Not Another Bad Date (23 page)

The doorbell rang, and she ignored it. It rang again, and she pushed the quilt aside. Zach. It had to be. Who else would be so pushy so early in the morning? Adele moved to the door and swung it open to stare into Tiffany’s green eyes and neon blue eye shadow.

“My daddy says you’re gonna have his babies,” the teen said without so much as a hello.

“Yes.” She stuck her head outside and looked around. “Does your daddy know you’re here?”

“No. Joe and Cindy Anne Baker came over. He went to breakfast with them at the Caralinda’s Cozy Cafe.” She played with the pull on the zipper of her coat. “I think they’re dating.”

“Who? Joe and Cindy Anne?”

Tiffany nodded.

Just a few short weeks ago, Joe had wanted a skin sandwich with Adele. “Come in.” She shut the door behind Tiffany, and the young girl followed her into the living room.

“Do you know if they’re going to be girls or boys?”

“What?”

“The babies.”

“Not yet.”

Her gaze lowered to Adele’s stomach. “You don’t look pregnant.”

“I’m not very far along.”

She looked back up. “When are the babies due?”

“August.”

Her eyes rounded and she pointed to herself. “My birthday’s in August.”

Adele smiled at the irony.

“My daddy said you won’t marry him.” Tiffany folded her arms across her chest. “Why?”

She really didn’t know how to explain it to a thirteen-year-old. So she said simply, “Because he doesn’t love me.”

“Maybe he will.” Tiffany shrugged. “Someday. You should think about it.”

Adele wasn’t going to wait for someday. She tilted her head to one side. “I thought you didn’t like me.”

“Things are different now.”

Which was a huge understatement.

“Where’s Kendra?”

“She and Sherilyn are bringing the baby home.”

“Gosh. Today?”

Adele heard the car pull into the driveway. “Right now.” A few minutes later they were all crowded in the baby’s room watching him sleep in the cradle Zach had put together. Adele was the first to leave the room. She returned to her spot on the sofa and closed her eyes. She was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep for a year or two.

She wanted to go home.

Adele shook her head. Her three closest friends sat at her kitchen table in her home in Boise, feasting on Lucy’s torte. She’d been home a day and a half, and her friends had come over to cook dinner together and catch up. Adele had waited until dessert to drop her bombshell.

“Nope,” Adele answered, and took a bite of cake. “Not shitting you. I’m pregnant.”

“And you waited until now to tell us.”

Adele shrugged. “I knew that’s all we’d talk about, and I wanted to know what y’all have been up to first.”

One corner of Maddie’s lips rose. “Y’all?”

“How far along are you?” Clare asked.

“Eight weeks now.” Two months. The nausea hadn’t let up, and her breasts were sore. She could practically feel them getting bigger, pushing against the restraint of her C cups.

The three friends all glanced at each other, and Maddie asked, “Who’s the daddy?”

“His name is Zach Zemaitis.” The sound of his name on her lips brought back memories of him and made her heart stutter. Distance had not put a dent in healing her heart.

A frown wrinkled Lucy’s brow. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“He used to play professional football.” She remembered the day in his office when she’d read about his skilled hands. She took another bite and said around a mouthful of torte, “He played for Denver.”

The wrinkle in Lucy’s brow smoothed. “That Zach Zemaitis?”

“The quarterback?” Maddie once again reached for her wine. “He’s huge.”

“Yep.” Lord, cake hadn’t tasted so good since she’d dated stoner Doug back in college, and she tried to concentrate on that rather than Zach and how much she missed him. Just like the first time she’d been with Zach, their time together had been hot and intense and brief, and he’d left her shattered.

“I don’t watch football.” Clare shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t know who he is. How did you meet him?”

“I met him years ago at UT,” she answered, then filled them in on the past. She told them that Zach was the first guy she’d had sex with and she told them about Devon. “Now he lives in Cedar Creek with his daughter,” she finished. She took a drink of her decaf coffee and wondered what he was doing. If he even knew that she’d left two days ago. She’d left without telling him. Not out of hurt or spite, but because he’d want to know when she’d be back, and she didn’t know the answer to that herself. Or maybe he wouldn’t want to know. Maybe he didn’t even care. He hadn’t called, so her guess would be that he didn’t care. He was probably out celebrating her refusal to marry him.

“I guess it’s too late for my safe-sex lecture,” Maddie said.

“We used two forms of birth control.” Or at least she’d thought she had birth control.

