The Perfect Divorce!

by Leigh Michaels

  And if not, Synnamon thought, it’s quite apparent whose neck will be on the line.

  “Is that agreeable to you both?” Conner asked.

  Synnamon nodded curtly. She could hardly disagree, since it had been her idea. Though what could he do to her, after all, if Annie failed? And Annie wouldn’t fail.

  Conner said, “Then let’s shake hands on it.” He extended a hand to Annie, and then to Synnamon.

  There was no way to politely refuse, though she wanted to. She hadn’t touched him since that night in Phoenix when she’d thrown herself at him with such embarrassing abandon. On the flight to Denver they hadn’t even sat together. The plane had been almost full—but she’d wondered at the time if he’d arranged the separate seats on purpose.

  His hand was firm and warm, the palm as smooth against hers as it had been against her breast that night almost four weeks ago—

  And that is enough of that, she told herself. The sooner that night was entirely forgotten, the better.

  She stood up. “If that’s all, Conner, Annie and I have a lot of work to do.”

  He smiled. “No particular hurry. You have ninety days, Synnamon, so surely you can take a minute to finish your coffee.”

  Christmas had a habit of never going quite as one expected, Synnamon thought. She was alone, just as she’d planned. The telephone was quiet, as she’d planned. Her nontraditional holiday feast was spread out on the glass-topped dining room table, as she’d planned—caviar and pate and quails’ eggs carefully arranged on a picture-perfect plate.

  But the only thing that looked good was the toast points.

  “Isn’t it just my luck,” she said, “to have to share Christmas dinner with a virus?”

  She munched a bit of toast and stared at the only ornament in the apartment, a big glass ball Annie had painted to look like carved marble. It looked terribly lonely, perched on an antique salt cellar in the middle of the dining room table.

  “I know you’re not much in the mood to celebrate this year,” the secretary had said when she’d brought it into Synnamon’s office last week. “But I wanted you to have a reminder that I’ll be thinking about you. And if you change your mind and want to come over, just call.”

  It was a good thing she hadn’t, though, Synnamon thought. Annie had two small children, and she wouldn’t want to give this virus to them. It was funny, though, how this thing seemed to come and go. She could be exhausted and miserably nauseated—and half an hour later feel energetic enough to go dancing.

  She picked up the marbleized ornament and cradled it in her hand. This would certainly be a Christmas to remember—despite her best efforts to make it completely forgettable.

  “And that’s quite enough feeling sorry for yourself,” she said firmly. “It was your decision to be alone, after all.”

  And not just for today, either, but altogether. She didn’t doubt that if she hadn’t asked for her freedom, things would be going along now just as they had for the first six months she and Conner had been married. All very pleasant and decent, but… lacking. The trouble was, she didn’t quite know what was missing.

  The holidays had never been the season of shimmering happiness for Synnamon that they seemed to be for other people. Last Christmas, with a brand-new diamond solitaire sparkling on her ring finger, she’d had hopes of feeling that incredible joy.

  But the day had turned out much the same as every other holiday she could remember. She and Conner had had dinner with Silas. The men had talked business till she’d wanted to scream, and when she’d excused herself to retreat to the kitchen, they hadn’t even seemed to notice. But Silas’s housekeeper, horrified at her request for something to do, had shooed her back to the living room. Silas had eventually remembered it was Christmas and handed her the usual envelope with the usual sizeable check .

  No, she couldn’t regret not having a repetition of that. The trouble was, she wasn’t so sure what she wanted instead.

  Today, with Silas gone, she and Conner would probably have gone to one of the country clubs for the luncheon buffet. A holiday dinner just for them was too much trouble, and Mrs. Ogden wanted the holiday with her own family, anyway, instead of with her employers.

  But next year, Synnamon thought, she’d put up a tree no matter what. She might even cook a turkey—who cared if it was just for herself? At least, she’d make a stab at having a normal Christmas, the kind Annie and other people talked about.

  Her stomach protested the idea of food, and she had to swallow hard to keep it in place. Hoping to distract herself, she wandered through the big living room and down the hall, as if she was seeing the apartment for the first time.

  The apartment was too big for one person. It had been large even for the two of them. But then she’d expected that someday there’d be a child.

  Synnamon had chosen the apartment, but it had been Silas’s wedding gift, and she’d had as much fun decorating and furnishing as if she’d been outfitting a full-size dollhouse. She hadn’t realized till later that Conner hadn’t seemed especially interested in any of it.

  She opened the door to his den for the first time in weeks. It was still as perfect as the day she’d put the final touches in place. It smelled like leather and—despite Mrs. Ogden’s constant cleaning—just a little like stale dust. He’d never really used it. He’d never even seemed to live here. Last fall, when he’d moved out, he’d taken only his clothes. Nothing else had changed.

  It was as if he’d been only a visitor in her home, in her life.

  That might have hurt, if she’d ever been foolish enough to believe that Conner had fallen in love with her. But he was too much like her father for that. She’d found that chemists were something like engineers—levelheaded and logical, wanting everything to have a sensible explanation.

