The Pregnant Bride (9 page)

J
ENNA
looked about ready to bolt—headfirst off the balcony, if necessary. “So what’s the big deal?” he said. “From the look on your face, anyone would think we’d been caught romping naked in the street.”

“You haven’t met my mother!” More rattled than he’d ever seen her, she flitted around the room, whisking the jeweler’s bag and box into a desk drawer, fluffing the cushions he’d disturbed, repositioning the flowers he’d sent so that the vase sat exactly in the middle of the coffee table.

“You haven’t met mine, either,” he said, “but I can promise you that when you do, I won’t start running in ever diminishing circles and foaming at the mouth. Calm down, for Pete’s sake! She can’t be
that
bad.”

She was that bad and worse! Bleached, permed, thin as a rail, and doing her best to pass herself off as closer to forty than sixty, she breezed into the apartment on a wave of perfume that just about knocked him over. “Your father and I are having dinner downtown and thought we’d get you to join us. He couldn’t find parking so he’s waiting in the car,” she chirped fruitily, then skidded to a halt when she clapped eyes on him. “Good gracious, it never occurred to me you’d be
entertaining,
Jenna. I trust I haven’t come at an inconvenient time?”

Both her tone and expression suggested she’d walked in on something too bawdy to bear the light of day.

“Well,” Jenna said, looking as if she was going to throw up again any second, “as a matter of fact, Mother, Edmund and I were in the middle of something.”

“Edmund?” Eyebrows plucked into near extinction shot up to meet fluffy blond bangs. Pale blue eyes skewered him.

“Edmund Delaney.” Jenna waved a distracted hand in introduction. “This is my mother, Valerie Sinclair, Edmund.”

He moved a little closer to Jenna and stroked her back reassuringly. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Sinclair. I’ve heard a lot about you.” Which was a lie, but who was counting!

“It’s more than I can say of you,” she replied frostily, nostrils pinched with displeasure at the familiar way he was pawing her firstborn. “I’ve never heard Jenna mention your name.”

Jenna’s insides gave an ominous gurgle. “That’s because Edmund and I…haven’t…um…”

She petered into silence and flung him a beseeching look.

“Broadcast our relationship,” he finished for her, pasting on his most obsequious smile. “We wanted to keep it just between the two of us a bit longer, but now that you’ve caught us, I guess we might as well go public. We were discussing wedding plans. Jenna just agreed to marry me.”

Valerie Sinclair spared him a glance which, though brief, conveyed her opinion that he needed a lobotomy in the worst way, then fixed Jenna in a beady-eyed stare. “What’s he talking about?”

“I’d have thought it was plain enough, Mother,” she said, groping for his hand. “Edmund and I are engaged.”

“I see. And where does that leave Mark?”

“Nowhere,” Jenna said firmly. “I’ve tried telling you that for weeks, Mother, and you refused to believe me.” She thrust out her left hand to show off the diamond. “Maybe this will convince you otherwise and prove that I, at least, have moved on to better things.”

“Well! I…hardly know what to say!”

“Congratulations would be nice,” Edmund suggested.

“No doubt,” Valerie replied, giving her nostrils another workout. “But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not quite up to par on social niceties, Mr. Delaney. This is a decided shock. We had no idea Jenna was seeing…someone, let alone getting serious about him. Well!” She shrugged her skinny shoulders helplessly. “I suppose you’d better join us for dinner, too. Once he hears the news, my husband will certainly insist on meeting the person who’s swept Jenna off her feet in such a mysteriously short time.”

“I guess we can accommodate you, just this once,” he said, ignoring Jenna’s smothered gasp of dismay. “Where are you dining?”

“At The Pavilion.”

He should have guessed. Securing a table at one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants would be right up Valerie Sinclair’s alley! She’d probably lose her appetite for a month if she knew he had a standing reservation there any time he wanted one.

“In case you have trouble finding it,” she went on, “it’s down on—”

“I know where it is,” he said. “Go ahead and don’t worry about us. We’ll meet you there.”

“We can’t have dinner with them!” Jenna cried, the minute the door had shut behind the old harridan. “They’ll see through us in a flash!”

