His Shotgun Proposal

by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  On the other hand, if she didn’t march right up to him right now and demand whatever a pregnant, practically penniless woman demanded from a man whose name she didn’t know but whose baby she was carrying, the opportunity might never come again. Then again, back to the other hand, she wasn’t exactly in the mood to be humiliated and he looked pretty engrossed in conversation with a tanned, long-legged, skinny and obviously not pregnant blonde.

  Perfect, Abbie thought. She’d just waddle right over there and let him get a good side-by-side comparison of her at her dumpy, lumpy, travel-weary worst with the disgustingly slender sun goddess whose smile seemed to have him mesmerized. On second thought, laying claim to his arm and his virility would put a definite crimp in his flirting and that would serve him right. Hi, she could say brightly. Remember me? Graduation party last December? So nice to see you again. What do you think we should name our baby? Oh, yeah, that would cool the ardor in those dark Arabic eyes but good.

  Arabic. Arabian.

  Oh, now that was just plain silly. Just because Jessica’s family raised Arabian horses and December’s mystery man had a slight Arabic ethnicity was hardly a reason to link him to the Colemans. That was like setting out to step over a ditch and then taking a running jump at the Grand Canyon instead. There was no basis, no reason at all to jump to such irrational conclusions. She’d just steer her luggage back into the airport, where the air was cool and conducive to logic. Why, five minutes inside and she’d probably realize he didn’t even resemble the man she’d met that night. Not even close. And Jessica’s cousin would turn out to be a leathery redhead and all would be well.

  The cowboy glanced up. His gaze moved past her and returned with a jerk of recognition. Abbie hadn’t known she could move so fast. Her foot shoved the base of the wire rack, a move calculated to get the wheels angled and rolling. Worked beautifully, except for that initial wrench of the castors, which caused the luggage to shift and tumble like an avalanche of untimely disaster. The paisley suitcase flew open on impact and a good deal of Abbie’s private life sprawled out across the concrete. She knelt to scoop it out of the public domain, tossing panicked looks at the stranger who was already pushing away from the big black truck he’d been leaning against, moving away from the startled blonde, coming straight toward Abbie.

  Black truck. Oh, jeez…

  “You?” he demanded without preamble.

  Abbie shoved her belongings into the suitcase, uncaring of order or wrinkles or that her hands shook so hard she had to pick up some items twice. “You who?” she said in a strangled voice. “You, uh, must have me mixed up with somebody else.” She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t solidify the supposition with the fact that he was who she thought he was and that she was…gulp…who he thought she was. “You don’t have to help me.” Scooping up scattered items with new fervor, she kept her head bent and her face averted. “My, uh, boyfriend is here somewhere, he’ll be here to help me any minute now. I can’t imagine what held him up in there. He was right behind me. Back there. At the baggage claim. Inside.”

  “Boyfriend?” His voice cracked the word like a whip.

  There was probably some special corner of hell reserved for liars, but Abbie clung to the hope she would be pardoned simply because she was so very bad at lying. Boyfriend? Now, that was a stroke of insanity. “Look, whoever you are,” she said in a rush of desperation, “I’m not who you think I am, so go away.”

  He stooped and stared, pushing up the brim of his hat until his familiar dark eyes were peering at her with all the warmth of polished onyx, trying to catch her in a stray glance. And just the feel of his gaze on her created a hurricane of hot remembrance inside her. She couldn’t look at him and she couldn’t not look at him. The most magical night of her entire life had been spent with this man, wrapped in his arms, clothed in his smile, naked in his bed…on the floor, the chair, the vanity…Abbie wrestled the memory into submission. She didn’t want to deny the experience, but she was scared to death to claim it, too. What if the blonde was his wife? What if he had mistaken Abbie for someone else? What if he thought she’d stolen his wallet or something? What if he believed they’d met at a bar mitzvah instead of at the street dance? What if he kissed her? Right here, right now? He was still staring at her and she struggled to locate a tone of offence. “You have mistaken me for someone else,” she pronounced defiantly.

