“Want to see the movie again?”
“No.” He glanced at her mouth, hoping to find a crumb of pizza crust that he could reach over and brush off. But he could find no excuse to touch that wide, expressive mouth. And he wanted to.
“I have some movies that I’ve bought. But they’re mostly…sentimental. I don’t think we should watch Titanic, do you?”
He studied her expression to see if she was kidding, and bless her heart, she was completely serious. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings or seem callous, but he felt the inappropriate urge to laugh. “No,” he said as the laughter worked on him some more, making his lips twitch. “I think Titanic would be a bad choice.”
Her eyes began to sparkle, and her mouth turned up at the corners. “I guess The English Patient wouldn’t be so good, either.”
“Nope.” He grinned at her, relieved that she got the joke. “I don’t think so.”
“Or Braveheart.” She began to giggle. “I know! Steel Magnolias!”
Her giggles were all it took to set free the laughter rumbling in his chest. “The choices keep getting worse! What’s next, Bambi?”
She burst into helpless laughter. “Yes! I have that!”
“God, woman!” He laughed until his sides ached. “For an optimist,” he said, gasping, “you sure have a morbid…video collection.”
“I do!” She giggled harder. “I never thought of it that way!” She struggled to get her breath. “I rent the funny ones, but I buy the sad ones.”
“No kidding.” He wiped his eyes and chuckled as he held up the case for Toy Story. “Now I know what to get you for your birthday.” He paused and glanced at her. “I don’t even know when that is. Arielle took care of it.”
“Yes, she did.” Her heart squeezed as she thought of the bouquet of flowers Arielle always sent on her birthday.
“I’ll bet you know when mine is,” he said. “In fact I know you do. You send me silly cards every year.”
“And don’t forget we deliberately calculated this pregnancy, hoping the baby would be born in September, close to the fifteenth, so now I’ll probably always remember your birthday. But that’s my thing. That doesn’t mean you should feel an obligation to remember mine.”
“I sure as heck should! We’re practically like relatives, and when the baby gets older, I’ll want her to send you cards on your birthday, and maybe even on Mother’s Day. I think she—”
“Morgan.” She put her hand on his arm. “That’s going to be pretty weird for a little kid if you try to explain who I am in terms of how she was born. Maybe you’d better think this through some more.”
He stared at her as the truth of her statement sank in. In less than four months he would become a father, but Mary Jane wouldn’t become a mother, at least not in the strictest sense. Arielle’s egg and his sperm grew within her. She was providing the environment, but the baby would be biologically Arielle’s daughter.
In clinical terms he understood that. After all, he was a man of science. But his heart refused to understand it. His heart believed that there would always be a natural, unbreakable link between Mary Jane and this baby. He was doubly sure of that after getting to know the kind of person she was. She could no more give birth and turn her back on this child than fly.
Maybe there was a solution they could all live with, a compromise that would give everybody something they needed. “You’re right,” he said. “I should think about this. I guess we both should, now that things have…changed.” He picked up his empty cola can and turned it between his fingers. “About the nanny thing. I could commute.”
“From Austin?”
He glanced at her. “That might be a little far. No, I meant, if you would consider the nanny position, I’d be willing to buy a place outside the city. You could help me look.” He warmed to the idea. “There are some wonderful little towns in the Hudson Valley. I could even keep an apartment in Manhattan, if the place you liked was too far for a daily commute. I could spend weekends there and weekdays in the city. And you could come back to Austin several times a year, so you could see your friends, and the Violet Crown.” He paused, feeling more hopeful than he had in days. “What do you think?”
As she looked into his eyes, he could see her refusal. He rushed to stop her from speaking and making it official. “Don’t decide yet,” he said. “Give yourself some time to think about it.”
“But—”
“I know. I’m asking you to uproot yourself from your home and travel into snow country, where you don’t know anybody but me. Trust me, Mary Jane, you wouldn’t be a stranger long. With your natural charm, you’ll have more friends than you know what to do with inside of two weeks.”
She smiled. “That’s nice of you to say, but the thing is—”
“Please. Don’t reject the idea yet.” He had pretty much fallen in love with the picture he’d created in his mind of a cozy cottage in the Hudson Valley and Mary Jane tending the baby there. He’d like to find something close enough that he could commute daily, but if not, he’d make the sacrifice of only coming home on weekends.
Whatever Mary Jane wanted, he’d do. He’d noticed she had a bird feeder in the back yard. The new place would have as many bird feeders as she wanted, and he’d have the place decorated the way she liked. She could pick out the furniture, or he’d pay to have this furniture moved there.
“Really, Morgan, I don’t think—”
“Give it a couple of days. That’s all I ask.”
“Okay.”
He saw the compassion in her eyes and decided he’d trade on her good nature, if necessary, to get her there. She didn’t really know what she was turning down. All she’d seen was the sleek, soulless apartment in Manhattan. The more he thought about that apartment, the more he wanted to move out of it. Maybe he’d try to break the lease. That apartment had been Arielle’s dream, not his. He’d never felt comfortable there.
