Body Check

by Alicia Hunter Pace

  Some folks say.

  Some folks say.

  * * *

  More like some folks lie. Thor slammed his eyelids closed. He didn’t want to see her anymore. Too bad he couldn’t write songs or sing. If he could, he would write one called “What Some Folks Say is Wrong.”

  You crashed my party and broke a glass.

  Sure, you looked hot, but sex was all it was.

  Something, something, something.

  Then you sneaked out without saying goodbye.

  That’s why I didn’t see you leaving.

  You big liar.

  * * *

  “Sir?” A voice interrupted his song composing. He opened his eyes to see a young woman wearing a Neon Fiddle T-shirt standing before him. “I am so sorry that I haven’t gotten back here before now. What can I get you to drink?”

  A drink? He’d forgotten all about that beer he’d needed. He glanced at the stage. Tradd was gone and another band was setting up. The girl held a pen and pad, ready to take down his order.

  “No, thank you. I need to go.” He reached for his wallet. “But let me tip you the price of a drink.”

  “That’s not necessary,” she said.

  “Nonsense.” He pressed the bills into her hand. Then he got an idea. “May I borrow your pen and a piece of your paper?”

  She looked puzzled. “Sure.” She handed him the pen and pad.

  He couldn’t write a song, but he sure could write a note.

  Once in the entryway, he folded the paper and handed it to his new friend. “Layton, I would like you to deliver this to Ms. Davenport.”

  “Do what?” Layton asked.

  Oh, right. “Miss Sanderson. Rita May Sanderson.”

  A storm cloud passed over the boy’s face. “Oh, Mr. Eastrom, I hate to tell you no, but that’s against the rules. I can’t.”

  Thor laid a hundred-dollar bill on top of the note. “Are you sure?” The boy looked from the money to Thor’s face and back again. “I promise you if you get in trouble, I will buy this place and make you manager.”

  The boy shook his head. “I don’t think it’s for sale.”

  “Everything’s for sale.”

  The boy sighed and took the money. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I guess I am.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tradd sat at the small vanity in the dressing room that wasn’t much more than a closet. She drank most of a bottle of water in one gulp, poured the rest on a washcloth, and blotted her neck. She was wringing wet with sweat and the muscles in her legs twitched from overuse. Anybody who thought it was easy to perform for two hours straight was sadly mistaken. She was out of shape and needed to get back to the gym. Not that being pregnant helped.

  But it had been so worth it—the crowd, the energy. She hadn’t even felt the fatigue and the heat until coming off the stage. After talking with Carson today and feeling the love from the audience tonight, she was beginning to believe her career could weather this bump in the road.

  Bump in the road. That wasn’t quite right. That sounded like a bad thing. Detour was a better way to describe her pregnancy. A detour might not be planned, but it could be the road to an unanticipated treasure.

  Maybe she could have it all—her career, her baby, and … Well, not everything. Not Lars. Not that she wanted him.

  She rose. She needed a shower and out of these damp jeans—though not in that order.

  “Ms. Sanderson?” The words were followed by a knock on the door. Fans weren’t supposed to be allowed back here but, truthfully, she wouldn’t mind it.

  But when she opened the door, she found, not a fan, but a young man in a Neon Fiddle T-shirt.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but someone left you a note.” He seemed nervous. “Only not just someone.” He put a small, folded piece of paper in her hand. “I’m sorry if I was out of line to take it, but it was Thor Eastrom—you know, the Sound player.”

  Her stomach fluttered. Lars had been here?

  The boy rattled on. “So I didn’t think he’d be crazy or anything. I hope it was okay.”

  “Yes, it was fine.” Though Lars might be crazy—crazy and everything.

  He looked relieved as she closed the door.

  The note had been written on a Neon Fiddle waitstaff order pad. It said, “Come directly to my house. Guest house. You know the one.” And it wasn’t signed.

  If that wasn’t an invitation for exactly how she wanted to end this fabulous night, she didn’t know what was. That he summoned her to the guest house made that absolutely clear. Her fatigue abated and her body hummed with anticipation. Soft sheets, warm hands …

  She showered, shaved her legs, and dusted herself with Chanel body powder. After applying a little mascara and lip gloss, she slipped into a pair of shorts printed with cherries and a leaf green T-shirt. She felt so lush, ripe, and alive that she didn’t even care that she had to leave the shorts button and first inch of the zipper undone. The shirt covered it and she probably wouldn’t have them on long anyway. After sliding her feet into red leather flip-flops, she surveyed herself in the mirror.

  At the last second, she stripped off her shirt and removed her bra. She briefly cupped her breasts with her hands, imaging how Lars’s hands would feel there. She smoothed the shirt over her bare breasts. Not bad. She wouldn’t want just anyone to see her this way, but Lars wasn’t just anyone. She didn’t know what he was, but not just anyone. If nothing else, he was the father of her baby.

  She held her bag in front of her as she made her way to the back parking lot.

  As she got in her car, it struck her odd that she hadn’t even considered not going.

