Tad stepped forward. He stretched out his hand. “Hi. I’m Tad McFarlane. Abby’s husband.”
Yvonne did a double take.
“We got married in Paris at the end of April,” Tad continued.
Yvonne’s glance cut to Abby’s left hand, lingering on the jade-and-gold ring she’d been wearing since her trip abroad. She looked back at Tad, who was wearing a plain gold wedding band. “You got married for the first and only time in your life and you didn’t mention it?” Yvonne asked, aghast.
Abby lifted her hands. “Everyone was so upset about the magazine, the financial problems we’ve been having, that I...” Abby was blushing furiously.
“I still think I would have mentioned it,” Yvonne retorted.
Not if you were getting an annulment, you wouldn’t Abby thought. “Look, don’t tell anyone else,” Abby insisted quickly, wanting her embarrassment to end here and now.
“Okay,” Yvonne agreed, like the devout friend she was. “But, uh...” Yvonne’s glance returned to Tad, then focused on the sparks flying between Tad and Abby. “Maybe you should go ahead and go. It won’t do any good to sit here wondering—”
“Good point,” Abby interrupted, not about to let Tad know she—and everyone else at the magazine she had lovingly labored over for the past year and a half—was currently in jeopardy of losing her job, thanks to a recent takeover of the parent company by a huge conglomerate. “I do need a vacation,” Abby said bluntly, vaulting to her feet. Even more urgently she needed to get Tad out of there. She snatched up the airline tickets he’d left on her desk, then grabbed his arm and her briefcase simultaneously. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Yvonne called to Tad as Abby hurried him down the hall.
Tad glanced at Abby. “Don’t worry,” he promised softly, letting her know he wasn’t giving up on them no matter how difficult she proved to be. “I don’t intend to be.”
“WELL, WHAT DO YOU think?” Tad asked Abby early the next afternoon after they’d completed the whirlwind tour of the brick building that housed the Blossom Weekly News.
“About what—western North Carolina?” Which was incredibly beautiful and heavily wooded. “Or Blossom?” Which was a charming little town of around ten thousand people in the Great Smoky Mountains, about sixty miles from the Tennessee border.
“About the newspaper,” Tad said, gesturing around them.
Abby had the feeling he was talking about a lot more than that; he was talking about the prospects for renewing their marriage. Stubbornly she focused only on what she was prepared to discuss at that moment—the business he had just purchased. “It’s a fine building. Well constructed. I’m not sure I like the bullpen atmosphere. I sort of like working in individual offices myself—find it easier to concentrate.”
He picked up a copy of the newspaper. “What about this?”
Abby searched for something nice to say. “It’s, um, compact.”
“And poorly written and designed and limited in scope,” Tad agreed.
Almost hopelessly so. “And yet you bought it,” Abby observed, thinking Tad was more an enigma to her than ever.
“Precisely because it does need so much work,” Tad confirmed. He gazed around them happily, taking in the four desks that had been scrunched together in the big uncarpeted room. “Can’t you see the potential here, Abby?”
What she saw made her think he was nuts. A journalist of Tad’s caliber and renown would never be happy here in the long haul. But he was going to have to figure that out for himself, Abby told herself firmly. It was not up to her to educate him.
“There are no computers,” Abby remarked absently as beads of perspiration sprang up along her neck and chest. Was it hot in here, she wondered as she tugged at the jewel collar of her cotton sweater, or was it just her imagination?
“That’s easily fixed,” Tad assured her with youthful enthusiasm. He picked up a paperweight and tossed it from hand to hand. “I’ll have some in by next week.”
Abby continued to pace the office restlessly, noticing that her knees felt a little wobbly, too. Why, she didn’t know.
Nonplussed by her sudden wooziness, she rubbed at the back of her neck. “And there’s only one section of the paper,” she continued wearily.
Tad grinned confidently as he placed the paperweight on a desk and looked around. “I’m planning to expand. In fact, I’m looking for a Lifestyle editor for the new Lifestyle section as we speak.”
