“You don’t know for sure that you will be.”
“I should be.” She threw the cloth down into the sink and it hit with a wet splat.
He settled his hand on her back, right between her too-sharp shoulder blades. He felt her flinch but she didn’t move away. He spread his fingers upward to the base of her neck, where her muscles felt as tight as his, and he turned her toward him into his embrace.
He’d expected resistance. But instead, she actually leaned against him. Her arms slid around his shoulders and she pressed her forehead against his neck. He could feel the sigh she gave throughout her entire body.
He kissed the top of her head. But he didn’t dare do anything more because he’d already proved that he had too little control where she was concerned. “It’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this. One step at a time.”
She didn’t say anything. But her arms tightened around him. “I can’t believe you remembered I wanted a bookstore like my mother’s,” she mumbled against him.
He closed his eyes. “I remember everything.”
Her head moved, but only, it seemed, to burrow deeper against him. “I asked Greer to feed your cat,” she finally said.
He smiled faintly and brushed a kiss against her hair one more time.
Nell stared at the plastic stick in her hand.
Two lines for positive.
One line for negative.
And there were absolutely two fat, pink lines.
The test she’d done the day before had given the same results.
And the one before that, also the same.
She lifted her arm to glare at the spot where she knew the tiny implant was located. “So much for you.”
She dropped her arm and tossed the pregnancy test stick into the trash along with its two twins and eyed her reflection in the crackled mirror over her sink.
Did she look different?
Her face didn’t. As long as nobody paid any attention to her breasts that seemed to have outgrown their usual cup size overnight, her body didn’t look any different, either.
She pressed her hand to her stomach. “Not yet, anyway.”
Her eyes suddenly stung.
It was an annoyance that had been happening with increasing frequency the last few weeks.
She’d gotten teary over the library site being finalized. Over her fifth failed attempt to bake a decent loaf of bread despite Montrose’s tutelage. She’d even cried over the unexpected phone call she’d received from Gardner, who’d called to ask Nell for advice about the best way to protect her boys should something ever happen to her.
Her knees felt as watery as her eyes and she sank down on the closed toilet lid.
How was she going to tell Archer when not even two weeks ago she’d sat in this very bathroom insisting there was no possible way for her to be pregnant?
That’s good. Would’ve had to marry you.
His words echoed inside her head.
As soon as he’d said them—before she’d even given any thought to the possibility that her implant might have become too old to be effective—she’d realized that the only proposal she would ever want from him was one not prompted by a baby in her belly.
She was in love with Archer Templeton.
And she feared she had been for a very, very long time.
Nausea clawed at her and she leaned over the sink, running cold water over the insides of her wrists until it began to subside.
They were supposed to be giving their workshop at the wellness expo that afternoon. He was picking her up because he was coming all the way from Cheyenne anyway after he’d spent the last few days in meetings at the state capitol building.
Considering the frequency of her bouts of nausea, she didn’t know how she was going to make it through the drive to Braden, much less the afternoon-long workshop they’d be conducting, without him noticing.
That’s good. Would’ve had to marry you.
She made an impatient sound and turned off the water. She mopped the mascara smudges from around her eyes, pulled on the soft pink biker-style jacket that Delia had talked her into buying at Classic Charms a few days earlier to go with her black jeans and left the bathroom just in time to hear a truck engine out front.
Her stomach lurched, but this time it wasn’t because of nausea. It was simply pure nervousness.
She opened the front door to wave at Archer, then ducked back inside. She went into the second bedroom, where she’d set up a small table and enough shelves to house her collection of books, and picked up the stack of stapled packets she’d been preparing in her spare time for the workshop.
Archer had told her that his office in Denver could have taken care of it, but if she’d agreed, she wouldn’t have felt like she was contributing anything to what was supposed to be their combined effort.
It was hard enough being ineffectual while waiting for the bar’s decision regarding her future as a lawyer. She didn’t need to feel useless where everything else was concerned, too.
She shouldered her briefcase strap and with her arms full of the packets, went back out to the living room. As usual, bells jangled inside her at the sight of him, tall and gold and crazily handsome, as he walked through her front door and set a stack of mail on the little table she’d placed there so she’d have a spot to dump her keys when she came in every day.
Like her, he was wearing black jeans. His white shirt was rolled up at the elbows and open at the neck. His jaw was clean-shaven and his hair was slicked back and if she hadn’t vowed not to repeat the mistake that had gotten her into her latest predicament, she’d have been busily wondering if she possessed what it would take to seduce him.
But she had vowed, and she was not in the market to
