Leslie Kelly - Here Comes Trouble

He somehow didn’t think she’d mind. He had the feeling that despite her angelic looks, this woman was not the sweet type. Which was good. Max didn’t much care for sweet girls. Not when bad ones were so much more…entertaining.

“Well,” she replied, “I guess it’s a good thing you’re not a Jason or a Freddy, then, or my guts might be hanging from a tree back in the woods right about now. Because my virginity was history long before Jason killed his hundredth victim.”

Sassy comeback. Damn, he really liked that. On top of everything else he already liked about this stranger, who’d popped into his mind several times the night before when he’d been trying to sleep. “Considering he probably hit a hundred by the second movie, I somehow doubt that. You would’ve been in preschool.”

“Thousandth victim, then. At least five movies ago.”

“Okay.” Since they were now discussing her virginity—Lord have mercy on his wicked soul for those mental images—he figured introductions might be good. “What’s your name, anyway? We never did the how-do-you-do stuff. Some self-defense expert you are.”

“It’s Sabrina. Sabrina Cavanaugh.”

He stuck his hand out. “Mine’s Michael. Michael Myers.”

She rolled her eyes, instantly recognizing the name of the psycho from the Halloween movies. Smiling, Max opened his mouth to offer his real name, but before he could, Sabrina—pretty Sabrina—cut him off with a surprised gasp.

“Oh, my God.”

Wonderful. The woman had obviously seen Hell House. Sighing, Max steeled himself for her obvious dismay when she realized just how bad it was. She’d run as fast as she could when she saw the kind of accommodations the owner of this crazy little town would get to live in.

And there was more. He simply couldn’t wait until she met Mortimer.

ASIDE FROM GETTING lots of attention and feeling the baby moving around inside her, being pregnant sucked the big one. Not that Alicia Cavanaugh knew much about sucking, big ones or little ones…her single sexual relationship had been short-lived and pretty straightforward. Vanilla. None of the icky stuff.

Just a three-week game of wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and here’s an up-yours to your sister, too. That pretty much described her one and only grown-up romance with Peter “the Prick” Prescott, who’d screwed her over but good, all to screw over her big sister, Sabrina.

Frankly, Peter the Prickface was the reason Allie was feeling especially yucky today. Well, Peter and the extra twenty pounds sitting squarely on her bladder. And the…other stuff.

It was beyond awful. Twenty years old and she had stretch marks and hemorrhoids. Unbe-freaking-lievable.

All of which Peter had provided. God, she wanted to kill him, especially after last night.

“It’s okay, Lumpy, he was just being a jerk. He didn’t mean it.” She didn’t know who she was trying harder to convince—the lump wriggling around on her kidneys, or herself.

He couldn’t have meant it. Could not seriously be considering fighting her for custody of this baby once he or she was born.

“Never in a million years,” she muttered as she scoured Sabrina’s refrigerator, dying for something chocolate. It was nearly noon and any reasonable person would assume that a pregnant woman would want chocolate for lunch on occasion. But was there any to be found? Nooooo.

No chocolate. Not even any chocolate sauce lurking behind the nauseating fresh fruits and vegetables and high-protein shakes.

“My kingdom for a Yoo-hoo,” she whispered, staring at all the healthy junk her sister had stocked up on before leaving town yesterday. “Bailing out, more like it,” she added as she slammed the door shut, feeling tears well up in her eyes.

She knew it was stupid to feel this way. Sabrina hadn’t bailed, she had a book expo to go to, a business trip. Her sister hadn’t wanted to leave Allie alone this close to her due date. But she’d had no choice. Now that she was supporting not only herself but her freeloading, knocked-up sibling, Sabrina had to work extra hard.

She probably hated Allie.

A fat salty tear fell out of her eye, slid down her face and landed on her big belly. Quickly wiping it off, she blinked a few times, not wanting the baby to know she was crying. Again. Poor little thing might get a complex before he was ever born, thinking his mommy was a basket case who didn’t love him.

“I do,” she whispered. “And Aunt Sabrina loves you, too. She loves both of us.”

In her heart, she knew her sister didn’t resent her, but her whacked-out hormones had been calling the shots for a good seven months now. So Allie couldn’t stop the tears.

She cried over being a burden to Sabrina.

Over being a single parent.

Over the scene with Peter the Prick-face.

Over the birthday coming up next month that would include no card from her younger sister or brother, no small bottle of cologne from her mother. No sermon disguised as a birthday greeting from her grandfather. No word from home at all.

Most of all she cried over the major screwup she’d made of her life.

Peter made it…

“No,” she said, her voice firm, her tears drying as quickly as they’d burst forth.

Peter had used her and hurt her, but he hadn’t forced her to open her legs and say aah. Or to trust him with the birth control issue. That was all on Allie’s shoulders. And, oh, they felt mighty small these days.

“I need to tell Sabrina that we ran into him,” she whispered. She was still cursing her decision to take the bus out to an upscale mall last night to window-shop for cute baby clothes she could never afford. Department store jammies were out of the question. Her baby was starting out life as a true American, clothed by Wal-Mart from head to toe.

“Should’ve just gone to the secondhand shop,” she muttered, knowing she never would have run into him if she had. Him…the snob who’d never be caught dead in a non-designer suit. The man she’d hoped to never see again. Her ex. Her sister’s ex. The six-foot-tall pile of shit in Versace known as Peter Prescott.

Sabrina’s gonna kill me.

Disgusted by the very thought of Peter ever entering their lives again, Sabrina had warned her to stay close to home. But figuring Peter was long gone, Allie hadn’t seen the harm in going out for a little while. The apartment was too quiet without Sabrina in it, talking about how adorable the baby would be and what a great job Allie would do as a mother.

She’d thought her sister was being overprotective about Peter. Because once he’d quit his job at the publishing house where he’d worked with Sabrina—quit because of some big hush-hush scandal her sister wouldn’t tell her about—Peter had supposedly left town. Sabrina figured he’d gone to New York. Allie had hoped he’d gone to a back alley in Tijuana and been jumped by some horny drug traffickers who’d kidnapped him and put him to work in a slave labor camp picking corn and cleaning toilets with his tongue.

Or something like that.

But, no, apparently not. Because he was here, in Philadelphia. So either he’d never really left, or he’d come back with his tail between his legs.

Whatever the case, the cat was out of the bag—or more appropriately, the pregnant belly was out of the maternity smock.

Remembering the initial shock on his face when he’d seen her—all of her—she couldn’t prevent a small stab of righteous pleasure. But because her own heart had tumbled at the sight of him, she hadn’t been able to enjoy his obvious dismay.

Allie wished it hadn’t hurt to see his handsome face and experience that familiar rush of want she’d felt from the minute she’d met him on campus at Tyler College. Back when she’d had no idea the man had, until recently, been her sister’s colleague—and boyfriend—and was carrying a grudge wider than an elephant’s butt.