Pregnant and Protected

by Lilian Darcy

  “I guess it is,” she admitted, then shrugged. Did he claim to have a different and more effective magic bullet? She needed something.

  “Can I tell you to relax a little, or is that out of line? I’m only doing it my way with the parenthood thing, I’m not claiming to have the answers.”

  Pity about that…

  “Relax,” she echoed, then smiled. “There’s probably a book on that, right?”

  He laughed. “That’s it. If there isn’t a book, maybe I should write one. Laugh, relax, enjoy it, do the best you can, love them. Just love them,” he repeated softly.

  “I do.” She curved her arm across her stomach, eyes pricking with tears suddenly. “I do that part already.”

  “I get down!” said Corey, the one in the red sweater. The boys didn’t look identical, but it was a close call. He wriggled and struggled in his chair.

  “Go inna baff!” Jesse agreed, starting to wriggle as well, although his mouth was still full.

  “They want their bath. Can I focus on this for a bit, then I’ll tuck them into bed and we can get on with it?” Daniel said.

  “I’ll clear up,” she offered.

  He told her she didn’t have to, of course, but she did it anyway. She had enough time to tidy the living-room floor as well, and crawled awkwardly around on all fours, putting blocks and trucks and wooden train tracks in blue plastic storage tubs. Was this the shape of things to come? Or would she have a nanny to do it?

  Neither alternative seemed to fit how she felt. She didn’t want to put her role in Dad’s company on hold. He was looking to have her take over completely within the next few years. But she didn’t want to kiss her baby bye-bye at dawn and night-night at dusk with no contact in between, either. As a sole parent, were those her only choices?

  “They’re on their way,” Daniel announced when he came back in. “Corey’s just about learned to climb out of his crib, so I’ve got cushions on the floor beside it now. Jesse’s a little more relaxed. Any day now, though, I’m going to hear a thud and some ominous little footsteps coming down the hall. Shall we start?”

  He flipped open his briefcase, and she couldn’t help watching the efficient way he sorted papers. She saw some brochures outlining various alarm systems, and a legal pad covered in his scrawled handwriting.

  “You don’t have a laptop?” she asked.

  “Tried one for a while,” he said. “Decided that with my needs and the amount of running around I do, I actually spent more time taking precautions against it getting stolen than it saved me in work efficiency.”

  “Makes sense. Go through your notes for me.”

  “Sure. I’ve broken it down into several distinct issues.”

  They spent twenty minutes on it, both of them focused and more than happy to keep to the point. Again, his efficiency impressed and reassured her. There had to be some safety in the fact that neither of them wanted to get any closer to each other than they had to.

  This wasn’t how she’d felt six months ago, she remembered. Back then, after their shared danger, the things they’d said to each other, the sheer fact of their survival, she’d wanted more. Ongoing contact? Closure, at the very least. Now she felt differently.

  You didn’t always get closure when you needed it. Sometimes you just got complications. The simplest thing to do, the only thing to do, is to fight the memory and attraction and keep this as cool as you can, Lauren thought.

  They were just about done when he pricked up his ears, broke off midsentence and listened. A second later, she heard it, too—a rattling sound coming from along the hall. Then came a thud, followed by those “ominous little footsteps” he’d mentioned earlier, and Corey arrived in the room.

  His blue flannel pajama pants were falling down, his curly hair was tousled and he had a huge, proud smile on his face.

  “I climbed out, Daddy!” he said happily. “I climbed out!”

  He launched himself into Daniel’s arms, and Daniel rocked him back onto the couch, laughing like Lauren had never seen him laugh before.

  “Little guy, you have no idea that I’m not ecstatic about this, do you? You think I’m going to be so pleased and proud about this great new trick you’ve learned!”

  “And you are, Daniel,” Lauren told him, laughing too. His amusement was infectious, tickling deep into her own belly. “Don’t try to deny it, because I can tell. You are!”

  He looked at her across the top of his son’s head, still grinning. “So shoot me for it! This is why I can’t take those books by your bed too seriously.”

  “Tell me. I want to know.”

  “Because not only do my kids never react the way the books say they should, but I don’t, either. I’m supposed to frown at him right now. But look at how proud of himself he is! He thinks he’s done great.” He squeezed his little son tightly again and kissed the top of his head. “Could you do it by the book?”

  “No.” She laughed some more. “No, Daniel, you’re right. I couldn’t.”

  “Corey, are you sleepy?”

  “No!” Blue eyes twinkled.

  “Well, hey, what do we do? If I put you back, you’re going to c-l-i-m-b right o-u-t again, aren’t you, buddy, and we’ll have a big, ugly battle on our hands.” He spelled the critical words in what Lauren suspected was a futile attempt to play down the whole thing.

  “Should I go?” she offered, strangely reluctant to have him take her up on the idea.

  “Maybe if I just sit him on the couch while we finish. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “That’s fine. It’s your call.”

  Ten minutes later when they’d finished, Corey was asleep, one dimpled hand softly curled on Daniel’s thigh and his head on a cushion. Something twisted in Lauren’s heart as she watched the two of them, a yearning need that she couldn’t shape into coherent thoughts, let alone words.

  No matter how dangerous and impossible it was, she needed something from Daniel Lachlan, and she didn’t even know what it was. Wisdom, perhaps. Almost a year as a single parent had taught him a lot, while she felt terrifyingly out of her depth and unable to trust that anything about this coming baby could possibly be simple.

  Support and sharing—did she need that? Just thinking about it seemed like a recipe for disaster. She needed to deal with things, solve things, decide things independently, not with the crutch of someone else’s help. Especially not someone like Daniel.

  In view of all of this, what she said to him next was possibly the worst question she could have come up with. In hindsight, it seemed obvious, but by then it was too late. She’d already said it.

  “How did…how did your wife die, Daniel? Was it sudden?”

  Dear Lord, this wasn’t keeping her distance or respecting his boundaries! She hadn’t paused for thought at all.

  She thought he flinched a little, and Corey murmured a dreamy sound.

  “I’m sorry.” She stacked his notes for him, her fingers like nervous birds. “Please don’t answer that! I had no right to—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, pinching his chin between thumb and forefinger. “I mean, it gets kind of unnatural when people skirt around it.”

  “Yes, I felt like that about my mother’s death,” Lauren remembered aloud. “It was like people were pretending she never existed.”

  “It’s horrible, isn’t it? It’s not what you want, when someone has been that important.”

  “I know.”

  “I try to talk to these little guys about her. Nice stuff, you know. We look at photos together. They point to Mommy in the pictures, and they say the word now. Mommy. One day, though, they’ll have to know about what happened. It was—”

  He stopped and shook his head.

  “Sudden or not sudden doesn’t really enter into it, it just shouldn’t have happened. You see, she developed gestational diabetes during her pregnancy, and it didn’t go away after the birth. That happens to some women. She was okay with it at first, but then she read this book—”

>   He gave a bitter laugh.

  “Maybe that’s why I have a problem with certain kinds of books!” he went on. “I like thrillers, because they don’t pretend to have big answers. Anyways, she got this whole crazy idea that she could control her diabetes with diet and exercise. She started going to this nutty and dangerous alternative healing group.” He scowled. “Never told me she’d stopped taking her insulin. I came home from work one day. The boys were asleep in their cribs. Becky was lying on the bathroom floor in a coma.”

  Lauren suppressed a hiss of shock.

  “The paramedics were great. Just fantastic. But it was too late. They couldn’t pull her out of it.” He shook his head. “And I’m still angry.”

  “With her?” Lauren’s voice creaked and it was hard to get the words out.

  “Yes. With her. With the book and the diet and the group. With myself. Hell, why did I let it slip to you that day about the guilt?”