“They’ll see exactly what we want them to see and not a thing more,” he told her. “Your mother might like to think she can rearrange the weather to suit her, but she’s met her match in me.”

“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for, Edmund!”

“I know this is something we have to face sooner, rather than later. We’re working to a pretty tight schedule here, Jenna, and while I agree it would have been better if we’d had a bit more time to rehearse, we can’t postpone the show indefinitely.”

“I can’t go through with it!” she moaned, flopping down on the couch like a rag doll. “Not tonight! Not this soon!”

“Sure you can. Just follow my lead. And if things get too dicey, go powder your nose and leave me to handle everything.”

“What if you can’t?”

He hunkered down in front of her and took her hands. “Hey,” he said, “this is me, remember? When have I ever let you down?”

He never had, nor did he that night, and if Jenna wasn’t just a little bit in love with him before then, she was afterward.

Her parents were already at their table when she and Edmund arrived and it was clear that her father had heard the news. But he, at least, made an attempt to be gracious.

“So,” he said, once introductions were out of the way, “the pair of you plan to get married. I guess that calls for champagne.”

“I think it calls for an explanation,” her mother said tartly, “because I frankly don’t understand how it happened. You’re aware, I’m sure, Mr. Delaney, that until very recently, Jenna was engaged to marry someone else?”

Edmund inched his chair closer to Jenna’s and smiled at her as if she were the only woman in the world worth a second glance. “Certainly. Jenna and I have no secrets between us.”

“Then you must also be aware that we were all quite devastated when things didn’t work out as we expected.”

“Perhaps you were more devastated than Jenna,” he suggested, cutting her off at the pass. “Or else her recuperative powers are greater than yours.”

Her mother turned faintly purple while her father, Jenna noticed, disappeared rather hurriedly behind the wine list.

“In any event,” Edmund went on, seeming blithely indifferent to the effect his words were having, “she’s engaged to me now, so the past is no longer relevant.”

“But she can’t have known you for more than a few weeks!”

“I’m not one to let the grass grow under my feet, Mrs. Sinclair. I know a good thing when I see it and Jenna is the best thing that’s happened to me in a very long time. Neither of us just fell out of the cradle, as I’m sure you’ll be the first to admit. We’re well past the age of consent and,” he finished pointedly, “fully capable of deciding for ourselves how and with whom we wish to spend the rest of our lives.”

Mercifully, the waiter showed up then, and after they’d ordered, everyone made a strained attempt to steer the conversation into more a general vein. But the minute their meals arrived and they were unlikely to be disturbed again, her mother picked up right where she’d left off, determined as a bloodhound on the scent.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I seem less than delighted by your news, Mr. Delaney, but I’m frankly having trouble coming to terms with the idea of accepting a total stranger as a son-in-law.”

“Mother, please!” Embarrassed as much by her own cowardice as her mother’s outright incivility, and furious that her father made no attempt to mitigate his wife’s remarks, Jenna sprang to Edmund’s defense. “I won’t tolerate your insulting the man I’m going to marry! If you can’t be happy for us, at least have the good manners to keep quiet. And if you can’t do that, then—”

Appearing totally undisturbed, Edmund threaded his fingers through hers. “Relax, sweet pea, and try to enjoy your dinner. Your mother’s concerned that you’re entering a pact with the devil, that’s all. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Sinclair?”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far, but—”

“But you’d find it a whole lot easier to welcome me into the bosom of the family if I were someone you could brag about to your friends. In other words, you’d like to scrutinize my credentials.”

“Well…!” For once at a loss, her mother dribbled into embarrassed silence and poked around at the food on her plate.

“Then let me put your mind at rest. I’m thirty-five, have a clean bill of health, pay off all my credit cards every month, own a condominium near Lost Lagoon, and run my own business. I make a respectable living and can well afford to support Jenna in some style. I’m an only child. My mother is a happy homemaker. My father is retired and plays golf whenever he gets the chance. I have a university education and have traveled extensively. I am committed to Jenna and to our marriage. I intend to make her very happy.”

Any trace of amusement long since dead, he rested his knife and fork on his plate and leaned forward to spear her mother with a laser-sharp glance. “Is there anything I’ve left out?”

