“The fresh air could be the ticket.”
“I’ve got the ticket right here.” She took a bottle of water from her purse, then a little packet that she tore open. It was filled with a powder that turned red when she dumped it into the bottle of water, then shook it around. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. I could have wasted a lot less time on the couch.”
“What is it?”
“An anti-nausea drink. It’s all-natural and mixes up in pretty much any bottle of water. Or a glass, I guess.” Lucy stopped shaking it and took the first sip. “It’s good.”
“I still think we should go.”
“Dress up and dash? I don’t think so.” Lucy took another sip and tilted her head in Holly’s direction. “She’s almost done.”
“Zip code?” Holly called.
Lucy rattled it off.
A minute later, Holly came over with her card and the receipt.
“Oh, shoot.” Lucy looked genuinely apologetic. “I have some returns, too. Can you—”
Holly took one glance at the bags on the floor at Aiden’s feet. “Sure thing.”
She swept them up into her hands and went back to the register. Lucy mouthed yikes to Aiden and took another long sip from her water bottle. Then she took another deep breath.
Aiden’s heart was still pounding. “We should get out of here.”
Lucy stood up, and Aiden took a quick step forward in case she toppled over. “I’m okay,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “I’m really fine. It comes and goes.”
He had been ready to sweep her up into his arms and carry her back out to his truck. He had wanted to. He was still ready now. But Lucy just gave him a smile. “You ready?”
Holly was coming back over with the receipt. Lucy took it, thanked her, then led the way to the front door. Aiden hurried after her. He could feel Holly watching them go.
“At least let me—” He wanted to open the door of the truck for her, then give her a hand up, but Lucy was already there, already doing it.
He made his way around to the other side, fighting frustration. Why wouldn’t she let him help her?
Eighteen
“I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.”
The hunger hit her five seconds after Aiden pulled away from the curb. They were down at the other end of the block. It was a striking example of just how weird and frustrating pregnancy could be. Why was it this way? Nauseated one moment, starving the next? Who knew when the tables would turn? Lucy rolled down the window and sniffed the air while Aiden was stopped at the intersection. Yes. She could smell it—fresh bread and butter. The scent was wafting on the summer air from Grazie, a hole-in-the-wall Italian place tucked in one building down from the corner. Lucy zeroed in on it like a homing pigeon, feeling her soul expand into a food craving the likes of which she’d never experienced. Pasta. With butter. With thin-sliced chicken. And the fresh bread.
“This place is new,” she said, pointing. “Let’s eat there.”
“It’s not new,” Aiden said with a laugh. It’s been here for—what, three, four years?” He looked up at the awning, complete with a bowl of pasta on it, until he caught Lucy’s gaze. “What?”
“Aiden, I appreciate your willingness to give me a rundown of the town history, but I don’t need that right now. What I need is pasta.”
His eyebrows rose, signaling a mix of delight and urgency. “Let’s get you inside, then. Maybe once I’ve trapped you with the promise of pasta, you’ll hear me out on whether it’s better to be alone or walking around in boutiques when those kinds of episodes happen.”
“Oh, come on. I had a drink with me. I was prepared.”
His strong hands steered the truck back into a parking spot. “Short ride,” Aiden commented.
“Don’t tease me,” she said, unable to stop herself from smiling a bit at his wry tone.
“I would never.”
Aiden held the door open for her as they stepped inside, and Lucy felt like a cat in the sunlight, only she was a human pregnant woman basking in the cool breeze of the air conditioning. She took a deep breath of the pasta-butter scent and felt every tight muscle relax. Once they’d been seated at a booth in the back, Aiden’s big hands framing a menu, he looked over the top of it and continued his tack from the store.
“You won’t let anyone help you, though. Not even me.” Lucy could tell he was struggling not to overreact. It squeezed at her heart, even more so when he continued. “I’m worried about you.”
She repressed the urge to make a flippant joke. “I…respect that,” she started in cautiously. “But I’m not worried about me. Even if you hadn’t been at the boutique, I’d have handled it.”