  “No,” he said coldly. “It’s you, all right.”

  Abbie swallowed hard, willed him to move on, get along, disappear, as she lifted her chin with completely false bravado. “Well, I don’t know you, even if you are standing on my underwear.”

  He was, too. And of course, it had to be a pair of her serviceable, sedate and completely unattractive maternity underpants. They were new, but that was about the most complimentary thing anyone could say about them.

  He seemed stuck for words as he stared at the scrap of unimaginative white peeking out from beneath his boot. So Abbie gave another verbal nudge to shoo him on his way. “Would you mind moving your big foot?”

  With an economy of movements he scooped up the panties without even looking at them and let them dangle, without dignity, on the end of his index finger. “With my compliments,” he said.

  Abbie snatched the lingerie and stuffed it into the mangled suitcase. “Yes, well, thanks. Hope you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”

  He shrugged, straightened and turned to walk away. Abbie knew she was a fool to let him go without a word. She owed him an explanation. Well, at least, she owed him the knowledge of his impending fatherhood. If she’d never seen him again, she could have lived with knowing she’d had no chance to tell him. She could have found a way of explaining to their child that one parent would always remain a mystery. But now he was here and he deserved to know, whether or not she wanted to tell him.

  Gathering the rest of her scattered belongings, she closed the suitcase as best she could and stood straight, holding it tightly in her arms. She’d just stack the luggage on the rack, get it out of the way, then she’d walk over and admit she was indeed the you he’d thought she was. With a glance, she noted the well-formed shape of his backside and remembered vividly the way that same backside had looked without tight-fitting jeans. She jerked her gaze from the hip pockets of his Levi’s and checked to see if the blonde was still there. She was. As was the truck. The big, black truck with the emblem of a horse’s head stamped on the side. A horse head with full Arabian show gear—horse savvy or not, Abbie recognized the regalia—and, in case she hadn’t, the words Desert Rose circled across the top and Arabians looped up from the bottom.

  Oh, no! This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be true. Fate wouldn’t play this kind of joke on her. The mystery man couldn’t be Jessica Coleman’s cousin. That would be too—she couldn’t even think of a word to describe how perfectly awful that would be. It didn’t help to think the sequence of events made an odd sort of sense now, either. The party after the graduation she’d shared with Jessica, about three hundred other grad students and whoever else had shown up to help celebrate, the fact that both their families were there, but somehow, in all the fanfare and folderol, none of the Colemans had gotten introduced to any of the Joneses. The way she’d met the mystery man at the outdoor, portable bar moments after Jessica had mentioned her cousin had gone to get a drink. It was all so impossible, and yet suddenly so completely plausible that Abbie forced her gaze up from the Desert Rose crest to the face of the man she now knew without a doubt was here to pick her up. Could this situation be any more embarrassing?

  “Mac,” she whispered aloud, because she had to feel the shape of his name in her mouth, had to affirm that he was both mystery man and Jessica’s cousin, had to do something to keep from melting into a puddle of humiliation right there on the hot Austin airport pavement.

  He couldn’t have heard her whisper. Yet he turned, nevertheless, still questioning her presence, her identity, her denials. But one look at her ashen face must have t
old the story. His gaze tracked hers to the Desert Rose insignia on the door of the truck and then returned with a flare of comprehension. His chin came up as he tugged the brim of his hat down to shade his eyes, and she noted, as if from a great distance, that his shoulders were moving up and down, up and down, in coordination with the rapid expansion of his chest as he inhaled, exhaled, inhaled.

  It was a loud moment, unique in that while she was incapable of hearing anything except the frantic flutter of her own breath rasping like a bellows from her lungs, she absorbed the noise of traffic, of planes taking off overhead, of voices all around, of arrivals and welcomes, and car engines starting, revving, receding. She listened, though, only to the echoes of his voice in her mind and knew he was grappling with the same set of impossible, improbable, implacable chain of events she’d just worked her way through. She knew, too, the instant he reached the same inevitable conclusion.