Abby moved away from Tad. She drew a deep breath to see if that would help. “I’ll let you know if I think of anyone,” she said dryly.
Tad paused, his eyes on her face. “Actually I already had someone in mind.”
Thinking maybe she’d feel better if she sat down, Abby eased herself onto the corner of the desk. “Really.” She crossed her legs at the knee. “Who?”
Tad smiled. “You.”
“Very funny, Tad,” Abby drawled, trying hard not to let him know just how woozy she was feeling.
She’d been trying to ignore it, but the truth was she’d been feeling funny, sort of weak-kneed and dizzy, ever since he picked her up at her apartment in New York City to take her to the airport for the flight to North Carolina.
“You think I’m kidding?” Tad asked in a low sexy tone.
Abby’s heart skipped a beat as she looked up into his eyes. Saved by the bell, she thought as the phone rang on the desk behind her. His eyes still on hers, Tad reached around her waist to answer it. “Blossom Weekly News. Yeah. Just a minute, Yvonne.” Tad handed the phone to Abby. “It’s for you.”
Knowing something had to have happened for Yvonne to call her here, Abby pressed the receiver to her ear. “What’s up?” she asked.
“You picked the wrong time to go out of town, kiddo,” Yvonne told her in a discouraged voice.
Anxiety hit Abby like a Mack truck. Aware her hands were suddenly trembling, too, Abby gulped. “What do you mean?” she asked with trepidation.
Yvonne continued grimly, “Trend has just been purchased by The Hindemythe Group in Great Britain. They’re moving the magazine overseas, pronto.”
“What about us?” Abby asked Yvonne as her heart began to pound. “And the rest of the staff?”
“We’ve all been fired.”
“WHAT IS IT?” Tad asked as soon as Abby thanked Yvonne for the information, told her they’d talk soon and hung up.
Abby wet her lips and tried to make sense of her increasingly fuzzy view of Tad’s handsome face. Sweat was gathering between her breasts and there was a roaring in her ears. What was wrong with her? Was it the altitude? The fact Blossom, North Carolina, was five thousand feet above sea level? Or was it just being around Tad, knowing he wanted to continue their hasty marriage, that left her feeling so dizzy and disoriented? Whatever was causing it, Abby decided firmly, she had to get a grip.
“I just lost my job, as did everyone else at Trend,” Abby told Tad calmly.
“I’m sorry.” Tad took her hands in his. He rubbed his thumbs across the insides of her wrists. “But maybe it’s not such a bad thing, after all.”
Abby blinked, stunned Tad did not see the development as the calamity it was. Her career was the one thing—the only thing—she had counted on through thick and thin. She’d put her heart and soul into her job at Trend.
“If it gives us a chance to be together,” he soothed, wrapping a comforting arm about her shoulders, “maybe it’s even a good thing.”
His analysis was so hopelessly optimistic, so far off the mark, Abby didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She only knew, with the room taking on an increasingly precarious tilt, and her whole world crashing down around her, that she couldn’t hold it together any longer.
She stopped trying to fight it, pitched forward into Tad’s waiting arms and let the swirling dizziness overwhelm her.
Chapter Two
“What’d you say to make her faint?” Doc Harlan said as Tad carried his new bride into the doctor’s of
fice just down the street from the newspaper.
“What makes you think it was something I said?” Tad asked as he eased Abby onto the examining table. “It could have been something I did. Or something someone else said.”
Doc grinned as he listened for her heartbeat and checked her pulse. “Always gotta see all the angles, don’t you, son?”
Tad tried not to show his fear. It had scared the life out of him when Abby had collapsed in his arms. “That’s the way I’ve been trained—the way all journalists are trained.”
