She stared at him, stunned. She would have never thought he could make such a confession. Was she just overtired and hallucinating? “Well, don’t look at me. You’re on your own there.”
“Except that I don’t want to be.” Eroding the distance between them, he took a risk and put his hands on her waist. She didn’t shrug him away. It gave him hope. “Being on my own after having someone to love is too empty. Too stark.”
He paused, trying to find the words that continued to elude him. It was like playing hide-and-seek with the wind, but he did the best he could. He suddenly realized that if he couldn’t make her understand now, he might never get another chance.
He was risking everything.
“After losing Ellen, I never thought that I could ever feel anything again.” He drew her in a little closer, doing more with his eyes than with his hands. “That anyone could ever make me feel again. The truth was, I didn’t want to find anyone. I was afraid of finding someone.” He took a breath. “Now, the only thing I’m more afraid of than finding someone is losing that someone. I’ve spent these last few days trying to get back to where I was before you bounced into my life—”
“Bounced?” she echoed incredulously.
“You do bounce,” he pointed out, his mouth softening as he allowed himself a smile. “There’s so much life, so much energy in you, you just bounce into every day. But I can’t get back to where I was,” he continued, his eyes serious. “Not with you living next door. Not when I know all I have to do is knock on your door to see you.”
His words were giving her hope. But she was afraid to hope. Afraid of walking out on that platform and finding that there was nothing beneath her feet but air. She wasn’t some Saturday-morning-cartoon character who could scramble back to safety. She would fall flat on her face.
Her eyes held his as she asked, “So you’re telling me you want one of us to move?”
God, communication just wasn’t his forte. Exasperated, he made it as plain as he could. He bared his soul. “No, I’m telling you that I love you.”
She was free-falling, she realized. But definitely not like some Saturday-morning cartoon. This was wonderful. There was wind beneath her sails and exhilaration rushing through her.
“Well, then, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you knock?”
There was no point in telling her that he had materialized so quickly outside her door this morning when she was dashing out to take Aggie and Cyrus to the clinic because he’d finally made up his mind to do just that. At four o’clock in the morning, he had come face-to-face with his feelings and decided to do something about them instead of waiting for them to somehow vaporize and leave him alone.
So now he did something he’d never done before in his life.
He pretended.
Quade raised his hand and knocked on an invisible door.
MacKenzie stared at him, a stunned expression on her face. Not quite trusting her own eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Knocking on your door,” he told her matter-of-factly. “Aren’t you going to answer it? And my question?”
Had she missed something? “What question?”
It was a step that had filled him with fear, with dread. But as he looked into her eyes, he found that it took no effort, no courage at all to ask, “Will you marry me?”
She couldn’t be hearing him right. “What?”
“Will you marry me?” he repeated, this time with more verve.
It wasn’t April 1st, but it had to be a trick. Oh, please, God, don’t let it be a trick. She could feel her heart begin to hammer wildly.
“You want to marry me.”
“I want to marry you.”
“Even though I’m pregnant.”
“Even though you’re pregnant. The way I look at it, I’m getting two for the price of one.”
She couldn’t believe him. Was still afraid to believe him. Because to believe and then find out otherwise would hurt too much. “You’re kidding me.”
Quade framed her face with his hands. He was way overdue to leave for work, but none of that held any importance to him, not now. Not until he could make her believe him.
“I have a limited sense of humor. I don’t often kid and never about something as serious as this. I want you and I want your baby, MacKenzie. I can’t put it any plainer than that.”
She said nothing.
Had he read everything wrong? Was he so taken up with the tug-of-war inside of him that he’d misunderstood the way she felt?
There was no graceful way to back out, nor did he want to.
No, she loved him, he knew it, felt it in his bones as it mated with the same feeling within him. But he didn’t want to pressure her. If she needed space and time, he could respect that.
Even if it wasn’t going to be easy for him. “Look, if you need time…”
She could hear her own words echo in her head as she said them. “What I need is to believe that this is on the level.”
He thought for a second. “I know someone with a polygraph machine, I could—”
“Always the man of science.” She laughed as the realization that he loved her began to take root. As joy swelled within, she wrapped her arms around him. A feeling of well-being took over every part of her. “You know, the next seventy years are going to be very interesting.”
He held her tightly against him. Relief gave way to longing. He was going to call in late and take the morning off now that he had something to celebrate. “Only seventy?”
Her eyes were teasing him. He was going to love getting lost in them, he thought. “For starters. After that, we’ll see.”
“Sounds good to me,” he told her as he brought his mouth down to hers.
Epilogue
“Well, you certainly don’t look like a woman who’s about to marry a hunky doctor,” Dakota said as she walked into her dressing room and found MacKenzie there. “What’s the matter?”
