Blindsided

by Ava Ashley

  At least, that’s the thought that’s running through my clouded brain as Emma and I pick through the racks at One Haute Momma. I needed clothes that fit. In just a few short months, I had gone from a size two to a size pear.

  I’m actually surprised that even a single clear thought has done anything but nebulize in my head right now. Over the last few weeks, my concentration’s been so murky, I’m absolutely certain there’s something seriously wrong with my brain.

  “I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to be looking for right now!” I sob. I collapse on a table filled with compression hose, burying my head in my arms. “I have a brain tumor!”

  Several concerned heads turn in my general direction. Emma’s isn’t one of them. She continues to sift through a collection of jewel-toned baby doll blouses.

  “You don’t have a brain tumor, you doof. Pregnancy brain is like a gold standard of pregnancy. Here. Try this one,” she says. She shoves a royal blue tunic in my face. “Your hormones are just screwing with you. Kind of a big fat reminder that screwing’s what got you here in the first place.”

  She smirks. I blink at her with teary, doe eyes. “You think I’m fat?”

  A fresh burst of saltwater gushes with a chorus of fresh sobs.

  “Oh, come on, Sloane. That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Emma scolds. Still, she pats a reassuring hand on my back.

  “No, Emma. It’s sooo bad. I left the condo the other day, to go to the library and the courthouse to do some records research on Lennox and Logan? I was actually feeling pretty good about myself. The morning sickness has finally stopped. I don’t have to pee all the time.”

  “That’s great!” Emma cheers.

  I shake my head vehemently. “Yeah, right? You would think so. But, wait. So, there I was, getting a lot of looks from some really cute guys. Some of them even whistled. I figured it was that whole ‘pregnancy glow’ thing they talk about. Was it? No. Nuh uh. It wasn’t until I got to the car that I realized I had forgotten to put my shirt on!”

  Emma stifled a chuckle. I smacked her. Hard.

  “It’s not funny, Em! The other day, I fixed Lennox a cup of coffee before he left. Two stevias. Soy milk.” I ticked off the ingredients on my fingers. “Just how he likes it. Later, when I went to make my own? I couldn’t find the milk. Lennox found it later that night. In the dishwasher!”

  Emma took my hands in hers. “That’s okay. You really shouldn’t be having coffee when you’re pregnant anyway.”

  “That’s what Lennox said!” I wailed.

  “It’s really not that bad, Sloane. The pregnancy is just messing with your sleep patterns. Being tired is bound to mess up your focus.”

  I stormed toward the other side of the store and angrily rifled through a rack of maternity sleepwear. Emma followed like a diligent service dog.

  “No. You know what’s been disturbing my sleep patterns? Him.”

  “Who him? You know the sex of the baby already? I though they couldn’t tell until after eighteen weeks at least.”

  I wave my hands. “No, no, no. Not the baby. Him! Lennox!”

  Emma takes a defensive stance. “Has that hormone-hyped monkey been bothering you? I told you moving in with him was a bad idea. Even if it gets you the story for Thirty. I swear, if he’s tried anything, I will personally drop-kick him in the -,”

  “Whoa! Hold on! Check your red card, Hope Solo. Lennox hasn’t done anything. Surprisingly, he’s been quite a gentleman. Do you know what he did the other night? I was sitting on the sofa, binge watching Pretty Little Liars while I was folding towels. It’s the weirdest thing. There’s always towels to fold. I swear Lennox takes more showers than any human being I know. Seems like he has to take one almost every time he sees me.”

  Emma raises one dubious eyebrow. Obviously, she has her own thoughts on Lennox’s hygiene practices, but, thankfully, she keeps them to herself.

  “Anyway?” she prods.

  “Anyway, he came home from practice and I told him all we had for dinner was some curry and shawarma from Been There, Thai’d That. My feet were too swollen to stand very long in the kitchen, so I ordered out. Yet another spectacular side effect of being knocked up. Balloon feet.”

  “So, what did he do?” Emma asks.

  “Instead of going directly to the kabobs, he actually sat down next me on the sofa and started rubbing my feet.”

