Just A Little Bit Pregnant

“All right, then.” He took a deep breath and got it said. “Will you marry me?”

She just looked at him, as expressionless as if he’d spoken in another language. In spite of every reason he had not to, he couldn’t keep from smiling at her blank expression. “Marriage,” he said. “You have heard of it?”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“That’s not quite the response I’m looking for.”

Jacy stared at Tom. She had trouble believing she’d heard what she’d heard. “It’s all you’re getting.” Nuts, she thought. The man is Obviously nuts.

All at once she needed to move. There was nowhere to go, no place to be except here, dealing with this—with him—but she didn’t have to stand still to do it. “What century are you living in, anyway?” She tossed the words over her shoulder as she paced. “People don’t get married because they have to anymore.”

“We both want what’s best for our baby. Having two parents is best.”

“Not if they can’t stand each other.” Jacy paced as if she were race-walking. When she reached the other end of the room she flung herself into a quick turn.

“I’m not surprised if you can’t stand me, under the circumstances. But I don’t feel the same.”

She scowled at him in disbelief and paused. “So maybe you don’t absolutely detest me. You don’t think much of me, period.”

“I... respect you.”

For some reason that infuriated her. “Don’t choke on it!”

“Jacy, I know you don’t want anything to do with me. But we’re not talking about what you want, or what I want.” There was something deliberate about his smile, something wicked—oh, yes, definitely wicked—a sexy twitch of his mustache, a knowing gleam in his eyes. “Though the fact that you want me almost as much as I want you ought to help us make a marriage work.”

She laughed at him. Put her hands on her hips, and laughed. “Oh, tell me another one. You want me? Sure—you took me out, took me to bed and decided once was enough. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant I’d never have seen or heard from you again unless I was interviewing you for the paper.”

“I can’t believe a woman like you could be so wrong about this sort of thing.” He started toward her.

What did he mean by that—“a woman like you”? A woman who had so many lovers she might not be sure which of them fathered her child? Jacy held herself steady against the fresh hurt. “Look,” she said, “I think this discussion is getting out of hand. I am not marrying you or anyone else.”

“Fine,” he said as he reached her. “We won’t talk for a while.”

Jacy was slow to understand. Later she would try to figure out why she’d been so slow, but now—now all she could do was step back. Only somehow she didn’t move fast enough. Or far enough. Even as she moved away he followed, reaching out.

His big hands cupped her face.

She should have been able to move then. He held her face firmly, his wolf-silver eyes fixed on hers—but she wasn’t hypnotized. She should have been able to move while he bent slowly over her.

Jacy braced herself. She knew what to expect The memory of how much Tom Rasmussin demanded of a woman made her body soften and ache for him even as she closed her mind and heart against him.

But he tricked her, damn him.

His mustache was soft. So was his mouth—soft and hot and riveting, gathering all her attention to her own lips as surely as a magnet draws iron. He passed his mouth slowly, gently, over hers. Once. Again...and again. The sweet persuasions of his lips undid her with every pass, unraveling her thoughts and her pride, leaving her balanced in some windless place where nothing existed except the quiet attention his mouth paid hers.

Her lips burned. Her breasts tingled. Her belly ached with the rich lightning pouring into her veins, while a longing as rich and forbidden as moonshine, as clear and potent as moonglow, banished sanity.

She reached for him.

In an instant the past surged up into the present. When her arms slid around him he circled her tightly, pulling her against him—body to body, wrapped tightly in each other’s arms, trapped together by passion. His tongue entered her mouth. She tasted him then as she had before, and she went a little crazy.

Jacy’s hands insisted on knowing his body again. They raced over him. The ache in her intended to have more than this delirious press of clothed bodies, and her mouth silently told him this was so. In return, Tom kissed her as if he were able to do nothing else, as if his next breath depended on tasting her, knowing her.

Just like he’d kissed her the last time. Before he’d left her without a backward glance.

