The Pregnancy Test (11 page)

“Hormones. It’s nothing.”

Making shushing sounds, he kissed her again, body tense beneath her. “Do you want a chocolate?”

That drew a startled laugh out of her, and she lifted her head to give him a wobbly smile. “No, thank you. I’m fine really, though you get points for a brilliant suggestion.”

He searched her face, tucking her hair behind her ear. “No regrets, right?”

“No. None.” Without thinking, her fingers trailed over his lips, and he kissed the tips. “A few months ago my roommate Jamie brought a psychic to our apartment. At the time, I might have been pregnant but didn’t know it, or was on the verge of conceiving. This man, who was a bit of a loon, by the way, told me when he looked at me, he saw pastries. Sweet, sticky things.”

Damien’s eyebrows shot up.

“I thought it was ridiculous, but then I did get pregnant, and hearing you call the baby a bun, I just had the thought, that well, maybe this is the way things were supposed to happen.”

Lying a little on her side, she touched the swell of her stomach. “Maybe I was meant to have this baby just like this, and it’s not an accident at all. Maybe I was meant to give up the shop and come work for you.”

No matter her feelings on Ben, she wouldn’t go back and give up her relationship with him, because he had given her this child, unwittingly or not. A child she wanted more than anything, ever.

And she wouldn’t give up this night with Damien.

The lamplight set his face in the shadows. “I’m not sure I believe in fate or destiny, Mandy, but all I know is that I’m really damn glad you’re here with me.”

“So am I, Damien.” She laid her head back down on his chest and felt him relax one slow breath at a time.

Her thoughts emptied one by one, her body replete and satisfied, her skin sticky in the hot night air.

They lay still, together, until her eyes started to drift and she knew she was in danger of falling asleep. “I guess I should head back to my room,” she murmured, to be polite and give him an out if he didn’t want her there.

“Stay,” he said, shifting a little so she oozed off his chest and down onto the bed. “Sleep with me, Mandy.”

“Okay.” Tucking her hands under her chin and turning her nose away from the tickling hairs on Damien’s arm, the word was barely out of her mouth before she was asleep.

D
amien stared at the ceiling, watching an insect flutter ecstatically around the light on the ceiling fan.

He hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to Mandy’s baby.

Sure, he’d felt that odd sensation of her stomach spasming beneath his hand.

Yes, he could see the small bump growing below her belly button. And he appreciated her breasts, which were full and tender, but he’d never seen them before her pregnancy, so most of the changes in her body meant nothing to him.

Intellectually, he’d seen the worry on her face on the beach, the hurt that dickhead Ben had offered her money to leave him alone. He’d heard her talk about her fears, her need for day care, her desire to be a good mother.

But he hadn’t really thought the whole thing through. In a few months Mandy would be walking around looking like she’d swallowed a basketball, then she would have a baby in one of those chest parachutes women used to carry their babies around, and her whole world would revolve around that child.

He’d known, but he hadn’t gotten it, and he still wasn’t sure he did. But when she had started to tumble forward onto him, some instinct he hadn’t even known he’d had had leapt to the surface and reminded him she was carting around precious cargo.

Mandy slept deeply next to him, her ankles crossed, legs drawn up, her breath warming his arm, and he understood her fears. Suddenly he was terrified.

What the hell had he done here? He had slept with a pregnant woman. A
mother
.

Way to be uncomplicated.

He couldn’t have just found an acquaintance willing to have a carefree night of fun. No, after three years of abstinence, he went and had sex with a woman pregnant with another man’s child. How did they say dumb ass in Spanish?

Damien shifted on the bed, curling his hand behind his head. He supposed he could have slept with another woman, someone confident and independent, who just wanted commitment-free sex. He’d had a few offers like that in the last couple of years and had turned them down.

That wasn’t what he wanted.

What he wanted was someone to talk to, someone who would understand why he needed what he did, someone to just hold for a little while. Someone who would make him laugh, while knowing they couldn’t have a relationship.

Someone he could be deeply attracted to.

That was why he’d slept with Mandy.

That was why he’d do it again.

And her baby was part of the package, part of what drew him to her, the love and worry in her brown eyes.

Damien sat up, drummed his finger on his knee. He couldn’t sleep. Nothing new there. He usually only slept four hours a night, then once a month or so collapsed in a twenty-four-hour coma where he slept straight through a Saturday. The first few times it had happened, he’d scared himself. But he’d learned it was a system that worked for him. He couldn’t sleep during the week, not when his mind was busy and he would lie there hour after hour thinking, seeing, feeling.