  No, Conner’s behavior had never been that of a young man in love. But then she’d never expected it to be. She’d always been aware that any man would find himself at least as attracted to Sherwood Cosmetics as he was to Synnamon herself. If she’d needed any further evidence of that, she’d have found it in Silas’s reaction to the news of her engagement. He’d been delighted, excited beyond anything he’d ever expressed before—at least where Synnamon was concerned. And before the week was out he’d announced that Conner would be his successor as president of the company.

  Their marriage might have been a chilly sort of bargain, but Synnamon had seen no reason they couldn’t make it work. Even the Contessa had told her, through the years, that love was greatly overrated, that there was a lot more to a successful marriage than a heady rush of emotion. “A level head will carry a match much farther than a case of hormones can,” she’d said.

  And they certainly both could gain from this alliance. Through Synnamon, Conner would get Sherwood Cosmetics—signed, sealed and delivered. Through Conner, Synnamon would gain independence and perhaps even some value in Silas Sherwood’s eyes. She wouldn’t simply be his awkward daughter anymore.

  It had started out all right, she supposed, and if it hadn’t been for Silas’s death, they might have rubbed along reasonably well together for years. Lots of married couples didn’t have a great deal to say to each other. Her parents had certainly never talked much, so why should she and Conner be different?

  They didn’t fight, and they weren’t incompatible in bed. She might not even have noticed how rarely Conner came to her room. They weren’t living in a soap opera, after all—they were ordinary people.

  But when Silas died, everything slowly began to come clear. It seemed to Synnamon that she’d been living in a frosted bubble for more years than she could count, but on the day of her father’s funeral the fog had begun to dissipate. And she didn’t like what she saw.

  Things had come to a head a few weeks later, when Conner had come home one night and suggested that perhaps they should take a week off and get away, since people were starting to comment about how tired they both looked.

  “No, thanks. Who cares what peo
ple think?” Synnamon had looked straight at him and added calmly, “We don’t have to pretend any more, you know. In fact, I’ve been thinking that it would be best for both of us if we called a halt to this farce. You have what you wanted, Conner, and you don’t need to worry about losing Sherwood. You’re welcome to it. All I want is peace and quiet.”

  He had said, finally, that perhaps she was right, and he’d moved out the next day.

  It had been the best thing for both of them, Synnamon knew. It was at least the honest thing. That was what she’d planned to tell the Contessa.

  And as for her hopes of a family… Well, she’d survive without a child. Perhaps she’d adopt someday, or perhaps…

  Suddenly there was a brassy taste in her mouth. Synnamon looked at the wreckage of her thumbnail. She’d unconsciously chewed off all the polish.

  She wished she could convince herself that accounted for the chemical flavor on her tongue, but she knew better. That nasty taste had an entirely different source. Its origin wasn’t oral at all, but mental—born of shock.

  Now everything suddenly made sense. Her lack of appetite, the way the Pinnacle’s motion had affected her, the virus that came and went, the sudden unbearable tiredness.

  She’d have to go to work early in the morning and stop in the employees’ shop for a quick manicure and a set of replacement nails. That way only the manicurist would suspect how nervous Synnamon was—and even she would have no way to know the reason behind that uneasiness.

  But even before that, she’d have to run another errand. She’d stop by the nearest pharmacy for one of those home-testing kits. And as soon as she was alone, she’d find out for certain whether she was pregnant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And if she was…

  It wouldn’t change anything, Synnamon reminded herself. She was perfectly capable of raising a child. She had the financial resources, and now, with her job almost finished, she would have all the time in the world. She could take on the responsibility of a baby. All the responsibility of a baby.

  She might as well be talking about the weight of the universe.

  But there was a good chance she was only imagining things, she told herself firmly. It wasn’t as if she had any real knowledge of what morning sickness felt like. And wasn’t every woman different, anyway? Maybe her upset stomach was only a combination of a kooky virus and a mind made suggestible by a bad case of loneliness.

  And the suspicion that she might be pregnant wasn’t exactly a logical one, either. She and Conner had lived together for eight months, so perhaps it was foolish to think that on one single, desperate night they might have created a new life.

  It wasn’t impossible, of course—but it was improbable. Incredible. So unlikely that she was certainly not going to drive herself crazy by worrying about it.

  But she wished it wasn’t Christmas, and that she didn’t have to wait till tomorrow for a pharmacy to open, so she could know for sure.

  * * *

  Synnamon’s newly manicured hands shook as she locked herself into the half-bath off her office and ripped open the home-testing kit. The instructions seemed a mile long, and she had trouble concentrating. But eventually she had followed all the directions, and she held her breath as she waited for the results.

  She was quite certain what she wanted the answer to be, she told herself. The last thing she needed to complicate her life right now was a child. And yet…

  The test strip slowly, inexorably, turned pink.

  She stared at it, stunned by the evidence that she would not be spending next Christmas alone after all—for by then her baby would be four months old.

  She bit her lip hard and sat down on the tiled counter next to the sink, still holding the test strip. What a tiny thing it was to change a life!

  Two lives—hers, and that of the child she carried.