“But what if it was worse than that?” Aiden questioned. “What if you’d been sick, or passed out?”
“I didn’t.”
“I know that, but…” Aiden pressed his lips together, like he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. A rush of compassion swept through her.
“You know, I’m not trying to…tell you off or anything. I just thought I’d be fine. I have a sense about these things.” She gave him an encouraging smile.
“I want to be there for you,” Aiden said firmly. “I want…to be involved in this. I want to help.”
Lucy wasn’t prepared for the pure, clean joy that swept through her. It was really too much to be decided over an impromptu lunch date, and maybe Aiden didn’t mean after the baby came, but the way he was looking at her now—she could see the truth in his blue eyes.
He cleared his throat. “You don’t have to accept the help if you don’t want to. You don’t have to let me carry you out to the truck if that’s what you really want.”
Lucy laughed. “I’m sure there will come a point when that’s all I want.”
“Then I’ll be there to do it. No matter what happens.”
The words pricked something in the back of her mind, but Lucy’s stomach growled, pushing the memory to a distant part of her brain. Before she could seek it out again, the waitress appeared. It was like watching an angel descend from heaven, that’s how hungry she was. That’s how weird pregnancy was.
“Pasta. The biggest pasta you have. With cream sauce. And chicken.” The waitress gave her a wink, then took Aiden’s order— hearty pasta in red sauce.
It sounded plain, but the pasta was Lucy’s dream come true. It was beautiful, the chicken grilled to perfection, the sauce smooth and satisfying but not too heavy. She spent most of the meal going back and forth between the pasta, the side salad, and the complimentary rolls, which tasted like nothing she’d ever experienced. So light. So fluffy.
They were in the middle of a conversation about the pesticide when Lucy took the last bite of her pasta, then scooped the rest of the salad into her mouth. It had been topped with a soft cheese.
God, soft cheese was so good. She’d miss it when—
The thought hit her brain like an anvil, and she froze, cutting herself off in mid-sentence.
It took Aiden a moment to notice. He was still working his way through his pasta. “Luce? What’s wrong?” He studied her for a moment. “You look pale.” He was halfway out of his seat before Lucy could wave him down. “Are you sure? We can go. Or I can take you—”
“I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. Honestly. It’s not a big deal.” He was still half out of his seat. “I’ll carry you, if you want.”
“No, it’s just—” The large salad bowl in front of her suddenly looked accusing in its emptiness. She’d eaten through the entire thing without thinking. Without thinking of the baby she carried inside of her. It took all of her willpower to stay upright. Lucy wanted, in fact, to crumple forward and bury her face in her cloth napkin. “I made a mistake.”
Aiden sat down heavily in his chair. “Was it coming to lunch with me? Or was it…talking about my involvement? If you want to back out—” He put his hands in the air as if he were absolving her.
“No, no, no. It’
s none of that.” Lucy sat up straighter, resisting the urge to bury her face in his hands. “I—my salad had soft cheese on it. I’m not supposed to eat that while I’m pregnant.”
“Why?” Aiden looked concerned, and it only made her feel more panicked.
“The risk of listeria. They gave me a sheet of things to avoid at the doctor’s office, and that was on it. That, and lunch meat.” She stared accusingly down at the salad bowl again.
“Was there lunch meat on the salad?” Aiden was staring at the empty dish, too—as if it would give them any clues.
“Does salami count as lunch meat?”
“They sell it at the lunch meat counter, but…” Aiden trailed out as Lucy dug her phone out of her purse. “What are you doing?”
“Looking it up.” The panic rose in waves.
“Oh, Luce, don’t do that—there’s nothing but conflicting information on the internet.”
She was already trying to think of the best Google query. Salami harmful during pregnancy? Or was that too pessimistic? Salami okay to eat during pregnancy? Lucy could feel her research chops slipping away underneath the fear.