So he’d learned to drop into bed only when he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore; then once a month he caught up on his sleep. Big improvement from the days when he hadn’t been able to sleep at all because of the nightmares, because of the guilt, because of the feeling that he had failed miserably.

In the first weeks after Jessica had been found, raped and strangled in an alley, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the agony of her, once so vivacious and confident, lying in that morgue. Then the police had decided he was the prime suspect. They had thought he could have done
that
to Jessica, his wife. The pain had eaten him from the inside out, leaving him a jittery insomniac, hovering on the edge of insanity.

He was better now.

But never whole. Never again.

Damien got out of bed, glancing down at Mandy as she sighed in her sleep and turned her head in the other direction on the pillow.

He couldn’t have a relationship with Mandy, but he was so glad they had this, here, tonight. With her teasing smile, Damien thought she’d taken a part of him buried deep inside under a layer of avoidance and had started to help him heal.

Grabbing his boxer briefs off the floor, he pulled them on and grimaced as his feet stuck to the tile floor because of the humidity. He pulled a soft drink out of the minibar and popped the top off. He thought it was cool they had Coke in glass bottles, like he’d had as a kid.

Taking a swig, he plopped on the chair at the round table holding all his work papers, notes, and his computer.

He could work.

But after five minutes, he admitted his concentration was off. He stood up, stretched his sore leg muscles, wondering why sex always seemed to use muscles that the gym could never touch. He straightened the table, picked up Mandy’s dress and folded it. Tossed her torn panties in the trash, indulging in a fantasy of buying her a new pair. Sheer, low cut, hot pink.

He’d never been a pink kind of guy, but the idea of seeing Mandy’s soft mound behind sassy pink had him hard.

“Damn. Enough already,” he told his erection.

He picked up Mandy’s beach bag to set it on the table, marveling at how heavy the thing was. “Jesus. She got sand bricks in here?” He took a peek. Sunscreen, sunglasses, her wallet, and a really thick book.

“
The Everything Guide to Pregnancy
.” He pulled it out and glanced at the cover. Some woman was grinning, which she really shouldn’t have been considering the ugly floral dress she was wearing.

Thumbing through it, he decided to read Month Four, which was where he thought Mandy was. Sitting back down, he put his feet on the chair opposite him and glanced at the drawn picture of a woman at sixteen weeks gestation. “That’s a freak out.” There was an alien sucking its thumb in that woman’s stomach.

“What you may be feeling…fatigue, constipation, breast enlargement, nosebleeds, mood swings, weepiness.” Well, he could attest to the weepiness.

There was advice on exercise, diet, and tests the doctor would be performing. “Measuring the height of the fundus? What the hell is that?” Suddenly getting a little nervous that there was a whole lot more to this pregnancy thing than he had thought, he used the index to look up Sexual Intercourse.

Thumbing back to page one hundred and twelve, he realized it might have been a smart idea to read this
before
he’d dipped his wick twice. Two paragraphs in, he was shifting uncomfortably reading about engorgement of genitals and colostrum leaking from breasts and bleeding of the cervix.

“If this happens, you may want to avoid deep penetration?” Damien felt a sweat breaking out all over his body. He’d deep penetrated, he was sure of it. “A fear that the baby is ‘watching’ you is normal, but unfounded, as is the fear of ‘bumping’ the baby.”

“Oh, my God!” That had never even occurred to him. He glanced over at Mandy, still naked. He’d read the baby already had eyes, and the image of Junior cringing as Damien’s you-know-what came hurtling toward him was horrifying and graphic.

He sucked down his Coke and turned the page.

“If air is forced into the vagina during oral sex, it can cause an embolism and prove deadly to mother and fetus. Oral sex is safe as long as you’re careful not to blow any air into the vagina.”

Damien reread it twice to make sure he’d gotten it straight. He bit his fingernail and tried to remember if he’d blown into her vagina. What constituted blowing? His tongue had been in her, plunging, licking. And maybe air would go along with his tongue on the way in, but it wasn’t like he’d pursed his lips and whistled “Yankee Doodle” into her crotch. What the hell did they mean? Fucking A.

“I could have killed her!”

Rubbing his forehead, he closed the book, flipped it to the front, and opened it at page one. He’d be better off just reading the whole damn thing.

Mandy woke up naked with Damien’s hand resting on her bum. It was just about a perfect way to start the day.

