She swivels around, and I follow. Kathia and Tracy are inside, right by the doorway, drinking wine, and Roxy presses her palms together in a plea. “I’m so sorry. That was rude of me, and I thought something else was going on, and it set off my jealousy flares.”
I stand a little taller when I hear “jealousy.” Wait. She’s playacting again, right? That’s the bodyguard in her?
Kathia smiles softly. “It’s okay, hon. I was just trying to help him.”
“I know. My deepest apologies,” she says, but then she turns pale, and she covers her mouth.
A strong scent of floral perfume wafts into my nose, and Roxy turns and coughs. “Excuse me.”
She leaves again, and puzzle pieces slide into place.
She’s sensitive to smells.
She’s not drinking.
Her tits are magnificent.
I scratch my head and follow her back into the hallway, where she’s slumped against the wall, her face ashen.
“Roxy, are you . . .?”
The strange thing is when she says I’m pregnant, I should be freaking out, but it’s kind of weirdly sexy too.
14
Miles
The car whisks us back to New York City. I offer her a bottle of Evian, and she takes it, drinking a hearty gulp. She hands it back, and I set it in the console on the side of the limo.
“Do you feel better now?”
She waves her hand in front of her face. “I’m okay, I swear. It’s a temporary thing.”
“I remember the other day in the city when someone walked by and you said perfume bothered you. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it then.”
She arches an eyebrow. “You’d have to be a pregnancy detective to figure that out. Now, if I’d yakked on you early in the morning, that would’ve been more obvious.”
Laughing lightly, I add, “Or requested pickles and ice cream for lunch.”
I move closer to her on the smooth leather seat of the stretch limo. “I’m glad you’re not barfing tonight. Did you have morning sickness in the first trimester?”
When I ushered her out to the car a few minutes ago, she told me how far along she is.
She shakes her head, the color starting to return to her cheeks. “Not too much. Just a touch of it here and there. It’s been a mostly easy pregnancy so far,” she says, then whips her head from side to side as if hunting for something. She raps the glass. “Knock on glass.”
I tap the window too. “Do you need anything? Are you hungry? Do you want to rest?” Even though I have so many questions, my instinct to take care of her seems to occupy all the space inside my head. This isn’t my first time at this rodeo. With She Who Shall Not Be Named, all I wanted to do then was make her—the evil woman she was—life easier.
The steady whoosh of the air conditioner hums as Roxy whispers a quiet no, then brushes her hair from her cheeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner.”
“It’s fine. It’s your news. You tell people when you’re ready to tell people.”
She gives me a sheepish little grin. “You probably have a lot of questions.”
When she dangles that kind of bait, I have to bite. I scratch my jaw, adopt a confused look, and say in a singsong voice, “Do the bird and the bee love each other very much?”
A smile lights her face, finally erasing all the pallid color. She answers like she’s talking to a tyke. “That’s exactly how it works, little Bobby.”
But then she swallows and sighs, smoothing a palm over her skirt. And I don’t think there were any birds and bees in love in her case.
I add up the evidence.
Roxy thinks dating sucks.
Roxy’s not involved with anyone.
Which must mean some asshole knocked her up and walked away. A plume of anger rises in me over that bastard. I can’t fucking abide by men or women who shirk their responsibilities. “Is he even going to help out?”
She shakes her head, but before she can say another word, I do. “Are you serious?” I spit out.
“Yes.”
She’s about to say something more, but I blow out a long stream of frustrated air. “Roxy . . .”
“He doesn’t have a right to know,” she adds quickly.
I furrow my brow. “What? I mean even if he’s a dick, and he clearly is, how can you say that?”
Because this guy is a dick. He’s a dick because he had his hands and everything else on this fantastic woman, and then he left. He doesn’t deserve her, and I’m jealous as hell of him for having her, even though I can’t be, which is a fucked-up way to feel, but there it is.
