скачать книгу бесплатно
The Second Time Around
Marie Ferrarella
By the way, did you know you're pregnant?Eight tiny words, but strung together in one sentence…they are destined to destroy life as Laurel Mitchell knows it. For after twenty-five years of wedlock and three grown children, starting over with the diaper-and-formula scene is…inconceivable.Apparently not. Now her sweetly snoozing marriage is frantically adjusting to a most unexpected wake-up call. And to the new man in her life–her husband, Jason. Recently devoted to working long hours and planning the perfect road trip, he's suddenly become impossibly sexy, affectionate and overprotective.And between the tears (hers) and the terror (his) they're waiting for a bundle of joy in pink (yes, pink!) that's already proving life's most unexpected gifts are the best.
“All right, then, what are you upset about?”
“You,” Jason said.
“Me?” He had completely lost her. “What about me?”
He turned away for a moment, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. Searching for words.
“Look, I don’t want to have to do without you.”
Was that it? He was afraid of losing his maid? Over the years she’d taken a relatively self-sufficient man and gotten him used to having everything done for him.
“I’ll still do everything I’ve always done,” she assured him, trying hard not to let her annoyance show. “Get up, throw up and move on. Your meals will still be made, most likely on time, you—”
“I don’t want to have to do without you,” Jason repeated, saying the words with more feeling. “If something happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to go on.”
For one of the very few times in her life, Laurel found herself truly speechless.
Marie Ferrarella
wrote her very first story at age eleven on an old manual Remington typewriter her mother bought for her for seventeen dollars at a pawn shop. The keys stuck and she had to pound on them in order to produce anything. The instruments of production have changed, but she’s been pounding on keys ever since. To date, she’s written over 150 novels, and there appears to be no end in sight. As long as there are keyboards and readers, she intends to go on writing until the day she meets the Big Editor in the Sky.
The Second Time Around
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
From the Author
Dear Reader,
Considering that I never liked playing with dolls, I was very surprised to discover that I loved being a mother. Loved the whole concept, from diapers to midnight feedings to reading bedtime stories and even to homework-helping at the last possible minute. I was blessed with two children, a girl and then a boy. Sadly, although they’ll always be my children, they are not little people anymore. They grew up (it was the daily watering that did it). I miss little fingers wrapped around mine, miss little bottoms nestled on my lap (my dog still sits on my lap, but it’s not the same).
And I have to admit, if it wouldn’t send my husband into something akin to anaphylactic shock, I would love to have another baby, even though both my kids have graduated college. I know a lot more now (or so I tell myself) and I would be a much more self-assured mother than the one who called the hospital hotline in a panic at two in the morning because her one-year-old was coughing.
But since I can’t have another short person of my own, I decided it might be fun to write a story about a couple who thought they had the rest of their lives completely planned and knew what was coming around every corner—only to find themselves pregnant. It’s not as upsetting a situation as you might think. After all, they don’t call it the miracle of birth for nothing.
As always, I wish you love and I thank you for reading.
Marie Ferrarella
To Dr. Anne Lai, for helping Rocky
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 1
If there was anything she looked forward to less than her annual visit to her gynecologist, Laurel Mitchell didn’t know what it was.
It wasn’t that her doctor was heavy-handed with the examination or made her uncomfortable. On the contrary, Dr. Rachel Kilpatrick, the same doctor who had seen her through all three of pregnancies, had a gentle touch and a fantastic bedside manner. And she was a kind, understanding woman to boot, someone she could talk to about anything that bothered her. Rachel Kilpatrick was not the kind of doctor who just roller-skated by, taking pulses and collecting fees. She genuinely cared for her patients.
No, it wasn’t Dr. Kilpatrick that she minded. What she found upsetting was the whole awful experience: sitting there in a cool room, wearing a vest that was made out of thin tissue paper with what could have passed as an extralarge paper towel draped around her lower torso. That was what she found so off-putting.
That and the stirrups.
Whose idea were they, anyway? Necessary or not, they made her think of something two steps removed from a torture rack from the Spanish Inquisition.
But she endured it all like a good little soldier. Because that was what women were supposed to do once a year: troop in, strip down and lie there, thinking of other things while cold steel instruments were inserted in places women of her grandmother’s generation never talked about.
Finally the probing and the scratching were over. Dr. Kilpatrick removed the instruments and put the prize she’d secured between two glass lab slides, then placed that on the side counter. