Her Best Friend's Baby
Page 2
She snapped on a light before walking to the door. Then she stood on tiptoe to peer through the peephole.
Morgan.
The breath went out of her as she twisted the dead bolt latch. She was nearly crying by the time she pulled the door open. Gasping, she stared at him.
Unshaven. Eyes red. Clothes wrinkled. Trench coat hanging open as if he didn’t have the energy to button it.
She wanted to slam the door. Whatever he’d come to her door to tell her, she didn’t want to hear it. She never wanted to hear it. Mary Jane. I have something— She began to shake.
His mouth opened, but no words came out.
Don’t say it, she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t speak. No. No. This was a nightmare. She’d gone to bed, and now she was having a bad, bad dream. The worst kind of dream. Wake up, Mary Jane.
His mouth opened. His words slurred. “She’s de—”
“No!” Mary Jane hurled herself at him, beating her fists against his chest. “Don’t you say that!” she screamed. “Don’t you ever say that!”
Tears pouring down his face, Morgan took the blows as if he couldn’t feel them. Then he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against him as she screamed, and screamed, and screamed some more.
She struggled, trying to get away from him, away from what he was trying to tell her. He wrestled her inside the house and still he wouldn’t let her go.
“Listen to me,” he shouted, his voice raw as he kicked the door shut. “Arielle—”
“No!” She fought him. If she could get away and go upstairs to her bedroom, this nightmare would be over. She would wake up, and tomorrow Lana would take Polaroids of The Belly, and they’d send them to—
“…a wreck,” he said, gasping as he crushed her against him. “Oh, God, Mary Jane. Don’t do this.” He began to sob. “Don’t do this, Mary Jane. Please.” He sank to his knees, pulling her down with him. “Help me.”
She stopped struggling. With a wild, keening cry she wrapped her arms around him, pressing his head to her chest as if his tears could somehow stop the pain that burned there. She rocked back and forth, clutching his head with one hand and his heaving shoulders with the other.
“It’s a mistake,” she whispered. “Somebody made a mistake.”
He shook his head and continued to sob.
“A mistake,” she insisted again. “A m-mistake. A—” Then her throat closed and she bowed her head over his, pressing her open mouth against his hair to stifle her cries.
“The baby…is all…I have.” He gulped for breath and held her tighter. “All I have left.”
This couldn’t be happening. She tried to escape to some faraway place, but his words kept coming, dragging her back to the pain.
His voice was toneless, muffled against her breast. “She was on her way…to the airport. To get…that artist. Raining…slick…she…skidded. It was instant.”
The blood roaring in her ears was loud but not loud enough. She heard what he said. She ached all over. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t believe me, either. But it’s true.” He clutched her tighter. “It’s true.”
“No.”
“It happened yesterday. No. The day before. I…don’t know anymore.”
Arielle. She started to get up. “We need to go.”
“Why?” He held her in place. “She’s gone.” He broke down again. “Oh, God. G-gone.”
“No!” She tried to pry herself out of his grip. “We have to do something. She needs…” She searched for the words, couldn’t make herself say them. “A…tribute.”
He lifted his head, his face twisted with anguish. “She didn’t want that,” he whispered hoarsely. “She told me…after we got married. If she died, she wanted no funeral. Nothing.”
And then Mary Jane knew this horrible moment was real. A steel band of grief tightened around her chest. Arielle had always said that she didn’t believe in any of that. A person should be allowed to slip quietly out of this life, she’d said, without making such an embarrassingly big deal out of it. Mary Jane had thought that very sophisticated, very evolved. Now it made her furious.
“How could she?” she cried. “How could she leave and not let us…not give us a chance to…”
“She didn’t think how it would be.” Morgan reached up and brushed his knuckles over her wet cheeks. His voice rasped in the stillness. “How it would be for us.”
Mary Jane stared at him for a long time. Her mind didn’t seem to want to work. “What should we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
She’d never felt so empty in her life, or so chilled and weary, as if she’d been forcing her way through a violent storm. He looked as if he felt the same way, as if he hadn’t slept since… She still couldn’t say it to herself. Maybe tomorrow she could say it. Or the next day. When she wasn’t so battered.
“You need to rest,” she said finally.
“I’ve tried. Can’t sleep.”
But he would collapse soon. She could see that. “Come upstairs and lie down. I’ll stay with you. Maybe then you’ll sleep.”
“You need your sleep, too. For the baby.”
She couldn’t imagine going to sleep now, but she wouldn’t tell him that and upset him even more. “I’ll try to sleep, too.”
“Good.”
“Tomorrow we’ll think about what to do next.”
He nodded. Slowly he stood and helped her to her feet. Supporting each other like war casualties, they made their way up the stairs.
In her bedroom, Morgan stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts with mechanical detachment and climbed into bed. She left the light on as she crawled in beside him. For the first time since she’d been four years old she was afraid of the dark.
He pulled the covers to his chin. “I can’t seem to stop shaking.”
“Me, either.”
As if by mutual agreement they turned and scooted into each other’s arms, holding each other close.
