by Avery Flynn
Kahn took a swipe at her shin and narrowed his little eyes at her as if to say, Just look already.
“I thought the whole cats-rule-the-humans thing was an exaggeration,” Tess said more to herself than the kitten and stood up so she could lean over and look at the pregnancy test result screens on each of the four sticks.
Plus.
She stared, blinking and uncomprehending.
Plus.
Her pulse skyrocketed.
Plus.
A lump—of excitement? anxiety? wonder?—formed in her throat.
Plus.
Before she kept forgetting to breathe, and now, it felt like she couldn’t stop inhaling and exhaling air, but she was doing it so quickly that none of it was actually getting to her lungs. She pressed her fist to her belly, holding it firmly in place, and then jerked it away.
Baby.
There.
Okay, not really. And it wasn’t a baby yet, but a fetus so small an ultrasound tech would probably be able to circle something on a screen but to Tess it would be indecipherable. That didn’t change the fact that this was happening. She was pregnant.
She plopped back down on the edge of the tub, her knees too weak to keep her upright, and focused on her breathing enough to actually slow the panicked hyperventilating thing she had going on and inhale a long, smooth breath through her nose and out her mouth. She repeated that five more times before she gave in to the constant whir of her brain and tried to process what she was going to do next. She had options.
It was too late for Plan B, but she could get an abortion.
She could have the baby but give it up for adoption.
Keep it and start her own family.
So which one was the right answer for her, right now, in this moment? Abortion made sense. Beyond her girls, she didn’t have a support system. Was she really ready to be a single mom without one? Did she have the tools to do it right or would she be continuing the family curse? She’d barely gotten to a point in her life where she felt qualified to have a pet. A baby needed and deserved so much more attention and love than she was sure she knew how to give.
Then there were the logistical issues. The demands of being a small business owner weren’t conducive to going it alone on the parenting route. Who would cover the flower shop when she had to go to prenatal appointments? Could she afford health insurance for the both of them? What about day care? That was easily the cost of another car payment, if not more.
Standing up, she tried to still the thoughts running through her brain faster than she could grasp and then walked over to the bathroom mirror. She lifted her shirt, looking down at her stomach. The little pudge under her belly button had been there for years, but still she expanded her abdomen to make it look bigger, rounder. That’s what it could be in a few months.
But was she ready? Even with her doubts, she couldn’t ignore that feeling that she was. She was staring down her thirtieth birthday, owned her own business, had an apartment, didn’t have that much debt, and a family was pretty high up there on her want list. Most importantly of all, she wasn’t her mother and never would be. This baby would know it was loved, had a place in the world, and was never an obligation. She couldn’t fix her childhood by having this baby, but she could give this baby the childhood she’d wanted—that had to count for something.
It wouldn’t be easy. Single momming it was not for the faint of heart. Then again, neither was anything else she’d managed to do in her life, including working her own way through college, starting a business, and just living life on her own in general.
She could do this.
Glancing down at her belly, she rubbed her palm over it, one soothing circle followed by another and another.
She would do this.
She was having this baby.
Letting out a deep breath, her lips curled upward in a smile that didn’t falter until two words entered her mind: Cole Phillips.
How in the hell was she going to tell him?
…
Paint and Sip nights with Lucy, Gina, and Fallon were sacred. She wouldn’t miss it, not even with her brain not taking half a breath between shooting out pregnancy factoids at her.
“Placenta” is Latin for the word “cake.”
The uterus expands more than five hundred times its usual size during the course of pregnancy.
Babies drink urine in the womb.
God, her brain really needed to shut the fuck up already.
“Perfect timing, Tess.” Gina slipped her arm through Tess’s as they walked through the door into the studio. “I am dying for a glass of wine. It has been a week. The bride from Harbor City is a delight but her soon-to-be husband the accountant? Oh my God. Total nightmare. Groomzilla galore.”
“Tell me everything,” Tess said.
And that’s all it took to get Gina off and running on this Hank guy and how high-maintenance he was. It was a brilliant move. No one told hilarious demanding-client stories like Gina, and this would get them through at least the setup for tonight’s painting. She was going to tell her girls about the pregnancy and enlist their help in tracking down Cole’s number so she could tell him, but she wasn’t ready yet. Instead, she listened to Gina describe the ten-minute voicemail Hank had left about the difference between white shadow and eggshell mist as they sat down next to Lucy and Fallon.
“Have you seen this week’s painting yet?” Lucy asked, nodding toward the front.