But he felt comfortable here, in Mary Jane’s little town house, comfortable enough to sit on the floor and eat pizza out of the box.
“If you’d let me buy that cake I could offer you dessert,” she said.
He had a horrible thought. “Don’t tell me today is your birthday?”
“Maybe it is. Does that mean we can go out and buy a big ol’ honkin’ cake and make pigs of ourselves?”
“If it is, I’m going to feel like a complete jerk.” He looked into her eyes and saw the amusement lurking there, although she was struggling to keep a straight face. “But it’s not.”
“No. My birthday’s the twentieth of July. You have lots of time to prepare.”
“What a relief.” He counted ahead. She’d be well into her seventh month by then. And he wanted to be here for that birthday of hers. She would be, he reminded himself, only twenty-three. At his next birthday he’d be thirty-two. “I’ll bet you go for the whole deal, with silly hats and horns and balloons,” he said.
“Yep. And cake.”
She’d be round as a balloon by the end of her seventh month, and he could hardly wait. “You’re not going to let me forget that cake business, are you?”
“Nope.”
“You realize that you’re making me feel like some anal-retentive creep for denying you that cake.”
She grinned. “That was the idea. Are we going shopping?”
It was either buy her that cake or lean over and kiss her, he decided. “Yes, we’re going shopping.”
CHAPTER SIX
MARY JANE didn’t really care about the cake anymore, but she decided that focusing on getting one would take up more of the evening. And they needed to stay occupied. In high school she’d had to read a Greek story about a guy named Ulysses who’d sailed on a perilous voyage. At one point he’d had to go through a narrow passage, and bad things were on both sides.
As she drove across town to the same grocery store where they’d shopped that morning, she thought about Ulysses and his narrow passage. Constantly being with Morgan meant navigating b
etween delicious temptation on one side and overwhelming grief on the other. She’d always had pretty good balance, which came in handy as a waitress. So far it was coming in handy in this situation, too. She wondered if Morgan appreciated how hard she was working to keep them both on an even keel.
Probably not. He’d been dumb enough to suggest that nanny thing. If he could imagine the two of them could live together in a cozy little house in the Hudson Valley and never, ever become sexually involved, then he wasn’t thinking clearly about anything. Well, of course he wasn’t, poor man. She’d give him the couple of days he’d asked of her and pretend to consider his dopey idea, and by then he’d probably come to his senses and realize it wouldn’t work without her having to say a word against it.
The half-price cake was gone. Most of the cakes were gone, in fact, except for a sad-looking vanilla one, which wasn’t what she had in mind.
“I guess you’re out of luck,” Morgan said.
“Not on your life. We’ll bake one.” She led him to another aisle and loaded him up with a chocolate cake mix, powdered sugar and cocoa. Baking the cake would take a good hour, she thought with some satisfaction. By the time they were ready for bed, they’d be so exhausted they’d sleep like logs.
Once they returned home, she taught Morgan how to use the electric hand mixer while she greased the cake pan. She treated him to the Smashing Pumpkins on the stereo while they worked. From the corner of her eye she could see the subtle movement of his hips keeping time to the music as he swirled the beaters through the chocolate batter. Interesting. Arousing. She stopped watching him.
They stayed very busy until the cake was in the oven. Then Mary Jane realized they had at least thirty minutes on their hands with nothing to do. And Morgan stood in her kitchen in those snug jeans, licking the chocolate batter off the beaters. Damn, but he looked good.
She searched her fevered brain for a distraction. “Gin!” she said at last.
Morgan glanced up from the beater and he transformed from yummy hunk to stern physician in no time. “Cake is one thing. But you’re drinking liquor over my dead body.”
“Cards,” she said. “What sort of a person do you take me for?”
“Sorry.” He looked contrite. “That was dumb on my part. I wasn’t thinking.”
She propped her hands on her hips. “I might not have the perfect diet, according to you, but I would never drink alcohol while I’m pregnant with this baby, Morgan. Or smoke cigarettes. I don’t know if you noticed, but I was drinking caffeine-free cola with my pizza, even though I offered you the regular kind.”
“I noticed.” He set the beaters on the counter, and his gaze begged her forgiveness. “I realize you’re very responsible and I’m sorry I implied otherwise.”
She took a calming breath. “Apology accepted. I’m probably touchy on the subject, because I haven’t been able to forget what you said this morning, that you thought I was mentally too young to handle a pregnancy.”
He winced. “I hurt your feelings with that one, didn’t I?”
“Well, duh. Of course.”
He started toward her, then seemed to think better of it and ran his fingers through his hair instead. “I said a lot of stupid things this morning, and that was one of the stupidest. I was speaking out of total ignorance of your character. Maybe it’s because of the way Arielle talked about you that I had the impression you were…immature. But that’s no excuse. I shouldn’t have spouted off until I’d had time to form my own opinion.”
The way Arielle talked about you. Her mind snagged on the words. “What do you mean? How did Arielle talk about me?”
“Oh, you know. She thought of you like a little sister. She used to say how sweet and loving you were. Too sweet, maybe. She implied that you needed looking after because you were…” He hesitated, as if realizing he might be headed into a ditch.
