But mostly she felt scared.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, as tears spilled down her cheeks. “Oh, God.” She leaned against the wall as the room seemed to spin around her. “What am I going to do?”
Duncan met her eyes. “There is only one thing you can do,” he said. “You’re going to marry me.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Her head felt as if it was filled with helium. Any second it would separate from her body and float off. She closed her eyes and pulled in a shaky breath. He was saying something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Slowly she began to slide to the floor. Duncan caught her before she fell.
“Stop doing that,” she murmured, letting her head drop onto his shoulder.
“Doing what, lassie?”
“Rescuing me. I don’t need your help. Maybe I’d like falling down. You never give me the chance to find out”
“Aye,” Duncan said as he carried her into the front room. “I can see that.”
For the second time that night, he placed her on a sofa then went to the kitchen to fetch her a glass of water.
“Thank you,” she said after taking a sip. “I don’t know what’s wrong—” She stopped, and a bitter laugh mingled with her tears. “Wait a minute, I do know what’s wrong, don’t I?” She buried her face in her hands and started to cry.
Duncan had never felt more useless in his life. She cried as if her heart was breaking, wrenching sobs that made his gut ache. He didn’t know why he’d said what he had. A bad marriage was a prison unlike no other.
Bloody hell, he still hadn’t quite comprehended the fact that she was pregnant with his child. Somewhere in his mix of confusion and anger, there was beginning in his marrow a fierce sense of elation. He remembered the last time and how it had ended. The one thing he knew, the only thing, was that this time would be different if he had to move heaven and earth to guarantee it.
“Stop staring at me,” she snapped between sobs. “Why don’t you just call a cab and go back to Scotland where you belong?”
“I can’t go now and leave you like this.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “If you hadn’t popped up here unexpectedly, you wouldn’t even know.”
“But I do know, and that makes all the difference.”
She swatted at his arm with her left hand. “Can’t you take a hint? I don’t want you here, Duncan Stewart. I don’t want you in my house.”
“You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“Why should now be any different?” Edgy laughter cut through her tears. “I’ve always been alone.”
Oh, God, Sam thought. Where on earth had that come from? She’d read about wildly escalating estrogen levels that made pregnant women highly emotional, but she’d never read about the self-pity hormone kicking in. She’d never be able to look him in the face again.
Once again Duncan chose to court danger. He reached over and smoothed a lock of pale blond hair from her cheek. He felt her tears against his fingertips, the rose-petal softness of her skin.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Can’t you take a hint? Go back to your castle where you belong.”
He held her while she cried, smoothing her hair with his palm, saying things in the language of his grandmother and her grandmother before her. He wondered what had brought him to this place, what primitive understanding had coursed through his veins and told him to find her. The randomness of it all. The blind amazing luck.
Finally she stopped crying and pulled away from him. Her nose was red. Her eyes were puffy and swollen. Her hair needed combing. And it didn’t matter a damn. Somehow she was still beautiful.
“Why did you come here?” she asked him.
He forced a smile. “To phone for a taxi.”
She didn’t smile back. “I mean, why did you come to Houston?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. How could he tell her about the Glasgow pub and the aching loneliness he’d felt every day since? “I had no choice in the matter.”
She nodded as if it somehow made sense. “This surprised me as much as it surprised you.”
“I doubt that.”
“I was taking the Pill,” she said. “You’re not supposed to get pregnant on the Pill.”
“But it happened.”
Her hands cupped her belly, and he saw the look of bewildered wonder in her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly. “It did, didn’t it?”
Another wave of bone-crushing fear gripped her, and she began to cry at the enormity of what had happened. She didn’t know the first thing about babies. How could she possibly have one of her own?
And she didn’t have a husband. She knew husbands were optional these days, but she couldn’t help wanting to give her baby what she’d never known herself—two parents who not only loved her but lived with her on a daily basis. Not just when it was convenient or when work permitted or when the stars and the moon were in some kind of mystical alignment. But all the time. Every day of the week. Every month of the year.
Crazy thoughts were popping into her mind at a dizzying rate. Her pregnancy would turn Wilde & Daughters Ltd. upside down. Martie would swoon with delight and turn Sam’s life into one long baby shower. Estelle would fuss over her like a mother hen, making sure Sam took her vitamins and exercised and ate all the right foods. She probably wouldn’t be able to draw in a single breath between now and her due date without someone staring over her shoulder and monitoring her oxygen intake.
And what about her staff and her clients and the inordinate amount of business travel she usually undertook between now and early autumn? How much of it could she do? More important, how much of it did she want to do?
The rumor mill was an amazing thing in the best of times. Sam’s pregnancy would have it grinding out gossip at a
