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“Actually, it is.” She lowered her eyes, toying with the hem of her shirt. “While I had no plan to get pregnant, I walked into that bar with every intention of seducing you.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up. Is that what she thought happened? She seduced him? “Is that so?”
She wouldn’t meet his eye. “It’s dumb really, but I was so mad at you after that interview, I wanted revenge. I wanted a way to prove you wrong. There was obvious chemistry, so I used it to my advantage. I guess the joke was on me.”
Maybe he should have been offended; instead, he felt sorry for her. She was beating herself up over something that wasn’t her fault. “Miranda, you can’t seduce someone who doesn’t want to be seduced. You could have danced naked on the table, but unless I was interested, it wouldn’t have gotten me into bed with you. And maybe you’re forgetting, but I made the first move.” He crossed the kitchen to her, cupping her chin in his hand and lifting her face to him. “Let’s forget about whose fault this is and figure out what we’re going to do.”
She nodded, gratitude in her eyes.
Touching her face brought back the memory of that night in the hotel, right before he kissed her. And since he was this close to doing it again, he let his hand drop and backed away.
“How long have you known?”
“A while. I wanted to give myself a couple of weeks to let it sink in before I told you.”
“And you’re happy?”
“I’ve always wanted children. It was just unexpected.”
He could sympathize.
“How about you?” she asked.
He wasn’t sure what he felt yet. He was still having a hard time wrapping his mind around the concept. He’d always planned on a family, too, just not like this. Looks like now he didn’t have a choice.
“When?” he asked.
“Right around Christmas.”
A Christmas baby.
He was going to be a father.
“Then I guess there’s only one thing we can do,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“We have to get married.”
Miranda had had her share of surprises in the past couple of weeks. The first was when she’d looked at her day planner and realized her period was a week late. The second had been when she’d counted back the days to her night with Zack and realized they’d slept together on what was likely her most fertile time of the month. Her third, and she thought final, surprise came when the doctor called, delivering the results of her blood test.
And none of them came close to the whopper he’d just laid on her.
“If that was a joke, it wasn’t funny,” she told him. Only, he didn’t look as if he were joking. She’d never seen him look so dead serious. Of course, she’d never seen him in anything but a suit and tie, either.
Well, that and naked.
“Do you really think I would joke about something like that?” he asked.
“I don’t know what to think. I don’t really know you, Zack. Which, if you weren’t joking, is a pretty good argument why we shouldn’t get married. I have no objections to you being a part of this baby’s life. I’m relieved that you want to be. I know that if we try we can work out a plan we both can be comfortable with.”
“I don’t think you’re looking at the big picture,” he said, in an infuriatingly patient tone. As though he were addressing a child. Or a moron. Yet somehow he managed not to sound condescending, which was even more frustrating. He was so damned sure of himself. So reasonable.
“That is all I’ve been doing for the past week,” she told him. “I’ve weighed my options. We live in the twenty-first century, where single parenthood is readily accepted.”
“Not for me it isn’t. It’s against everything I believe. I’ve built my career around family values.”
“And I’ve built mine around being a modern, independent woman. Am I just supposed to marry you and throw that all away?”
“A child should grow up with both parents.”
“And our baby will. Just in separate households.”
“If you’re worried about money, I’ll see that you’re always taken care of, no matter what.”
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head and narrowing her eyes at him. He was stepping on very dangerous ground. “Don’t even go there. Don’t think for a minute that you’re going to turn me into Suzie Homemaker. I’ve played that game before and I lost big-time. The only person taking care of me is me.”
“So this is all about your career?” he asked, and she could see his patience slipping. He was getting frustrated. But he still hadn’t so much as raised his voice.
Would he be like her ex-husband? Would he change after they were married? Would he start calling her stupid and useless? Would he compare her to wives of his friends? Things like, “Dave’s wife keeps their house spotless. Why can’t you be more like her?” or “Look how thin Mike’s wife is. Why don’t you lose some weight?”
“Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black,” she told Zack. “Tell me you’re not thinking about the jump in book sales when everyone hears you’ve reformed a man-hating feminist she-cat.”
The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Someone actually called you a man-hating feminist she-cat?”
She shot him a warning look and he wiped the smile from his face. “Saving your career is a lousy reason to get married.”
“And it’s a lousy reason not to.”
“You want a reason why we shouldn’t get married? You don’t love me and I don’t love you. We hardly know each other!”
“How about this for a reason.” He cupped a hand behind her head, threading his fingers through her hair and tilted her face up to his. The same aggressive yet gentle approach he’d used that night in the hotel. She knew what he was going to do, and she knew she should stop him. But as his head lowered, as if she were under some sort of spell, her eyes slipped closed instead. And when his lips touched hers, she went weak all over.
Talk about a pushover. Where was her sense of empowerment? The one she talked about in her book. The one every woman was supposed to have. The God-given right, not to mention responsibility, to speak up and say no.
Or maybe you had to want to say no for that to work.
The kiss went from sweet to passionate in the span of a heartbeat. He tasted like coffee and something sweet, and she was thankful for the breath mint she’d popped in her mouth on the way over from the airport.
He slid one big hand over her backside, pulling her intimately against him, and her brain nearly shut down altogether. She fisted her hands at her sides to keep from touching him.
When he finally pulled away he did it reluctantly, his lips lingering over hers for several seconds, his hands sliding up to her shoulders, then down her arms before he let go and backed away.
“Reason enough?” he asked, his tone deep and lusty.
She attempted a reply, but her voice cracked, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “You know as well as I do that animal attraction isn’t enough to make a marriage work.”