“Spit it out. Because I was what?”
“Naive. But I think she was wrong,” he added quickly. “It’s natural that she had a tough time accepting the fact that you were growing up. She really liked the big sister routine.”
“Yes, she did.” Mary Jane struggled with her anger. How could she be angry at someone who had just died? But she was. She’d always suspected that Arielle liked keeping her one down. Lana, Ellie and Beth had come close to saying that themselves the night they’d told her she was nuts to get pregnant with Arielle’s baby.
But it had felt like the right thing to do. It still did. “I probably was a little naive,” she said, more to herself than to Morgan. “And I really didn’t know what I was getting into, having this baby.”
“I’m sure. And I’m going to be there for you, Mary Jane. I’m going to help you make it through this with a minimum of problems so that you can get on with your life.”
She met his gaze. “I appreciate that, but don’t worry too much about me. I don’t know if I can explain this, but from the minute the pregnancy test was positive, I’ve felt this power inside me.” She wondered if he’d smile indulgently, which would make her feel stupid about what she was trying to tell him.
Instead, his attention sharpened, as it had when he was examining the bluebonnet.
Being the focus of that attention was pretty cool, and she spoke with more confidence. “From then on I’ve known, deep down, that carrying this baby for nine months was going to change me. Recently I’ve been sort of resisting that change, but now…now I feel ready for it.”
He continued to study her, and then he nodded. “I can see that. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to help in any way I can.”
She thought about the moment when he’d soothed his soul with the womanly gift she’d given him. She remembered the sense of purpose and courage that had flowed through her when he had accepted her offering. He’d validated her in a way no one ever had.
Later he regretted what he’d done, but for a brief moment, she’d understood what that glow of power within her was all about. “You already have helped me,” she said.
“I hope so. I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped me. Before I showed up here last night, I wondered if I’d survive. Now I’d say I have a fifty-fifty chance.”
“A big piece of chocolate cake is gonna raise those odds.”
He smiled. “No doubt.”
She’d love to think that if they made love, she’d raise those odds even more. But maybe not. He had a conscience the size of Texas. And then she’d have to worry about whether she’d get hooked on him and do something dumb like go to New York as the baby’s nanny. An employee.
No. Never. This baby was a gift of love. At first the gift had been meant for Arielle, but now Mary Jane knew the gift belonged, had probably always belonged, to the little girl she carried close to her heart. The minute she started taking money for what she was doing, she would destroy the beauty of that gift.
She glanced at the clock on the stove. “I still have time to beat your butt in gin.” She crossed to a drawer, opened it, took out a well-worn pack of cards and motioned to the table in her kitchen nook. “Prepare to get annihilated.”
“You’re that good, huh?” He grinned and sat down at the table.
“Yep.” She sat opposite him and shuffled the cards. “Ask Lana, Beth or Ellie, who have all fallen victim to my killer instincts.” She slapped the deck on the table. “Cut.”
“Okay.” He flexed his fingers a couple of times and held them poised over the cards.
Naturally she found herself watching those fingers as they curved over the stack of cards and deftly separated them into two piles. Good hands. A doctor’s hands. Gentle, caring, precise. And suddenly there she was, imagining those hands all over her, while the needle spun out of control on her lust-o-meter.
His knee bumped hers under the table. “Deal,” he said.
She snapped out of her daze and blushed. “Right.” She misdealt the cards, something she never did, and had to do it over.
“As an intimidation factor, misdealing leaves something t
o be desired,” he said as he picked up his cards and fanned them.
Cards might not have been the best idea, she thought. Her table was smaller than she’d remembered, and their knees kept touching. Before they’d started the cake baking, he’d unsnapped the cuffs of his shirt and turned his sleeves back. She hadn’t thought much about it until she was sitting across from the table staring at his muscular forearms and missed a critical card in the discard pile.
And his lashes. My God, the man had sinfully long lashes, which she noticed every time he looked at his cards. And the way he fingered those cards while he debated his discard was almost pornographic.
He won the first hand. After the point tally, he glanced at her. “Don’t go easy on me, now.”
“Well, you are a guest, after all. And I am very polite.”
When he won the second hand, she vowed to buckle down and forget that little freckle on his cheekbone and the lock of hair that kept falling over his forehead, no matter how many times he combed it with his fingers. She had to ignore the way he caught his lower lip between his teeth as he studied his hand. Most of all she couldn’t look forward to the glow of triumph in his eyes when he threw down his gin card. There was something almost sexual in that look, and she was in danger of losing the third game just so she could see that gleam of victory again.
She squeaked out a win. And another, making them tied at two all.
“And now for the championship of the world,” she said, right as the kitchen timer buzzed. “While the cake cools.” She gave him the cards and stood. “Go ahead and deal while I take it out of the oven.”
“You trust me not to stack the deck?”
She laughed as she opened the oven door. “Honey, you invented the word trust.”
She put the cake on the cooling rack and turned to the table to find him staring at her. “What?”
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