The Pregnancy Test (19 page)

They had their air-conditioning running, yet Mandy still looked warm, her hair matted to her forehead, her legs scissoring like she was trying to kick the covers off in her sleep. He thought she was amazingly beautiful.

“Mandy.” She didn’t stir, so he took a step toward her and spoke louder. “Mandy.”

She rolled over. Damien cursed, rubbing his temples. He dropped to his knees next to her bed and shook her shoulder a little. Her flesh was hot, with a sheen of perspiration, which he knew was normal for this stage of pregnancy. Night sweats, the book called them.

“Mandy.” Feeling desperate and ridiculous, he shook her again and kissed her lightly.

With a jerk, she came awake, her eyes wide and unfocused. “Wha…”

“It’s me, Damien.”

“Damien? What’s the matter?” Mandy tried to sit up, but he held her shoulders gently.

“Shh. It’s okay, nothing’s the matter. I just needed to see you.”

He had needed to see her, to touch her, to remind himself what could never be. To stare her straight in the eye and tell her that love was pain and he didn’t want any more of that ever.

Yet it was so hard to remember any of that when she blinked up at him and all he wanted to do was kiss her, hold her, love her.

M
andy fell back against her pillow, thinking she was having a really vivid dream, that annoying pregnancy side effect that had been plaguing her nearly from conception. But Damien looked real enough, even if she couldn’t see his face clearly in the shadows. And if she were dreaming he would be naked. “I thought you were in Chicago. And what time is it?”

She was struggling to figure out why he was in her bedroom in the middle of the night. Not that she was complaining, mind you. But it struck her as a little odd, to say the least. She was hoping it was odd in a good way, as though he’d had an epiphany that he reciprocated her feelings.

“I was in Chicago, but I just got back. It’s two in the morning. After you called this afternoon when I was getting the tattoo, I finished up my business and took the first flight back.” He brushed her hair back off her forehead.

Sitting up, Mandy grimaced. Her hair was sweaty. Nice and sexy. Not that Damien seemed interested in sexy when she studied him in the dim lighting. He looked as if his dog had died. Which meant anything he might say was probably not going to involve his own vow of love and wish to remain by her side through better or worse, richer or poorer, having another man’s child, whatever.

“We need to talk.”

Swallowing, she felt sadness rush over her. Those words were the kiss of death for relationships.
We need to talk
meant one of two things.
You’re clinging to me and I’m not ready, so I need some space
—aka
We’re breaking up
. Or
This just isn’t working anymore
—aka
We’re breaking up
.

“Okay,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. While she loved Damien, if he didn’t want a relationship, she wasn’t going to pursue him. She was too old and too pregnant for that kind of futile and desperate effort. “Why were you in Chicago, Damien?”

“I needed to take care of a few things.”

He paused and she waited. The one thing she wasn’t going to do was settle for cryptic, not now, when he’d woken her up in the middle of a REM cycle. He did at least owe her some answers, about why he was there and how he felt about her.

“I needed to talk to a Realtor about selling the house I had with Jess. I saw my parents. I gave Jess’s parents some of her things.” He put his hand over his forearm. “And I got my tattoo…redone.”

It wasn’t smart to feel hope, but she did, a bright burst of hope that took her breath away and made her heart pound. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t there at two
A.M.
to deliver the break-up speech. She reached out and touched his cheek, ran her finger across his lip. “Why, Damien? Why do all those things now?”

“It’s time…I’m trying.” He drew a shuddering breath. “I need to try and let it go, move forward somehow. I want…people back in my life.”

Mandy watched him for a moment, wishing the light was on so she could see into his blue eyes, read in them what he was really trying to say. She stroked across his skin, felt him lean toward her into the touch, his thigh pressing against her hip as he sat on her bed.

There was so much he had shown her, given her, yet so much she still didn’t know. “Tell me how she died,” she whispered. That was really what it was all about. There was something about Jessica that still held him captive, his emotions strained and contained, his heart unreachable.

Damien shuddered. He dropped his head so that her hand fell away. “She was murdered.” His voice was raw and hoarse, nothing more than a whisper, but loud in the quiet room.

