From Here To Maternity: A Second ChancePromoted to MomOn Angel's Wings

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Because I wasn’t about to tell her at that point that it had already been six weeks, I couldn’t do anything but nod.

  Neither did I tell her that her biological father had just sired a biological sibling for her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WHAT DID YOU DO THAT NIGHT beside talk to Denny about Kylie, Mellie?”

  Only Shane could get away with calling me that dreadful name. “I did the second most stupid thing of my life, okay?” I said, pacing in front of Shane and Derek in their blue-and-green living room after dinner the next night. Turning, I stared them both down. “I had sex with Denny.” Then, to break the stunned silence, I added, “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.”

  Shane lifted a hand, let it fall back on his leg. “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

  Right. I knew that.

  Plopping down between the two men, who sprawled in identical fashion at either end of the sofa, I looked back and forth between two pairs of understanding eyes.

  I almost couldn’t bear being here with them. This was so different from any of the other hundreds of times I’d been in that room. I’d chosen these blues and greens fifteen years ago, when I’d been the one sharing this home with Shane. I’d spent weeks searching for the couch on which I now sat.

  I’d never expected to be sitting on it pregnant.

  Life was filled with ironies.

  I noticed I was wringing my hands and clasped them together. “We met at his hotel—you know that resort just off Highway 11 by the lighting place? I insisted that we meet in the restaurant and talk over dinner, like two adults who barely knew each other.”

  “Good choice,” Derek said, and nodded his encouragement.

  “I’d only contacted him because I’d promised Kylie I would. We were there to talk about her, period.”

  With another glance back and forth, I jumped up, rounding the coffee table to face Shane and Derek. “We couldn’t talk there,” I explained. “There was this little Mexican band playing and they kept coming up to our table to serenade us.”

  “Ah, must’ve been a Wednesday night,” Derek said, naming the band and telling me they’d been playing there for as long as he could remember. Where’d he been when I’d made my plans?

  And if that was a smile he was trying to hide, I was going to—

  Shane coughed, attracting my attention. He wasn’t smiling at all. In fact, that sweet ex-husband of mine had drawn brows and a look of concern I recognized quite well.

  “A busload of senior citizens was arriving in the lobby,” I continued. “A couple of families out by the pool.”

  “You went to his room.” Shane’s voice was full of empathy.

  “It’s just that…being with him…it was like nothing had changed, you know?” I needed someone to understand. To tell me I wasn’t completely crazy. “More than thirty years had passed and yet when I looked in his eyes, I knew what he was thinking, the doubts and regret, the relief. And the whole mind reading thing wasn’t just one-sided. He was dealing with my own confused emotions before I’d even sorted through them. It was as if he looked at me and saw me—the real me, just as he always had.”

  “You went to his room,” Shane repeated softly.

  “Yes.”

  My legs were going to give out on me, so I sat back down between my friends.

  “My heart recognized him instantly.” I looked at each of them. “Being with him felt so natural, you know?”

  “Yeah,” they said simultaneously, both nodding.

  Folding my hands on my knees, I stared at the floor. “He was so there. So alive.”

  I looked at Shane then. “And for the first time in over thirty years, so was I,” I murmured. He more than anyone would understand that.

  Shane’s eyes darkened and grew warm, as he rubbed my back.

  “Of course, afterward I wanted to die.” I cringed inside, as I had every single time I relived those moments in Denny’s arms.

  “My forty-eight-year-old bones are certainly no match for the seventeen-year-old body of his memory.”

  “Come on, Melanie, you’re gorgeous and you know it,” Derek said. “The past twenty years on that treadmill of yours have served you well.”

  Yep, that summed me up. The longest relationship I’d ever had was with a treadmill.

  “He fell asleep, but then he woke up while I was getting dressed to leave.”

  “You didn’t stay the night.”

  And how I regretted that. “I couldn’t. I’d started to think, to worry.…”

  “And?” Derek sat forward.

  “He said he needed time to think.”

  “Understandable,” Shane murmured.

  “It’s been six weeks and I haven’t heard a word.”

  “Some guys are slow thinkers.” I looked at Shane as he said that and his grimace was a pretty good indication that even he knew how weak an excuse it was.

  “He had the best of me thirty years ago,” I said to the floor between my feet. “He probably thinks that sleeping with me now paled in comparison to the memories of his youth—if he remembered me at all.”

  “Okay, woman, enough of that,” Shane said with all the authority of the vice president he was, nudging my shoulder. Did I mention that Shane went from husband and coworker to boss? It never really seems to be an issue with us. He’s not my husband anymore. And he doesn’t feel like my boss, either. He’s Shane. My friend. And we work together.

  “Of course he remembered you. And unless he’s changed completely from the man you were in love with, he wouldn’t have compared your body then and now. Nor would he have slept with you if it hadn’t meant anything to him. And you wouldn’t have felt the years fade away if he hadn’t let them go as well.”

  See why I love Shane? He always knows just what to say. But what if he was right? Fear came around another corner. Which was something else I’d learned on the bumpy road to happiness—there’s always another corner.

