Prim, Proper... Pregnant

She rubbed her temples with fingers that were still trembling. “I can’t imagine anyone being sorry he isn’t Ryder,” she told him.

This earned her a startled blink. “But you must have…cared…for him once.” When her gaze flew to his face, Rob added, “I’m sorry. I just meant that if you’re pregnant with his child—”

“I know what you meant,” Amelia interrupted. She wanted to add that she’d been with Ryder only once, that she’d been stupid and naive but that would sound as though she was making excuses for herself. She said, “Look, I know he’s your brother, a twin brother at that. I don’t want to stand here and trash him.”

His stare penetrated her. “I’m afraid there’s little you could say about my charming brother that I don’t already know,” he finally said.

She nodded. Her hands fluttered near the life contained within her body and she added, “Merciful heavens, I’m going to have to do this whole thing over again.”

Looking over her head, he said, “Sooner than you think.”

Amelia turned to face the man she’d really come to address, Rob’s twin brother, Ryder.

Ryder. The father of her child. Ryder, with the same smile as his brother, the same flash in his eyes, the same midnight hair and refined features.

“Well, well,” Ryder said, his voice slightly slurred. Obviously, he’d been drinking. “Amelia? What are you doing here? I didn’t know you knew Rob.”

Standing nose to nose, the resemblance between the two brothers was absolutely incredible, from the cut of their hair to the way they walked and the sound of their voices. Only the fraternity ring on Ryder’s hand and their boutonnieres differed, Rob’s white, Ryder’s red. They eyed each other with suspicion and hostility which hinted at a lifetime of turmoil that went a long way toward explaining why Ryder had hardly ever talked about Rob.

“We just met,” Amelia said.

Ryder grinned as he said, “You two looked awfully cozy.”

“Knock it off,” Rob said.

“I came to see you,” Amelia said, glancing up at Ryder’s face.

Ryder unpinned the red rose from his lapel and drew it across Amelia’s cheek. His eyes, so like Rob’s, were full of feigned innocence. She knew they belied a fair-weather man who wasn’t interested in the long haul. He said, “Well, now, Amelia, I’m glad to see you’ve come to your senses.”

She narrowed her eyes as she brushed the rose away. “My senses?”

“About our little misunderstanding last March.”

“Oh,” she said, her insides churning. “You mean the ‘misunderstanding’ we had when you asked me to marry you and then within a week slept with someone else.”

“Is that how you remember it?”

“That’s how it was,” she said.

“Funny, but I don’t remember it that way at all,” he continued. “Seems to me that you were the anxious one. Not that I minded, I assure you.”

Rob formed a fist which Amelia caught on the upswing and held. Though she felt the embarrassing sting of Ryder’s words clear down into the center of her heart, she knew that now wasn’t the time to acknowledge it. When Rob finally looked down at her, she said, “Please, let it go.”

As Rob slowly lowered his arm, Ryder hooked a flute of champagne from a passing waiter and toasted Amelia. “Here’s to you. Here’s to last March and all the Marches yet to come.”

Rob and Amelia exchanged a quick look. His eyes seemed to say, There’s your opening, go for it.

It was cruel that she should have to make this big confession twice in the same afternoon. Either the tension or her pregnancy or a combination of both made her feel wobbly. With a dreadful feeling of déjà vu, she looked at Ryder and said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

She felt Rob try to disengage his hand, no doubt so he could beat a hasty retreat. However, as his hand was the only thing keeping Amelia on her feet, she held on tight.

Ryder drained his glass and called out to the waiter who was making another pass with the champagne. “Over here. Just leave the tray.”

“Sir—”

“Just leave the tray!” Ryder snapped in his courtroom voice.

As the waiter skittered off without his tray, Amelia took a deep breath and announced, “I might just as well say it, Ryder. I’m pregnant, and you’re the father.”

There was a long moment of silence that seemed to encompass the whole town of Seaport, maybe the entire state of Oregon. The only realities to Amelia were the feel of Rob’s hand and the look of stunned disbelief on Ryder’s face. Then Ryder dropped the flute. Heedless of the shards of glass at his feet and the puddle of fizzing wine on the toe of his shoe, he sputtered, “This is a joke, right?”

“It’s not a joke,” Rob said.

Ryder stabbed a finger in the air at his brother. “You keep out of this!”

“Then you calm down.”

“It’s not a joke,” Amelia said.

Ryder stared at her, shaking his head, speechless. She found herself wishing she’d found a better way to tell him, a way that would have given him a chance to assimilate the news without anyone watching.

Quietly, calmly, she repeated her plans, stressing that she wasn’t asking for a marriage proposal. She had a feeling he would assume she was trying to put some kind of squeeze on him because that was the way his mind worked. Maybe in his line of work, where people tended to reinvent the past to suit their purpose, it was only natural. None of her explanations seemed to sink in, though. He just kept shaking his head.

“I felt you had to know,” she said, “so you can decide what part you want to have in your child’s life. You have to tell your folks they’re going to be grandparents.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Ryder said firmly. He looked over her head for a moment, then back, his eyes suddenly cold and calculating. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “You’re trying to use my family to trap me. I’m warning you right now…it won’t work.”

Rob took a step forward. “Ryder, just listen to her.”

Ryder pushed his brother’s arm away and gulped more champagne. Amelia wanted to tell him that drinking wasn’t going to help, but she suddenly felt a burning desire to escape. She said, “Whether or not you want to be part of your child’s life is up to you, Ryder, but I can’t believe you would deprive your parents of knowing their first grandchild. Tell them. It’s the only decent thing to do.” With an apologetic glance at Rob, she released his hand and escaped the Hogan twins.

The tears started in the ladies’ room and continued for five minutes. After Amelia finally stopped crying, she became violently ill and lost every bite of lunch. By the time she’d mopped up her face and washed out her mouth, almost a half hour had passed. Her only desire now was to get out of the building without encountering Nina and Jack Hogan, Ryder’s parents. With any luck at all, they would never even know she’d been there.

Long ago, she’d decided to protect them from the Ryder she knew. Sometimes she wondered how they could have raised him and not understood what a manipulator he was. She’d taken the heat for their breakup, blaming a change of mind, hiding the fact that Ryder had slept with her after a phony marriage proposal and then blithely skipped off to the bed of another woman. It was too late now to change game plans, especially at their eldest son’s wedding.

Besides, she knew Jack Hogan’s heart condition was serious and she wouldn’t dream of doing anything that might make it worse. She loved Nina and Jack—it was that simple, and that hard.

She was unlocking the door of her car when a commotion at the front of the country club caught her attention.

“Ryder, don’t be a fool. You can’t drive in your condition,” Rob said as he tried to keep Ryder from entering a red sports car pulled up to the curb.

“Mind your own damn business!” Ryder snarled.

“You haven’t changed a bit since college, you know that?”

Ryder held up his fists. “You want to put your muscle where your mouth is?”

“This isn’t the time or place for these kind of antics,” Rob said. “Use your head. Philip just got married.”