Mandy froze with her fingers on the sheet she was bunching about her waist. That was not what she’d expected to hear, and his words arrested her. “Oh, Damien! That’s awful. God, how did it happen?”

His head lifted and went slowly back and forth. “You don’t want to know.”

Tears sprung to her eyes. “I do. I want to know what you’ve been through.”

There was hesitation, but only for a second or two. Then Damien started to speak.

“Jessica and I had an argument about her spending habits.” He could still hear her voice.
Fuck you and your fifty bucks
, she’d said, when he had complained that she’d bought another pair of shoes, pushing their credit card over its limit. “Sometimes when we fought, she’d leave and go out with her friends. Spending lots of money, getting drunk, and flirting with guys was her way of getting back at me, her way to get me jealous and piss me off. It always worked.”

Damien dug his fingernails into his legs. He never said these words out loud. It hurt to do it now, it ripped and clawed and shredded at him, but if he wanted to make Mandy understand why he wasn’t lovable, he had to tell her the truth about him. “It wasn’t a healthy way to deal with her anger, I guess, but then neither were the bribes and begging that I alternately used to try and get her to see my side of things. I think we both wanted the other to be something we just weren’t. But anyway, she took off that night, and while I was mad, I wasn’t surprised. Later her friends said when they left the club they’d gone to, Jessica had refused to go with them. They went on to the next party place and left her there.”

Mandy’s hand closed over his, forcing his grip on his pants to relax.

“It wasn’t the first time she’d stayed out all night, but in the morning I asked around and no one knew where she was. I called the cops right around the same time a restaurant owner was throwing his trash out in the alley and found her body. She’d been raped and strangled.”

The words meant nothing, could never convey anything as horrible as the sight of his dead wife that had greeted him in the morgue. The crime scene photos had cemented the knowledge that Jessica had suffered tremendously and had sent him retreating in his head to the safety of logic. Cold, hard survival. Never emotion. He had shut all that down like a pool at the end of a summer season to protect himself.

“Oh, dear God.”

Tears rolled down Mandy’s face, and her fingers jerked on his. Even in the dark, he could see the shock in her eyes, the horror. The pity.

“Damien, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’ve suffered.”

“I don’t want you to know!” he said, voice shaking. Biting the inside of his cheek and hardening his hand into a fist, he tried to regain control of himself. “I don’t want you to see the dark places I’ve been, I don’t want to expose you to that. I don’t want to hurt you or your daughter. I want you safe. I want you happy.”

“I want those same things for you. You deserve to be safe and happy, too.” She took his face in her hands, shook him a little. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He almost laughed. He’d heard those words so many fucking times, if he strung them together they’d stretch from Chicago to New York three times. He was trying to hold on to his anger, to his conviction that he couldn’t have Mandy, but it was so damn hard when she was looking at him like that.

Like she loved him.

“I love you, Damien. Please don’t dismiss that.”

“You don’t even know me.” He took her arms, moved them to her lap to distance her, to distract him from his pounding heart and stupid foolish hope.

“Yes, I do. I know everything that matters about you. I know you’re a wonderful man of integrity. I know that you’re complex, driven, and that you’re compassionate. I know you.” She ignored the wet stains on each of her cheeks and met his gaze straight on. “And I know that you didn’t come to my apartment at two in the morning to tell me to kiss off.”

He had thought he had. He had thought he was here to warn her away from him. But he wasn’t sure he could convince her when he was desperately wavering himself.

“What do you really want, Damien? If there was no past and no guilt and no fear? What do you really want?”

That was brutally easy to answer. But he wasn’t sure he could say it out loud. Wasn’t sure it would be smart to put into words feelings that couldn’t, shouldn’t, matter in the long run. Eyes closed tight, he drew in a painful breath.

Mandy kissed his forehead, her dewy lips gliding back and forth, her whispered words muffled against his skin. “It’s okay…just tell me what you feel. Tell me what you want.”

He couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t keep his fingers from drawing up her back, pulling her into him. He couldn’t help the words that tumbled out of his mouth.