“What’s he do now?” Clare wanted to know.

“He coaches high-school football,” she said, and recalled the way he pushed and pulled at his hat as he stood on the sidelines. Her chest ached, but she wouldn’t cry. Not now. Her friends were here. She didn’t want the sadness to swamp her like an incoming tide. Not yet.

“What does he think about the baby?”

Adele held up two fingers. “I’m having twins.”

“What?”

“No!”

“Yep. Twins, and Zach believes I got pregnant on purpose to trap him into marriage.”

“Jerk.”

“Ass.”

Clare reached for Adele’s hand. “You would never do that. If he thinks so, then he is unworthy of you.”

Adele smiled and squeezed Clare’s fingers. “Thank you.”

“What are your plans?” Lucy asked.

Adele shrugged and lifted her gaze to the dark windows above Lucy’s head. Outside, fat snowflakes floated toward the ground and blanketed the earth in virgin white. It was the first weekend in January. New Year. New snow. New life.

“You know we’ll help you in any way that we can.” Lucy spoke for all of them.

“I know.” She looked at her friends who were so important to her. The four of them were as close as family. They’d been through a lot together and shared their writing and heartache and joy. She loved them like they were her family, but a big chunk of her heart, her life, wasn’t here anymore. It was more than a thousand miles away. With Sheri and Kendra and Harris. And Zach. She wouldn’t raise two children so far away from their father. It wouldn’t be fair to them. Zach might be fine with having his children live several states from him. That’s how he’d raised Tiffany until three years ago, but it wasn’t okay with Adele. She hadn’t gotten pregnant by herself, and she wasn’t going to raise these babies by herself. Once the babies were born, she and Zach would have to work out custody. She couldn’t ask him to uproot and move from Texas. That wasn’t fair to Tiffany. Adele would have to move home, and the thought of leaving her friends added another heavy layer to her sadness.

“How do you feel?” Lucy asked. “You look tired.”

“I am tired. I sleep a lot, and I wake up tired. On the plane here, I read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
and I guess it’s normal.” She’d spent her time the past two days reading and staring at the ultrasound of the babies. “I have something to show y’all,” she said, and left the kitchen. She grabbed the photo from her dresser, then returned and set the picture on the table. Over the past few days, she’d started to feel a little motherly. The more she stared at the images, the more it felt real, and the more she started to feel protective. She hadn’t planned to have children this way, but it wasn’t their fault. An unexpected wave of warmth and love washed over her, and she lowered a hand to cover her stomach. It wasn’t their fault they looked like little shrimp.

“Well,” Clare said through a smile, “they’re just adorable.”

Lucy laughed. “They look just like you.”

Maddie leaned forward for a better look. “Does this one have a penis?”

“Don’t joke about that. I’m having girls.” The doorbell rang, and Adele left to answer it. Her friends’ laughter followed her as she moved through the living room and opened the door. Immediately she froze in a way that had nothing to do with the snow falling from the sky.

“Dwayne.”

“Hi, Adele.” Her old boyfriend stood on her porch wearing a shearling jean jacket. “You look good.”

Adele didn’t know whether to scream, call the police, or punch Dwayne in the head. For three years he’d left stuff on her porch like he was on some sort of insane reconnaissance mission.

“I’m returning this.” He held up a grocery sack. “It’s that nurse’s outfit we bought at The Pleasure Boutique.”

She took it from his hand and crossed her arms over her bulky sweater. “Why didn’t you just leave it on my porch and sneak off like you’ve been doing for the past three years?”

His cheeks turned a little more pink. “’Cause I wanted to tell you that I’m not going to do that anymore.” His breath hung in front of his face and he shrugged one shoulder. “I can’t explain why I was doing it at all. I just don’t know.”

She knew.

“I’d just get this wild hair and…”

“Act crazy?” It was the curse.

“Yeah, but I’m over it.” He flashed her a smile that used to make her heart melt. “You look good,” he repeated.

She wore a bulky sweater, jeans, and fuzzy slippers. Her hair was pulled back in a dreaded scrunchie, and she seriously doubted she looked anything other than complete crap.

“Maybe we can go out for a drink sometime.”

Even if she hadn’t been expecting another man’s babies, she wouldn’t have accepted his invitation. She opened her mouth to let him down gently, but a voice from behind Dwayne said, “She’s not going anywhere with you.”