  “You don’t have to tell me—”

  “I do. I need to say it now. I’m just sorry that it has to be you who has to hear it, because it’s uglier than I want it to be.”

  He raked his fingers back through his hair, then brought them forward again to massage the knots out of his temples. His forehead, above that twice-broken nose, was high and squarish, suggesting his intelligence, but it had more lines there than should have shown in a man of his age. She didn’t have the right to touch him, but if she had, she would have wrapped her arms around him and shared his suffering.

  “It’s so obvious that it just shouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t been so miserable in our marriage, if I wasn’t already angry with her for getting pregnant in the first place. Because she admitted she did it on purpose! If I’d been trying harder, maybe she would have told me about the diet and about what she was doing. I should have known Becky wasn’t taking her insulin!” He stopped abruptly, as if he’d put a time lock on his mouth. “So there you go. The bottom line. Yes, her death was sudden, and if there was any way that I could grieve instead of feeling guilty like this…”

  Once more, he shook his head. Their eyes met, zapping electric awareness back and forth. His mouth dragged her gaze toward it like a magnet. The way his shirt fabric clung to the muscles of his arms and shoulders begged her to reach out and explore.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, ending the moment. “You don’t deserve to have that dumped on you.”

  “You don’t deserve it either, Daniel. You’re wrong about the guilt. You can’t save people from what they want to do. I’ve been through all that because of Ben.”

  “So you’ve said it to yourself, too? ‘If I’d known. If I’d listened. If I’d tried.’ You’ve said those things.”

  “Yes, I’ve said them. Of course I have! Why didn’t he tell me his company was in trouble? Why did he run away? Well, I guess I can answer that. Greed. But is it the whole story?”

  “Locks both of us away in a pretty lonely place sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s a good way of putting it,” she agreed.

  They talked about it a little more, both of them using clumsy, difficult words that might not have made sense to anyone else.

  Finally, Daniel said, “Well, we’re done here for tonight, so…”

  “Yes, I’ll go.”

  “You’re feeling safe at your place?”

  “There’s no indication that the guy knows where I live. The letters have all come through our corporate mailroom, and of course the tire thing happened at work.” She glanced down at little Corey, who had burrowed farther onto his daddy’s lap. “Don’t get up,” she told Daniel. “I’d hate to wake him. They’re such great kids, Daniel. I’ll see myself out.”

  “It’s okay. He won’t wake up now. I’ll let you out and then lay him in his crib.”

  Carefully, he stood up, shifting the sleeping child to his shoulder. Lauren could hear the slow rhythm of Corey’s breathing, and his little cheek was pushed into a fat apple shape against Daniel’s shirt. She lifted her hand and touched the soft baby curls, and Daniel smiled at her.

  “Best sight in the world, isn’t it? Makes up for all the mess.”

  Lauren couldn’t speak, just nodded and followed him to his front door. It felt to her as if they were separated by an endless chasm. He was the last man in the world who’d want to get close to a woman who was pregnant with another man’s child and dealing with so much baggage of her own.

  Chapter 5

  “Nice gym.”

  Daniel’s direct, assessing gaze took in the immaculate shine on the tinted glass at the front entrance, the manicured plantings of winter color and the dust-free sign that proclaimed this to be the Cedarwood Athletic Club.

  “It has all the facilities I was looking for when I joined,” Lauren said. “And I’ve since discovered it has a really nice prenatal exercise class as well.”

  “Good security?”

  “Yes, you have to show your pass in the lobby, and it has a photo ID.”

  “Can you wait in the car a minute? I’d like to check something out.”

  “Sure.”

  She watched him as he loped up the steps and through the automatic doors. He wore tailored pants the color of beach sand and a dark, chunky sweater with an equally chunky jacket on top. The clothing emphasized the solid length of his legs and the broad strength of his shoulders.