“Well…yes,” she said, dabbing her mouth with her serviette. “You omitted to mention the kind of business you run.”

He lolled back in his chair again, the smile on his face reminiscent of an alligator moving in for the kill. “You’ll find me in the Yellow Pages under Used Building Materials,” he said, lifting his wineglass in a mocking toast. “EJB Limited at your service, madam, with four outlets throughout the lower mainland dedicated to meeting your renovation needs. Perhaps I should mention, though, that my father actually began the business with just one. Unfortunately, he ran into serious financial problems and very nearly had to close down the entire operation, but I was able to turn things around to where things stand today.”

After that revelation, there was no redeeming the evening. Jenna thought her mother was going to faint dead away, and could well imagine the fallout her father would suffer later.

Used building materials? The man’s little more than a garbage collector, Warren! Our future son-in-law makes his living out of a Dumpster and his father probably filed for bankruptcy! How will we ever lift our heads in public again?

Caught between hysteria and nausea, and not sure she could control either, Jenna muttered something about a headache and hurried to the ladies’ room for the fifth time in the last hour. When she came out, Edmund was waiting for her near the front door.

“I made our excuses,” he said, taking her elbow and towing her out to where his car waited with the engine running. “I don’t think they minded too much that we didn’t stick around for dessert.”

Once in the car, she fairly collapsed from the strain. “I don’t know how we lasted as long as we did!”

“Nor I,” he remarked dryly. “The next time someone offers you alcohol, sweet pea, try saying ‘no’ instead of swilling your glass into mine when you think no one’s looking. I’d have been pie-eyed if we’d stayed there much longer.”

“If I’d refused champagne to toast our engagement, they’d have been really suspicious.”

He spared her a quick glance as he shifted into gear and headed south through Stanley Park. “They’re suspicious anyway. You didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive, you kept disappearing into the ladies’ room, and you were so uptight, you could barely string three words together without babbling. If your mother were any more suspicious, she’d try to have me arrested.”

The edge in his voice had Jenna covertly studying him, but all she could discern was the rather severe cast of his profile. “I did try to warn you, Edmund.”

“You did.”

Although the sun had long since set, the night was warm enough that he’d left the top down on the car, but she felt cold suddenly and it took real effort for her to pose her next question. “Are you having second thoughts…about us?”

They were passing the beach by then and instead of answering her, he braked to a stop in a deserted parking area, turned off the engine, and stared out across the bay.

“Edmund?” Heart fluttering with unaccountable anxiety, she said again, “
Are
you having second thoughts?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she said, so dismayed that she almost whimpered.

He turned in his seat and slid his hand around her neck. “Face it, Jenna,” he said, his fingers weaving sultry circles on the skin just below her ear, “you don’t need the kind of stress you were subjected to tonight. It wouldn’t be good for you at the best of times. In your present condition, it’s preposterous and I won’t allow it to happen again.”

“So what do you want to do,” she whispered, stunned at the devastation sweeping through her. “End things between us?”

His fingers stilled. “Is that what you think I’m saying?” he asked incredulously.

“Aren’t you?”

“Hell, no!”

“You wouldn’t be the first man to back out,” she said miserably. “And I could hardly blame you if you decided that’s what you wanted to do. Tonight was a complete disaster and I don’t see it getting any better, at least not where my mother’s concerned.”

He swore softly and cupped her face between both his hands. “I’m no Mark Armstrong, Jenna,” he said, “and I’m not looking for an easy way out of what I admit is a tough situation. Just the opposite, in fact. I vote we make this the shortest engagement on record and set a wedding date, because the sooner you and I are married, the sooner we can stop pussyfooting around other people and get on with our lives the best way we know how.”

“But what about Molly? You can’t just spring a stepmother on her without warning.”

“We’ll drive up there on Friday and spend the weekend with her. That’ll give you time to get acquainted before we break the news. And remember, she’s only four. She isn’t going to go looking for hidden motives or ask questions you won’t know how to answer.” He dipped his head closer to hers. So close that his breath fanned warmly over her mouth. His hand strayed down her shoulder and came to rest midway between her waist and thighs, just about where the baby lay snug and safe in her womb. “So what do you say to us making it official the week after next?”