  Emma pulls her neck in like a turtle. “That’s actually kind of sweet.”

  “Right?! That’s what I thought! That’s why I can’t figure him out, Emma. At home, he shows me this sweet, albeit incredibly hot, Lennox, but the only thing anybody else sees is a conceited, arrogant, tough guy with a serious attitude problem. And I don’t know if it’s the ‘pregnancy brain’ thing or what, but I’ve been living with him for three whole weeks and I haven’t been able to figure out the who, what, where, when or why, not one single friggin’ ‘W’ of the Lenox Hardy puzzle. Including what happened to Logan when the twins were born. It’s almost like his brother never even existed!” I collapse into a nearby moon chair next to a mannequin draped in a shapeless maternity housecoat.

  Emma sniggered and pointed to my belly. “Oh, he existed all right.”

  “Bite me,” I quip. “I’m serious, Em. The clock is ticking. The election will be here soon and my time with Lennox will be over and Giselle’s going to expect a story.”

  A sinking sensation chills the pit of my stomach when I think about what I just said.

  My time with Lennox will be over.

  The past three weeks have been, well, pretty damned awesome. And it’s not just the foot rub thing I tell Emma.

  “There was the other night when the temperature outside dropped during the night and Lennox crept into my room and dropped and extra blanket over me. He must not have realized I was awake. I thought, for just a moment, he was going to put some of his infamous playboy moves on me. To be perfectly honest, my raging second trimester hormones weren’t necessarily against the concept.”

  “Sloane!”

  “I can be an independent, freethinking woman and horny,” I defend.

  “Well, I guess it’s not like you can get pregnant again right now,” Emma shrugged.

  I smack her with one of those crescent-shaped nursing pillows. “Thanks for being my conscience, Jiminy.”

  “So, did you let our ‘real boy’ stick his ‘nose’ anywhere?”

  I level a thoroughly baleful stare at her. “You are my most disgusting friend.”

  Emma takes a mock bow. “Dirty old ladies’ club. Not just a member. I’m also the president.”

  “But, the answer to your question is no. He just fluffed the blanket over me, quiet as a mouse, then turned and left. After a few minutes, I tiptoed down the hall after him, not exactly certain if I expected to tell him ‘thank you’, jump his bones, or what. What I certainly didn’t expect was to see Lennox on his computer at the breakfast bar, tube-socked ankles wound through the stool legs, scrolling through pages of Pottery Barn baby furniture.”

  “Huh?”

  “Now do you see why I’m having such a hard time with this story? Nothing makes sense! And it’s not like anything I’ve come across in his past sheds any light on the great enigma that is Lennox Hardy. Some reporter I am.”

  Emma fluffs the nursing pillow and cops a squat on the floor in front of me. As if a coffee klatch on the middle of a retail floor is the most normal thing in the world. That’s one of the thing I love about Emma. She’s her own person.

  “Well, let’s look at the facts,” she says, shifting into her research librarian mode. “Gimme what you’ve got so far.”

  “His father, Tristan Piers Hardy? Pillar of society. Old California family. Graduated from my alma mater –Stanford – California’s answer to the East Coast’s Ivy League. Married the daughter of his father’s fraternity brother. It was big, society to-do. A widely-touted wedding. Son of a billion-dollar oil baron marries the daughter of an equally-flush Pennsylvani
a steel and rail tycoon.”

  Emma scoffed. “And they say there are no arranged marriages in America.”

  “The society articles I’d found covering it were a retrospective of who’s-who in American financial circles – members of the Hearst, Haas, and Hewlett’s were in attendance.”

  “No wonder I’m living on Ramen and pork and beans. I guess your last name has to start with the eighth letter of the alphabet in order to be in the Fortune 500.”

  “Anyway, after the wedding and a dazzling European honeymoon, the newly minted couple settled into a comfortable home in El Dorado Hills. You know. That toney suburb outside the city? It’s within spitting distance of the 1848 Coloma gold rush site – and, for a while at least, the couple was golden. They were the ultimate power couple, beautifully perfect in a John and Jackie sort of way, complete with Colgate grins. On every society circuit in southern California.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Right? Well, when his father passed, Tristan had taken over the reins of the thriving family oil business, which had burgeoned through the Reaganomics of the eighties. And the icing on the cake? When Anna Catherine announced she was expecting. It was a golden friggin’ paradise.”

