The Strangers on Montagu Street (54 page)

BOOK: The Strangers on Montagu Street

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Nola opened the door to the bedroom. “Sophie says it’s time, Mellie. Her dad’s waiting outside.”

I looked at her in panic. “Tell Sophie just one more minute.” I didn’t wait to see her go back inside. Turning back to Jack, I took a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

There was a brief pause, and then he leaned close to me, as if he’d suddenly gone hard of hearing.

“I said I’m pregnant.”

I wondered whether this was what the Tower of Babel had been like, with people talking to one another without anybody understanding what they were saying.

“I’m going to have a baby,” I said, wondering if it was the word “pregnant” that was confusing him.

He blinked several times, his eyes revealing a separate emotion each time, none of them I could interpret, because my own vision was suddenly blurry with tears.

Jack continued to stare and blink at me. “But how could you be pregnant?”

“Pregnant?” Nola’s voice ended our staring match.

We both turned to find Nola and Sophie in the doorway, their expressions almost as shocked as Jack’s. Nola pressed her hands against her eyes, as if trying to block out a mental image. “Dad! I mean, really. Haven’t you heard of birth control?”

Sophie took Nola’s arm and began walking down the hallway to the stairs. “As much as I’d like to hear the rest of this conversation, Melanie, I’ve got a wedding to go to. I’ll be outside with my dad and Nola, waiting for you. You’ve got two minutes.”

When I turned back to Jack, he no longer looked like a man tied to the railroad tracks as a train approached. Instead, he closely resembled the old Jack of the sparkling eyes and wicked grin, the Jack I’d fallen in love with despite my best efforts not to.

He placed his hands gently on my shoulders. “A baby. Wow.” His thumbs brushed my bare skin, making my blood zing through my veins. “I don’t know what to say.”

I love you,
I wanted to prompt, but instead I remained silent, blinking back the tears that lately always seemed to be hovering. I stood still for another moment, waiting, then pulled back, feeling the reluctant slip of his hands as they slid from my shoulders. “I have to go,” I said, taking a couple of steps backward before turning and heading in the same direction as Nola and Sophie.

“Marry me, Mellie.”

I stopped suddenly, the change in movement making my head spin. Of all Jack’s responses I might have imagined, this particular one hadn’t even grazed the surface.

I turned to face him, admiring again the face I adored, the smile that came to my dreams more often than I cared to admit. But my overriding thought was of Bonnie, and how she’d left him while pregnant with Nola, certain of the knowledge that he would tie them both down because of an ingrained sense of duty that would make him do what he believed to be the right thing regardless of his true feelings.

My breath caught in the back of my throat. “No, Jack. I can’t.”

He took a step forward, then stopped. “What do you mean, ‘I can’t’? I thought you said you loved me.”

I stood staring at him for a long moment, wanting him to fill the empty space with the only three words that would make me change my mind. I swallowed down my disappointment. “I do, Jack. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. But I can’t marry you.”

Before I could start crying again, I turned and fled down the corridor, then out into the bright sunshine of a late-summer Charleston morning.

THE END

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Karen White
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of fourteen previous books. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia. Visit her Web site at
www.karen-white.com
.