The Second Time Around

He wasn’t convinced. She could see that by the way he set his jaw. She loved the man dearly, but when Jason came to a conclusion, he stuck by it as if he’d been put there with crazy glue. “Would you like to talk to Dr. Kilpatrick?”

This was a losing battle. He’d been with her long enough to know that. It wasn’t that he relished the idea of what he was proposing; it was just that if he had to make a choice between Laurel and a baby, it would be Laurel each time. He didn’t want to look back and find himself wishing that he had made a choice when he had the power.

“What I’d like to do,” he told her, “is talk some sense into you.”

He made it sound as if this was all on her. As if she’d somehow done this all by herself. Maybe he needed to be reminded of how this kind of thing worked. “Hey, this isn’t my doing alone, buster. As I remember, I had help.”

These days, by the time he got home from work, he was far too tired to think of making love with his wife. The job drained him. And when he did have spare time, he wanted to use it putting together the train layouts that had been sitting in boxes for, what was it, almost two decades now?

But every so often, Laurel would come to him with that look on her face, wearing something sexy and sheer. And there was this particular perfume she wore on those occasions. A man couldn’t think when the space in his head was all taken up with that scent.

“You seduced me,” he accused.

She threw her hands up. “You found me out. I put engine oil behind my ears and made noise like an AmTrak passenger train leaving the station.”

The deadpanned statement brought a laugh out of him.

Laurel breathed a sigh of relief. At least he was laughing again. The sound instantly made her feel more mellow.

“It’s going to be all right, Jason,” she promised, putting her arms around him and leaning her head against his chest. “Really.”

Funny how things turned out, she thought. She’d been hoping Jason would comfort her about what was ahead and here she was, reassuring him instead.

Jason kissed her forehead. His breath lightly fluttered against her skin as he asked, “So, how far along are you?”

She did a quick mental calculation, remembering the last time they’d made love. The time before that was too far in the past to count. “Three weeks.”

He glanced at her, surprised at her precision. “There’s room for error.”

She moved her head slowly from side to side. When it came to their life together, the man remembered nothing. While she, on the other hand, remembered everything. “There’s no error.”

Jason pressed his lips together in a reproving frown. “I want you to get a complete checkup.”

“That was what today was supposed to be about,” she reminded him, not that she expected him to remember that, either. Jason had a habit of not retaining information unless it had to do with either his work or his hobbies. She counted herself lucky that he remembered the boys’ birthdays, although he tended to forget the years. As far as listening went, her husband had gotten “uh-huh” down to an art form. “Dr. Kilpatrick gave me a complete physical.”

“More complete,” he insisted. “Blood work, an amniocentesis.” He saw her frowning. “You know, like you did with Christopher.”

With Christopher, there had been some complications at the outset and she’d wanted to make sure the baby she was carrying was all right. Personally, she’d thought it was like being harpooned. She didn’t see a need to go through the ordeal the test represented this time around, since all she felt was queasy.

But she kept that to herself because she didn’t want to create too many waves right now. Now that she’d calmed down, she could see that Jason was obviously trying to come to terms with the bombshell she’d just dropped on him.

That made two of them, she thought. “Yes, sir, Dr. Mitchell, sir.” She saluted.

His eyes narrowed even further. “I’m serious, Laurel.”

“I never thought you weren’t.”

He couldn’t tell if she was deadpanning again, being sarcastic or for once, being serious. He changed the subject. To a degree. “Did you tell your mother?”

“Not yet.” She’d been too dazed to call anyone. And then she smiled as she thought of her mother. “This is going to knock her for a loop. She thought we were going overboard when we had Christopher.” Her mother’s philosophy had always been simple: two hands, two kids. According to her, there was a divine message there.

He looked down at her flat stomach. “This time, she’s right.” When he raised his eyes again, the sad expression on Laurel’s face tugged at his heart.

“Aren’t you the least little bit happy about this?” she asked.

“So little I might be overlooking it.” And then, because he could see that his flippant answer really bothered her, he made an effort for Laurel’s sake. “I love kids, Laurie, I always have. You know that. It’s just that I thought, at this stage of our lives, we were done with diapers, baby food and toys all over the living room, and were moving on to the next chapter of our lives.”

“Just think of this as a slight detour. A chance to relive a piece of our lives.”

“Why? We did it right the first three times,” he told her.

“We’ll do it right again,” she said with more conviction than she actually felt. “Besides, now that you’ve landed the Aimes Baby account, we can get a few free toys and perks,” she teased. Forcing a smile to her lips, she threaded her arms around his neck. “It’s going to be all right, Jason,” she assured him again. “It really is.”

“Right,” he echoed.

Jason did his best to infuse his voice with feeling, but he just couldn’t seem to manage it. The word came out so flat that had it been a reading on a hospital monitor, the patient attached to it would have been pronounced dead.

But that, he supposed, was to be expected. Men who were in shock often registered no emotions.

CHAPTER 6

The office of Bedford Realty Company looked like a miniaturized Swiss chalet, inside and out. The scent of wood, finely crafted and highly polished, greeted the client the moment he or she entered the small, two-story building. Those who worked there were completely oblivious to the scent, having long since lost the ability to detect either the wood or the lemon polish applied nightly.

When Laurel walked in that morning, only Jeannie Wallace, her best friend of ten years, was in the office, seated at her desk. Because of the Mercedes parked in the reserved spot, she knew that the manager, Ed Callaghan, was in the back, most likely looking over the number of sales that had been brought in this month. Beyond that, the office was empty.

She’d debated keeping her news to herself for a while, thinking it might be better that way. But Jeannie only needed to take one look at her face to know something was up.

“C’mon,” she urged in her no-nonsense voice, “spill it.”

So she did.

For a total of ten seconds, Jeannie said nothing. And then she found her voice. “You’re kidding.”

Laurel laughed softly to herself. “Funny, that’s the same thing Jason said when I told him.”

Jeannie’s wide mouth curved ever so slightly. She and her husband, Jonas, socialized with Laurel and Jason on a fairly regular basis. She knew all about Jason’s plans for the future. “Before or after he got up off the floor?”

Laurel turned on her computer out of habit rather than any specific need to view anything. She kept her schedule in her head as well as on the hard drive. Other than putting in a call to the First Escrow Company of Bedford to find out what was holding up the process for the Newtons, one of her recent sales, she didn’t have anything on her agenda.

“After.”

Jeannie pursed her lips and shook her head. There was humor in her eyes. “Pregnant, huh?”

Laurel was really having a hard time getting accustomed to the idea. She’d had the same problem the first time around, but then it had been because she was walking on air. That wasn’t exactly the case this time. “You don’t have to grin like that.”

Jeannie leaned back in her chair, which creaked its protest. “I’m just thinking better you than me.” Her eyes swept over her friend’s petite frame. “I always thought you could stand to gain a few pounds. If I was the pregnant one, they’d have to start reinforcing the chairs around here.” The idea made her laugh. At close to six feet, Jeannie was what was politely referred to as heavyset. It never seemed to bother her. Jeannie had always seemed comfortable in her own skin. “I’m lucky Jonas likes his women big.” And then her grin widened. “Or maybe he’s the lucky one.” Pushing away from her own desk, Jeannie, still seated, brought her chair around closer to Laurel. Her eyes were a tad more serious as she asked, “So, how do you feel about it?”

She kept asking herself that same question, Laurel thought. She shrugged in response. “Numb. Nauseated.”