Torn (23 page)

His wife shrugged as though his gratitude meant nothing to her, but then smiled. “You’re welcome.”

Jennifer walked away and Tyler focused on the article, putting her abnormally friendly behavior out of his mind. It was a photo spread of the two of them, one of several done to promote the movie they were currently filming. As he opened his letter, he reflected on the images in front of him:
Jennifer and Ty in a tight, affectionate embrace, Jennifer and Ty sharing a kiss, Jennifer and Ty holding hands as they walked together down a road in Kivalina, Jennifer’s yellow gold wedding ring sparkling in the sun.

Tyler rolled his eyes and pulled the folded piece of newspaper from the envelope. It was obviously an article… but who would send him an article? He picked up the envelope and looked at the postmark. Big Timber, Montana. Big Timber? Who did he know in Big Timber? Besides that, there was no note, no other form of correspondence other than the newspaper clipping.

He unfolded the cutout and grinned when he saw Chelsea Morgan’s beautiful face smiling at him. From Chelsea then. He shook the paper open, but nothing fell out. No, Chelsea would have included a letter or something. His broad shoulders lifted and rolled in a loose stretch, and he started reading the article.

Local Graphic Artist Turned Movie Star… Our Own Chelsea Morgan.

Blah, blah, blah…
Tyler skimmed over the first couple of paragraphs, which consisted of nothing more than talk about the fact that she’d been cast in the newest film by Hollywood’s most famous female director, Julie Bishop. This was stuff he already knew.

He jumped down to the last paragraph –– which was finally about Chelsea herself, and not the upcoming film –– and had to reread it four times before its meaning sunk in.

Not only does our Black Creek resident get to look forward to attending her first movie premiere in the upcoming months, Chelsea and Jake Morgan will
be welcoming their third
and fourth
babies into the world. You read it right, folks. This incredibly lucky couple is expecting
twins
!

He couldn’t breathe.

His heart had jumped into his throat and was blocking his air. All he could hear was its furious pounding, and his hands, suddenly clammy, fisted around the clipped article.

Chelsea. Pregnant.

Twins.

He looked again at the photo of Chelsea included in the article. She glowed, even through the newspaper print. Her amazing eyes were sparkling, but there was a sadness, a tiredness, to her expression. He dropped his gaze to her abdomen. Her noticeably
pregnant
abdomen.

Tyler closed his eyes, not even noticing his hand crushing the thin paper as his fingers curled into a fist.

“Hey, Ty,” his wife began, her heels clicking quietly against the linoleum flooring. “Did you know that your
friend
Chelsea is pregnant?”

He opened his blue eyes to see Jennifer walking towards him, a folded newspaper clipping in one hand, an open envelope with no return address in the other. Intent on reading the article, she didn’t see Tyler’s eyes narrow, his fist clench tighter around the piece of newspaper.

“Jen, I need your phone.”

A slender, blonde brow lifted in response, but she handed him the miniscule, chrome-toned cellular phone without argument, watched as he lifted the lid to expose its tiny keypad. Her smooth brow furrowed, her sharp gaze spotting the pulverized newspaper clipping on the table, the tormented look in her husband’s eyes.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she sighed. “Ty… Tell me it isn’t true.”

Tyler stopped pressing numbers and looked at his wife, his own brow lowered. “What?”

“You’re calling
her
, aren’t you. And it’s because of that.” Her dainty chin pointed to the crushed paper ball on the counter. “She’s carrying
your
babies, isn’t she.”

Tyler blinked in surprise, stared. Good lord, was that
sympathy
he heard in Jennifer’s tone?

But then her lips quivered and the sound that escaped her lips sounded suspiciously like laughter. “Don’t tell me you knocked up Mrs. Cleaver! Or maybe just one of them is yours. Ever hear of
half-identical
twins? That slut was probably banging both you
and
her husband at the same time. Might as well have your cake and eat it too. That husband of hers is no slouch in the looks department, that’s for damn sure.”