“Hey.” His voice called her back from the brink. “Aren’t these things just a precaution? There have to be people in the world who accidentally eat soft cheese, and everything turns out fine.”
“What if it didn’t turn out fine? What if I’ve hurt the baby?”
He glanced down at the plate again, this time more thoughtfully. “I don’t think you did, Luce. There wasn’t much cheese on the salad.”
“But did you really look?”
He gave her a pointed look. “If there had been that much, I would have noticed. And I might have said, that’s a lot of cheese. But I didn’t.” Aiden cracked a smile, and beautiful as it was, it irritated Lucy.
“You should take this more seriously, you know. It’s your—” She caught herself at the last moment, a dangerous statement on the tip of her tongue. It’s your baby, too. That’s what she had wanted to say, but that was…that was too far. That was outside the scope of their agreement. And yet, in this moment, Lucy wanted it. She wanted it badly. She wanted it so badly that she wasn’t about to jinx it by saying something as ridiculous as that. “It’s your responsibility to help me stay safe,” she said lamely. It was hardly believable after the way she’d refused his help in the boutique.
“I really and truly don’t think it’s a very big deal. If you’re worried, you could call your doctor. But I don’t know why you’re this worried about it. There’s not much of a reason to think…” He trailed off. “Is there another reason you’re worried?”
“No, of course not.” Lucy dropped her fork into the bowl. The waitress had just delivered another basket of bread, but she didn’t reach for another piece. She was still hungry, but she couldn’t bring herself to take another bite.
“Luce.”
“Yeah?”
“You have a terrible poker face.”
She looked up into Aiden’s eyes, blue like the ocean and an invitation for her to float, to let go. “You don’t have to be…we don’t have to talk about this. It’s personal. It’s…not part of the agreement. You don’t have to—”
“What’s making you so worried about the cheese?”
Lucy couldn’t fight him any longer. He was so present. So sturdy. So kind and concerned. All the things she’d ever wanted from a man, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome as hell and good in bed. Plus, he was a figure right out of her past.
She took a deep breath. “This isn’t my first pregnancy.”
Aiden leaned back in his chair. “It’s not?”
“I know we didn’t…talk about that. Maybe we should have.”
He shook his head. “It’s not my business how many pregnancies you’ve had. But I’m glad you felt like you could share that with me.” The language sounded a little stilted, but it was all heart. Lucy felt her body warm.
“Obviously,” she said, her throat going tight, “it wasn’t a…full-term pregnancy. I had a miscarriage at ten weeks. And I’m not there yet, so…”
“Oh, Luce.” Aiden ran a hand over his eyes, then over his hair. “I’m so sorry.” When he looked at her again, she could see the sorrow reflected in his gaze. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell anyone, really,” she admitted. “It was pretty early on in my…last relationship.” She worried at the hem of the cloth napkin. “I think that he was relieved when I miscarried. It was the kind of thing where—” Lucy knew, in her heart, that bad timing or no, she would have loved that baby. “It wasn’t the right time. Maybe it was fate warning me away from him, or him from me.”
“Did he want to be…warned away from you?”
“You know, he wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of a baby.” Lucy still felt a stab of shame when she thought of her ex’s reaction. “He thought it would make it harder for me to get jobs and develop projects. And he wasn’t…fully committed to the whole enterprise, either. He had his own academic career to worry about.”
“I’m fully committed,” Aiden said softly.
Lucy reached for his hand, and when he took it, she held tight to him. It felt so, so good.
“It probably wasn’t meant to be,” she said around the swell of emotion. “I know it wasn’t meant to be. He wasn’t the person for me, and our life wouldn’t have been a happy one for that child. So it all worked out in the end.” One last wave of fear rose and crested, pushed away by Aiden’s hand. “But it’s still scary.”
“I see that, but—”
Lucy looked Aiden directly in the eye. “If it could happen once, it could happen again.”
