The Pregnancy Pact: The Pregnancy Secret / The CEO's Baby Surprise / From Paradise...to Pregnant!

Was Jessica going to be okay after being mugged? Not her arm. That would heal. But her. She had always had that artistic temperament, ultrasensitive to the world.

If he knew Jessica—and he did—she was not nearly as brave as she was trying to be.

So, on Saturday morning, feeling a little foolish in his brand-new tool belt, Kade knocked on the door of the house he had shared with Jessica. He was certain she had said she would be at work, but she opened the door.

He could see why she wasn’t at work. She would scare people away from her fledgling business in the getup she had on. She was wearing a crazy sleeveless dress that was at least four sizes too large for her.

But, in truth, it was her face that worried him. Just as he suspected, her drawn features hinted she might not be doing well. There was the gaunt look of sleeplessness about her, as well as dark circles under her eyes.

“It’s a maternity dress. I have three of them.” Her tone was defensive. “They’re easy to get on. See the buttons down the front? That is a very hard thing to find in a dress.”

“I didn’t say anything.” Her arm was in the sling. At least she was following doctor’s orders.

“But getting dressed was not that easy, even with the buttons. I’m running late.”

He noticed her cast had been decorated with all kinds of signatures and drawings.

In college, she had always been surrounded by friends. But then marriage had done something to her. Her world, increasingly, had become about him and their house. When the pregnancy quest had begun, Jessica had quit the job she’d had since earning her arts degree. Admittedly, it had not been the best job. She had barely made minimum wage at that funky, fledgling art gallery in east Calgary.

At first, he’d liked it that Jessica was home, and doted on him. He’d liked it quite a lot, actually. Maybe he’d liked it enough he’d encouraged it. Who didn’t want to come home to fresh-baked bread, or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or three dozen chocolate-chip cookies still warm out of the oven?

Who didn’t want to come home to the most beautiful woman in the world waiting for him, with some newly inventive way of showing she loved him? Once it had been rose petals floating in a freshly drawn tub. Another time it had been a candlelit wine tasting in the back garden, a garden that she had single-handedly wrested from a weedy demise.

But slowly, all her devotion had begun to grate on him. He was so aware that Jessica’s world was becoming smaller and smaller: paint colors for rooms rather than canvases. She was always trying new recipes. She discovered shopping online and was constantly discovering useless bric-a-brac that he was supposed to share her enthusiasm for.

It had pierced even his colossal self-centeredness that she was becoming a shadow of the vibrant person she had once been. The obsession with the baby had just intensified the sense he didn’t know who she was anymore.

She’d started buying things for a baby they didn’t have: little shoes just too adorable to pass up, hand-crocheted samplers for the walls of a nursery they didn’t have yet. The magazine racks—God forbid a magazine was left conveniently out—were stuffed with parenting magazines.

She was forever showing him articles on the best baby bottles, and strollers, and car seats. She wanted him to go over fabric samples with her because she had found a seamstress to custom make the crib bedding. But it didn’t matter which one he picked. The next day she had more for him to look at. She was acquiring a collection of stuffed animals that would soon need a room of their own, not to mention require them to take out a second mortgage to pay for them all.

“Jessica,” he remembered shouting at her, “nobody pays three hundred dollars for a teddy bear.”

She had looked crushed, and then unrepentant.

The anger, he knew in retrospect, though he had no idea at the time, had nothing to do with the teddy bear. It had to do with the fact he felt responsible for the awful metamorphosis taking place in her. It had to do with the fact that he was aware, in her eyes, he was not enough for her.

She brought him back to the present. “You didn’t have to say anything about the dress. I can see in your face how you feel about it.”

He was fairly certain it was the memory of the three-hundred-dollar-teddy-bear fight that had been in his face, so he tried to banish those thoughts and stay in the moment. “I’m not sure why you would wear something so...er...unflattering.”

“Because I don’t care what you think, that’s why!”

Or, he thought looking at her, she was trying very, very hard to make it appear that she didn’t care what he thought.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#u3e8dc4ab-89bf-5f1e-8782-ac9193400ecf)

“I LIKE THE CAST, THOUGH,” Kade told Jessica.

And he did. He liked it that she had a bigger world again. All the scribbling on the cast was evidence of friends and coworkers and a life beyond the house. Okay, it grated a bit that she had managed to make a bigger world without him, and somehow it was still about babies.

“The dress is what I could get on by myself. See? Buttons down the front.”

“About the dress,” he said, deadpan. “Are they all that color? What would you call that color?”

“Pink?” she suggested.

“Nausea, heartburn, indigestion...” It was the slogan of a famously pink stomach-relief medication.

“The other ones are worse—”

“No, no, they can’t be.”

“Spiced pumpkin and real-woods camo.”

“A camo maternity dress? I guess my next question would be, how are sales?”

“They are very, very popular.”

“Tell me it ain’t so,” he groaned.

“They are part of an extraoversize line.”

“Look, you are scaring me with the visual.”

“Well, your visual is a little scary, too,” she said, standing back from the door to let him by her. “A tool belt? And what is that you’re driving?”

“I borrowed a truck.”

“A truck worthy of a camo-wearing pregnant lady, too.”

“I needed it for the vibrating floor sander I rented to refinish the floors.”

“A floor sander. The scariness increases. You always thought we should just replace the floors,” she reminded him.

“You always thought we should refinish them.”

“But it doesn’t matter now!” she said, but it felt as if it did. It felt as if it was part of all that was unfinished. In the house, and between them. But Kade did not tell her that.

“What do you know about refinishing a floor?” she asked, looking at her watch.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said. “I went on the internet. It’s easier than you think.”

Jessica looked insultingly doubtful.

“I think that refinishing will be less time-consuming than ripping out the old floor and putting down a new one,” he told her. He didn’t add it might be more in keeping with his skill set.

“Why are you tackling it? Why didn’t you just hire someone? That guy you hired to install my door was excellent. By the way, I owe you some money for that.”