Here Comes Trouble (31 page)

“Will it help you sleep?” she asked after forcing her voice to come out normal.

One corner of his delectable mouth tilted up. “Only one thing will help me sleep.”

She resisted the urge to roll he eyes. “I’m out of commission for a while after that last time.”

“Wore you out did I?”

“Most undoubtedly,” she said with a slight grin. “And I’m sure, by the way. So keep going.”

His bare chest puffed when he inhaled a deep breath. “She had an abortion without telling me.”

For the first time in…well, Lacy wasn’t even sure how long she’d last been at a loss for words. Her speechlessness made it difficult for her to determine which issue to address first: the fact that Chase had never told a soul about this, yet decided to clue her in, or how in the world his girlfriend could do something so deceitful and hurtful.

She pulled in a calming breath and pillowed her arm beneath her head. “How did you eventually find out?”

“I found out a week later through a mutual friend. Needless to say, I ended the relationship.”

Chase’s expression was unreadable due to the lack of light, but his hushed voice held a twinge of regret. “Why would she tell you about the pregnancy if she was planning on aborting it? That seems a little needless, not to mention cruel.”

His soft chuckle lacked humor. “The cruel part probably never entered her mind. As for telling me, well, she said the abortion was a spur of the moment decision when she realized having a baby was last thing either one of us needed. I told her she didn’t have the right to make that decision for me, then I stormed out of her dorm room.”

His thick shoulder was tense beneath her hand. “I’m glad you said that to her. Most guys would have been relieved or not even cared.”

“I can’t say I wasn’t relieved but I was furious as hell that she did that behind my back. Looking back now…” he lifted the shoulder beneath her hand. “It was probably the right decision.”

Did Chase not want kids? Did he not see himself as a father one day? “What makes you say that?”

Silence was her answer for a moment. “Before that happened, I hadn’t exactly been a model student. I was going nowhere fast. But after--”His eyes closed for a brief second--“I was hit with a large dose of reality. I stopped the all night partying and got my ass in gear.”

No matter how much Lacy thought she knew about Chase, he’d whip something else out and blindside her with all sorts of surprises. In fact, the lack of predictability in him was one of the things she loved most about him.

Love?

Oh, hell.

She cleared the lump out of her throat. “Why did you never tell anyone?”

Like before, he waited before answering. The knuckle of his index finger ran over her collarbone then dipped down between her breasts. The caress was whisper-light but powerful enough to send waves of shivers along her skin.

“I didn’t want to give them a reason to be disappointed in me,” he finally answered.

Well, what do you know? Chase really
was
all mush. His I-Don’t-Give-A-Damn attitude toward everyone in his life was nothing more than a smoke screen. Despite what she thought about him, he had just as many deep scars as she. While most the town knew about hers, Chase kept his under lock and key.

Without a word, he rolled from the bed and stalked across the bedroom, completely unabashed of his own magnificent nudity. “I shouldn’t have told you any of that,” he muttered before disappearing into his bathroom.

As she lay in bewildered silence, the shower in the bathroom turned on. Geez, the man went from hot to cold in less time it took Boris to fall asleep. And Boris fell asleep
really
fast.

So, Chase had told her something he hadn’t even told his own family. Why? Maybe he’d been feeling especially chatty and needed to get that burden off his chest. Or, the more desirable option, he felt she was special enough to share something he couldn’t tell anybody else. Yeah, in a perfect world.
 
More than likely she was nothing more than a good lay to him. No, she refused to think of herself that way. He had to feel something more than that.

Dammit, her heart went out to him. He’d gone through a difficult situation at a young age. Someone he may or may not have been in love with betrayed him on the deepest level possible. And he’d dealt with all that alone. Lacy, more than anyone, knew what it was like to feel utterly alone. No one to spill your troubles to or understand how said troubles kept you awake at night. How had he’d handled the outcome? He’d focused on what needed to be done and made something of himself. He’d finished college and now ran a successful restaurant.

