Michelle Celmer - The Secretary's Secret

She shrugged. “Two weeks, maybe three.”

“Which is it, two or three?”

Oh, hell. She slumped into her desk chair. “Probably closer to three.”

He took a long deep breath and blew it out. She could tell he was fighting to stay calm. “And why am I just hearing about this now?”

“I thought maybe it was a virus or an infection or something,” she said, and he gave her an incredulous look. “I was in denial, okay?”

“Missed periods can happen for lots of reasons, right? Like stress?”

She flicked her thumbnail nervously back and forth, fraying the edge of the box. Stressed? Who me? “Sure, I guess.”

“Besides, we used protection.”

“Did we?”

He shot back an indignant, “You know we did.”

She felt a glimmer of hope. Condoms could fail, but the odds were slim. Maybe she really wasn’t pregnant. Maybe this was all in her head. “Even the last time?”

There was a pause, then he asked, “The last time?”

Suddenly he didn’t sound so confident. Suddenly he had an, Oh-damn-what-have-I-done? look on his face.

Her stomach began to slither down from her abdomen. “You know, against the wall, by the door. We used a condom then too, right?” she asked hopefully, as if wishing it were true would actually make it true.

He scratched the coarse stubble on his chin. The guy could shave ten times a day but he was so dark he almost always had a five o’clock shadow. “Honestly, I can’t remember.”

Oh, this was not good. She could feel her control slipping, panic squeezing the air from her lungs. “You can’t remember?”

He sat on the corner of her desk. “Apparently, you can’t either.”

He was right. That wasn’t fair. This was in no way his fault. “I’m sorry. I’m just…edgy.”

“If I had to guess, I would say that since I have no memory of using one, and my wallet was in the other room, we probably didn’t.”

At least he was being honest. Obviously they had both been too swept away by passion to think about contraceptives. But that had been what, their fourth time? Didn’t a man’s body take a certain amount of time to…reinforce the troops. Were there even any little swimmers left by then?

Leave it to her to have unprotected sex with a guy who had super sperm.

“I guess there’s only one way to find out for sure,” he said. “Taking the test here would probably be a bad idea, seeing as how anyone could walk into the bathroom. So would you be more comfortable taking it at your place or mine?”

This was really happening. With Nick of all people.

When she didn’t answer right away he asked, “Or is this something you need to be alone for?”

Being alone was the last thing she wanted. They were in this together. She didn’t doubt for an instant that he would be there for her, whatever the outcome. “We’ll do it at my house.”

He rose to his feet. “Okay, let’s go.”

Her eyes went wide. “You want to go now? It’s the middle of the workday.”

“It’s not like we’re going to get fired. I own the company. Besides, you know what they say.”

She thought about it for a second then said, “Curiosity killed the cat?”

He grinned. “There’s no time like the present.”

Nick drove them the ten minutes to Zoë’s house in Birmingham. They didn’t say much. What could they say? Zoë spent the majority of her time praying, Please, God, let it be negative.

How had she gotten herself into this mess?

Her devout Catholic parents still believed that at the age of twenty-eight she was as pure as the driven snow. If the test was positive, what would she tell them? Well, Mom and Dad, I was snow-white, but I drifted.

They were going to kill her. Or disown her.

Or both.

And this would surely be enough to send her fragile, ailing grandmother hurtling through death’s door. She would instantly be labeled the family black sheep.

It didn’t matter that her parents had been nagging her to settle down for years.

When are you going to find a nice man? When are you going to have babies?

How about never?

And if the man she settled down with was Nick they would be ecstatic. Despite the fact that he wasn’t Catholic, they adored him. Since the first time she’d brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner they’d adopted him into the fold. And Nick had been swept up into the total chaos and craziness that was her family. He loved it almost as much as it drove her nuts.

So, if she were to call home and tell them she and Nick were getting hitched, she’d be daughter of the year. But the premarital sex thing would still be a major issue. In her parents’ eyes, what they had done was a sin.

She let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. Maybe this was just a bad dream. Maybe all she needed to do was pinch herself real hard and she would wake up.

She caught a hunk of skin between her thumb and forefinger, the fleshy part under her upper arm that the self-defense people claim is the most sensitive, and gave it a good hard squeeze.

“Ow!”

“What’s wrong?”

She opened her eyes and looked around. Still in Nick’s monster truck, rumbling down the street, and he was shooting her a concerned look.

She sighed. So much for her dream theory.

“Nothing. I’m just swell,” she said, turning to look out the window, barely seeing the houses of her street whizzing past.

“Don’t get upset until we know for sure,” he said, but she was pretty sure he, like her, already knew what the result would be. They’d had unprotected sex and her period was late. The test was going to be positive.

She was going to have Nick’s baby.

When they got to her house, he took her keys from her and opened the door. He’d been inside her house a thousand times, but today it felt so…surreal. As if she’d stepped onto the set of film.

A horror film.

She and Nick were the stars, and any second some lunatic was going to pop out of the kitchen wielding a knife and hack them to pieces.

She slipped her jacket off and tossed it over the back of the couch while Nick took in her cluttered living room.

Last night’s dinner dishes still sat on the coffee table, the plate covered with little kitty lick marks from Dexter her cat. Newspapers from the past two weeks lay in a messy pile at one end of the couch.

She looked down at the rug, at the tufts of white cat fur poking out from the Berber and realized it had been too long since she’d last vacuumed. Her entire house—entire life—was more than a little chaotic right now. As if acting irresponsibly would somehow prove what a lousy parent she would be.

Nick looked around and made a face. “You really need to hire a maid.”

She tossed her purse down on the cluttered coffee table. “I am so not in the mood for a lecture on my domestic shortcomings.”

He had the decency to look apologetic.

“Sorry.” He reached inside his leather bomber jacket and pulled out the test kit. “I guess we should just get this over with, huh?”

“We?” Like he had to go in the bathroom and pee on a stick. Like he had to endure months of torture if it was positive. A guy like him wouldn’t last a week on the nest. He may have been tough, may have been able to bench press a compact car, but five minutes of hard labor and he would be toast.

Her mother had done home births for Zoë’s three youngest siblings and Zoë had had the misfortune of being stuck in the room with her for the last one. She had witnessed the horror. Going through it once seemed like torture enough, but understandable since most women probably didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into. But nine times. That was just crazy.