  “Abbie?” His voice was incredulous, hesitant with dismay, rough with amazement. “Are you Abbie?”

  Chapter Two

  Mac’s boots might as well have fused with the hot pavement for all his ability to move them. He couldn’t seem to do anything except stare at Abigail Jones, his mystery date, his cousin’s friend, the woman he’d come to the airport to meet. How was it that fate had turned aside every attempt he’d made in the past five months to discover who she was only to unaccountably drop her back into his life at this precise instant? Why had she denied knowing him when he remembered her so vividly? How could she have forgotten him when his whole body held the memory of hers?

  She looked the same, but different, too. She’d worn a short, slender, sensational dress the night they’d met—except for later, when she’d worn nothing at all—and now she was dressed in a baggy shirt that was too big for her by half, but which made her look small and absurdly sexy. She might be a little more filled out than before, but that could just be the clothes and the way her hair was pulled back at her nape instead of curling loosely about her shoulders as it had that night. The glasses were definitely new, though.

  She must have been wearing contacts when they’d met. Or maybe she hadn’t needed glasses then. Or maybe she had but hadn’t gotten them yet. What if she hadn’t seen him clearly at all that night, and that was why she claimed she didn’t recognize him now? Except she had recognized him. Her bowed head, the way she wouldn’t meet his gaze, the breathy, scattered tones of her voice all belied her spoken doubt. He’d have known her anywhere, anytime…the eyes as blue as Texas bluebonnets, hair not quite blond, not quite brown, but a soft, honeyed shade in between; the slight upward tilt at the end of her nose; the deceptively demure lift of her chin; the set of her shoulders; the warm tones of her skin. In that one glimpse, memory had flooded his mind’s eye with images of her. His body, too, remembered, and he’d known her as much by the physical response as by sight.

  Jessica must have set this up somehow. But how could she have known he and Abbie had ever met? He hadn’t even made the connection until just now. And Abbie looked equally astonished. Appalled, even, as she stood there, clasping a dilapidated suitcase in her arms and staring at him as if he were the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He was surprised to see her, but not shaken, as she appeared to be. She’d said there was a boyfriend with her, which had made Mac unaccountably angry. But there was still no sign of another man, and Jess certainly was expecting only one guest. Mac figured any significant other of Abbie’s was a long way from here, or invented on the spot to save embarrassment.

  But whether or not there was a boyfriend, Abbie had been traveling and she obviously needed help with her luggage. Mac couldn’t just keep standing there, stuck in the moment, awash in unaccustomed emotion, wondering how he could keep from scaring her away again, wondering if it was all right to admit he was glad—so glad—to see her again.

  “Hey, remember me?” said a voice near his ear. The leggy blonde, who’d been in the process of inviting him to spend some quality time with her at the Four Seasons. Betsy or Bambi or whatever the hell she’d said her name was had been completely forgotten the moment his gaze had fallen on Abbie. Abbie. Abigail Jones. What a plain and glorious name. How well it suited her, too. He wanted to say it over and over. He wanted to welcome her back into his life with a kiss. Oh, yeah, he especially wanted to kiss her. But his knees were stupidly weak and his heart was beating ridiculously fast and she was just standing there staring at him as someone tugged at his elbow, demanded his attention.

  “What’s the matter?” the blonde asked. “Is the heat getting to you? You were about to offer me a ride, remember?”

  “I was?” He couldn’t take his eyes off Abbie, who continued to clutch the one suitcase with its wispy flags of underwear peeking out around the edges, as she trundled the whole rickety stack of luggage toward him. He stepped out, offering in a gesture to take the suitcase from her arms, but she stopped like a skittish filly at his first advance and eyed him nervously.

  “You’re Mac?” Her voice was a shaky whisper, and he edged closer to hear her.

  “Mac Coleman,” he said, as if they needed an introduction. “I’m Jessica’s cousin.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.” Abbie wrinkled her nose, then tried to adjust her glasses via facial contortions because her hands were wrapped around the broken suitcase, and, for some reason, she didn’t seem to want to let go. “Holy Maloney, this is awkward.”

