Covert Conception

He didn’t respond right away. Rick groaned softly and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Your caterer, I think.”

The fit of temper that Natalie had nourished and fed suddenly cooled. “What does the caterer have to do with any of this?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.” He paused, caught her gaze. “Someone put something in my drink.”

Natalie considered what he was saying. “You think that someone was the caterer?”

He nodded. “The only thing I had to eat or drink that night was at your party.”

“That proves nothing.”

Or did it? Because someone on the catering staff, a man, had given her a drink as well. Sparkling fruit juice. It’d had a somewhat bitter tang to it. At the time Natalie had attributed the taste to her prescription meds.

“No. But the lab test I had done proves something,” Rick corrected.

That captured Natalie’s complete attention. “What lab test?”

There was no sign of cockiness or victory in his stormy gray eyes. There was only frustration and yes, lots of anger and confusion. “When I woke up that morning after the party, I realized I didn’t have a clue how I’d gotten home. My motorcycle was there, parked outside the garage, a place I’d never leave it. Never. Since I felt like hell, I went to see my doctor right away. He ran some tests, and the lab found a substance in my blood.”

“What kind of substance?” Natalie asked.

Rick shook his head. “It was some kind of narcotic. My doctor had no idea what it was so he sent it out for further testing. The lab is still trying to identify it.”

Natalie was so glad she was sitting down. If she hadn’t been, that would have sent her in search of a chair. She felt a couple of steps past being light-headed. But she wasn’t so light-headed that she didn’t immediately spot an inconsistency in his account.

“Why didn’t you go to the police with this?” Natalie demanded.

“And tell them what, exactly? That maybe someone at your party slipped an unspecified narcotic into my drink? I decided I’d wait for the lab results before I started pointing any fingers. Of course, that was before I saw that surveillance video. I’m ready to do some finger-pointing now.”

Natalie shifted her position slightly, trying to find some kind of equilibrium both mentally and physically. “Why would someone on the catering staff have drugged you?”

“I’ve asked myself that a dozen times, and the only thing I could come up with was maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe the beer was contaminated or something.”

“Then why wasn’t anyone else affected?” she immediately asked.

He stared at her and waited for her to draw her own conclusions. It didn’t take long. Rick was likely the only person at the party drinking beer. It was indeed a champagne crowd. But then, she was probably the only one who’d had sparkling fruit juice.

And that in turn meant it would have been fairly easy to drug them.

That explained the how, but it certainly didn’t explain the who and why.

“I don’t know the caterer,” she continued. “And I don’t know the man who handed me my drink.”

But she could find out, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

Natalie checked her watch. It was nearly 6:00 p.m. and she wished for more hours in the day, because her list of things to do was growing. “I want to talk to your doctor and the lab technician who ran the test on you. I’ll also want to talk to my mother, since she’s the one who hired the caterer. She’ll be home from her therapy session by now. I’ll call her.”

Rick caught onto her wrist when she reached into her purse for her phone. “Think this through. If you start asking questions about the caterer, your mother will want to know why. And she won’t quit until she gets the truth. The whole truth. So, if you plan to tell her about the baby tonight, you won’t want to do that over the phone.”

That was true. Natalie only wished she’d thought of it first.

“We’ll drive over there and talk to her,” Rick insisted, keeping hold of her wrist.

Natalie shook off his grip. “We?”

“We,” he confirmed. Without warning, he peeled off his damp T-shirt, grabbed a clean one from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and slipped it on. “I want to get to the bottom of this, too, and I want as much information as we can get about this caterer.”

Natalie almost argued with him. Mainly because it was natural to argue with Rick about any- and everything. But he had a point. The caterer or someone on his or her staff could have orchestrated all of this.

After all, someone had cleaned up the “crime scene.”

Someone had gotten both Rick and his motorcycle back to his house. Someone had dressed her for bed and discarded any evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. So that meant someone at her party had been involved on a very personal level. Her mother was the first step to figuring out whom.

And they could do that after they told Macy about the pregnancy.

Natalie was already dreading the conversation. It would be messy. Her mother just wasn’t very good at handling contingencies, and this pregnancy definitely fell into that category. There’d be tears and perhaps hours of melodrama. Unfortunately, her mother had to know.

Rick grabbed his keys from the desk and headed for the door. Natalie was right behind him.

“We’ll take my car,” she insisted.

Rick glanced over his shoulder and gave her that look. One she instantly recognized. And hated. She called it his blue-collar/chip-on-the-shoulder glare.

“This has nothing to do with the price of my vehicle,” she pointed out. “It’s just I’m conveniently parked right out front, and I’m not exactly dressed to climb onto the back of your Harley.”

He made a sound to indicate he didn’t believe her explanation.

She made a sound to indicate she didn’t care what he thought.

It was going to be a long drive to Macy’s.

“Besides,” she added, “riding a motorcycle in my condition wouldn’t be smart. And even you can’t argue with that.”

He didn’t.

With both of them still stewing and no doubt asking themselves a dozen unanswerable questions, Rick let one of his employees know that he needed to run an errand before they got into her car.

Natalie hadn’t thought the tension could get any worse, but she was obviously wrong. Without the noise and the distraction of the shop, the silence settled uncomfortably between them. And with each additional moment of silence, Natalie became more and more upset. More and more frightened.

More and more incensed.

Why was this happening?

Why had she become pregnant with Rick’s child?

Rick, of all people.

They had so much bad blood between them. Too much. But it hadn’t always been that way. Rick and she had known each other since childhood, and her mother had tried to get them together for years. Why, it was never clear to Natalie, but apparently Macy felt that Rick and she were the “perfect couple” destined to lead the “perfect life.”