Her Best Friend's Baby

A heavy steel door seemed to have slammed, separating Mary Jane from the woman she loved, the woman she would do anything for. Now she could do nothing. Nothing. “Oh, Morgan.” Her voice was thick with tears. “I wanted so much to give her this baby.”

“I know,” he said roughly. “The baby is all that’s kept me going.”

“Oh, Morgan.” She began to cry again, and so did he. They held each other desperately, shuddering with anguish.

He choked out the word baby and put his hand over her stomach.

“The baby… Arielle’s still here,” she said, crying.

“Thank God.” He kissed her hair, her wet cheek. “Thank God, we still have the baby.”

She hugged him close as tears streamed down. “Yes.”

“The baby.” He kissed her throat between choked sobs.

“It’s okay.” She needed to comfort him, needed it more than anything in the world. She pressed his head to her breast. “It’s okay, Morgan. Everything will be okay.”

“Oh, God.” He rubbed his damp, bearded face against her breasts, almost as a baby might. “I need to feel….” He slipped his hand under the hem of her T-shirt and flattened it against her belly. His howl of misery echoed in the small room. “Arielle!”

Her heart broke into a million pieces. And she understood what she’d never wanted to know, that death and birth are spokes of the same wheel. Instincts older than time moved within her. Laying her hand over his, she guided it down between her thighs.

“She’s here,” she murmured.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes.

“Here.” A wisdom handed down through the ages urged her to open her thighs. A wound this deep could only be healed with the ultimate bonding of man and woman. “Come to me.”

Moving like a sleepwalker, he held her gaze as he discarded his shorts and moved over her.

They came together smoothly, as if they’d been making love to each other for years. He said nothing as he thrust again and again into her, his teeth clenched against the sobs racking his body.

Concentrating on his face, she clutched his shoulders and rode the crest of the wave carrying her toward the only salvation they could find tonight. He seemed to understand it, too. As they neared the crest, the despair in his eyes gave way to a new light. At the moment before they climaxed, she drew strength from that light. Then she tumbled with him into chaos, bearing with her the faint yet steady glow of hope.

CHAPTER TWO

MORGAN AWOKE with a sense of well-being. He loved waking up with Arielle tucked in close beside him like this, especially after a night of—

Nausea washed over him, and he scrambled out of bed as if it were full of a million snakes. Snatching up his pants, he held them over his nakedness as he fought the gorge rising in his throat. What had he done?

Mary Jane turned toward him, a smile on her lips, her eyes still dazed with sleep. Then she focused on him.

He watched in horrified fascination as reality replaced fantasy in her blue eyes. He knew exactly what she was going through.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rusty and coarse. What an asinine thing to say. Sorry didn’t begin to cover it. He couldn’t imagine how he could ever make up for what he’d done last night.

She swallowed and kept staring at him, her gaze bleak.

“Say something,” he pleaded. “Call me names. Tell me I’m the worst sort of slime ball you’ve ever come across. I deserve whatever rotten things you want to say about me.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Why? I’m the one who threw myself at you like some—”

“No! It is not your fault. You were upset! I hit you with the news, and then I…” He couldn’t bear to think of what he’d done. Unforgivable.

She opened her eyes and sat up, still wearing the pink sleep shirt he hadn’t bothered to remove before he took advantage of her. Arielle had sent her that to wear once they’d seen the pictures from the first ultrasound. And now he had profaned that cute, silly T-shirt.

God, she was so young. He’d never seen her like this, flushed with sleep, her hair a tousled riot of curls falling to her shoulders. Arielle once said Mary Jane’s hair was the color of maple syrup, which was appropriate, because Mary Jane was so incredibly sweet. Morgan closed his eyes, awash with pain and shame. And damn his soul to hell, he wanted her. Still. Stirring like a dark secret, desire taunted him with his worthlessness.

“I knew what I was doing,” she said in a not-quite-steady voice.

His eyes flew open. “You most certainly did not! You were carried away by the news and your fluctuating hormones, which is perfectly understandable, especially at your age. But there’s no excuse for me, a thirty-one-year-old man who’s supposed to be in control of himself.”