Larry, their instructor, stood next to a painting of a pie with a radioactive glow sitting on a windowsill with a view of a decrepit nuclear reactor. Someone must have been reading about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “I think including the skull and crossbones as an imprint on the pie crust is pretty genius.”
“We need to get him to try some cheerier reading material just for a change of pace,” Gina said as she poured four small plastic cups of red wine. “Last week was a cow being led into a slaughterhouse.”
“Larry would find a way to make Harold and the Purple Crayon horrifying,” Fallon said, accepting her cup from Gina. “The man has a gift—let him express it.”
Gina made noises of agreement as she handed a second cup to Lucy and then turned to Tess, the cup filled nearly to the brim with cheap Merlot. For a second, all Tess could imagine was a little skull and crossbones etched into the plastic cup.
“I’m good,” she said, waving off the drink.
Gina chuckled. “You know this high-quality product isn’t available on just any grocery store shelf.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, joining in on the joke. “You wouldn’t want to turn this stuff down unless you’re pregnant.”
Tess blanched, her palm automatically going to her belly.
All three of her girls stared for a second, their jaws going slack with realization.
Tess nodded. “And I’m keeping the baby.”
“You’re pregnant!” Fallon practically shouted. “This is awesome.”
If only it had been Gina, there would have been hope that the two words would have been whispered. With Fallon, a Hartigan right down to her feisty Irish bones, it came out as a bellow. Everyone in Paint and Sip whipped around to stare at her. She smoothed her hand over her curls, all of which were frizzing from the light snow that had just started to fall as she crossed the parking lot, and tried her best to melt into the background. It’s where she liked to be. People forgot about her and, as she’d learned at a young age, it was always safer when she wasn’t noticed. Being reminded of her presence had only made her relatives remember that she’d been foisted upon them in the first place. They’d start complaining loudly about the extra mouth and wondering with harsh regularity when her mother was going to come reclaim her.
That wasn’t going to happen in the art studio, though. All the regulars, including her girls, were raising their cups in toast—even Larry, who almost looked like he might be smiling.
“Thanks,” Tess said when they wou
ldn’t stop staring at her as if waiting for confirmation of Fallon’s exclamation. “I’ll be one of the nearly forty percent of American women who are unmarried when they have babies.”
All of the happy murmurings silenced, and Larry’s hint of a grin disappeared as if she’d imagined it.
Way to go, Tess. Nothing like letting your awkweird show in public.
“To Tess and the forty percenters,” Gina said, holding up her cup.
Years of working as a wedding coordinator and using the force of her personality to get a crowd of tipsy strangers to behave as they should must have worked its magic, because all the other painters and Larry raised their cups and then went back to getting ready for tonight’s painting. Fallon, Gina, and Lucy wrapped their arms around her in a group hug that helped settle her. This feeling, the one that made her warm and content and at ease, was what she wanted the baby to grow up bathed in.
After the hug ended, Lucy held her by the shoulders and gave her the look that sent her misbehaving crisis communications clients into a flurry of I-will-never-fuck-up-again activity. “Who is the mystery man?”
“Yeah, who have you been hiding from us?” Gina asked, sitting down in front of her blank canvas, wine in hand and attention focused solely on Tess.
“I was hoping to talk to you about this later.” Paint and Sip was not exactly the best location for spilling her one-night-stand pregnancy secret.
“Good luck with that.” Fallon snorted and sat down on her stool. “With these two, that’s not gonna happen.”
The no-nonsense emergency room nurse always called it like she saw it, and she wasn’t wrong. Still…
“Did you know a rhino’s horn is made of hair?”
None of her girls even batted an eye. Damn it. There was something to be said for being able to throw people off their game by throwing random facts their way. It was amazing how often that worked. For someone like her who hated to people, it kept interactions blessedly contained and short.
“Nice try, Tess,” Lucy said. “But we’re here so often that Larry barely even shushes us anymore. Spill.”
“Cole’s the dad. We used three condoms, but something must have been wrong with them.”
“He triple wrapped?” Fallon asked.
“At the same time?” Lucy looked up at the ceiling as if she was imagining the logistics of rolling one condom on top of another and then doing it again just to be sure. “I know he has this whole cleanliness thing, but that’s just fucking weird.”
“No,” Tess managed to squeak out. Oh God, why was this embarrassing? These were her closest friends. They knew she had sex. “We did it three times the night before Lucy got married.”
“In one night?” Gina did a quick series of quick happy claps. “No wonder you were late for hair and makeup.”