She laughs and rests a soft hand on my thigh. “Miles, he signed away those rights when he donated sperm. He’s simply donor 2368.”
I’m a car sputtering in the driveway, trying to turn on. I blink, and finally the engine whirs to life as I process the fact that Roxy went to a sperm bank.
“Why?” That’s all I can get out. I’m certainly aware that many women choose that option. I just wasn’t expecting to hear that from her. Because . . . it’s an unusual choice.
She adopts a playful expression. “To get my muffin buttered. To plant a pea in my pod. To place a pig in the poke.”
Her smile is infectious. This is what she wants, and that means there’s only one thing to say. “I guess congratulations are in order.”
“Thank you.”
A hug would seem to be in order too, and I’m not just saying that because I dig getting up close and personal with her. But I do like touching her, and I’m a sneaky enough bastard to seize my chances. I wrap my arms around her. “Seriously. That’s great,” I say, catching a whiff of jasmine from her hair. There’s a faint hint of cinnamon, too, from her lips. I don’t want to let go, but if I don’t, am I the guy who’s perving on a pregnant woman?
I pull away since I don’t want to be that guy.
She shoots me a nervous look. “Are you annoyed I didn’t tell you before tonight? Only my parents and brother and Mackenzie know. I haven’t told a lot of people.”
Am I annoyed? I suppose a part of me wishes I’d known. Because if she’d told me, that would’ve meant I was in her inner circle. But then, why do I want to be in her inner circle? We can’t go anywhere with our kiss from earlier. That absolutely delicious, dirty, ferocious kiss.
Because of William. Because she’s pregnant. Because I have a kid. Mostly because neither one of us wants anything more.
“No. I’m not annoyed at all. Are you going to tell more people now?”
“Maybe?” she offers noncommittally. “I think at a certain point you realize exactly how lucky you are to be pregnant at all and to make it through the first trimester. One of my girls at work lost a baby at twenty weeks. I know people who’ve gone even farther and miscarried, so I’m cautious.” She frowns. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be a downer.”
“Hey, you’re not a downer. It’s sad. The world can be sad. You want to believe everything is going to be sunshine and roses, but sometimes life throws horrible shit at you.”
“There’s a part of me that wants to keep it to myself the whole time,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “I think it’s like if I wanted to write a novel, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell anybody until it was finished.”
I tap my fingers on her leg. “Only, you can write a novel in secret, but you can’t really be pregnant in secret.”
She puffs up her cheeks like a chipmunk’s and mimes a balloon belly. “Pretty soon I’ll be like that.”
“Sounds hot to me,” I say, because Roxy getting rounder is kind of strangely appealing. Plus, I don’t want her to think she’d ever be unattractive, and if there’s no dude in her life to tell her she’s stunning, I can rise to the occasion.
She scoffs. “Please.”
“I do not lie. You are hot now at fifteen weeks with those glorious tits, and you’re going to be even hotter when they get bigger.”
She straightens her spine and sticks out her chest. “Glad yo
u noticed the girls.”
I run a hand down her arm, recalling how she felt back at the school. “I noticed them when you showed up tonight backstage. And I noticed them when you were pressed up against me. What can I say? I’m a boobs man.”
She quirks up the corner of her lips. “I’d have thought by how you grabbed my ass you were an ass man.”
“Fine. Fine. You uncovered my dirty little secret. I’m a card-carrying ass man and a card-carrying boobs man. And you bring it out in me.”
She flashes me a flirty smile, and I love that we’re flirting, and it feels friendly and normal too. “Also, how is the baby doing so far?”
Her smile spreads wider. “She, or he, is great. Everything looks great.”
“Why go the route of Donor . . . 2368, was it?” I ask, eager to understand her. “Most single parents I’ve known have either been given the shaft by their partner, like yours truly, or it was unexpected. But yours is intentional, and I’m curious to know more.”
“I found a ten percent off Groupon and could not pass that up.”