Her back stiffened. “What do you mean by that crack about my age? You sound as if I’m a mere child!”

“I consider twenty-two pretty damn young!” He wasn’t going to tell her that this morning she looked younger than that, which made the heat within him even more reprehensible. “That was one thing that bothered me about this whole pregnancy. Physically you’re a perfect age for bearing a child, but mentally—”

“What a crock! You don’t know a damn thing about my mental age. I have to say, Morgan Tate, you are a real pr—uh, prude.”

“Go ahead and use the first word you thought of,” he said. “It fits.” He’d much rather have her anger than the bleakness he’d seen in her eyes when she first woke up. He’d probably shattered her illusions forever, but she was trying to pretend she was worldly enough to handle it. He’d never loathed himself more than he did at this moment.

She whipped out of bed. “Go ahead and beat yourself up about last night if you want. I don’t intend to do that, because I knew exactly what I was doing, and it seemed like the best thing for both of us at the time. Maybe it was wrong.” She sent him a challenging look. “But it’s done. Now I’m going to go take a shower.”

“Mary Jane, it will never, ever happen again.”

“I wouldn’t expect it to.” She drew herself up a little taller, which still wasn’t very big. She couldn’t be more than five-three, max. “Especially since you consider me such an infant. There’s a half bath downstairs if you want to use it.” Then she marched into her bathroom like royalty and shut the door.

He wanted her so much he nearly groaned aloud. He was a pig, not worth someone putting a bullet through his head. His wife had been dead two days. Until Mary Jane had taken him into her warm body, he’d been as good as dead, too. She had saved him, pulled him from the black pit of hell, and he yearned for her with an unholy fierceness.

But she would never know.

MARY JANE STOOD under the shower and let the hot water pour over her head. She wondered if a person could drown in the shower if they breathed in the water. It was a tempting thought, but it probably wouldn’t work. You had to be pretty determined to drown yourself, like the guy who walked into the ocean in that old movie A Star is Born.

Besides, even if she started to drown, there was a doctor in the house. He’d revive her. Yes, there was a doctor in the house. An embarrassed doctor who thought he’d forced himself on an innocent young woman. He’d turned a thing of beauty into something ugly.

It was right, what she’d done last night. She clenched her fists and raised her face to the hard spray. The right thing. If he couldn’t understand that, then to hell with him.

Except that she wanted him to understand it. She wanted him to see that last night had been her last gift to Arielle, her attempt to take care of the man Arielle had loved so much. Arielle would have understood. Mary Jane would never have allowed last night to happen that way if she hadn’t believed, deep inside, that Arielle would have been okay with it.

Well, if she didn’t intend to drown herself in the shower, which she would never do anyway because she had the baby to consider, then she might as well stop stalling and wash up.

As she moved the washcloth over her body, her nerve endings hummed in response. Her heart might feel like a hunk of lead, but her body was saying thank-you for the favor of a little loving. She’d only had two serious boyfriends in her life. One had been a good lover but a terrible conversationalist, and she’d discovered how important it was to her to be able to talk to a man when they’d stopped kissing for a little while. So the second relationship had started with lots of conversation. Great conversation. And he’d turned out to be a dud in bed.

According to Lana, finding the combo of a good talker and a good lover was definitely the old story of looking for a needle in a haystack. And Lana, being twenty-six, had four more years of experience than Mary Jane, so she knew all about needles and haystacks. Lana said some women finally settled on which was more important, the body connection or the brain connection, and went with that.

Mary Jane had never had the guts to ask Arielle if she got both when she married Morgan. Arielle had been so enthusiastic about what a great person Morgan was, not mentioning his body, that Mary Jane had concluded the brain connection was the main thing. And yet…powerful, smooth strokes…feeling complete…rising, reaching together.

Shaking her head, Mary Jane put the image out of her mind. It could have been a lucky accident that she and Morgan had been so in tune last night. One time didn’t count. Morgan and Arielle had likely connected primarily on the mental level. After all, Arielle was extremely smart, and she’d once said sex wasn’t the most important consideration in a husband. Mary Jane remembered how she’d laughed and argued with Arielle about that. But Arielle had stuck to her guns. She…

She was gone.