  “Then, let me guess. The bottom fell out of heaven.”

  “Bingo. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait generated the oil price shock of 1990 and Tristan’s company lost millions. I was able to follow the company’s struggles in The Wall Street Journal. Forbes. And while Tristan still made the covers of major papers and magazines, becoming infamous for his tirades against Washington and the damaging effects he felt it was wreaking on his livelihood, Anna’s appearances in the society pages became more sparse and erratic.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  I shrugged. “I just chalked it up to the stress of the family’s money problems and the struggles of pregnancy. The latter of which I am starting to become intimately familiar with.”

  I tug at the waistline of my restricting jeans. I’m pretty sure I now have a permanent dent in my middle from the tight pants.

  “The few pictures I was able to locate? They were missing that carefree Camelot look of the early days of her marriage. It’s weird. In the older photos, she had favored strapless gowns, and breezy sundresses. Her eyes were always bright and smiling. Kinda like Lennox’s do when he’s in a. good mood. In the later photos, though, she seemed inclined toward long sleeved, pearl-buttoned cardigans and those big-lensed, dark-tinted glasses Audrey Hepburn used to wear.”

  “Hm.” Emma chewed on her lower lip. I can practically smell the smoke as her wheels start turning. “She ever show up again?”

  I nod. “She made a brief appearance again in late 1991, in a less than comfortable-looking family photo. It was her, Tristan, and a new baby I had to assume was Lennox. The caption on the photo had made absolutely no reference to Logan or even the fact that it had been a twin birth. Then it’s like Anna just disappeared into the background. I know she was around. Lennox talked to me about her.”

  “Let me do some digging at the paper. Maybe I can come up with something.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Of course I would, sweetie. And if it will help another media outlet score a scoop over Kirk? Well, that’s just bonus.”

  We share a hearty laugh, which is cut short by the reproachful look of the sales associate.

  “Time to move this party. Besides, I’m craving hummus,” I suggest, leveraging myself out of the moon chair. If this is what it’s like at four months, life’s gonna be an absolute joy at nine.

  Emma gives me a helping hand and we head out of the store.

  “So, sounds like you’ve got quite a mystery on your hands.”

  “Yeah. I still know next to nothing about Lennox’s past.”

  Emma shook her head. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  We get out to the sidewalk and we head toward Byblos. “What do you mean then?”

  “I’m talking about the mystery of why Lennox was looking at baby furniture.”

  I stop dead in my tracks and turn to face her. Suddenly, my stomach heaves. I clap my hand over my mouth and rush back into the maternity store toward their bathroom.

  So much for being over morning sickness.

  Chapter 10

  Lennox

  I grit my teeth, knuckles whitening on the rim, and brace myself for what’s about to happen.

  “Two minutes,” I keep telling myself. “Just two minutes and it won’t matter after that.”

  I suck in a huge breath and swing my legs over the edge, plunging my two hundred thirty pound frame into the fifty-five degree ice bath.

  The shock is immediate. My manhood instantly goes crawling for warmer places. As the solid chunks of water bump and swirl around me, I’m not so sure there is such a spot. As my body’s core temperature starts to drop, I’m kind of stupidly glad that Sloane isn’t around to see. Other people’s opinions had stopped mattering to me a long time ago. I could give a rat’s ass what other people thought. But Sloane? Somehow, Sloane’s opinion matters. She matters.

  Nothing was going to matter if I couldn’t move later.

  “Two minutes,” I repeat, already ticking the time in my head. After two minutes, I’ll be numb and the cold therapy can just do its job and alleviate the delayed onset muscle soreness I know is headed my way. Dante put a world of hurt on me today in practice.

  Guess the red jersey was more of a red flag in front of a very pissed off bull instead of a tackling deterrent.