I crack up. “Are you serious?”
“No. But don’t think for a second I wouldn’t have used one.” Then her tone turns serious. “It’s honestly simple. I want to be a mom. And I don’t really have the best of luck when it comes to romance.”
I gesture to the gorgeous, brilliant, kind woman sharing the back seat with me. “I don’t understand how a man could snag a chance to be with you and fail to recognize everything that you have.”
She snorts. “Believe me, it happens all the time. I could go on and on about the joys of online dating.” She shares a few details as the car whips along the highway toward Manhattan. “But really, I think back to my last serious boyfriend, Carl. That was six years ago, when I worked on Wall Street. I wanted a commitment. He kept putting it off, saying we’d talk about it the next year. And when he finally agreed to talk, he admitted that he didn’t want anything more. He could have told me that six months earlier and saved me some time.” She sighs heavily. “At the time, it wasn’t a huge thing. I was only twenty-five, and I figured I’d meet somebody else who wanted the same things. But I didn’t, so I did it myself.” She touches her belly protectively. “This is something I’ve known I wanted for a long time. It’s sort of like knowing you love dogs or music. It’s intrinsic. It’s not as if I had to acquire the desire like you acquire the taste for coffee.”
I laugh at the analogy. “And if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to make you acquire the taste for coffee, it’s having an infant.”
“Good thing I already love it,” she says with an easy grin. “And it also became so clear to me that going solo was doable. I know so many amazing single parents, like Mackenzie before she met Campbell. And even you. And I also knew that doing it solo was probably the only way it would happen. Do you know what I mean?”
I nod, even though I don’t know precisely. My situation was different, but in the end, I suppose the result will be the same—I have Ben to myself. She will have her baby to herself.
We’re silent for a few minutes as the car zooms along in the night. My mind spins both forward and backward, thinking of everything that’s coming her way, and everything that has led me to where I am tonight.
She breaks the silence, perhaps sensing where my thoughts have drifted. “What was it like with Diana? Did she ever want Ben?” she asks softly, as if she’s touching a still-tender wound. I flinch. Most people don’t say her name. Hell, I hardly ever mention it. But I must have once or twice, and Roxy remembered it.
I slump back in the cool leather seat. “I thought she did. I thought she wanted to be with me too. But hell if I knew a thing.”
“How did you meet her?”
“She was a dancer. I met her on the road, touring. We fell in love quickly. Maybe too quickly. She was great at first. But everyone’s great at first, right?”
She laughs dryly. “Truer words.”
“And because it was great for those first few months, we made a decision to”—I pause and sketch air quotes—“not not try.”
Roxy blinks, shaking her head. “No wonder she got pregnant. You were using too many double negatives.”
I laugh. “Well, we weren’t trying to get pregnant. But we weren’t trying to avoid it either.”
She nods crisply. “I figured that out. But not not trying sounds like famous last words.”
“Exactly. Anyway, it worked the first time, and she was thrilled about it for the first six months. Read all the pregnancy books, took her folic acid, ate kale.”
“When in doubt, eat kale.”
I raise an eyebrow playfully. “Are you eating your kale like a good girl, Roxy?”
“Gross. No way.”
The mood turns more serious again, and I go back to the saga of Diana. “But something changed for her around six or seven months, right after this crazy baby shower she threw. She was young, only twenty-two, and she started freaking out about her career. I thought it was pregnancy hormones.”
“They are powerful devils.”
“That’s why I didn’t entirely believe it when she started saying she didn’t want to be a mom. Then, right near the end, she started saying the baby would be fine with me because of my job and finances. But I still didn’t believe her.”
Roxy slides closer to me, worry etched on her forehead.
“I thought she was just hyperemotional,” I continue. “She said she didn’t want the baby, and she didn’t want to be together, and she didn’t want this life.”
A tear slips down Roxy’s face. “That’s awful. Were you devastated?”