“I’m impressed you were able to roll out of bed at all,” Lucy said with a chuckle. “Good for you.”
“Wait,” Fallon said, using one of her paintbrushes as a pointer and directing it at Tess. “That was only a month ago. How can you know you’re pregnant? You could just be late.”
“I took tests.”
“Plural?” Lucy asked.
Tess nodded. “Four of them. They were all positive.”
“Then I guess after Paint and Sip, I’ll go get my uncle’s shotgun he left me along with the house and we go have a little chat with Cole about his intentions.” Gina squared her shoulders and arranged her brushes, prepping to paint the radioactive apocalypse. “The serial number was filed off it, but I’m sure that was just a Luca family quirk and not because it was probably used in the commission of a crime like Ford says. It’ll be fine.”
“He doesn’t need to have intentions,” Tess said, the words tumbling out of her as she tried to figure out how to explain the situation to her girls so they didn’t form a vigilante posse. “I’m not trying to make Cole marry me. I barely know him and, anyway, I’m not sure I even ever want to be married. However, there’s no way I’m going to keep this baby a secret. He deserves to know he’s going to have a child.”
“So we go along for moral support,” Lucy said.
Yeah. That was not going to happen. “I’m sure that’s how he’ll see it, as opposed to oh, I don’t know, the torch-bearing villagers after his head.”
Gina tsk-tsked. “We’re not that scary.”
“Yeah we are,” Fallon and Lucy said at the same time.
“I appreciate it, but this is something I need to do myself. All I need is his address.” She turned to Fallon, who was engaged to one of Cole’s fellow Ice Knights players, and Lucy, who kept the players out of hot water. “Can either of you get that for me?”
Lucy took out her phone and opened her contacts app. “Consider it done.” She hit send.
Tess’s phone buzzed in her pocket alerting her that Lucy’s text went through. “Thanks, you guys are the best.”
“We’re your best friends,” Fallon said, reaching over to give her a quick hug. “It’s what we do.”
“Well, that and buy a million teeny tiny baby clothes,” Gina said with way too much excitement.
There’d be no guessing on which one the baby’s spoiler aunt would be.
Lucy swiped Tess’s wine cup. “And drink your wine now that you can’t.”
“More wine for us,” Gina said with a giggle as she snagged the cup from Lucy.
Fallon, who never messed around when it came to a competition, did an oh-look move and then just took the cup from a distracted Gina and downed it before anyone could stop her.
They were all laughing hard enough that when Larry shushed them for the beginning of class, they could barely catch a breath. That was the thing with her girls—they always made things fun, even the hard things. Her phone buzzed in her pocket, alerting her for the second time that Lucy had texted Cole’s address. Now all she had to do was figure out how to tell her baby’s daddy that the stork was coming to town. That would be easy, right?
Hi, we haven’t talked since that dance when I told you good luck with getting back together with your ex, but we’re gonna have a baby. Surprise!
Oh yeah, this was going to go over like Forever in Bloom running out of roses on Valentine’s Day.
…
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Acknowledgments
Y’all, I have the best job in the world writing happily ever afters and there is no way I could do it without the support and smarts of the good people at Entangled, specifically Liz, Jessica, Riki, Stacy, and Heather. This group of women makes the world work—even the fictional worlds. As always, I’m awed and amazed to get to work with Jenn and Sarah at Social Butterfly. These ladies know how to get things done! If you follow me online at all, you know my life would crumble without Rachel. Seriously. Shout outs to Kimberly Kincaid and Robin Covington for being my ride or dies. You two are a mess and I love you so hard. And, of course, none of this would happen without the most amazing readers in all of Romancelandia. THANK YOU for sharing the precious free time you have with my characters and me. I’m so grateful. One final thank you goes out to the Flynn family for being the absolute best—even when I’m on deadline.
Xoxo,
Avery
About the Author
Avery Flynn has three slightly wild children, loves a hockey-addicted husband, and is desperately hoping someone invents the coffee IV drip. Find out more about Avery on her website, follow her on Twitter, like her on her Facebook page, or friend her on her Facebook profile. Join her street team, The Flynnbots, on Facebook. Also, if you figure out how to send Oreos through the internet, she’ll be your best friend for life.
Also by Avery Flynn…
Awk-Weird
Butterface
Muffin Top
Tomboy
The Negotiator
The Charmer
The Schemer
Killer Temptation
Killer Charm
Killer Attraction
Killer Seduction
Betting on the Billionaire
Enemies on Tap
Dodging Temptation
His Undercover Princess
Her Enemy Protector
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