The Pregnancy Test (22 page)

Her mouth opened into a surprised O. Then she wet her lips and gripped her purse. A sensual sigh drifted over to him. “Take me home, Damien, so I can show you what you deserve.”

M
andy strolled down the pavement, leaning on Damien’s arm. It was a fabulous night, the air warm and balmy on her bare arms. Traffic was light in this neighborhood, trees tucked into little squares of dirt curbside, and flowers spilled out of window boxes. For having spent most of her girlhood in the English countryside, she really did love the city, and this was a quiet, well-established area.

In the restaurant rest room, she had splashed water on her face and got a handle on her emotions. Now, strolling along on a beautiful summer night, she realized she was feeling at peace with the world. With herself. So Ben didn’t want a baby. That was not new information, and if he took himself off now before the baby was born, all the less complicated everything would be.

None of that mattered. It would all work out. She was certain of it.

“Don’t faint from hunger. My building is right here.” Damien pulled her toward the front doors and led her inside. Since he actually looked worried, she gave a smile to reassure him.

“When I was sick in my first trimester, my doctor told me not to ever worry about the baby. That if need be, my body will give to the baby first, consume my fat stores, then attack my own muscles to provide the baby with nourishment.”

“That’s kind of gruesome. But biological maternal instinct, huh?” Damien stopped in front of the elevators after hitting the button. He opened the bag of food he was holding and pulled out a spring roll. “Eat it. We don’t want your muscles being cannibalized.”

They got on the elevator, and Mandy laughed. “Don’t worry, I have a few fat stores left before they get to the muscles.” But she bit the roll anyway. She was starving.

“Elevator, upset stomach…if I had any coffee, this would remind me of the day we met.”

“Should I bend over? Then it would really be romantic.”

“Yes, it would.” His eyebrows went up suggestively and his eyes darkened. “Though hot is probably a better word than romantic.”

Mandy clamped her mouth shut so carrot and water chestnuts bits wouldn’t fall out. “I was joking! I meant it wouldn’t be romantic, like the day we…oh, never mind. I know exactly what you were thinking, you bloody pervert.”

He just laughed.

After eating, Damien showed Mandy around his apartment. It had been built in the sixties, so it was sparse on details, with chopped-up rooms and low ceilings. He had been working on fixing that, adding molding around the windows and working on plans with a contractor to knock out the walls that created narrow hallways. The end result would be an open, airy flow from three principle rooms, instead of the five tiny rooms he had now.

Except he was thinking some modifications to the plans might be needed.

“It’s a great apartment, and so amazingly quiet.”

“That’s why I moved here.” He paused in the doorway of his bedroom. “I was planning to knock this wall out into the other bedroom and make this room bigger and the other into a walk-in closet, but I’m rethinking that.”

“Why?” Mandy went into the room and turned around, taking in the space as her fingers trailed over his bed, lingering on the soft downy white pillows. “And why am I not the least bit surprised that this room is so clean and neat you could probably eat off the floor?”

Because he had become slightly neurotic. He knew he couldn’t control a lot of things in the world, in his life, but he could control his personal environment. He could wrestle order and tranquility into this apartment.

“I’m a neat freak. I’m man enough to admit that. And it’s something that you need to think about—whether or not you can live with that.” He meant that literally. He wanted her to live with him. “And I’m rethinking my plans because I’m hoping that I’m going to have to accommodate a nursery.”

Her head turned sharply back to him.

Damn, that wasn’t right. He had meant to start with her, tell her how he loved her, propose to her. Then discuss living together, the baby, eloping over the weekend.

But he was feeling a little sick, and it wasn’t the chicken. He wanted these changes. He wanted Mandy. But he was terrified she’d say no. Terrified she’d say yes.

God knew he didn’t want to hurt her, and he didn’t want to make the same mistakes he’d made the first time with Jessica.

Mandy stared at Damien, searching his face for something, anything that would reveal to her what he was really saying. He had a way of putting out words that masked what was really going on underneath.

He wanted to build a nursery in his apartment. Did that mean marriage? Living together? A guest room for her baby when she came over to visit Uncle Damien?

Heart pounding, she was about to ask when her cell phone rang in her purse. She had been hauling her purse around to freshen up her makeup when Damien showed her the bathroom. She absently glanced down toward the sound.

“Let it ring.” His voice was urgent, harsh almost.

“It might be my mother. Or Ben. Just let me check.” Mandy pawed through her purse and pulled the phone out. It was the number to the apartment flashing. She answered it, not sure what her roommates could possibly want since they knew she was out with Damien.

“Hello?”

“Mandy, this is us.” It was Caroline’s voice, so Mandy wasn’t sure what the
us
entailed. All of her roommates, she had to assume.

“Hi, Caroline. Listen, I’m a bit busy. Can I ring you later?”

Damien was giving her a most frightful scowl.

“No! Just listen to me. I have to tell you something about Damien…Honey, this will come as a shock I know, but you need to know this.”

Mandy was only half listening, waiting for that moment when she could interrupt Caroline to tell her it would have to wait.

“Damien’s wife was killed. Murdered.”

Mandy turned toward the window, startled. “I know that, Caroline. But how do you know that?”

“I read it on the Internet in the
Chicago Tribune
’s articles. Damien was charged with killing her. The cops were certain he did it, but the grand jury didn’t indict him.”

Mandy almost dropped the phone. Damien had been arrested? Good God. She felt a hot flush start up her neck. “Why are you telling me this?”

“So you can get yourself away from him. Just go to the rest room and sneak out the front door of the restaurant. You don’t want to be involved with a man like this.” Caroline’s voice was urgent.

Mandy swallowed hard, her heart aching. “I’m with Damien at his apartment right now. I’ll talk to you later.”