Fine tremors ran through him, as if he had a fever, and his bristly chin scraped her cheek. “I tried to call,” he said.
“I know.” Not minding his scratchy beard, she snuggled closer, needing the body contact while she tried to keep her own shakes under control, tried to get warm.
“That was stupid. Trying to tell you on the machine. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay.” She wanted to rewind the day and go back to that golden moment before she’d played her messages. That moment when she’d been excited about two days off. She would work every day of her life if she could make this not be true.
“It’s not okay. What if…what if the shock of hearing it on the phone…what if something had happened to the baby?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth against the wail of despair that strained at her throat. Arielle’s baby. And the little girl was Arielle’s, in every sense except that she would develop in Mary Jane’s womb. And now Arielle would never see her daughter.
A heavy steel door seemed to have slammed, separating Mary Jane from the woman she loved, the woman she would do anything for. Now she could do nothing. Nothing. “Oh, Morgan.” Her voice was thick with tears. “I wanted so much to give her this baby.”
“I know,” he said roughly. “The baby is all that’s kept me going.”
“Oh, Morgan.” She began to cry again, and so did he. They held each other desperately, shuddering with anguish.
He choked out the word baby and put his hand over her stomach.
“The baby… Arielle’s still here,” she said, crying.
“Thank God.” He kissed her hair, her wet cheek. “Thank God, we still have the baby.”
She hugged him close as tears streamed down. “Yes.”
“The baby.” He kissed her throat between choked sobs.
“It’s okay.” She needed to comfort him, needed it more than anything in the world. She pressed his head to her breast. “It’s okay, Morgan. Everything will be okay.”
Her heart broke into a million pieces. And she understood what she’d never wanted to know, that death and birth are spokes of the same wheel. Instincts older than time moved within her. Laying her hand over his, she guided it down between her thighs.
“She’s here,” she murmured.
He lifted his head and looked into her eyes.
“Here.” A wisdom handed down through the ages urged her to open her thighs. A wound this deep could only be healed with the ultimate bonding of man and woman. “Come to me.”
Moving like a sleepwalker, he held her gaze as he discarded his shorts and moved over her.
They came together smoothly, as if they’d been making love to each other for years. He said nothing as he thrust again and again into her, his teeth clenched against the sobs racking his body.
Concentrating on his face, she clutched his shoulders and rode the crest of the wave carrying her toward the only salvation they could find tonight. He seemed to understand it, too. As they neared the crest, the despair in his eyes gave way to a new light. At the moment before they climaxed, she drew strength from that light. Then she tumbled with him into chaos, bearing with her the faint yet steady glow of hope.
CHAPTER TWO
MORGAN AWOKE with a sense of well-being. He loved waking up with Arielle tucked in close beside him like this, especially after a night of—
Nausea washed over him, and he scrambled out of bed as if it were full of a million snakes. Snatching up his pants, he held them over his nakedness as he fought the gorge rising in his throat. What had he done?
Mary Jane turned toward him, a smile on her lips, her eyes still dazed with sleep. Then she focused on him.
He watched in horrified fascination as reality replaced fantasy in her blue eyes. He knew exactly what she was going through.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rusty and coarse. What an asinine thing to say. Sorry didn’t begin to cover it. He couldn’t imagine how he could ever make up for what he’d done last night.
She swallowed and kept staring at him, her gaze bleak.
“Say something,” he pleaded. “Call me names. Tell me I’m the worst sort of slime ball you’ve ever come across. I deserve whatever rotten things you want to say about me.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Why? I’m the one who threw myself at you like some—”
“No! It is not your fault. You were upset! I hit you with the news, and then I…” He couldn’t bear to think of what he’d done. Unforgivable.
She opened her eyes and sat up, still wearing the pink sleep shirt he hadn’t bothered to remove before he took advantage of her. Arielle had sent her that to wear once they’d seen the pictures from the first ultrasound. And now he had profaned that cute, silly T-shirt.
God, she was so young. He’d never seen her like this, flushed with sleep, her hair a tousled riot of curls falling to her shoulders. Arielle once said Mary Jane’s hair was the color of maple syrup, which was appropriate, because Mary Jane was so incredibly sweet. Morgan closed his eyes, awash with pain and shame. And damn his soul to hell, he wanted her. Still. Stirring like a dark secret, desire taunted him with his worthlessness.
“I knew what I was doing,” she said in a not-quite-steady voice.
His eyes flew open. “You most certainly did not! You were carried away by the news and your fluctuating hormones, which is perfectly understandable, especially at your age. But there’s no excuse for me, a thirty-one-year-old man who’s supposed to be in control of himself.”
Her back stiffened. “What do you mean by that crack about my age? You sound as if I’m a mere child!”
“I consider twenty-two pretty damn young!” He wasn’t going to tell her that this morning she looked younger than that, which made the heat within him even more reprehensible. “That was one thing that bothered me about this whole pregnancy. Physically you’re a perfect age for bearing a child, but mentally—”
“What a crock! You don’t know a damn thing about my mental age. I have to say, Morgan Tate, you are a real pr—uh, prude.”