Nineteen
Aiden drove to his mother’s house without seeing the road. His mind was too full of what Lucy had told him, and it had been forever since their lunch the other day. It settled in his gut like a stone, knowing that she’d lost a baby before. It was like she’d thrown a light switch, illuminating a hidden room.
Honestly, it put the whole agreement into perspective. She’d suffered a two-fold kind of hurt with her ex, and he understood completely why she wouldn’t want to risk that again. The stakes were higher the second time around.
That was why he’d kept his distance for a few days. Well—he’d meant it to be a few days, but the time apart was coming up on a week. He wanted to be involved, yes. Parts of him wanted more than to be a father figure in the child’s life. But could he really ask that of Lucy when she’d gone to so much trouble to make sure she was shielded from pain?
He was still thinking about it when he turned into his mother’s driveway. The longer he let this silence go on, the harder it would be. But he didn’t know what to say. What did you say to a pregnant woman who had been through a miscarriage before? Aiden had looked it up on the internet, but none of the solutions felt right. He couldn’t imagine saying anything like that to Lucy.
His sister’s car was there in the driveway, and he pulled up alongside it. Instead of figuring out what to say, he’d filled the past week with as much work as he could make for himself. Some of it had had a positive result. Through one of his connections at his city hall post, he’d gotten his mother a nomination to a state-wide real-estate networking group. He’d started working on two other proposals for the city. And he’d helped Andrea fix some lighting equipment that had gone haywire.
Tonight was the next in his series of to-dos. He’d engineered it too well. All he wanted to do was drive over to Lucy’s, but he had agreed to drive his mother to an event in the next town over so she wouldn’t have to drive at night.
He took a deep breath to psych himself up and hopped out of the truck.
His mother’s house was never a bastion of quiet—she was a whirlwind of a woman under the best of circumstances—but tonight was on another level.
“Finally,” his sister Andrea said, breezing through the entryway. “I’ve been waiting forever for you to get here.”
“Did we…have plans?” He followed her thro
ugh to the living room. The lighting equipment he’d just fixed the previous week was strewn in the center.
“I brought this over because it’s still not working.” Andrea stood over the equipment, frowning down at it. “It worked for about a minute, and then it broke again. I need you to look at it before you go.”
“Leave him alone, Andrea.” Linda swept into the room looking every bit the powerful businesswoman that she was. Her hair was pulled back in a sleek chignon, and she wore a skirt suit that looked to Aiden like it would fit in easily in a modern, big-city boardroom.
Andrea raised her eyebrows at Linda. “If I need to leave him alone, then so do you, Mom.”
“You shouldn’t rely on him for this.” Linda raised her hands to one ear, then the other, putting on earrings that even Aiden could tell went beautifully with her outfit. “You should ask the guy at the hardware store what he thinks. He’s got more experience.”
Andrea rolled her eyes. “I love you, but you’re so transparent.” She flicked her gaze back to Aiden. “She’s hoping I’ll hit it off with Hardware Store Greg, and we’ll fall in love and give her real—” His sister cut herself off abruptly. “I can ask whoever I want for help fixing this setup. Mom, you’re the one who needs to go elsewhere for help.”
Linda cocked her head to the side. “Me? For what?”
“Aiden shouldn’t be driving you to these events.”
Their mother shrugged. “I can’t see well enough at night. It’s too dangerous for me to drive in the dark.”
Andrea laughed. “You’re not that old. They can fix it. Like I said. With glasses. Do you want me to make an appointment with Doctor Cooper?”
“Oh, stop, Andrea. I’m set to see him in a few months. And Aiden said he was free, so I don’t see the problem.” Linda surveyed the lighting equipment strewn across her living room floor. “But I don’t know if he’ll have time to help you with this…extra task.”
The two women went another few rounds, but Aiden wasn’t listening. He was thinking of all those extra tasks. He’d taken them on because they gave him space to breathe, but they’d also had the effect of letting him procrastinate on the one thing he really needed to do: see Lucy.
The Rancher’s Baby Bargain Page 13