate’s strides lengthened in the shadows by the edge of the road. She had no one to fix this. No one to turn to but herself.

She barely paid attention as the car slowed beside her, the glow of headlights confirming what she already knew—it was time to turn around. Then she heard the window slide down, and her heart slammed in her chest. She didn’t dare look. Because if it was
him
...

“Kate, what are you doing out here?”

Kate blew out a slow breath and didn’t even try to hide the raw emotion in her eyes. “I was just...” but she couldn’t finish, couldn’t even begin to formulate the rest of the sentence, as Rachel threw open the driver’s door and ran to wrap Kate in her arms.

“Oh, honey, what’s wrong?”

Kate looked over Rachel’s shoulder at the empty rear seat.

“Before you ask, Liam’s with my dad. Grams wouldn’t tell me why you needed help tonight, but I knew it must be something major. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay away. We’ve been so worried. Susan and Grace are on high alert waiting for my call.”

Kate bit her trembling lip and looked at the sky, willing her flooded eyes to dry up. She’d caused these good people so much trouble. “I never meant to worry you.”

“I thought that’s what friends were for.”