Delores Fossen - Covert Conception

Natalie and him.

Or rather it was a couple who looked like Natalie and him. Because there was no way it could actually be them.

Not caring for the sickening feeling that suddenly came over him, Rick pushed himself away from the filing cabinet and moved closer to study the images on the screen. “Are you going to tell me why you doctored this video?”

Outrage flashed in her eyes, but she didn’t voice it. The rush of emotion seemed to make her queasy. Or maybe it was the sweltering heat. Because she wiped away the perspiration again and slid her hand over her stomach as if to steady it. “I didn’t doctor it.”

“Then someone did,” he fired back.

“Kitt checked,” Natalie explained. Her breath was uneven now, and the color was draining from her cheeks. “The images haven’t been altered.”

“The hell they haven’t.” Rick watched as the couple got closer and closer to Natalie’s bedroom door.

The couple staggered. The woman’s right arm banged against the doorjamb. The man didn’t fare much better. He crossed in front of her. Staggered as well. And his left shoulder hit against the wall.

That caused Rick’s mouth to turn to dust.

The couple’s awkward intimate dance continued until the man caught the woman. She went into his arms. Willingly. Their bodies came together. Mouths, too.

In a desperate, hungry kiss.

“I know for a fact that I would have remembered that,” Rick insisted in a rough whisper.

Natalie swallowed hard enough that he could hear it. But what she didn’t do was agree with him. Instead, she froze the images and pointed to the woman’s right arm. “I had a bruise there the morning after my party. I didn’t know then how I’d gotten it.”

Hell.

Rick waited for the other shoe to fall.

She pointed to the man’s left shoulder. To the spot that had rammed into the wall. “Did you have a bruise or any kind of mark?”

Rick didn’t even have to think about it. “Yeah. I figured I’d gotten it here at work.”

Natalie’s posture and bearing were suddenly as unsteady as the couple in the video. “I don’t think you got that bruise here.”

It took him a moment to get his teeth unclenched so he could speak. “Are you saying you think that happened?” Rick asked. “You really believe the two of us had a hot and heavy kissing session outside your bedroom door?”

She closed her eyes. Paused. Gathered her breath. “I don’t think the hot and heaviness stopped there. I believe we went inside my bedroom and finished what we started.”

Her eyelids lifted, and she met his gaze head-on. “I’m four weeks pregnant. And judging from that video, you’re the baby’s father.”

“Is this your idea of a bad joke?” Rick asked.

Natalie carefully studied his reaction—his iron jaw, his narrowed gunmetal-gray eyes and thunder-struck expression—and she quickly realized she didn’t care for any of it. It was too similar to what her own reaction had been when Kitt first told her about the test results.

She’d expected…what?

A confession?

Perhaps an explanation that would cause all of this to make sense?

Or maybe that’s what she hoped he would do, help her make sense of the situation. A miracle of sorts. However, it was obvious Rick didn’t have answers or a miracle. Or if he had them, he wasn’t ready to share them with her.

That didn’t mean he was innocent in all of this.

“Please tell me this is a joke,” he amended.

“Are you saying you didn’t orchestrate what happened?” Natalie countered.

He looked at her as if her ears were on backwards. “You’re damn right that’s what I’m saying.”

And he was adamant about it, too.

Natalie suddenly felt even more desperate, and it was desperation that made her toss the next question at him. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m telling you the truth, that’s why.” Rick opened his mouth. Closed it. Shook his head. Cursed. “Hell’s bells, Natalie, do you really believe I’d drug you so I could sleep with you?”

She’d already asked herself that. At least a dozen times. And during none of that personal questioning had she convinced herself that Rick would do something like this. He wasn’t the sort of man who required drugging or any coercion to get a woman into bed.

“I’m pregnant,” she restated. “I don’t know how it happened, and my only clue is that surveillance video. I need answers, and that’s why I’m here.”

He shook his head. “What you need is to have the pregnancy test repeated.”

“I’ve already done that.” She was up to a dozen times of watching for minus signs on little urine-soaked white plastic sticks. She’d try a dozen more if necessary, praying for one negative result. “They’ve all been positive.”

“Then, you need to see a doctor right away,” Rick quickly suggested.

“I did that a few hours ago. I had an ultrasound and a thorough examination. There’s definitely a baby.”

He cursed again, made his way to the chair, gripped the armrest and dropped down onto the seat. “This can’t be happening. The tests, the doctor, the ultrasound and the video are all wrong. They have to be.”

She’d had that reaction, too. Denial. It’d taken hours to get past just the tip of it. But she couldn’t afford Rick that same amount of time to work through his issues. She had an eerie feeling that time wasn’t on their side. “I need you to think back through—”

“Something happened that night,” he interrupted. But he didn’t say anything else.

Natalie froze. Waited. She forced herself to stay calm. “Obviously something happened,” she said when Rick just sat there.

He glanced at her stomach. “I didn’t mean that. I mean I blacked out.”

Her heart had been racing before that, but she could have sworn it stopped mid-beat. Natalie shook her head. “When? How?”

But before he could answer, the phone rang. He waved it off, but the ringing continued and when he perused his shop and apparently realized his employees were all busy, he reached across the desk and answered the phone.

Natalie actually welcomed the interlude. Yes, they needed to get to the bottom of this. Yes, she desperately needed to know what’d happened to her. To them. But she also needed a moment to compose herself. Right now, a thin thread of composure was the only thing that prevented her from screaming. And she didn’t want to lose it in front of Rick.

What was going on?

What?

Natalie had been asking herself that for a day and a half and was afraid she wasn’t any closer to the truth than she had been when Kitt had first dropped this bombshell.

She was pregnant.

Pregnant!

With a child she couldn’t even remember conceiving.

Unplanned motherhood alone would have been more than enough to deal with, but motherhood under these circumstances was terrifying.

“I’ll get that work order,” she heard Rick say at the end of a heavy, frustrated sigh.

He stood, brushed past her. He was so close that she had no trouble catching his scent. With the nonexistent A/C, the steamy claustrophobic office and the fact that he’d obviously just finished a long day of manual labor, his body odor should have been offensive.

It wasn’t.

Far from it.

Oh, there was sweat all right. His white cotton T-shirt was practically soaked, and the snug fabric strained across his toned pecs and arms. His hair was wet as well. His slightly too-long coffee-colored hair fell, permanently disheveled, almost to his shoulders. But he didn’t smell sweaty. He somehow managed to smell, well, manly.

He snatched one of the forms from the top of the filing cabinet and read off some figures. Because her energy seemed sapped and her pulse had turned thick and syrupy, Natalie simply sat on the edge of his desk, watching and listening. Waiting for him to finish—without a clue what they would say to each other once he was done. None of her life experiences had prepared her for this.