MacKenzie frowned. She was still trying to sort out what had happened earlier this morning at the complex manager’s office. No matter which way she examined it, it just didn’t make any sense.
“You want it alphabetically or chronologically?”
“I want it any way that makes sense.”
“Then you’re out of luck.”
“Give.” Gesturing toward the sofa, Dakota sat down next to her. That was when she noticed. “Where’s your cameo? Did you give it away already?”
MacKenzie ran her hand over her throat, as if that could somehow make the cameo materialize. “No, that’s just the problem, I didn’t. It’s missing. I never take it off. But when I looked in the mirror this morning, it wasn’t there. I looked all over my apartment and Quade’s.” She sighed. “Then I went to Aggie’s.”
“And?”
“Not only is my necklace missing, but so is she.”
Dakota stared at her. “Excuse me?”
MacKenzie began at the top. “I rang her bell. When she didn’t answer, I got concerned. I thought maybe Cyrus had a relapse or something, so I looked in through the side window. There was no furniture in the apartment.”
Surprise was etched on Dakota’s face. “She moved out without telling you?”
MacKenzie held up her hand. “Wait, it gets better. I went to ask the complex manager about her and he told me that the apartment’s been vacant since January when the college professor moved out.”
“What?”
“My sentiments exactly.” She felt as if she’d fallen headfirst into the Twilight Zone. “He insisted there was no one there.” She looked at Dakota. “It’s like I’m losing my mind. She was there, Dakota. If it wasn’t for Aggie, I’m not sure that Quade and I would even be together. She was the one who really started the ball rolling.” And because of her, two hearts were now unbroken.
MacKenzie scrubbed her hands over her face, too confused to form a clear thought. “Why would she just disappear like that? And why would the manager say she was never there?”
The moment Dakota made the offer, MacKenzie began to rifle through her purse. “All I have is this photo in the article they did on her when she made her debut at the Laugh-Inn. I was going to show it to you. I thought maybe we could have her on the program as a filler.”
When she handed the article with its photograph to Dakota, the latter looked and paled.
“What’s the matter?”
Dakota stared at the small picture a moment longer before she raised her eyes toward MacKenzie. “Are you sure this is Aggie?”
MacKenzie felt a nervousness slip over her. “Yes, why?”
Dakota took a deep breath and then let it out. Weird, that’s what it was. But then, she believed in the legend—maybe this was all part of it. “Because that looks exactly like the woman who sold the cameo to me. The one at that antique shop upstate I told you about. The one that, when I went back to see her, the people who ran the store told me that she’d been buried on the day that I insisted she sold the cameo to me.”
MacKenzie remembered Dakota mentioning this. At the time, she’d thought it was just a misunderstanding. Maybe a case of mistaken identity. But now it was taking on an eeriness.
“You’re making this up.”
“No, I’m not.” Things began to fall into place for Dakota. “Think about it,” she said. “The cameo is gone and with it, this Aggie woman. And Quade is very much a part of your life.”
MacKenzie took back the article and stared at the woman pictured in it. “So what are you saying? That this is all some kind of magic trick?”
“Not magic exactly, but…” Dakota let her voice trail off.
MacKenzie shook her head. “I don’t believe in magic.” Doubt began to slip in. Quade had come into her life the day after she’d received the cameo. “But even if I did… No, no,” she backtracked, stopping her thoughts before they could run away with her. “Aggie was real,” she insisted. “The woman had a dog. She performed in front of a bunch of people.”
Dakota smiled. She’d thought that woman in the shop was real, too, despite evidence to the contrary. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
MacKenzie sighed and shook her head. “Quoting Shakespeare. Always knew your degree would come in handy for something.”
Dakota squeezed her hand. “All that counts is that Quade is real.”
Her thoughts began to get carried away. “Oh God, what if—”
But she never got to finish her statement. Dakota was pointing behind her to the open door and smiling.
MacKenzie shifted in her seat and saw Quade standing there. Like a jack-in-the-box, she was on her feet. She hadn’t been able to reach him when she’d found out about Aggie. “I’ve been trying to call you. What are you doing here?”
He had taken some time off. The fund-raiser had bought him a great deal of goodwill and leeway. “I wanted to make it official, in case you started to have doubts about it.”
Before she could ask him what “it” was, he had taken out a small velvet black box from his pocket. Inside was a ring. A cameo encrusted with tiny diamonds.
With Dakota making appropriate noises behind him, he slipped it on MacKenzie’s finger. “I know it’s not your standard engagement ring but—”
“It’s beautiful,” she cried, holding it out so that the diamonds caught the light. “And nothing about this whole situation has been ‘standard.’”
He took her into his arms, blessing the miracle that had brought her into his life. Because she’d given him a life. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
And neither would she, MacKenzie thought as he kissed her.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7045-3
SHE’S HAVING A BABY
Copyright © 2005 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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