  This had been a lot easier than she’d expected, particularly after his emotional revelations to her last night. Maybe their talk had eased some kind of pressure in both of them. Maybe they had achieved a kind of closure to what had first connected them. She certainly felt better, with a more positive energy and zest for life, than she had in months. Normally, it was teeth-gritting determination that kept her going. Dealing with Daniel and her own personal tire slasher felt, today, like challenges she could handle.

  She had begun to sense, as well, how important Daniel’s work was to him. He was approaching this consultancy as he no doubt approached others, his mind stimulated by the task of problem solving.

  Arriving at her office earlier in the afternoon, he hadn’t wasted any time on chitchat. Instead, they’d gotten right down to business. She was used to that. She liked achieving set tasks, crossing items off lists, moving important files from “In” to “Out.” The questions and answers that batted back and forth between them like tennis balls had steadied her and made her feel in control.

  He was happy with the security systems and protocols at Van Shuyler corporate headquarters, and they’d arranged for her to drive several different company cars in a random rotation until the man who had slashed her tires was caught.

  Now he was assessing her gym. She could see him through the tinted glass, standing at the front desk and talking to a smiling receptionist. The conversation was apparently satisfactory to both parties. The receptionist was nodding and pointing with increasing energy. She typed something into a computer, listened to Daniel intently, and finally handed something to him across the high desk. Lauren couldn’t make out what it was.

  He said something that earned another huge smile, then loped back toward the automatic doors with a zesty rhythm to his steps. But by the time he reached the anonymous-looking dark blue Van Shuyler company car and slid into the passenger seat, he was looking a lot more serious.

  “I have a visitor’s pass to check out the facilities,” he drawled. “Aren’t I lucky? Vanessa, at the desk, was delighted that I was planning to join up.”

  Lauren caught the point at once. “That’s not good, is it?”

  “No, it’s not. I had to show a photo ID but basically I was polite and well-dressed and all she saw was a potential new member. I could have been anyone. Hey, maybe our tire slasher is a member of this club already.”

  “Don’t make me stop coming here.” The words fell from her mouth, heartfelt and defensive. “I really like my exercise class, and I’ve made a couple of good friends who are also due in late January. We’re planning to keep in touch and have our babies play
together.”

  “I’m not going to make you stop coming.”

  “Thank you!”

  “Let’s go in. You can show me the pool and where you take your class.” As they went up the steps together, he added, “I’ll talk to whoever handles security here and tell them you’ve had some problems. I’ll check out their cameras and their incident response procedures. By the way, when we talk about this, you always refer to ‘the guy.’ But I want you to consider that it could be a woman, or a couple. They’re clearly looking to intimidate you, get to your conscience, maybe, so in my opinion a scenario involving some kind of confrontation is a possibility. Say, in the locker room at a point in your routine where you’re feeling vulnerable.”

  “You mean when I’m changing, or naked and just out of the shower?”

  “Yeah,” Daniel agreed, hearing the way his voice caught on the word.

  Hell!

  She ought to be able to say the word naked, for mercy’s sake, without his body going into full tactical response! Standing at the front desk while Vanessa indicated various facilities, he’d seen an aerobics class hard at work and he’d immediately thought of Lauren in her prepregnancy shape, dressed in one of those stretchy, figure-hugging outfits. “Naked” was just one step further, and his imagination had no trouble in stretching the distance.

  When was it going to stop? Last night should have been more than enough to douse the flames. Any reminder of how unhappy he and Becky had been should have been enough to put him off the idea of a new connection with a woman. Permanently.

  Except that it hadn’t worked that way. Lauren’s acceptance of what he’d said and the fact that she saw some similarities to herself and Ben had been cleansing somehow. He felt lighter today and fully engaged by the issue of how to protect her.

  The problem was, the more he saw of her routine, the closer he got to the inescapable conclusion that she didn’t just need alarms and cameras and vigilance, she needed him.

  Or a bodyguard, basically. He had a platoon of them in his employment, available for just this sort of job. Full-time, part-time, temporary, permanent. Squat, dark and burly. Tall, willowy and blonde. He had staff for the job.