  Thor showered and put on the oldest shorts and T-shirt he owned. There was comfort in old things, though exactly why he was looking for comfort, he couldn’t have said.

  He also couldn’t explain why he had sent her that note commanding her presence, and now he hoped she wouldn’t come. After all, he was a toy, a child’s plaything—Tradd being the child. She’d used him for sex and a subject for that song. And he’d been stupid enough to believe her when she’d said he was the first man she’d ever had an orgasm with.

  But she wouldn’t use him anymore. No. And he would tell her that when—if—she came here tonight. No more sex, but he meant it this time.

  To think, he had risked his career, not to mention his relationship with Pickens Davenport, and for what?

  A song! A stupid song where the good girl is wallowing in misery because the bad guy did her wrong.

  Maybe she wouldn’t come.

  The doorbell rang. Figured. She probably needed another song.

  He threw open the door and there she stood—shorts, T-shirt, messy hair, and a come-hither smile. She thought she was here for sex.

  His penis stood at attention like a soldier who had just stumbled onto a general. But he was in charge tonight—not General Tradd.

  She stepped inside and fanned herself with her hand. Why did women do that? A hand couldn’t stir up any air. “You’re in shorts, too. It feels like June, doesn’t it?” She smelled amazing. She looked around. “Have you moved in here?”

  This was not what they were supposed to be talking about. “What makes you think that?”

  “Laptop, beer bottle, Sound cap, bag of Hershey kisses.” She gave him a sexy look. “It looks lived in.”

  “It is.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I like it here.” She touched the corner of his mouth with her index finger. “How’s your mouth?”

  “Well enough to talk.” And you’re not going to like what I have to say to you.

  “Oh, yeah?” She made her eyes sparkle. How did she do that? Probably some kind of wicked witch spell. “What do you intend to say?” She leaned toward him a little. She thought she was going to get some more sexy bed talk.

  And damn. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her nipples were hard and her breasts looked lush with that green fabric clinging to them. He wasn’t impressed, eve
n if the soldier was.

  He took a step back. “You wrote that song after leaving my bed. You made it sound like I deceived and rejected you.”

  The sexy look disappeared from her face. “What song?”

  “Don’t play stupid with me, Tradd. You know what song. The one about people saying this and that. You have made me out to be a bad man when we both agreed it was just sex.”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts. Now that they both had their arms crossed they looked like bookends. “You’re out of your mind. That song was not about you—or me, for that matter. It was about what could happen after a one-night stand—not what did happen. You certainly don’t think I’m in love with you.”

  Did she have to sound so certain?

  “I certainly do not,” he agreed. “If that were the case, you wouldn’t have written a mean song about me—how I broke your heart and you were just my one-night girl.”

  She started to get mad. “You must have the biggest ego on the planet. I tell you, ‘Some Folks Say’ was not about you.”

  “You have made me a laughingstock!”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes like she was trying to figure something out. “A laughingstock? How could I make you a laughingstock? Even if that song was about us—which it is not—no one knows about that night.”

  She had a point, but he wasn’t backing down. “I know! I am a laughingstock to myself and that is worse.”

  “You are the weirdest person I know. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.”

  “I will sue you if you write another song about me!”

  She threw up her hands. “Good luck and lawyer up. Anyway, I did not write the first song about you. I have written no song about you. Can’t you get that through your thick skull?”

  “Did you write it after leaving my bed?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yah. Right. And while we are on the subject—”

  She slung her hair off her face. “You are on the subject. I am on no subject.”

  “While we are on the subject,” he reiterated, “the reason I didn’t see you leave is because you sneaked away out of my bed like a mouse looking for cheese.”

  She wrinkled her forehead and some of the anger in her expression drifted away. “A mouse looking for cheese? Really?”

  “A robber in the dark!”

  She rolled her eyes. He hated eye rolling. “That’s a thief in the night.”

  “As you say. I just know I reached for you and found only an empty bed!” Damn. He hadn’t meant to say that.

  “Yeah?” She turned her head and smiled at him sideways, but it wasn’t a sweet smile. It was an I’ve got you smile—a sneer. “You reached for me? For what purpose?”

  Because I hadn’t had enough of you, like I will never get enough of you. Because I wanted to feel your arms around me, bury myself deep in you, and make you cry out in pleasure. Because I wanted to feel, again, like I had never felt with anyone else. I wanted to fill you up and make you mine.

  But she would never know that. “I was reaching for you to wake you up to tell you to go.”

  A little hurt look tiptoed across her face and he felt a little sorry—but only a little. She had still used him.

  “Is that right?” She put her hands on her hips and her shirt crept up, like it had on stage. He looked at that little band of skin. He couldn’t help it.

  Then he noticed something else.

  She had left the button on her shorts undone—and a little bit of the zipper.

  A strange feeling crept over him. Where had he seen that before? Why did it mean something?

  Then it came back to him. Julia. When she’d been pregnant with the twins—in the early weeks before she bought maternity clothes—she’d just left her pants undone a bit. He stepped back and looked at Tradd a little closer. Her stomach still looked pretty flat to him, though maybe not as flat as it had been. But then she was tall and she had been skinny. Then it began to snap into place like a jigsaw puzzle—her fuller breasts, her throwing up this morning, but feeling fine tonight.