Adele lifted her gaze from Dwayne’s startled face to Zach as he moved within the light of the porch. He wore his dark wool coat, and the porch light caught in the snow on his big shoulders and in his hair. Her stomach lifted and smashed into her heart.

“Who’s this?” Dwayne asked.

Dwayne was a big guy, but Zach was bigger. His brown eyes bored into Dwayne like he’d dared to intercept a perfect pass. “None of your damn business.” Zach stepped in front of Adele’s former boyfriend. “You’re out of my sight for two days, and some bozo is asking you out already? If you think I’m going to wait around to catch you between dates again you’re crazy.” He pointed behind him with his thumb. “Did you tell him you’re pregnant?”

“It didn’t come up.”

He looked hard into her eyes. “You are still pregnant, aren’t you?”

She frowned. “Of course. Why would you think I’m not?”

“Maybe because you left without talking to me.”

The thought of ending the pregnancy had entered her head and exited very quickly. Maybe if she hadn’t seen the ultrasound, she might have given that option more than a passing thought. But she had seen it, and the babies were real to her and becoming more so with each passing hour. “If I’d decided to end the pregnancy, I would have talked to you.”

“Ahh…” Dwayne said, and took a few steps back. “I guess I’ll see you around, Adele.”

“Okay.”

“No, you won’t.”

Adele looked into Zach’s eyes on the same level as hers. She couldn’t quite believe he was actually standing in front of her. “How did you get here?”

“The usual way. Took a plane. Rented a car with GPS. Here I am.”

“How did you know where I live?”

“Sherilyn.” A puff of warm breath hung between them. “I went to her house this morning, and she said you’d left. You took off without a word to me about where you were going and when you’d be back.”

“I don’t have to check in with you, Zach.”

He rocked back on his heels. “I’m not going to let you move across the country with two of my children.”

She’d planned on going back, but he didn’t need to know that. Not right now, when he was being so bossy. She poked a finger into his chest. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

He looked at her hand, then back up into her face. “It’s not just you anymore, Adele. You’re having my babies, and you can’t just pick up and run away when you feel like it.”

She dropped her hand. “I wasn’t running away.”

“Just like fourteen years ago.”

“I didn’t run away. I left.”

“Same thing.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“We can argue about this inside.”

She didn’t want to argue at all.

“Adele, I’m freezing my balls off out here.”

Even though she wasn’t sympathetic to his frozen balls, she took a step back, and Zach followed her inside.

“Hello, ladies,” he said, looking behind her.

With her nurse’s costume in one hand, Adele turned and shut the door. Her three friends stood in the middle of the living room, their arms folded beneath their breasts as they eyed Zach. Adele walked around him and set her bag on the chair. “Zach, these are my very good friends. This is Lucy Rothschild-McIntyre. She writes mystery novels.” Next she pointed to Clare. “This is Clare Vaughan. She writes historical romance novels, and this is Maddie Jones. She writes true crime.”

“Adele’s told me about you ladies, and it’s my pleasure to meet you in person.” He unbuttoned his coat and shrugged out of it as if he intended to stay for a while. Beneath the coat he wore a white-and-blue-striped dress shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s. “Cold enough for y’all?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not bad.”

Maddie tilted her head to one side and looked at him. “It’s been colder.”

“I haven’t been in a good snowstorm since I lived in Denver. Never thought I’d miss it, but I do.” He smiled and the sudden infusion of testosterone in the room messed with her friends’ usually level heads. The tension eased, and they smiled back at Zach. As Adele hung his coat in the closet, they asked about his trip and about flying in through the snow.

Then Maddie got down to business. “Adele’s pregnant. What are your plans?” she asked as if she was Adele’s father.

Zach smiled. “That’s between me and Adele.”

Maddie nodded and gathered her things to go. On her way out she put one hand on Adele’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Do you have the stun pen I gave you?”

Adele frowned. “Somewhere.”

“Get it and the Mace.” She looked at Zach. “If he gets out of line, zap him.”

Adele knew that Maddie was kidding—mostly.

Lucy filed out next. “If you need anything, call.”

“I will.”

Then it was Clare’s turn. “I love you.”

“I know.” She hugged her good-bye. “I love you, too.” She waved one last time to her friends, then shut the door behind them and moved back into the living room. Zach stood by the fireplace looking at the photos on the mantel.

“I wasn’t running away, Zach. I always planned on going back to Cedar Creek.”

“When?” He set down a picture frame and looked at her.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“You don’t think you should have talked to me before you left? You don’t think you should have mentioned your plans?”