Except she had to use the loo.

Rolling onto her back with a sigh, she was planning on easing herself away from Damien’s sleeping form and taking care of business. She jumped a little when she saw he was wide awake. Staring at her.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile, brushing her fingers over his chest.

“Hi.” Damien gave her a warm kiss. On the forehead.

Mandy wet her lips, leaning toward him, but he made no move to touch her. She decided she’d have to initiate a proper good morning. She didn’t want him to feel awkward about the night before, and she didn’t want things to end so quickly. They had a whole day and a half left before they had to go back to New York and she wanted to make good use of them.

Damien stiffened as she started wandering lower, fingers fanning out in feathery touches. Stiff was good. She was disappointed to find he was wearing briefs, but wasn’t about to let that deter her. Only she looked up again and found he was still wearing that same odd stare, a sort of reverent gaze of awe that was damned unnerving and not in the least bit sexual.

“What?” she asked, shifting a little under his scrutiny.

“Hmmm?” His hand touched her hip, but lightly, as though he was afraid she might deflate like a souffle.

“Why are you looking at me like I’m the Madonna? And I don’t mean the one who kissed Britney Spears with tongue.” He was scaring her, the intensity in his blue eyes searching and expectant.

“I just think you look beautiful.” His hand slid over onto her stomach, and he stroked softly. “I can’t believe the baby is five inches big. That seems so little, yet at the same time so huge, considering it’s growing inside you.”

Mandy dropped her hand from the front of his briefs. He wasn’t thinking about sex. He was thinking about her
baby
. Good God.

“Five inches?” she said, not sure what to say. This wasn’t a conversation she’d pictured having with Damien.

“I know, it’s unbelievable.” He shook his head. “And it has eyes and can suck its thumb and has fully formed sexual organs. It’s a boy or a girl already, a real live human being.” His thumb went over her belly. “Right there. Amazing.”

Had he slipped in the shower and hit his head? Something had obviously happened while she’d been sleeping, and whatever it was, he had lost his mind as a result. He shouldn’t be looking at her like that. He couldn’t. Their relationship couldn’t go there.

“How do you know all that?” She didn’t think fetal development was knowledge Damien had just picked up along the way. And they were facts he hadn’t seemed to know the night before.

“I read the book in your beach bag. Very informative.”

“You read
The Everything Guide to Pregnancy
?” She gaped at him, shocked at the idea of Damien Sharpton, workaholic businessman, thumbing through the Labor and Delivery chapter. “The whole thing? When?”

“While you were sleeping.” He frowned. “Hey, do you think I blew into your vagina?”

“What?”
Mandy felt all the blood leave her face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“It says in the book blowing into the vagina during oral sex can cause an embolism and is dangerous. I don’t think I blew any air, but what do you think? Did it feel like air was going into you?”

Mandy blinked. No one had ever discussed her vagina with such a cavalier attitude before, and she didn’t like it in the least. It felt uncomfortably as if she was at the OB/GYN, not lying in bed naked with her lover.

“I forgot to turn on my vaginal air pressure gauge,” she snapped. “I don’t know! I was too focused on not losing my mind to worry about physics.”

He looked hurt, the idiot. “Well, I didn’t know…I’m sorry, Mandy. I didn’t mean to do anything harmful to you or the baby.”

Oh, damn. His hand was stroking on her again, and she felt like the biggest bitch for yelling at him. “I know that. Of course you wouldn’t hurt me. But you startled me, and frankly, I haven’t read that chapter in the book so I have no bloody idea what you’re talking about.”

Which was rather distressing to realize that she was walking around making choices for herself and her baby without having the facts straight first. What was the matter with her? Who was she to think she could raise a child and not make a disaster out of it?

“I’m sure it’s fine. We just won’t have oral sex again. And when you go to your next prenatal appointment, you can ask the doctor about it. Oh, and we should avoid deep penetration or having you on your back for long periods of sex.” He nodded, as though this all made perfect sense to him and that this wasn’t an incredibly bizarre conversation for a man to be having with his knocked-up secretary.

“I have to use the loo.” She shoved on his chest so he would back up. All thoughts of sensual good-morning sex were gone, shot into orbit by his vaginal-blowing fears.

“I’m starving,” he said, obviously not picking up on her tension as he sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. “Do you want to grab some breakfast? Then I should probably get some work done for a couple of hours.”

“That’s fine. I’ll shower while you’re working.” And read the damn
Everything Guide to
goddamn
Pregnancy
.