The Secretary's Secret

How had she gotten herself into this mess?

Her devout Catholic parents still believed that at the age of twenty-eight she was as pure as the driven snow. If the test was positive, what would she tell them? Well, Mom and Dad, I was snow-white, but I drifted.

They were going to kill her. Or disown her.

Or both.

And this would surely be enough to send her fragile, ailing grandmother hurtling through death’s door. She would instantly be labeled the family black sheep.

It didn’t matter that her parents had been nagging her to settle down for years.

When are you going to find a nice man? When are you going to have babies?

How about never?

And if the man she settled down with was Nick they would be ecstatic. Despite the fact that he wasn’t Catholic, they adored him. Since the first time she’d brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner they’d adopted him into the fold. And Nick had been swept up into the total chaos and craziness that was her family. He loved it almost as much as it drove her nuts.

So, if she were to call home and tell them she and Nick were getting hitched, she’d be daughter of the year. But the premarital sex thing would still be a major issue. In her parents’ eyes, what they had done was a sin.

She let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. Maybe this was just a bad dream. Maybe all she needed to do was pinch herself real hard and she would wake up.

She caught a hunk of skin between her thumb and forefinger, the fleshy part under her upper arm that the self-defense people claim is the most sensitive, and gave it a good hard squeeze.

“Ow!”

“What’s wrong?”

She opened her eyes and looked around. Still in Nick’s monster truck, rumbling down the street, and he was shooting her a concerned look.

She sighed. So much for her dream theory.

“Nothing. I’m just swell,” she said, turning to look out the window, barely seeing the houses of her street whizzing past.

“Don’t get upset until we know for sure,” he said, but she was pretty sure he, like her, already knew what the result would be. They’d had unprotected sex and her period was late. The test was going to be positive.

She was going to have Nick’s baby.

When they got to her house, he took her keys from her and opened the door. He’d been inside her house a thousand times, but today it felt so…surreal. As if she’d stepped onto the set of film.

A horror film.

She and Nick were the stars, and any second some lunatic was going to pop out of the kitchen wielding a knife and hack them to pieces.

She slipped her jacket off and tossed it over the back of the couch while Nick took in her cluttered living room.

Last night’s dinner dishes still sat on the coffee table, the plate covered with little kitty lick marks from Dexter her cat. Newspapers from the past two weeks lay in a messy pile at one end of the couch.

She looked down at the rug, at the tufts of white cat fur poking out from the Berber and realized it had been too long since she’d last vacuumed. Her entire house—entire life—was more than a little chaotic right now. As if acting irresponsibly would somehow prove what a lousy parent she would be.

Nick looked around and made a face. “You really need to hire a maid.”

She tossed her purse down on the cluttered coffee table. “I am so not in the mood for a lecture on my domestic shortcomings.”

He had the decency to look apologetic.

“Sorry.” He reached inside his leather bomber jacket and pulled out the test kit. “I guess we should just get this over with, huh?”

“We?” Like he had to go in the bathroom and pee on a stick. Like he had to endure months of torture if it was positive. A guy like him wouldn’t last a week on the nest. He may have been tough, may have been able to bench press a compact car, but five minutes of hard labor and he would be toast.

Her mother had done home births for Zoë’s three youngest siblings and Zoë had had the misfortune of being stuck in the room with her for the last one. She had witnessed the horror. Going through it once seemed like torture enough, but understandable since most women probably didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into. But nine times. That was just crazy.

“I’m afraid to go in there,” she said.

Nick reached up and dropped one big, work-roughened hand on her shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’re in this together, Zoë. Whatever the outcome. We’ll get through it.”

It amazed her at times, how such a big, burly guy who oozed testosterone could be so damned tender and sweet. Not that the stubborn, overbearing alpha male gene had passed him by. He could be a major pain in the behind, too. But he’d never let her down in a time of need and she didn’t believe for a second that he would now.

“Okay, here goes.” She took the test kit from him and walked to the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind her, her stomach tangled in knots. She opened the box and with a trembling hand spilled the contents out onto the vanity.

“Please, God,” she whispered, “let it be negative.”

She read the instructions three times, just to be sure she was doing it right, then followed them word for word. It was amazingly quick and simple for such a life-altering procedure. Too simple.

Less than five minutes later, after rereading the instructions one more time just to be sure, she had her answer.

Nick paced the living room rug, his eye on the bathroom door, wondering what in the heck was taking Zoë so long. She’d been in there almost twenty minutes now and he hadn’t heard a peep out of her. No curdling screams, no thud to indicate she’d hit the floor in a dead faint. And no whoops of joy.

It was ironic that not five minutes before she stepped into her office he’d been thinking about having children. Just not with her, and not quite so soon. Ideally he would like to be married, but life had a way of throwing a curve ball.

At least, his life did.

He let out a thundering sneeze and glanced with disdain at the fluffy white ball of fur sunbathing on the front windowsill. It stared back at him with scornful green eyes.

He was so not a cat person.

He sat on the couch, propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his fisted hands.

So what if she was pregnant?

The truth was, this was all happening so fast, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. What he did know is that if she didn’t come out of the damned bathroom soon, he was going to pound the door down. It couldn’t possibly take this long. He remembered the box specifically stating something about results in only minutes.

As if conjuring her through sheer will, the bathroom door swung open and Zoë stepped out. Nick shot to his feet. He didn’t have to ask what the results were, he could see it in her waxy, pasty-white pallor. Her wide, glassy-eyed disbelief.

“Oh boy,” he breathed. Zoë was pregnant.

He was going to be a father. They were going to be parents.

Together.