Without asking him to, he’d confided in her. What had she’d done? She lay there and let him pull away from her. And now he was in his shower. Alone.

Just like he’d been before.

Determination had her tossing the covers aside and walking to the bathroom. A cloud of steam greeted her when she opened the door. With a stealthy silence, she tip-toed across the floor, grabbed a handful of the shower curtain and peeled it back far enough to step in. Chase had his back to her with all the cords of muscle pulled tight and bunched together. His hands were braced on wall above him and his head hung down between his shoulders. Her heart practically cracked open at the defeated sight of him.

He lowered his hands from the wall and, as though sensing her presence, turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. Something close to sadness darkened his blue eyes.

Lacy placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Water ran down over both of them and plastered their hair to their skin. Steam swirled around their two wet, naked bodies. The muscles in his jaw clenched when Chase reached a hand out and then snaked his arm around her waist.

She went to him as though she had no choice in the matter because, really she didn’t. All he had to do was glance at her and she practically melted. Her breasts smashed against his wet chest. His powerful thighs, dusted with soft hair, brushed against her softer, feminine ones. She wound her arms around his neck as he buried his face against his shoulder. They remained that way for a long time, holding each other in a silence only two people comfortable enough with each other could do. As the water ran cold, Lacy no longer could deny that she was totally and completely head-over-heels in love with him.

****

“I’ll come visit you on one condition.”

Lacy held her cell phone to her ear with one hand and used her free hand to turn the steering wheel. Megan had called her about five minutes ago just as Lacy had walked out of the framing store with a sack-full of frames and mating for her drawings. The two of them had chatted about their summers while Lacy drove through town and headed back home.

“Okay, what’s your condition?” Lacy asked as she turned down her heavily tree-lined street.
 
Mrs. Pratt had her head buried in her bright pink azaleas and two little boys rode their bikes down the street, enjoying their last two weeks of summer before school started.

“You have to read Mom’s letter.”

Dang it, Lacy just
knew
Megan would say something like that. The letter had sat, forgotten on her dresser, for almost three months now. At one point in time she’d almost come to the conclusion that she’d toss the letter without ever opening it. No sense in irritating old wounds, right? Her mother left for greener pastures, in essence shaping the person Lacy had become, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to change that. Lacy didn’t give a flying rip about her mother’s so-called sentiments or explanations. They were twenty-five years too late.

“I know you don’t want to,” Megan continued as though reading Lacy’s cynical thoughts. “But I think you need to. And don’t take this the wrong way but you’re a little bit on the jaded side. I know you care, even though you say you don’t.”

Lacy hit the button on the garage door opener when she pulled into the driveway. “It’s not that I don’t care, I just,” she sighed and dropped her head back to the headrest. “I’m still not ready.”

“Are you ever going to be ready? It’s like a Band-Aid; you’ve got to just get it over with. Look,” Megan’s voice dropped to a softer tone. “What Mom did to you was pretty unforgiveable. And, trust me, it’s taken me a long to accept that she actually did that. I just think you’ll regret not reading it. I won’t come see you if you don’t.”

“You drive a tough deal,” Lacy complained after pulling the car into the garage.

“Tough love, my dear sister. It’s for your own good.”

Shouldn’t Lacy get to decide what was for her own good? She wasn’t used to people caring about her like this.

“Just promise me you’ll try. School starts in three weeks.”

Lacy turned the car off and tossed the keys in her purse. “I’m promise I’ll try,” she found herself saying. Megan had been just as much a victim as she and at least deserved Lacy’s good word.

“Thanks. I’m late for my spinning class so I’ve got to go. Call me next week and let me know.”

Lacy disconnected the call, grabbed her bags and walked into the house. Maybe she really did need some tough love. After all, her stubbornness, at times, served as her own worst enemy. Sometimes it really did take a relentless force for her to see the error of her ways. And she missed Megan. Lacy saw a lot of herself in the girl. They both had the same shade of honey-blond hair, both had their mother’s green eyes. And both of them had been hurt by the woman who’d birthed them.