He gave her that grin, the one that managed to be cocky without actually being cocky. “We connected. You can’t deny that.”
She wouldn’t even try to. And she could see he wasn’t going to back down. What did he think—he would kiss and she would melt?
Well, okay, maybe she had melted. That didn’t mean he could snap his fingers and tell her to jump and expect her to ask how high. Not in this lifetime. Not even if he asked politely. “It’s not going to happen, Zack. I don’t want to marry you, and I don’t think you want to marry me, either.”
“I want to be a part of my child’s life.”
“And you will be. We’ll work out a custody arrangement we can both live with.”
“Fatherhood doesn’t begin with the birth. I want the whole nine yards. I want to hear the heartbeat at doctor’s appointments. I want be there for the ultrasound. I want the baby to bond to the sound of my voice. It would be unfair to deny me that.”
He was right. This was as much his child as hers. But he was asking the impossible.
She took a seat at the kitchen table, suddenly feeling exhausted. She thought telling him would be a relief, that it would lift the weight that had been resting on her shoulders. Now she could see that it had only opened the door to more problems that would need solving before she got back to her life. “How can we do that? We live a thousand miles apart.”
“We have only one choice.” He pulled out the chair next to hers and spun it around, straddling the seat, his arms resting on the low back. It was tough to reconcile the memory of the relationship guru she’d sparred with on the radio, with the real man sitting there in jeans, a T-shirt and bare feet. He looked so normal.
“I’m all ears,” she said.
“One of us will have to relocate.”
Of course, that would be the logical solution. And she could just imagine which of them he expected to pull up roots and move halfway across the country.
But she was in the middle of writing a book. She had piles of research and reference books in her home office that she needed access to. She had an obstetrician she loved. There was simply no way she could uproot her entire life right now.
And she was sure that wasn’t what Mr. I-Want-To-Be-A-Part-Of-My-Child’s-Life wanted to hear.
“Since my lecture schedule will frequently be taking me on the road, anyway,” he continued, “it makes sense that I move to Texas.”
Huh?
She was too dumbfounded to speak. She must have heard him wrong.
“You would relocate to be close to me?” she said, to confirm exactly what he was saying.
“Temporarily, yes. At least until the baby is a few months old.”
No way it could be that simple. He had to have something up his sleeve. There had to be some sort of condition to go along with his seemingly generous offer. “What’s the catch?”
He shrugged. “No catch.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m supposed to believe that you’re willing to move across the country to be closer to me and you expect nothing in return?”
“Let me guess. Your ex-husband wasn’t so willing to compromise? Or was it an overbearing father?”
Both, actually, but that was none of his business.
She shot him a look. “Don’t shrink me.”
He reciprocated with one of those cocky, but not really cocky, looks. How did he do that? “I promise not to shrink you, if you promise not to make assumptions based on experiences you’ve had with men who aren’t me.”
Touché. She had to hand it to him, if nothing else he was direct. And fair.
“All I’m asking for, Miranda, is your time. I’d like us to get to know each other. You may be surprised to find that I’m not such a bad guy.”
Maybe that was what she was worried about. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to be tempted. Her husband had seemed like a nice guy, too, and look what a disaster that had turned out to be.
But it would be incredibly unfair to deny him the opportunity to be a part of her pregnancy due to her own feelings of insecurity and self-doubt.
Oh, great, now she was shrinking herself. And she was a lawyer for heaven’s sake!
“Where would you stay?” she asked.
“I’ll find a rental. Preferably one close to your place.”
Her practical side, the one that had lived for five years with a husband who kept her on a strict monthly allowance despite a lucrative law practice, cringed. “Won’t that be expensive?”
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter either way. And why would it? The guy was an empire. He had produced a library of DVDs, written half a dozen books that had become instant bestsellers, and she could just imagine what he made on the lecture circuit filling countless auditoriums to capacity.
The area where she lived was comfortable, but not exactly upscale, which would probably be what he was looking for, but there were developments not far from her that would probably suit him. Complexes with penthouse apartments and luxury condos. And she was only a twenty-minute drive from downtown Dallas. He would definitely find something cushy enough there.
“I’m sure you could find something close by,” she said.
He reached behind him for the pad of paper and pen sitting next to the phone and handed them to her. “Write down your address and I’ll have my assistant look into it. I guess you should probably include your phone number while you’re at it. So I can reach you.”
She was having his baby, and he didn’t even know her phone number. This was too weird. The kind of thing she read about in books or saw on television dramas. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in real life. Especially not to her.
As she jotted the information down she wondered what the heck she was getting herself into. Everything was moving so fast, and felt so…final. She had been hoping he would want to be involved with the baby. Weekend visitation at best. But he wanted to be involved.
She didn’t know if she was ready for this.
She had considered not telling him about the baby, but she didn’t doubt her pregnancy would eventually reach the media. Zack was a smart guy. It would take only a very simple equation for him to determine the baby was his.
And for all her talk of being modern and independent, she still knew right from wrong.
Sure, she could raise the baby alone. She had the financial means. But to deny the child a relationship with its father, and vice versa, wouldn’t be right.
It was a moot point now. She was here and it was a done deal.
She handed the paper back to him. “What are we going to do about the media? I’m assuming you would prefer this not get out.”
“How do you feel about that?” he asked, sounding an awful lot like a shrink.
“I understand. I don’t expect you to jeopardize your reputation for the sake of my feelings. And I’m not exactly looking forward to the media attention, either. I won’t say anything if you don’t.”
“Deal,” he agreed.
“So, when are we talking? I’m guessing soon.”
“As soon as I’m able. When is your next doctor appointment?”