  “Doesn’t need to be.” He put his hands on the suitcase, wanting to be gallant and charming and helpful, but when he gave the bag a tug, she clasped it all the tighter. “I can show you Jess’s picture in my wallet,” he offered, “if it’ll reassure you and make you feel more at ease. She really wanted to come in to meet you today, but there’s a lot of work at the ranch, what with my brothers getting married recently and not spending as much time helping as usual, and I had business in town today anyway, so here we are.” He was talking too much, trying too hard, wanting quite desperately to see her smile.

  She sighed instead. “This is really awkward.”

  “And here I am, thinking that seeing you again is such a pleasant surprise.”

  “Yes, well, you haven’t seen that much of me yet.” She glanced at the other woman, licked her lips, pressed them together, and Mac, interpreting the glance as anxiety, hurried to reassure her.

  “She was just asking me where she could catch the hotel shuttle,” he said, gesturing dismissively at the blonde, never transferring his full—and hopefully charming—attention from Abbie. “How have you been since…December?”

  Her blue eyes shifted doubtfully to him. She opened her mouth, closed it again, then sucked in a deep breath, squared her shoulders and said in a rush, “Pregnant. How have you been?”

  His smile faded, along with the excitement and possibility that seeing her again had evoked. Pregnant? What had she said? “Pregnant?” he repeated, his gut clenching in protest as his gaze dropped helplessly to her midsection.

  “Pregnant,” she confirmed, thrusting the suitcase at him and revealing the unmistakably rounded contours of her belly beneath the oversize white shirt. “Congratulations, it’s yours.”

  ABBIE COULDN’T BELIEVE she’d just blurted it out that way. But then, there probably wasn’t a good way to tell a complete stranger you were having his baby. Miss Manners ought to put together a pamphlet of suggestions. Mac’s expression was turning grimmer by the second, but oddly enough, Abbie felt a certain amount of relief. It had been a strain to keep the secret and now, whether for better or worse, it was out of the bag. She turned her attention to the other woman, who was eyeing her with a curious hostility. “Hi,” she said, offering a handshake with her now unencumbered hand. “I’m Abbie Jones. I’m sorry to have interrupted. I know this must seem a little strange.”

  “This is Bambi.” Mac’s voice had all the warmth of a refrigerator as he butted in to make the introduction. “We’re giving her a ride to her hotel before we head out to the ranch.”

  “
Brandi,” the blonde corrected amiably. “But maybe I should go look for that shuttle and let you two work out your…problem.”

  But Mac—pale beneath his dark skin—stayed her with a glance. “No. Please,” he requested in a voice no one in their right mind would argue with. “I want to give you a ride to the hotel. It will be my pleasure. Once her—” he jerked his head toward Abbie “—boyfriend gets out here, we’ll be ready to roll and as friendly as four coyotes on a foggy day.”

  “There’s no boyfriend,” Abbie admitted in a rush, determined to be truthful from here on in. “You startled me and I…well, I just made him up for protection. Before I knew we were going to have to get better acquainted.”

  Mac looked at her, clearly unimpressed with the truth. “Get in,” he said.

  Abbie didn’t know how this could work out, but she wasn’t getting into that truck, and she didn’t really think Brandi should do so, either. “I’m not going to the ranch,” she announced with more gusto than guts. “Not now.”

  Mac tossed her suitcase into the back of the truck and reached for another, his gaze dropping to her rounded waistline and skittering quickly away. “You’re going to the ranch. Jess is expecting you. She’s expecting me to get you there safe and sound. You’re going.”

  Abbie raised her chin. “I’m not.”

  The red plaid suitcase landed in the pickup bed, and was quickly followed by the duct-taped brown tweed. “Yes,” he said, “you are.”

  “I can get a cab.” Brandi edged toward the curb, but Mac touched her arm and his voice warmed. “I want to take you to the hotel. So, please. Get in the truck.”