The Pregnancy Plan / Hope's Child: The Pregnancy Plan / Hope's Child

“I’d say the picture in your trash can suggests otherwise.”

“You’re right,” she decided. “This has everything to do with Trevor. Because if he hadn’t chosen to send that picture to me, I wouldn’t have sliced my hand and you wouldn’t have needed to stitch it up, and you definitely wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Then maybe I should thank Trevor,” he said.

She glared at him. “In any event, I have no intention of picking up our relationship where we left off just because it’s convenient for you now.”

He felt his own anger stir. “My feelings for you were a lot of things,” he told her. “But convenient was never one of them.”

As soon as her prescription was delivered, Ashley took the requisite pills and sent Cam on his way.

From the moment she’d returned from her shopping trip earlier in the day, nothing had gone according to plan. Coming face-to-face with Cam had been unexpected, but it had also been unavoidable. Especially since he would be moving in down the street.

So while their meeting was inevitable, she’d been confident that when they did meet, they would simply exchange a few coolly polite words and go their separate ways. She certainly hadn’t expected anything like the kiss they’d shared in her kitchen.

Because while Cam might have made the first move, there was no denying that she’d been an equal—and willing—participant.

Yeah, that kiss had definitely been a mistake, because now she was dealing with the aftermath—a jumble of feelings that she hadn’t been prepared for and didn’t know what to do with.

It had only been one kiss. Nothing that should have the power to turn her world upside down. But it felt as if that was exactly what had happened.

He’d been absent from her life for twelve years but somehow, after only a few hours, he’d managed to churn up all kinds of feelings and desires that she’d buried a long time ago. Or so she’d thought.

She sorted through the mail, opened the cupboard under the sink to drop the flyers into the recycle box and saw that a new bag had been put in the garbage can. Cam must have taken out the other bag for her—the one with the broken picture frame and her engagement photo in it.

Because he thought seeing the photo again might upset her? Or because he thought she was clumsy enough to injure herself again when she took the bag out?

She closed the cupboard and sighed. She had no idea what Cam’s reasons were. She didn’t know anything at all about him anymore. And yet, there was something still there between them. Something that both thrilled and terrified her.

It had been easy for her to toss the picture of her fiancé into the garbage, because she had closed the door on that part of her life with no regrets. She had been happy with Trevor, at least for a while, and she’d wanted the life they had planned to build together. But the truth was, she’d never loved him as completely and wholeheartedly as she’d loved Cam.

It was an unsettling realization, and one she wasn’t ready to examine too closely. Determined to push the sexy doctor out of her mind, she went upstairs to get ready for bed.

The sun hadn’t yet set, but she was exhausted—physically and emotionally—and she wanted nothing more than to crawl between the sheets and sink into oblivion where thoughts and memories of Cam Turcotte didn’t exist.

Cam was surprised to find his parents’ car in the driveway when he got back to their house after his detour to Ashley’s. He walked through the back door and followed the trail of an enticingly spicy scent into the kitchen where his mother was stirring something on the stove.

“I thought tonight was your bowling night,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

“Your dad spent the afternoon at Harry Reiner’s, helping him lay patio stones,” Gayle told her son.

“He screwed up his back again, didn’t he?”

“He’s in bed with an ice pack now,” she confirmed.

“Why does he do things like that?”

“Because Harry helped stain our deck, and your dad insisted that this was his way of returning the favor.”

“A paintbrush doesn’t weigh forty pounds,” Cam noted.

His mother smiled. “Which is exactly what I said to him. But then I made the mistake of noting that he’s also several years older than Harry, which he interpreted as a challenge.”

“Because it drives him crazy the way Harry flirts with you.”

“Harry’s been widowed for nearly ten years, he’s lonely, and he flirts with every woman who crosses his path.” She finished scooping chili into a bowl. “Do you want some?”

“Oh. No, thanks. I had a couple of slices of pizza earlier.”

She carried her bowl to the table and sat down. “Is everything okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because you’re a lot later than usual getting home and you seem a little distracted.”

“Busy day at the office.” He helped himself to a bottle of beer from the fridge and sat down with her.

He’d moved in with them when he’d returned to Pinehurst because it was convenient and gave him the opportunity to look for a place of his own. What had surprised him was how much he’d enjoyed spending time with them. After living so far away for so many years, it was nice to reconnect again, and to realize that he actually liked his parents.

“That’s why Elijah needed to hire you,” she said. “So what was different about today?”

He took a long swallow from the bottle. “I saw Ashley.”

She paused, her spoon halfway to her lips. “Ashley Roarke?”

He nodded.

“How did that go?”

He thought about their kiss—the soft responsiveness of her lips, the yielding warmth of her body—and her abrupt and complete withdrawal from him. “Better—and worse—than I expected.”

“I’m … sorry?”

He smiled. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected that she’d be happy about my decision to come back to Pinehurst now.”

“I would think, if her feelings for you are well and truly gone, she wouldn’t have much of an opinion one way or the other.”

He mulled that over for a minute. “The implication being that if she cares, she must still have feelings for me?”

“Twelve years is a long time, and you were both so young when you went away. And yet—” she smiled “—a woman never forgets her first love.”

“Spoken like a woman with fond memories,” he noted.

“I fell in love when I was fifteen—much to the chagrin of both my parents and his. He was nearly twenty, already in college, and our families were united only in their desire to keep us apart.”

“What happened?”

Her eyes sparkled. “I married him.”