  So, what if that night in Palm Springs had meant even a smidgen as much to Denny as it had meant to me? What if he called and wanted to see me and then found out that I was pregnant?

  “Is he married?” Derek asked, still leaning forward and glancing sideways at me. I had a feeling he was hankering for the beer he’d declined earlier when I’d said I wasn’t having anything to drink. I couldn’t remember any other time we’d all three sat there during an evening without something to sip on.

  “No,” I finally answered. Denny had never married. And that fact just won’t leave me alone. Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, it torments me with hope—the hope that Denny, like me, had had the love of his life at seventeen, that no one else could fill the spot. Then, in the reality of daylight, I realize it probably just means Denny’s happier alone.

  “You used to torture yourself with visions of him happily settled with another woman.”

  “I wanted that for him,” I said, meaning every word. On one hand. “I wanted him to be happy.”

  “I know you did.”

  The year I graduated from college Shane had urged me to try to find Denny, if for no other reason than to put the past to rest. To free my heart. I’d been afraid to interfere with whatever life he was making for himself, afraid to impinge on the freedom he’d never had when I’d known him. Heck, I’d just plain been afraid of what I might find.

  My heart had been too shattered back then to ask for much. To believe.

  Shane had made the suggestion a second time, shortly after our marriage ended. I thought about it, briefly. But I’d made a decent life for myself and I figured Denny had, too. He’d never come looking for me—and I hadn’t gone far. Besides, what were the chances of him being in his early thirties and still unattached? And what was the point of dredging up old and painful memories? They’d almost destroyed me the first time around.

  “Does he live alone?” Shane asked, bringing me back from my solitude.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed with regret. I’d slept w
ith the man and I had no idea if he’d been with a hundred women in the past two months, or had one special one whose heart would be broken if she found out that he’d slept with me. “He said he wasn’t married, but we didn’t talk about other relationships. He could have a girlfriend, could be living with her. For all I know he could’ve been with her for the past thirty years.” I gulped. “He could have a houseful of grandkids.”

  He hadn’t said. I hadn’t asked.

  “Cheer up, Mellie,” Shane said, massaging the back of my neck. “You’ve been laid for the first time in far too many years and you’ve come back to life. That’s a good thing.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  The hand on my neck stilled.

  “Damn!” Derek muttered softly.

  “I’m not surprised, really,” I heard myself saying, although I knew perfectly well I had no idea what I was talking about. “It’s just so unjust, how could it not have happened?”

  “You’re pregnant.” Shane sounded disbelieving. I didn’t know whether to be amused or offended. Perhaps I was a little of both.

  “Yep.”

  “You’re forty-eight years old,” Derek contributed—as if I didn’t already have that handy bit of information.

  “Yep. Divorced, too.”

  The room grew so quiet I began to panic again. “Oh, and let’s not forget I’m the mother of a thirty-one-year old.” I added, mostly because it was easier to talk than to think.

  “You already went through menopause,” Shane told me.

  “Guys!” They both jumped as I spoke a little too loudly. “I don’t have the option of changing my mind here!” What I needed from them was some magical solution that I hadn’t thought of yet. Something that would at least slow the spiral of fear that was spinning through me.

  “So much for having a grip on anything at all,” I said. “I’m nearly fifty years old and I’m going to have a baby. Oh, Shane, what am I going to do?”

  And at that moment, I started to sob.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DEREK THOUGHT I should call Denny immediately to tell him about the baby. Shane told me to wait for Denny to call. But I didn’t have another thirty years to do that. According to Lynn Marsh, my baby was due a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. This year.

  A month before my forty-ninth birthday. Thirteen months before my fiftieth.

  Great. Now I was counting in months. Only mothers of new babies count in months. Eighteen months. Twenty-four months. Why didn’t a year and a half or two years work as well for new mothers as it did for the rest of the world?

  Denny’s phone had rung four times. Maybe he slept late on Saturday mornings. Maybe he was off for the weekend on some lovers’ tryst.

  It was possible I was going to throw up. Apparently I hadn’t grown out of morning sickness over the years. Six rings.

  I paced my kitchen, tennis shoes squeaking against the hardwood floor, phone at my ear, thinking about the long day that loomed—hours and hours to spend battling panic.

  Perpetua, my poodle, paced behind me. I’d ask her opinion, but I wasn’t ready to deal with her disdain over my stupidity. Or her worries that her utterly spoiled days might be over when my attention was shared by another baby in the house.

  Eight rings. Didn’t the man have voice mail?

  Four framed prints filled the wall between my cupboards and countertop. Each was a different depiction of brightly colored pansies—my whole house was filled with bright colors and floral prints.

  I couldn’t figure out what I’d been thinking when I’d made those choices. What was wrong with bare white walls? They didn’t imply hope or expectation or express individuality of any kind.

  Ten rings.

  “Yes!” The male voice on the other end of the line was clearly irritated and breathing heavily.

  Abruptly I stopped pacing, not sure what to say. Perpetua stopped pacing, too, and stared at me. I hoped she couldn’t read my mind.

  “Hello?” Denny’s voice crackled over the line. “Who’s there?”