However, Lacy wasn’t so stubborn that she’d refused to see her own sister because she couldn’t bring herself to read a stupid letter. It wasn’t like the letter needed to mean anything to her. They were only words written by a person who meant nothing to her. Now, Lacy’s reasons for ignoring the letter seemed childish and immature.

“Hey buddy,” Lacy greeted Boris when the dog came ambling through the kitchen. He must have been eating his leftovers and heard her open the garage door. Her ancient semi-crippled, partially blind friend was always there for her. She gave the dog an absent-minded scratch behind the ears before carrying her purchases down the hallway.

Over the past week, Lacy had gotten her butt in gear and finally selected her top pieces to display at the festival. All in all, she was pretty satisfied with her wide variety of drawings. Since the frames and matting were so expensive, she’d opted to frame about half of them, set a higher price tag for those, and sell the others, “as is.” The whole project of blowing up the drawings to a large portrait size and buying the framing had set her back a pretty penny. So much so that she’d decided to put off her hair cut another few weeks.

She placed the bag of frames and mats on the couch in the drawing room and carried her other bag of purchases into the bedroom
 
On the way home from the framing store, she’d made an impromptu visit to the drug store to pick up a few things she’d been running low on. She tossed a tube of mascara in the makeup drawer, placed a small bottle of vitamins in her medicine cabinet then pulled a package of cotton balls out of the grocery bag. Just as she set the cotton balls inside the cabinet underneath the sink, her eyes landed on a light blue box of tampons. An unopened box of tampons.

With a slight frown, she took the box out of the cabinet and set it on the counter. When had she bought these? It had been so long ago, she couldn’t even remember. The tip of her index finger ran along the seam of the carton as she thought back. During her previous menstrual cycle, she’d used the last tampon she had. Because she hadn’t wanted to be unprepared, she’d purchased another box the next day. How long ago had that been? Her stomach turned over and a fine sheen of perspiration coated her forehead.

Not being able to remember her last period was not good sign. No way was this happening to her. Her heart slowly sped up to an unnaturally rapid beat. Lacy hadn’t made a habit of keeping track of her periods with a calendar, but she walked to pantry anyway and took the calendar down. With unsteady, sweaty fingers, she flipped the pages back several months, hoping to trigger her memory of her last cycle. It didn’t help. She flipped the pages back to August. Only one week remained until September. She knew for a fact she hadn’t had her period yet this month and was almost positive she hadn’t gotten it in July. What about June? She turned back to May. She and Chase had spent two weeks together in May and had been broken up by June. Then they’d gotten back together in July. Now they were almost in September. Had she bled in June? Dammit, she couldn’t remember!

The timing was too suspicious for her to write it off as an irregular cycle. Generally her cycles had sometimes been off but not that off. She simply couldn’t ignore the fact that she hadn’t had her period in at least two months, possibly three. How had she not noticed until now?

Fear and anxiety like she’d never known before made her hyperventilate. She turned from the counter and paced to the living room.

Okay, don’t freak out. You need to think
.

First of all, Chase always wore condoms. At least she was pretty sure he had. Was it possible there had been at least one time when both of them had forgotten? Immediately popping into her head were a few occasions back in May that had been especially hot and frenzied. One had been in this very living room where she currently paced a hole in the already threadbare carpet. They’d just finished sharing a bottle of wine when Chase had lowered her to the couch. If her memory served her correctly, he’d pulled a condom out of his pants pocket seconds before slipping into her. So, that couldn’t be it. The second memory was from his kitchen. The whole thing had happened so fast, Lacy hadn’t had time to catch her breath before he’d entered her. He’d given her one look, then lifted her onto the counter top. For the life of her, Lacy couldn’t remember him rolling on a condom. Could that be it? Could that one moment of lust-filled, passionate insanity resulted in an unexpected pregnancy?