Fortunately he’d had Doc nearby. The sixty-year-old physician had taken care of the people in Blossom for the past thirty years. His kind eyes and comforting smile were as well-known to residents as the plaid sport shirts, khaki trousers and suede loafers he wore beneath his starched white lab coat. Tad searched Doc’s face anxiously, taking solace in the fact Doc was such a capable family physician. “Is Abby going to be all right?” Tad asked as Abby began to moan and come around.
“Yes, but I’d like to know why she fainted. Does this happen often?”
Tad shrugged as he turned his attention back to Abby’s pale oval face. She hadn’t fainted in Paris. Or when they got married in Memphis.
“Not that I know,” Tad said. “But we’ve only been married a little over three weeks.”
Doc nodded, accepting that information as he broke open an ammonia capsule. “Did she just have a shock?”
Tad nodded, recalling the precipitous phone call from her friend Yvonne. “She just found out she lost her job.”
Doc gave Tad a compassionate look. He waved the capsule beneath Abby’s nose. “That’s probably it, then, but just to be safe, I’d better examine her.”
Catching a whiff of the ammonia, Abby coughed. Her golden-brown eyes fluttered open. Bewildered to find herself lying prone on an examining table, she looked at Tad, then Doc, then Tad again. Embarrassed color highlighted her delicately sculpted cheekbones, and the tip of her tongue snaked out to wet her soft pink lips. “What...?” She tried to raise herself slightly, abruptly lost all color and lay back down again.
“You fainted,” Tad told her, taking her hand.
Remembering, Abby groaned.
“I caught you,” Tad continued.
Abby moaned louder and covered her face with both hands.
Doc grinned. “That’d be my reaction, too, if I was married to him.” Doc angled a thumb at Tad.
Abby’s eyes widened. She peered at Tad through her splayed fingers as if to say, You told him?
Tad shrugged. If it were up to him, he’d be shouting it to the world.
“Since you were in no shape to do so, I had to give him permission to treat you,” Tad said to Abby. To Doc, “She’s not really used to being my wife yet.”
“So I gather,” Doc said.
His nurse came in, patient gown in hand.
Hand on his shoulder, Doc ushered Tad toward the door. “There’s a good selection of magazines in the waiting room. Make yourself comfortable.”
“But—” Tad protested.
“I’ll call you when I know something,” Doc promised.
“IT CAN’T BE,” Abby whispered hoarsely, tears glimmering in her eyes as she sat on the examining table, still in her pale blue patient gown.
“Honey, it is,” Doc said gently.
Silence filled the small room as Abby tried to absorb all he’d just told her.
“I’ll get your husband.” Doc patted her knee. “The two of you can talk, then if you have any questions, you can ask me together.”
“What is it?” Tad asked seconds later as he rushed into the room, looking worried.
Abby drew a deep breath and shot him an accusing look. This was all his fault! “I’m pregnant.”
Tad stared at her, evidencing much the same gut reaction she’d already had. “That can’t be.”
Which was, as it turned out, exactly what she’d said.
“We used—”
“Protection, I know,” Abby said grimly. “But as Doc says, every kind of protection fails sometime. We just happened to hit one of those sometimes.”
“In Paris.” Tad swiftly pinpointed the time and place.
“Or our wedding night in Memphis,” Abby supposed, remembering how jubilant and uninhibited their lovemaking had been just after they’d eloped. “Either way, I’m due approximately eight months from now.”
“A baby,” Tad repeated in a low stunned voice as he sat down beside her and took her hand. Slowly his deep blue eyes filled with joy. “We’re going to have a baby.”
“Looks like,” Abby said, still feeling as though she’d just had the wind knocked out of her.
She had always sworn she would never get pregnant until the man and the moment were right, until she could provide her child with the kind of loving stable home her oft-married-and-divorced parents had never given her.
Yet here she was. Trying to annul her marriage to Tad at the same time she discovered she was carrying his child. Could it get any worse?
“This changes things,” Tad said firmly.
“Yes,” Abby agreed, “it does.” It made them much more complicated.