Jacy didn’t cool down as fast as she’d heated up. But her mind awoke, filled with thoughts as jumbled and unpleasant as the aftermath of a tornado. She wrenched herself away.

Her body was cold, separated from his. In a minute, just a minute, that cold would reach the rest of her, and she’d be able to speak.

“You understand now,” he said, his voice hoarse with strain. “I wanted you. All along, I’ve wanted you.”

“And you hated it.” She knew it was true even as she spoke—saw the truth of it in the sudden flicker of emotion in his startled eyes. “You wanted me and you hated it.” She stepped back another pace, trying to steady herself with distance. And failing. “That’s why you never called, isn’t it? Because you couldn’t stand wanting so much.”

“Yes. In part, at least.”

She ignored the catch in her breath, the sudden stab of pain, to pursue truth the way she always had. “What’s the rest of it, then?”

“Maybe I thought you had feelings for me. Feelings I can’t return. Whatever makes a man capable of love died in me, Jacy, three years ago. When I buried my wife.”

His honesty was as quick and certain as a sword thrust, and for a second or two she couldn’t draw a breath. She answered with equal honesty. “You don’t need to worry about my feelings anymore. I thought I felt something for you, too, but I was wrong.”

Oh, yes, she’d been wrong. Not about what she’d felt—her feelings had been too strong to mistake, too frightening for her to want to claim them if she hadn’t had to. But the man she’d been falling for, the lonely man she’d thought lived inside those pale, watchful eyes, didn’t really exist. That’s what she’d been wrong about. Because that man, the one she’d always dreamed of finding, was someone a woman could count on, no matter what. That man would never have left her the way Tom had.

“I think,” she said, “that you should go now.”

She expected him to argue, or even to refuse to leave until she’d agreed to his stupid proposal. However she might have confused herself about him in some ways, she knew Tom wasn’t a man to be turned aside from a course he’d set himself. But he just looked at her. His gaze drifted down her body, and she realized he was looking at her middle, where the baby rested. It gave her an odd, uncomfortable feeling.

He nodded, and bent to pick up his hat from the coffee table, then turned away. At the door he paused, his hat in his hand, and she was reminded of the other time he’d paused on his way out her door.

This time he didn’t speak of regrets. “We’ll talk more later,” he told her. “Be sure to lock the dead bolt behind me,”

The door closed quietly behind him.

Lock the dead bolt? That’s all he had to say? Jacy started to laugh, but the high-pitched sound that came out scared her into silence. She stood next to her bright red couch in the living room she’d filled with her things and she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth.

She’d wanted to say yes. When Tom asked her to marry him, she’d wanted to say yes. Knowing he didn’t love her, couldn’t love her, she’d still felt as if she’d come home when he’d put his arms around her. For a few insane minutes she’d wanted to take him on any terms she could have him.

The truth tasted dark and sour, like a bitter candy held too long on the tongue. When she swallowed, it went down like ground glass.

Eventually she moved. Her elbows felt stiff and creaky as she unwrapped her arms from around herself. She walked slowly to the door and slid the dead bolt home just like he’d said, because this world was a very unsafe place indeed, and she had no intention of being taken by surprise again.

Three

Pandemonium was the normal order of things at the Sentinel as deadline approached. Saturdays were especially crazy as the paper geared up for the Sunday edition, and this Saturday was no exception. Phones rang. People yelled or cussed. The smell of microwave popcorn competed with that of stale cigarette smoke, though the newsroom was supposedly smoke-free.

A row of glass-fronted cubicles faced the big room where people rushed, typed, argued or talked on the phone. In one of those cubbyholes, the Rolling Stones moaned about a lack of satisfaction from a radio perched high on a cluttered bookcase. Yellow sticky notes bloomed on printouts, clippings and miscellaneous piles of paper that threatened to bury the empty soda cans on the desk. A small ceramic planter held a dead plant surrounded by crumpled candy wrappers.

The nameplate on the desk read simply Outlaw.