  He shook his head and met her eyes. “You’re pregnant.”

  Her face morphed to surprise, but there was no doubt. The confirmation was there, as surely as it had been written on a road sign. He hadn’t even realized how much he had hoped for denial.

  “You let me inside you last night while you are carrying another man’s baby.” He was enraged and appalled. How dare another man touch her? How dare she let him be intimate with her under such circumstances?

  Suddenly she looked scared and sad. “I didn’t,” she whispered. “It’s not another man’s baby. It’s yours.”

  His?

  She had not let another man touch her. The baby was his. The thought left him breathless and it never occurred to him to question her. They were going to have a child.

  He was going to have the thing he’d thought he would never have, the thing that he thought didn’t matter anymore.

  And he was going to have Tradd. She might not know that yet, but he did.

  There was no rage left in him, and it was hard to remember why he’d been angry in the first place. So she’d written a song after leaving his bed. Why had he thought that mattered? Why had it made him act as if they were in kindergarten and she’d broken his crayon?

  Maybe it wasn’t the song that’d upset him. Maybe it was that she’d left his bed that night. Maybe it was frustration that she was forbidden fruit. Maybe he’d blown the whole thing out of proportion because he wanted to see her again to confront her—seeing her again being the real point.

  He didn’t have any answers about any of that and it didn’t matter.

  Everything was different now.

  Chapter Sixteen

  So now he knew. Not how she had intended to tell him. Of course, there had been no intentions, except “not now.”

  Suddenly, he looked about eighteen years old with his wide eyes, blank expression, injured mouth, and a T-shirt that was so faded that the words Hard Rock Stockholm were barely discernible.

  Computer printout. That was what she needed, what she would have if she had it to go over again—one that would explain that men with low sperm count could father a child. But she didn’t have it and he would never believe her. Not that she blamed him.

  “Are you certain you’re pregnant?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes. I saw a doctor just a few days ago.” So there is no reprieve for you unless you choose it. The baby is a fact of life. She opened her mouth to tell him that he did not have to be involved, but he spoke first.

  “And the doctor—he said all is well?”

  “Yes. I’m fit as a fiddle and so is the baby.”

  Then he did a thing that couldn’t have surprised her more, not if he had morphed into a werewolf and peed on the sofa.

  He dropped to his knees, put his hands on her hips, and gently kissed the spot where her zipper wasn’t closed. As though they had a will of their own, her hands drifted to his head and she stroked his hair.

  There was nothing sexual about these gestures, not on his part or hers.

  “Ett barn,” he said softly.

  Oh, hell. He was speaking Ikea again. “What?”

  He turned his head so that his cheek rested against her stomach and he looked up at her. “An infant—a baby. A miracle. I thought it was impossible.”

  “No.” She pushed his hair off his face. “Not impossible. Highly improbable but not impossible.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Two minutes ago, you wanted to kill me.”

  He looked up and shook his head. “No. Never that. And none of that matters. Write as many songs as you like. Portray me in any way you choose. I don’t care.” He rose and pulled her to him.

  It would be the understatement of the century to say she had not expected this. “I told you the song was only what might have happened after a one-night stand.” He didn’t have to know there was a little more of hersel
f in that song than she was willing to admit. He spoke softly into her ear, “You will marry me, of course.”

  “What?” She jerked out of his arms. “What did you say?”

  “That you will marry me. Soon. Before I leave for Minnesota next week for the first round of playoffs. If the plane should crash, I want there to be no question that you and my child will inherit.”

  Hell in a hand basket! Her head was spinning. Inherit? Lars dead in a plane crash? Her stomach went into a tailspin. “You have lost your mind! Plane crash?”

  He shrugged. “Planes crash all the time.”

  “No. They do not. Hundreds—probably thousands—of planes fly every day. Hardly ever does one crash.”

  “Hardly ever does a man with low sperm count and motility get a woman pregnant the usual way, but it happened. The plane will probably crash.”

  She felt dizzy. She dropped to the sofa and put her head in her hands. “You aren’t going to die in a plane crash and you aren’t thinking.”

  “I am thinking and I have to think fast.” He came to sit on the coffee table facing her.

  “First of all, if you marry me, you won’t be going to Minnesota. My father will fire you.”

  He shrugged. “Then I won’t die in the plane crash.”

  She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “Will you please stop about the plane crash—or rather a plane crash?” The would indicate that there was a specific plane crash. “Do you want to be fired?”

  He shrugged. “You know I do not, but he will fire me or he won’t. It is out of my control. But don’t you think he would be more likely to fire me for getting you pregnant and not marrying you?”

  “He wouldn’t have to know.”

  Lars’s head snapped up. “What did you say? If you think I would crawl around on my belly like some kind of lowlife lizard and not claim my child, you don’t know anything about me.”

  “I don’t know anything about you—except that last night it was awfully important to you to play another year in the NHL.”