Tyler’s jaw clenched as his looked at his wife. No wonder the mosquitoes liked her. They recognized a fellow bloodsucker when they saw one. His stare turned into a glower and he stormed past his wife, out of the trailer where he could have some privacy. He used his credit card to make the call, once he got through to the wireless operator –– he didn’t want the parasite he’d married having access to Chelsea’s phone number.

“
Hello?”
A child’s voice answered the other end and, in spite of the precarious stability of his temper, Tyler smiled.

“Hi, Faye, how are you?”

“
Tyler?”
He could hear the grin of recognition in the word.

“Yep, it’s me. Is your Mom around?”

“
I’m good. She’s sleeping. She’s tired a lot. We’re having babies. Momma has two babies in her womb, not just one.
Two
!”

Tyler’s chest tightened. Somehow, he managed to speak. “I heard. I’d like to congratulate her. Do you think you could wake her for me? It’s important.”

“
Just a second.”

He heard Faye thunder through the house and he could picture her bursting into her mother’s bedroom and jumping on the bed.
Momma!
Momma
!
Tyler’s on the phone! He’s calling all the way from Alaska! Will we get to go to Alaska?

His brows rose, then lowered. How did Faye know he was in Alaska?

Chelsea’s voice floated from his memory:
Hey, I know you can’t stand
People
magazine, but I won the free year’s subscription in a raffle, okay? Give me a break!

The voice became real, as an exhausted sounding Chelsea answered on the other end.
“Tyler?”

The sheer relief at hearing her voice again hit him at the knees and he had to sit down on the steps leading up to the back door of the trailer.

“Chelsea.” Was that weak sound
his
voice? He barely recognized it.

“
Tyler… Why are you calling here?”

He frowned. That was an odd question for her to ask. She must know that the last few months being apart from her had been torture. And she sounded so… shaky.

“Are you all right?” he asked, suddenly worried, jiggling his left leg against the ground –– his one nervous habit.

“
I’m fine. Look… Ty… This isn’t a good time.”

Silence. Then,
“Thank you.”

The air Tyler sucked through his teeth at her acknowledgment was hollow and cold… just like the thank you. Whoa. Did he miss something?

“Chels…” He glanced around, bent his head low over his knees. His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

A longer silence.
“I didn’t see the need.”

His jaw dropped and he snapped it shut, rocked back against the narrow, aluminum steps. She didn’t see the
need
?
Didn’t see the
need? She was carrying his babies… wasn’t she? Or… were they Jake’s?

I slept with him. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!
The memory of Chelsea’s confession froze him, dousing the burning joy in his soul ––joy at the thought of
her
carrying
his
children.

“Are they mine?” he whispered, the burn now starting from beneath his closed eyelids.

Her distressed, tremulous sigh tore through his heart, and the joy flared anew. They were. He knew it in his soul. Chelsea was pregnant with
his
babies.

But then came her soft words.
“Jake and I are happy, Ty. You shouldn’t… You shouldn’t call here again.”

“Chels? …Chelsea?”

Tyler looked at the LCD information screen on the cellular phone in disbelief.
Call Ended
.

She’d
hung up
on him.

Oh, God.
The magazine.
Tyler stared at it with a caustic eye.
People
magazine.

He’s calling all the way from Alaska! Will we get to go to Alaska?

Chelsea had seen the spread.

Chapter Twenty-One

C
helsea sighed as the nurse moved the weights further back on the scale. When the instrument balanced, she jotted the numbers into Chelsea’s chart, her brows lowered in concern.

“What?” Chelsea asked, her dark eyes narrowing as she tried to peak at her patient file.

The nurse clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and sighed. “You’re not gaining weight, Chelsea. In fact, you’ve actually lost…” she checked her chart, “…one-and-three-eighths pounds since you were here two weeks ago. While that can be normal during the first trimester of pregnancy, you’re in your second trimester now. The feeling nauseous and throwing up stage should have passed by now. Hasn’t it?”

It was Chelsea’s turn to sigh as she stepped off the scale and back into her comfortable shoes. “Yes. Thank God.”

