Not bad, I thought. It didn’t show on my face that I was pregnant. I turned to the side, checking the silhouette of my body in the tight black dress. Nope, didn’t show there, either.
“Wow,” César said when I walked into the kitchen. His eyes swept up and down, surveying me. “You look beautiful. Where are you headed?”
“Thank you.” The expression on his face was gratifying. It was like, “You’re good enough to eat, and I’m hungry.” I got a little hungry myself, looking back at him. “I’m meeting up with friends,” I explained. “What about you? Why are you so spiffy?”
He was dressed to the nines himself and totally gorgeous, but he always was. I had been conducting a secret survey of César at various points in the day and there hadn’t been one moment that I had come across him when he didn’t look yummy. Sleepy, hungry, grumpy, sweaty—he was delectable all the time. Especially, though, when he’d come downstairs to get his phone, right after a shower and wearing only a towel. I’d had to stop myself from drooling on the counter where I’d been eating a bowl of the high-protein grain mix he’d insisted I have for breakfast. I had put down the spoon and peeked around the corner so I could watch his butt flex under the terrycloth as he went back up the stairs. That towel hadn’t been as thin as a woman might have liked, but it had given away enough that I had taken a piece of ice out of the freezer to eat along with my nasty grain mix.
“I’m spiffy because I have a date,” he told me now. “Dinner with someone.”
“Oh. That’s nice.” I swallowed, then smiled. “That sounds fun.” I wondered what she was like and I wanted to see her, to see the two of them together. “What’s her name?” I asked, watching his face.
“Arielle.” His expression didn’t change as he messed with his cufflink. “We went out a few times before Christmas. She’s cool.” He held out his arm. “Can you help me with this?”
I stepped to him and it felt weird. We hadn’t often been this close together in the few days that I’d lived here, except when he’d insisted that I go down to his mega-gym in the basement. “This is why I moved,” he had explained, showing me around the huge room. “I don’t have to leave to work out.” He had given me a sheaf of papers with an exercise routine he’d drawn up for me and then stood very near, very close as I tried it out. He’d adjusted the machines and watched over me carefully. He was very interested in keeping the baby healthy, I reminded myself.
“Who are you meeting up with tonight?” he asked.
“Some guys I know. Derrick, Pierre, Carson,” I said, messing with the cufflink. For some reason, I didn’t mention that Julie and Sonia would also be there. My fingers brushed over the warm skin of his wrist, the soft hair.
“How do you know them?”
“From college. From when I transferred back up here to finish.” I stroked my fingertips against his skin again, mostly by accident. “You should already know that, since I believe that I completed the part about my education on your questionnaire.”
“You did,” he agreed. “That wasn’t one of the questions you left blank.”
“You said that you majored in ancient history with a minor in classical studies. How, exactly, does that blend with football?” I played with the cufflink.
“It didn’t, not very well. It was pretty hard to pull it all off but I wanted to graduate before I left school, and I wanted to do it with a real major.”
“And a useful one.”
He laughed. “Those were the subjects that interested me. You wrote that you spent three years downstate, one up here. Why did you transfer?”
“Soleil was sick,” I said. “My mom, I mean. I came home for the summer and saw that it was bad, so I transferred to be closer and help her. She died last spring. She had waited a long time before going to the doctor and they couldn’t do much to help.”
“I didn’t realize that happened so recently,” he said. “I’m sorry, Camdyn.” His voice was always kind of growly, but those words were soft.
“Are you trying to make me cry?” I looked up into his brown eyes and blinked away some stray tears. “We’re going out to have fun tonight, right?”
“Right.” He stepped back, and I realized that I had been holding on to his wrist. “Where are you heading?”
“Um…” I checked my phone for the plan. “Dinner and then drinks at the Silver Dollar, probably.”
“Drinks,” he repeated. “Drinks with three guys. They’re good friends?”
“Sure,” I answered off-handedly.
César took another step away. He looked again at my outfit. “What does that mean, ‘sure?’”
I saw by the clock on the microwave that I was a little late in meeting them and I started to leave. “It means, sure, they’re good friends,” I said over my shoulder.
César followed behind me. “More like, boyfriends?”
“No, not at all. Well, Derrick and I used to go out some, if that’s what you mean. Also, Carson, and I guess I went out a few times with Pierre, too.” We’d had a few casual dinners, but it had never gone farther than a little kissing with Derrick.
“So, all three of them are former boyfriends? Or are they current boyfriends?”
I turned and found him eyeing me. “They’re friends, I said.”
“Do they know that you’re pregnant with someone else’s baby?” César asked me.
I glared at him. “No. I