  “Hello.” I turned my back on my canine companion.

  “Mel?”

  “Yeah,” I said now completely embarrassed I’d let the phone ring so many times. What had I been thinking?

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No! Of course not!” I answered too quickly and then had to stop myself from babbling. Denny had figured out thirty-odd years ago that I only babbled if I was hiding something. The day he’d pointed this out was the day I’d fallen in love with him. I’d never known such attentiveness before. I was fifteen at the time.

  Perpetua curled up at my feet, apparently bored.

  “I just wondered if you were going to be in the desert anytime soon. Maybe we could have a drink…or something.” I added the last when I remembered that I wouldn’t be drinking.

  “I’m heading down today.”

  And he hadn’t called. Now I really felt like a fool. And desperate and alone and frightened and lost and…

  I guess the long hours of panic I’d predicted for the day had already begun. I needed to get out. To be among people. Immerse myself in work. I needed to find something that felt good.

  I needed to stop shaking.

  I paced, Perpetua trotting beside me.

  “I make things out of wood—decorations—in my spare time and I have a couple of clients there who carry my stuff.”

  “You do?” I asked, instantly curious. “Who sells them? I’d love to see them.”

  I was being way too forward. But then, around Denny, when hadn’t I been? Asinine to worry about it now.

  “They’re no big deal,” he said. Of course, he’d said that about his writing in high school, too, and he’d won a state competition with a piece I’d submitted without his knowledge. “I’m small-scale, just me, no production team, and I have no intention of changing that.”

  “I wasn’t asking you to change.” I couldn’t believe I was grinning. Talking with Denny just felt so right—and I hadn’t felt right since I didn’t even know when.

  “A drink would be fine, Mel, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

  Hell, yes, I wanted it. I just couldn’t have it. At least not the alcoholic kind.

  “I’m sure,” I said, feeling sixteen and excited again. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I haven’t called.”

  “I know.”

  “Nothing’s changed since we last spoke.”

  Well, yes, it had. “You still haven’t decided about Kylie, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  “I understand.”

  He asked me where I lived and said he’d swing by to get me. I arranged to meet him on Palm Desert Drive, instead. On a Saturday night it would be a place where I could get lost in the crowd, hide from the questions in my head—and maybe even, if the need arose, hide from him.

  I thought about telling Denny that I wasn’t going to sleep with him again. I’d promised myself that I’d lay that groundwork immediately. But then, I’d promised myself never to be pregnant and unmarried again, too. Somehow when I was around Dennis Walker I forgot every agreement I’d ever made with myself.

  It didn’t bode well for the future.

  DENNY LOOKED BETTER than any forty-eight-year-old man had a right to look. The few gray hairs on his head just served as interesting highlights to the dark brown hair I’d always loved. His skin was tanned, his muscles firm, and there was no sign of a middle-aged gut in evidence. The motorcycle he pulled up on must have cost him as much as my Lexus. He swung one long leg over the saddle, strapping the helmet he’d already pulled off onto the back of his bike, and I started to salivate. In faded jeans and T-shirt, he could easily have fulfilled any woman’s biker fantasy.

  I felt every wrinkle in my skin, every hint of cellulite as I stood there in a short-sleeved flowered cotton dress. I should’ve worn the black jeans with crystal studs that Kylie had talked me into buying on sale last summer after every eye in the store turned when I wore them ou
t of the dressing room for her to see.

  And with them, my favorite tight white top.

  I should be braless.

  And for having those thoughts, I should be hanged.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WAS ONLY A LITTLE past five, and we had our pick of stools at the bar of the Mexican café I’d chosen.

  Denny, raising a brow when I ordered lemonade instead of a margarita, asked for a bottle of beer. Seeing him drink was odd—as though I was watching someone I didn’t know. I’d felt the same way six weeks ago.

  “We were too young to drink back then,” I murmured aloud. Too young to do a lot of things.

  “We’re still too young to drink,” Denny said, as he molded his mouth around the bottle of beer. “This stuff’ll kill you.”

  I wanted to ask the obvious—why was he drinking it? But I didn’t.

  “Have you told her about me?” With one hip leaning against the bar stool he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

  I could hardly swallow I was so hungry for him. “Yes.”

  What was the matter with me? I was forty-eight years old, not a teenager. I’d matured, learned control, grown emotionally. And I was pregnant.

  He nodded.

  “Just last night, though,” I added as I watched melancholy steal across his expression. He cared about Kylie. Didn’t want her hurt. Just looking at him, I knew.

  “I told her you needed time to think.”

  He peeled at the label on his beer. “And she said?”

  “That she understood.” I forced myself to concentrate despite my rapidly beating heart. “She likes to think about things before taking action.”

  Did he see that she was like him in that way? Did he care?

  “So that’s why you called. To tell me she knew.”

  Sure.

  I opened my mouth to say so. Met those deep, dark eyes and gulped instead. I could hardly breathe. Felt dizzy. How was it possible to still react so intensely to someone I’d only known for a couple of years when I was very young?

  I ended up just shaking my head.