Thank God, indeed. She’d spent the entire first three months of her pregnancy with the inside ring of her toilet bowl for company. She’d been so ill that her doctor had scheduled another ultrasound to make sure that the baby was okay. Everything had been fine. She’d gone home.

Two more weeks later, when the statistics of her visit declared that she’d lost a total of thirteen pounds since the start of the pregnancy, was delirious with exhaustion, and that she was now anemic, her OB whisked her into the ultrasound room himself. This time, they found the cause.

They’d missed it the first time –– the wily bugger had hidden out of sight behind baby “A”… But there it was. Baby “B”. One, two… Chelsea was carrying twins.

Chelsea had taken one look at the ultrasound monitor and laughed. She’d laughed throughout the rest of the appointment… and all the way home. Laughed until her sides hurt and she couldn’t breathe. Then she’d crawled into bed and cried for two hours straight.

When she’d woken up three hours later, she’d sat up in bed and stared at her larger than single pregnancy stomach. Touching it with gentle fingertips, she’d smiled, felt a wave of love so strong, it left her shaken. Twins. A double blessing. Thank you, God.

She’d gotten out of bed and immediately logged onto the Internet, wolfing down any and all information she could find about twins and multiple births. She was doing fine until she came across a website that not only mentioned identical twins, and mirror-image twins… but half-identical twins.

Half
-identical? What was
that?

Apparently, it happened –– extremely rarely –– when the egg divided into two, and each half was impregnated by a different sperm. More specifically than that, when the sperm belonged to two different men.

Or, of course, half-fraternal, which basically meant the same thing as half-identical, except with two different eggs and two different sperm. Two different men.

Two different men? Chelsea remembered repeating the words silently. Oh,
hell
no. In which category did her twins lie? Could Nature really have
that
strong a sense of humor? According to the website, yes. In a panic, her appetite flew out the window.

It had yet to come back.

In spite of the fact that Jake was amazing towards her –– more so than he’d been through her other pregnancies –– the pregnant woman’s ideal spouse, Chelsea was stressed.

She supposed guilt had quite a bit to do with that. There was fear too. A large part of her wanted to come clean with Jake. She owed him that much… Out of respect for their love and friendship over their years together.

But there was also a part of her that couldn’t help remembering one of the late night “what if” conversations they’d had after a friend’s messy and painful divorce. They’d agreed, for the children’s sake, to keep things as friendly and as easy as possible. Joint custody. No bad-mouthing. Dividing everything in half.

It seemed like the perfect plan, but then after they’d agreed to release the other if love ever left their hearts, Jake had admitted something to her that had seemed funny at the time: If Chelsea ever cheated on him, he would throw her out of the house and keep the girls.

The thought now gave her chills, as if an icy hand squeezed around her heart. “What if” had suddenly become “what now”.

She couldn’t tell him.

In love with two men, now pregnant with two babies, with the possibility of them having two fathers… With a situation like this, how could anyone say that Someone Up There didn’t have a sense of humor?

So now she took an iron supplement, in addition to her double-strength dose of prenatal vitamins, and was required to drink at least two nutritional shakes at breakfast, then again before bedtime, just in case she couldn’t manage to keep any food down. Surprising, however, was the fact that her blood pressure stayed fine, even with the guilt and stress. Go figure.

When she was five-and-a-half-months pregnant, a woman from the
Black Creek Bugle
had asked to interview her, as a follow-up to the interview she’d done with Chelsea when she’d first been hired on to play Ty Benson’s wife.

Shortly after the reporter left, Faye had come home, bringing the day’s mail in with her. “Look, it’s Ty, Momma!”

Chelsea had looked up from the southern-style fried chicken she was making for dinner, and caught a glimpse of Tyler and Jennifer Benson in a cheek-to-cheek close-up on the cover of her new issue of
People
. A quick twist of the dial turned the flame off under the iron griddle and she took the magazine from her daughter, flipped through the pages until she found the spread on the Bensons.