Tad smiled at her. “Looks like we have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes, I’d say so.” Such as, what were they going to do? She wanted this baby—Tad’s baby—so much. But she was afraid, too, that in the end neither she nor Tad would be able to do right by their child and give him or her the peaceful loving two-parent home every child deserved. She did not want to hurt her child the way she’d been hurt when her parents had split.
“Do you need any help getting dressed?”
Just the thought of him helping her take off the examination gown and put on her clothes made her skin burn. Abby drew an unsteady breath. “I can handle it.” She met his eyes. “I’m feeling fine now. Honest.”
“All right.” Tad rose reluctantly. “I’ll be waiting for you in the reception area.”
Abby nodded.
“And, Abby?” Tad came back to cup her shoulders warmly and kiss her brow. “This is good news.”
“READY TO GO?” Tad rushed to his feet as a pink- cheeked Abby came out into the waiting room, several samples of prenatal vitamins and a prescription in hand.
As ready as I’ll ever be, Abby thought, nodding.
“Good.” Tad flashed a sexy grin that brought his dimples into prominence. “’Cause I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Abby dug in her heels as they moved through the clinic doors and headed toward his Jeep. “I’m not sure I can take any more surprises.”
“You’ll like this one. I promise.” Tad helped her into the passenger seat, climbed in himself, then drove across the center of the small town to a shady residential street of older Victorian homes. He parked at the curb in the center of the block in front of a house with a Sold sign in front of it. With a feeling of dread, Abby looked over and saw plenty of room, crumbling gray-white paint, windows smeared with years of grime, shrubs badly in need of a good trimming and a yard overgrown with weeds.
“Don’t tell me...” Abby began, with a sinking feeling of dread.
“I bought it along with the newspaper,” Tad announced proudly. He was already out of the car and sprinting around to her side. “You’re going to love it.”
Somehow Abby doubted that.
“It’s the perfect place for rearing kids. Once it’s fixed up of course.”
Abby looked at the sagging steps leading up to the front porch. “It would take years.”
Tad remained undaunted. He braced his hands on his hips and looked around with satisfaction. “Not with someone like you running the show.”
Abby was the first to admit she had a lot of talent. She could spot an idea that would excite readers and compel them to buy a magazine in an instant. But this? Just the thought of tackling it made her feel overwhelmed. “Tad, I’m an editor, not—”
“A home-and-garden editor.” Tad unlocked the door and opened it wide.
“I’ve never personally supervised the renovation of a home. I just okay the ideas behind different projects and oversee the articles written about such endeavors.”
Wordlessly Tad picked Abby up in his arms and carried her across the threshold. He closed the door behind them, strode over to the ugliest olive green Naugahyde sofa Abby had ever seen in her life. He set her down gently and then sat beside her. “Our life together is going to be full of firsts, Abby,” he told her gently, taking both her hands in his. “The first marriage, first child, first home, first newspaper, first lifestyle section...”
His enthusiasm made her want to grin. Holding on to the grim reality of the situation with effort, Abby replied, “Back to that again?”
Tad lifted her hand to his lips. He kissed it soundly, then laid it against his face. “I need you, Abby,” he told her softly. “Together we can make all our dreams come true.”
Abby wanted to believe that; she couldn’t. Her life thus far had taught her to take nothing for granted, to depend only on what she knew to be a concrete basis for her life.
She rose and moved away from him. “My dream has always been to climb to the top of my profession,” she reminded Tad.
Together they walked through the downstairs, viewing a large imposing entryway, living room, den, dining room and kitchen. All of which looked as if they’d been decorated by a color-blind two-year-old and furnished at a swap meet.
“You can still climb to the top of your profession if you work with me,” Tad pointed out as they went up the stairs and toured the four bedrooms and two full baths. “It’ll just be in a different format.”
The third floor was an attic, and it was as filled with junk as the rest of the house. Feeling she’d seen enough, Abby turned and headed back down the stairs.
Make Room for Baby Page 2