She hung up the phone.

Jamie shook her head at Caroline, who looked as flustered as she’d ever seen her. “That was not a good thing to do for a lot of reasons.”

Allison tucked her hair behind her ear impatiently. “What did she say? Was she horrified? What restaurant is she at? We’ll go pick her up.”

Caroline bit her lip, another gesture that indicated extreme agitation. Caroline didn’t have bad habits. She froze bad habits with the force of her will.

“She’s not at a restaurant. She’s at Damien’s apartment.”

Jamie clapped her hand over her mouth. “Caroline! She’s at his apartment and you told her that he’s a murderer?”

“Well, I didn’t know when I told her!” Caroline’s cheeks flushed an angry red.

“Okay, this could be bad.” Allison’s long legs ate up the living room as she paced back and forth. “What did Mandy say?”

“Nothing. She just hung up on me.”

“Well, she must not think he did it. And she knows him better than we do. She’s probably right.” Jamie looked at both of them. “Right?” She didn’t want to think that the man who’d shown such interest, such concern for Mandy could be a cold-blooded murderer. “They didn’t indict him, after all.”

“Because they didn’t have any evidence, not because he didn’t do it!” Caroline dropped the phone on the couch. “Damn, I’ve made a mess out of this. What if she confronts him and he…does something to her?”

Jamie didn’t think that was likely, really, she was sure he wouldn’t. But what if he did?

“Oh, shoot. We have to call her back!”

Mandy’s phone rang again as she sat heavily down on Damien’s bed. A glance at it showed it was Caroline again. She turned it to vibrate and ignored it.

Damien was staring at her. “What’s the matter? You look all flushed. Is talking about a nursery here too soon? Am I rushing you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered, though she supposed she knew the answer. It was something of a miracle that Damien had shared with her what he had. But she wished she had known the full truth about Jessica right from the start, because it explained so much.

“Tell you what?” A cautiousness slid over his face.

“That you were arrested for killing Jessica.”

Shock sprang into his eyes. “Who the hell told you that?”

“Caroline. Just now. Apparently she saw a newspaper article.”

He turned away from her, paced the room, voice bitter. “And do you think I did it?”

That startled her. “No. Of course not. Absolutely not! But why didn’t you tell me when you talked about Jessica last night? It must have been so painful for you…so horrible to be accused like that.”

She could only scratch the surface of imaginings of what he had been through. He had loved his wife. She had been killed, after they’d argued. And then in that intense, soul-shattering grief, he had been arrested for doing such a heinous act.

His thumb twitched, but he stopped walking. “Horrible? Oh, yeah, it was horrible. That’s why I didn’t tell you, Mandy. How do I find the words to tell you that the cops thought I followed my wife, angry that she’d spent too much money, angry that she flirted with other men, and I raped her, and closed my fingers around her neck and squeezed the life out of her?”

His voice cracked.

“Damien…” Even she could hear the pity in her own voice.

“Don’t.” He raised his hand. “Please don’t feel sorry for me. I saw that so many times at first, the deep pity people felt for me. They meant well, but it was smothering to look at so many faces and never feel normal, never have them understand that my life was over just as sure as Jessica’s. Then the looks turned, and they started to suspect, started to question, started to remember all the times that Jessica and I had fought, how she’d complained about my stinginess, how she ran around with other men, and really who could blame a husband for being angry about that? But murder…it was there in all their eyes, in the cold, hard stare of the detectives, in the prosecutor. They all thought I did it.”

Damien clamped his mouth shut to stem the words. He hadn’t meant to tell her this, any of this, ever. But he couldn’t stop it all from spewing out of his mouth. “I didn’t tell you because there’s nothing to tell. It’s ugly, it’s bitter and hateful, and it’s thankfully over. But if you want, I’ll tell you all the evidence they supposedly had against me, and I’ll tell you why they didn’t indict if that would make you feel better. Tell you all about forensic evidence and how my semen was found in her, and my skin under her fingernails, because before our argument we had sex—I mean, how crazy is that? A man sleeping with his own wife?”

It still rankled that they had used that against him, his desire and love for Jessica. That the only thing that had saved him had been a lack of conclusive evidence, a few stray fibers on her body that didn’t match anything he owned, and a damn good defense attorney.

“I don’t
need
to hear any of that,” she said in a quiet voice. “I only need to hear what you’re willing to tell, what you want to share with me. But if we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, which I’m sincerely hoping we will, then you need to trust me with the ugliness as well as the good things.”

Her dignity, her calm, controlled tone, jerked him out of his ranting. His shoulders fell and he leaned back against the wall, then sank to the floor, too tired to stand anymore. It was just as exhausting now as it had been three years ago. He wasn’t over a damn thing. “Christ, Mandy, I didn’t want to ever bring you into any of this. You deserve better than this.”

“Better than what? A man who loves me? A man who loves my child?” She stood up and came toward him, dropping onto the floor in front of him. “It’s not your fault, damn it. You didn’t do anything. You didn’t kill Jessica and it doesn’t matter what those cops thought. You know the truth here.” She jabbed her finger in his chest, right over his heart. “And
I
know the truth.”

“Then why can’t I let it go?” He touched her cheek with longing. “All I want is to be with you. All I want is just a sliver of happiness. Why can’t I have that?”

“There’s no reason you can’t.” Her mouth turned into his palm, her lips brushing across his flesh. “You can have whatever you want.”

He closed his eyes, everything in him aching. “There are people who will always think I did it. The publicity wasn’t as bad as it could have been since it was in the aftermath of 9/11 and there were more important news stories. But there will always be a question in some people’s minds. Do you want that for you and your daughter?”

“I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks.”