“Go ahead and use the first word you thought of,” he said. “It fits.” He’d much rather have her anger than the bleakness he’d seen in her eyes when she first woke up. He’d probably shattered her illusions forever, but she was trying to pretend she was worldly enough to handle it. He’d never loathed himself more than he did at this moment.
She whipped out of bed. “Go ahead and beat yourself up about last night if you want. I don’t intend to do that, because I knew exactly what I was doing, and it seemed like the best thing for both of us at the time. Maybe it was wrong.” She sent him a challenging look. “But it’s done. Now I’m going to go take a shower.”
“Mary Jane, it will never, ever happen again.”
“I wouldn’t expect it to.” She drew herself up a little taller, which still wasn’t very big. She couldn’t be more than five-three, max. “Especially since you consider me such an infant. There’s a half bath downstairs if you want to use it.” Then she marched into her bathroom like royalty and shut the door.
He wanted her so much he nearly groaned aloud. He was a pig, not worth someone putting a bullet through his head. His wife had been dead two days. Until Mary Jane had taken him into her warm body, he’d been as good as dead, too. She had saved him, pulled him from the black pit of hell, and he yearned for her with an unholy fierceness.
But she would never know.
MARY JANE STOOD under the shower and let the hot water pour over her head. She wondered if a person could drown in the shower if they breathed in the water. It was a tempting thought, but it probably wouldn’t work. You had to be pretty determined to drown yourself, like the guy who walked into the ocean in that old movie A Star is Born.
Besides, even if she started to drown, there was a doctor in the house. He’d revive her. Yes, there was a doctor in the house. An embarrassed doctor who thought he’d forced himself on an innocent young woman. He’d turned a thing of beauty into something ugly.
It was right, what she’d done last night. She clenched her fists and raised her face to the hard spray. The right thing. If he couldn’t understand that, then to hell with him.
Except that she wanted him to understand it. She wanted him to see that last night had been her last gift to Arielle, her attempt to take care of the man Arielle had loved so much. Arielle would have understood. Mary Jane would never have allowed last night to happen that way if she hadn’t believed, deep inside, that Arielle would have been okay with it.
Well, if she didn’t intend to drown herself in the shower, which she would never do anyway because she had the baby to consider, then she might as well stop stalling and wash up.
As she moved the washcloth over her body, her nerve endings hummed in response. Her heart might feel like a hunk of lead, but her body was saying thank-you for the favor of a little loving. She’d only had two serious boyfriends in her life. One had been a good lover but a terrible conversationalist, and she’d discovered how important it was to her to be able to talk to a man when they’d stopped kissing for a little while. So the second relationship had started with lots of conversation. Great conversation. And he’d turned out to be a dud in bed.
According to Lana, finding the combo of a good talker and a good lover was definitely the old story of looking for a needle in a haystack. And Lana, being twenty-six, had four more years of experience than Mary Jane, so she knew all about needles and haystacks. Lana said some women finally settled on which was more important, the body connection or the brain connection, and went with that.
Mary Jane had never had the guts to ask Arielle if she got both when she married Morgan. Arielle had been so enthusiastic about what a great person Morgan was, not mentioni
ng his body, that Mary Jane had concluded the brain connection was the main thing. And yet…powerful, smooth strokes…feeling complete…rising, reaching together.
Shaking her head, Mary Jane put the image out of her mind. It could have been a lucky accident that she and Morgan had been so in tune last night. One time didn’t count. Morgan and Arielle had likely connected primarily on the mental level. After all, Arielle was extremely smart, and she’d once said sex wasn’t the most important consideration in a husband. Mary Jane remembered how she’d laughed and argued with Arielle about that. But Arielle had stuck to her guns. She…
She was gone.
Stuffing a washcloth over her mouth to hide the noise, Mary Jane cried under the shower until the water turned cold.
WHILE GETTING DRESSED, she could hear noise downstairs in the kitchen—the faucet going on and off, the refrigerator door closing and cabinet doors banging shut. She could guess what Morgan was up to. He was checking to see what she’d been eating. Wonderful. She’d planned to stock up on fresh veggies today. Her supply was pretty much gone.
She wondered if he’d found the brownie mix in the cupboard or noticed the box of doughnuts sitting on top of the refrigerator with one stale raised glazed left in it. She’d left the bag of Jolly Ranchers right out on the counter.
Well, too bad. She would not be treated like a wayward child in her own house. Glancing at herself in denim overalls and a T-shirt as she passed the dresser mirror, she realized that’s exactly what she looked like. Damn.
Quickly she rummaged through her drawers and pawed through the clothes in her closet, looking for something more sophisticated. Finally she gave up. Unless she planned to parade downstairs in the silky silver number she’d worn on New Year’s, she was SOL. The silver dress wouldn’t fit anymore, anyway.
She should probably do something with her hair. Freshly washed, it curled and cavorted everywhere. But she had to tame her hair for work, and after six days of that she was sick of tying it back. Screw it.