I swallow hard past the stone that always rises in my throat when I think of those dark days. “Safe to say it was the shittiest thing that ever happened to me,” I deadpan, since that’s the only way to get those words out. “I loved her, and I wanted to have a kid with her. But I didn’t have a ton of time to mourn her because I had this six-pound person who needed all of me, and that’s what I wanted to give him. That’s the thing about kids—you go from not knowing this person to falling completely in love with them, instantly willing to lay down your life for them.”
Roxy sighs contentedly, and I do too, because this is the happy part of the story, and the part that never hurts.
“When he was born, I was overjoyed. Even with Diana’s antics. Once he was there in my arms, I was so damn happy. I rushed to find my mom in the hospital waiting room, and I said, ‘It’s a boy’ and ‘It’s just like magic.’”
“Magic,” she repeats, like the word itself holds all the wonder in the world.
I nod, a stupid smile sneaking across my face as I remember. “It was magic.”
But the magic burns away because the story’s not done. “And that was that. It was the most wonderful day of my life, followed by the worst. Because . . . Diana meant everything she said. She left two days later. That was it.”
Roxy releases a deep exhale and takes my hand, threading her fingers through mine. “That’s terrible. She’s a witch, and I hate her.”
“For a while I did too, but I also didn’t really have the time to hate her. For the first few weeks, I tried hard to understand her choice. But you can’t make sense of something like that. And that’s why I had to stop trying to understand it and simply accept my new reality. I think once I did, that made getting over her incredibly easy because I couldn't forgive her choice. So I decided, it was him and me. He was my focus.”
“What did you do in those early days, though, when he was just a newborn?”
“My mom helped. She basically stayed with us for the first month or two, and she helped me figure it all out. She’s a saint.”
Roxy smiles as she squeezes my fingers. “Did Diana ever try to come back?”
I shake my head.
“Did you ever hear from her?”
Another shake.
“Do you miss her?”
A vehement shake, followed by a “Hell no.”
“Do
you wish she hadn’t left?”
I stop to think about that one. At the time, her leaving felt like someone had scooped out my vital organs with a rusty shovel, then tossed them into a skillet and cooked them on high. I’d have done nearly anything to reverse time and change the course of our lives. To change her. But looking back, I can see how my life unfolded in its own fantastic way. I might have wanted her then, but now, I want everything I’ve had without her.
“I did wish it, once,” I say with a faint smile. “But I can honestly say I don’t regret a damn thing about how our lives have played out since.”
“I like your life now too,” she says, her lips tilting up in a small grin, maybe even a shy one. “Does Ben ever ask about her?”
“Not often. I’m the only parent he’s ever known. And I decided to give all of my heart and all my love and make him the center of my world. That’s why he’s been with me on the road, touring with me and hanging out—so I never missed a single milestone.”
A sob falls from Roxy’s lips, and she clasps a hand to her mouth then flaps her other hand in front of her face. “I’m sorry for all these dumb tears.”
I reach for her, tuck her in close with an arm around her. “Why are you crying, sweetheart?”
“I can’t imagine doing what she did. I would never do that.”
“I’d never think you would,” I say, petting her hair, and the funny thing is I know she wouldn’t. Diana blindsided me, yes. But Diana was also selfish. Diana loved Diana, and maybe I was blind and stupid, too captivated by her body, her looks, and her spark to see what lay beneath.
Roxy’s so much more solid and decent than Diana ever was, from how she treats her friends, to how she runs her business, to the fact that she went with me tonight simply as a favor.
She sniffles. “Maybe I am emotional,” she says quietly.
“So it’s emotions and perfume? Rather than yakking and pickles?”
She laughs, nodding against me.
I speak softly into her hair. “I think you’re allowed to cry and be emotional. I don’t mind your tears.”
She raises her face and swipes a hand over her cheek, wiping away the remnants. “I bet you don’t ever want to get involved with anyone again.”
Once Upon A Wild Fling Page 8