  I came limping off the field after practice today, searching for relief from the beating. I know I had done wrong by my teammates, but fuck! Forgive a guy already! Can’t apologize if you’ve pretzeled me to the point where my own head is up my ass.

  An ironic grin smears itself across my face.

  Kinda thought having my own head up my ass is what got me into trouble in the first place.

  I had painfully peeled my pants from my sweaty body. Winced as I contorted and twisted myself out of my helmet and pads. Hugh had been conspicuously absent from the locker room as the team came into change, so a painkilling shot would have to wait. Ice bath was the only option, so here I am, a jocksicle, waiting for the absent trainer to get his ass back where he’s supposed to be.

  I’m not all that disappointed in his absence. For all the relief those damned Toradol shots are supposed to be giving me, they sure make me feel like shit. Sure it did the trick, making it possible to push through the pain and accomplish some amazing things out there on the field, but three days or so after? By then it had worn off and I felt like the floor of a taxi cab – funky, stale, and stomped on.

  I rest my head back along the edge of the tub, hands gripping the sides as I try and let the cold do its thing. I try to think of warmer things to take my mind off the chill that’s starting to seep into my bones.

  Without any great effort, Sloane swims into the focus of my subconscious. There hasn’t been a woman in my life, one of any substance anyway, well, since Mom...passed away.

  Passed away. What an understated, inadequate euphemism.

  I couldn’t bring myself to think, let alone say, what really happened. To do that would just be admitting that the asshole had won and I couldn’t bring myself to concede to that stomach-twisting fact.

  I try turning my mind back to more pleasant things. Sloane brought me that lunch – that absolutely perfect lunch – for no other reason than kindness. I hadn’t meant to walk out on her so abruptly. It had just brought up so many painful memories – what with the crusts cut off the sandwiches and all – I couldn’t breathe.

  Yeah, I know, right? Me. The epitome of cardiovascular health. The finely-tuned athletic machine. And a PB&J sandwich takes my breath away.

  Wrong, asshole. Sloane takes your breath away.

  My inner Freud has a heyday with my psyche.

  He isn’t wrong. She’s so goddamned beautiful. And it’s effortless. Half the girls I’ve been wit
h must own stock in Sephora and M·A·C. It would take an archaeological excavation team and probably several weeks to chip away at the layers of foundation and blush to get at the honest faces underneath – if they could be found at all – time and energy I had no desire to spend.

  Sloane wasn’t like that.

  Just her and those adorable fucking freckles that dotted across her nose and cheeks. Not enough to make her look like Little Orphan Annie, mind you, but enough to add a refreshing sense of honest innocence.

  Didn’t get a lot of honesty in my life. Not from my agent. Not from the fan girls. Not from Logan. And sure the hell not from my Dad.

  But, then there’s Sloane. Just a faintly tinted moisturizer with SPF30. Simple and health-conscious. Big plus in the pro column.

  Okay, fine. I admit it. I might have snooped in her makeup bag once when she left it on the bathroom counter once. Sue me.

  It didn’t even bother me when she left her unmentionables drip drying over the shower rod. Apparently, you can’t just throw the damned things into the washer and dryer like a normal pair of boxers. Nope. Instead I get to wash my pits while staring at a black lace C-cup.

  An evil little grin creeps into the crooks of my mouth. She used to be a B-Cup. Pregnancy had a few perks I am starting to find out.

  And she probably thinks I haven’t noticed.

  I’ve noticed.

  Despite the ice, I feel a sudden rush of warmth flow to the lower half of my body. I can’t stop thinking about Sloane standing in that same shower, naked, rivers of soap trailing down from the sweet bend of her neck. Down her rounded breasts. The dark rosy flesh of her nipples thrusting forward in an open invitation to suck them. Over the smooth, growing hump of her belly, somehow even sexier now in its gentle curve. And further still, sliding over that bare mound of her pubic bone and down into the intimate recesses of her forbidden folds.

  I feel a twitch and a tightening. An itch I’m dying to scratch. I know Sloane and I have an agreement, but every day it gets harder to abide by it.

  That’s not the only thing getting harder.