“I want you…I want you to love me.”

Her mouth shifted on his forehead, kissing over to his temple, with a tenderness that made his throat constrict.

“That’s easy enough. I do love you.”

It sounded so true, so right, so pure when she whispered that to him. “What else do you want?”

“I want you to be mine.” His voice got stronger, the lump in his throat easing up. He rubbed his lips along her cheek. “I want to love you.”

Her lips met his, briefly, tantalizing. “Then love me, Damien. Love me.”

He did. With all of the shards and damaged pieces of his heart, he did truly love Mandy. In a way he’d never thought possible, with a desperate sort of ache and a quiet joy.

“I do. I will.” And he covered her mouth, kissed her softly again and again, wanting the moment to stretch and last and allow them both to hover in that place of promise.

He touched her—arms, waist, shoulders, neck—questing, intimate touches, the need to feel Mandy’s flesh everywhere, to caress and worship every inch. Their tongues met as they kissed, a slow, leisurely mating that sent of kick of hot desire through his body.

“I want to feel you closer,” she said, pulling back to yank her tank top off. In the shadows, he could see the full roundness of her breasts.

It had been over three weeks since he’d seen her without her shirt, and then he’d only known her body for two days, but he knew she looked different. The change to her breasts was subtle, the dark pinkness around her nipples larger, her belly a little rounder. She looked incredibly sexy to him. But she also looked beautiful, wonderful, vulnerable in her love for him.

He was in absolute awe that she could look at him and think there was anything for her inside of him. “Mandy.”

She started to tumble back onto the bed, reaching for him.

“Don’t lie that way, remember,” he said, mentally referencing the
Everything Guide
as he took off his own shirt. “Lie on your side and just let me hold you. I just want to hold you.”

She did as he asked, her head falling onto the sleep-squashed pillow, a soft smile on her face as she settled onto her side. Damien stood up, took his shoes and pants off. He left his boxers on as he slid in alongside her. This wasn’t about sex. It was about feeling her, being near her and cherishing the idea that they could be together.

That love could be enough.

Mandy sighed when he reached for her and shifted closer until they were touching from shoulder to toes, her soft curves nestled against his hard flesh, her belly resting above his pelvis.

They shared her pillow, faces hovering inches apart.

“This could work, Damien,” she whispered. “It’s honestly all up to you whether we should try or not.”

He knew she wasn’t talking about sleeping arrangements or sexual positions, but about them. The future. Rubbing his lips across her forehead, he asked, “Why is it up to me? You’re the one having a baby. That’s the most important thing we need to think about.”

“Exactly. I know that you’ll be wonderful with my baby. I don’t doubt that for a minute. But I need to know if this is temporary or long-term. If we need to take it slow…or we need to leave it at this tonight.”

The words tickled his ear as she spoke. He could smell the floral scent of her lotion, feel the dampness of her hair as he drove his fingers through her curls.

“I don’t want to pressure you or rush you or be insensitive to what you’ve been through, but I do have to think about my baby, and I just need to know what it is you want.”

What he wanted and what he should do seemed to be two different things. It wasn’t fair to ask Mandy to wait for him to heal the wounds he had. It wasn’t fair to ask her to take him on as he was, more liability than asset. It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to allow him into her daughter’s life.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t give a shit about fairness. If he couldn’t have Mandy, tonight, here, now, love her and feel her love for him, if he couldn’t have a life that included her in it, then he wasn’t sure he could face that empty future.

Selfish or not, he needed her.

“I want you. I want your daughter. I want
us
.”

“I was really hoping you’d say that,” she whispered.

It wasn’t clear to him who moved, but their lips were together, coaxing, pressing, begging, tasting each other, and he gripped the side of her cheek, desperate in his desire, his feelings.

He loved her. She loved him. And Mandy said it could be that simple. Here, in the dark, with her in his arms, her taste on his tongue, he believed it.

Mandy kissed Damien for all she was worth, trying to push into his mouth all the feelings, the love, the tenderness she felt for him. She knew it wasn’t easy for him to open up to her. He had been living in emotional solitary confinement for three years.