  Panic threatened to overwhelm her. It was one thing to consider solitary child-raising in the abstract, but it was a bit different to contemplate a real-life, breathing, screaming baby.

  Annie tapped on the bathroom door. “Mrs. Welles? Are you all right?”

  Synnamon had to swallow hard before she could answer. “I’m fine, Annie. Be right out.”

  Her hands were still shaking as she hurriedly gathered up all the paraphernalia and dumped it into the Tyler-Royale shopping bag in which she’d smuggled the kit into the building. She shoved the bag into the cabinet under the sink and said, as she came out, “I’ve got just a little upset stomach—I think I celebrated a bit too much yesterday.”

  Only then did she see who else was waiting for her. Conner was leaning against her desk with his arms folded across his chest, the long fingers of his left hand drumming gently against the sleeve of his deep charcoal suit.

  “Mr. Welles is here,” Annie said unnecessarily.

  Conner, Synnamon thought desperately. How on earth was she going to break the news to Conner that in a well-meaning act of consolation he’d fathered her child?

  What, she thought half-hysterically, would the Contessa advise? No matter how thorny the situation, the queen of etiquette had always had an answer. But what would she say about this tangle?

  “Sorry to rush in on you,” Conner said briskly, “especially at this hour of the morning. But I’m on my way to Fargo because there’s been a contamination in one of the production lines at the plant up there.”

  “Contamination? What—”

  “Nobody knows yet how it happened. I just wanted to let you know that you’re apt to be getting some questions from customers when the rumors start to fly. As soon as I know what’s going on I’ll give you a call, and you can put out a statement. But in the meantime if you can just try to keep a lid on the speculation…”

  Synnamon nodded, and her heartbeat steadied a little. “I’ll take care of it, Conner.”

  “Of course you will.” There was obviously no doubt in his mind. Synnamon supposed she should consider it a compliment.

  Conner turned toward the door and then swung back abruptly to face her. “Are you all right, Synnamon? Really?”

  Half of her wanted to blurt out her news right there and have it over and done with. But with Annie in the room, and Conner obviously anxious to be gone, it would hardly be fair to drop a bombshell like that.

  Besides, she wanted a little time herself to come to terms with this complication before she let the rest of the world in on it. She needed a little time. Surely it wasn’t cowardly to want to think it over first?

  “I’m fine,” she said steadily.

  Conner’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, Synnamon noticed. But then she suspected hers didn’t, either.

  “And pigs fly, too.” He nodded toward her hands. “Biting your thumb now and then is one thing, but when you’re wearing a full set of fake nails, Synnamon, it’s a dead giveaway.”

  She raised one hand and stared at the offending fingertips. The acrylic nails looked just fine to her—perfectly natural and elegantly shaped. She’d have said this new product was by far the best adhesive nails Sherwood had ever produced. They were even lightweight and comfortable. But if Conner could tell at a glance…

  She said wryly, “Maybe the real question you should be asking is how to improve the nails so they don’t look fake.”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t to most people,” Conner assured her. “I’m just particularly attuned.”

  To the nails? Synnamon thought in sudden panic. Or to me?

  “Don’t forget I supervised the last research trials on that brand,” he went on. “I’d recognize them a mile away.”

  She started to breathe again.

  “If the problem is that you’re already missing your job, Synnamon, I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” she said dryly. “Don’t let me make you miss your plane.”

  After he was gone, Annie said, “I’ll start working up a standard answer for any questions, if you’d like.”

  Synnamon n
odded. “Good idea.”

  Annie’s voice was hesitant. “Mr. Welles is right, you know. If you should change your-mind and decide to stay—well, I just want you to know I completely understand.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not going to happen.” Synnamon swallowed hard and sat in the overstuffed chair next to her desk. “In fact, you may be handling the job even earlier than you expected, Annie. I don’t think I’m fine, after all.”

  She didn’t want to tell him.

  There’s no reason to, a little voice at the back of her brain argued. It wasn’t as if this incident would make a difference in the course of Conner’s life. The responsibility was entirely hers. She was the one who’d invited this disaster, and she was the one who would have to deal with the consequences.

  The divorce might not be quite final, but the marriage was long over—and that meant the days of expecting loyalty whether in sickness or in health were already past.

  If she’d walked out in front of a truck and been injured, she wouldn’t expect Conner to come running to her assistance. Well, this accident wasn’t his fault, either, so why make a point of bringing him into it?

  Because it’s different, she told herself wearily. She couldn’t keep a pregnancy hidden forever.

  Or could she? If she finished her work and announced that she was moving away…

  There was nothing keeping her in Denver. It was quite logical, with all the stress and changes in her life this year, that she’d want to start over somewhere else. She could sell the apartment and go to live in Phoenix for a while—in the Contessa’s town house—while she made up her mind.

  Except for one minor detail, she recalled. She’d promised to give Annie ninety days of support and training, and she could hardly do that over the telephone.

  No, she’d have to tell Conner. It was only fair to do so, anyway. She’d simply have to be careful how she did it, to make it clear that she didn’t expect anything from him.