Kathleen O'Brien - Everything but the Baby

Next to this guy, Lincoln would look about as sexy as Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Suddenly, the stranger flicked his wrist and let the knife fly. It zipped through the air and buried itself with a thunk into Lincoln’s ripe watermelon body, just above the cute raisin belly button. A drizzle of pale pink juice seeped out around the blade.

“Got him!” Bitsy applauded. “Well done!”

He bowed sardonically. “Thanks, but I was actually aiming for the heart. Guess I’d better not quit my day job.”

Allison tilted her head and felt her pearl tiara slip sideways. Though she’d taken off her veil an hour ago, the silly crown was embedded under an inch of teased hair, so she’d left it on.

She reached up to straighten it, aware that she looked ridiculous. A wannabe princess who couldn’t find anyone to play happily-ever-after with. “And what exactly is your day job? There can’t be enough money in hating Lincoln Gray to make it a full-time career.”

“Probably not.” He smiled, and the sharply carved bow of his upper lip softened, hinting that he might have interesting layers beneath the comic-hero facade. “There are too many people who’d be willing to hate Lincoln Gray for free.”

“There are? Who?”

Bitsy, who was rocking the knife blade out of the watermelon, smiled over her shoulder and raised her hand. “Me!”

“Other than my best friends,” Allison said. “Look, maybe you’d better get straight to the point Mr….? I don’t think you told us your name. Why are you here? Did you know this was going to happen?” A horrible thought presented itself. “Are you trying to tell me that Lincoln has done this before?”

“I’m Mark Travers. I’m here because my private detective told me that Lincoln Gray would be here. I did not know this was going to happen. But, yes, he’s done this before. Sort of.”

She felt a little woozy. She put her hand on one of the empty tables and tried to focus on Mark Travers’s face, which seemed to be fading in and out. “Sort of?”

“Yeah. He’s done the disappearing thing. But the last time he vanished, it was after the wedding. One month after, to be exact.”

She sank onto one of the chairs. “Lincoln has been married before?”

“Not has been,” Mark Travers corrected. “Is.”

“Is…”

“Is. Present tense. Is currently, legally married. To my sister.”

FOUR HOURS LATER, Mark Travers entered the downtown Boston Lullabies with a grim lack of enthusiasm, cursing the chivalrous impulse that had made him agree to any rendezvous poor, jilted Allison Cabot suggested.

He understood completely her need to get out of that fairy-tale wedding dress before she discussed the details of her fiancé’s treachery. It even made sense that she’d wanted to meet here, at the flagship store of her successful string of baby boutiques, because this was obviously where she felt most powerful.

However, Lullabies was every bit the estrogen explosion he’d expected. Hundreds of ornate, overpriced cribs, tinkling mobiles and sickeningly cute booties being stroked moronically by pregnant women. Even the walls frothed with sweetness, as if the floor had thrown off stuffed ducks and bunnies the way a cotton-candy machine throws off pink sugar.

He turned sideways to avoid a woman who was so pregnant she definitely needed a wider aisle and just might, if he bumped her too hard, need an ambulance. Unfortunately, that caused him to knock into a three-foot-high plush lamb that immediately began to make weird whooshing noises. Emits Womblike Sounds, the tag on the lamb’s tail said. Mark dug around for the off button, but apparently the damn thing was motion activated.

Hell. He set his jaw and strode toward the staircase that led to the second-floor loft, where Allison had said her offices were located. The stairs were carpeted in pink frogs; butterflies dangled from the banister rails. The public-relations professional in him admired the imaginative decor, but he’d still rather have met her at the city dump.

He didn’t do babies and he didn’t do women who wanted to do babies.

He saw Allison even before he reached the top. The front wall of her office was all glass, so that she could survey her sugarplum kingdom and monitor her subjects, the sweet-faced salesgirls who hovered around the pregnant women like handmaidens.

She was watching him now as he ascended. She wore a severely tailored suit and her hair no longer floated in an auburn cloud around her shoulders. He couldn’t read her expression—the glass was mottled with reflections of rainbows with happy hands and moons wearing nightcaps. He was struck, though, by how completely still her stance was, rigid and cold, the antithesis of the warm fuzzy chaos below her. She looked like a mannequin that had wandered away from the Armani store across the street.

When he hit the last step, she met him at the door.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. She extended her hand and when he took it he could tell it was stiff, too. He glanced at her left hand and saw that she’d substituted a small ruby ring for the diamonds that should have been there.

“I needed to be at the office,” she went on, clearly just talking to fill the space. “I had a lot of things to catch up on. Preparations for the wedding ate up a lot of my time for the past several weeks.”

Thank goodness the pink frothing had stopped at the door of the office, replaced by calming beige and brown with blue accents. He felt his guts relax.

“No problem.”

She made her way to the chair behind her desk while he took the seat she offered him, its back to the window. He crossed his legs and waited for her to begin the questions she must be burning to ask.

He decided not to mention how absurd her opening statement had been. A lot to catch up on? If Lincoln Gray had shown up today, she would still have been over at the Revere, dancing and eating cake. And then, according to his P.I., she would have spent the next two weeks in Dublin making love and buying extravagant presents for her insatiable new husband.

But why rub it in? Let her save a little face.

“You were going to tell me about your sister.” She put a hand up to her hair, checking the braid that dove straight as an arrow down her back. It was so tight he wondered if it made her temples ache.

“Yes. My sister, Tracy. Well, the story is sad but simple. She’s five years older than I am. Last year, while I was out of the country, she met Lincoln Gray at a local fund-raiser. Apparently he swept her off her feet, because she married him two weeks later, without a prenup. A month after that, he disappeared. So did a lot of her money.”

Her lips parted and her brows tightened. She met his gaze for a few seconds, but as she took in the full implications of his speech, her eyes darkened.

She squared off some papers on her desk. Finally, she looked up, and her eyes were less revealing.

“Look, Mr. Travers. It’s not that I think you’re lying—”

“Call me Mark. After all, we were nearly in-laws.” He smiled. “Or something.”

She clearly didn’t like the joke. But too bad. This whole thing was a classic bedroom farce, and she now had a leading role. So did he. And Tracy. They all just had to get used to it.

“Mark,” she amended politely but without warmth. “I do have to tell you that I find it…difficult to believe that Lincoln—that he would really—”

“I thought you might.” He opened his jacket and pulled a sheaf of legal papers from his breast pocket. “I brought these, to help make it more concrete.”

She took the papers and read them carefully, her lips pursed as if she needed to double-check every word for some kind of trick. She kept her back ramrod straight and he could see under the desk that her knees were locked, her brown pumps lined up, toes and heels touching in military precision.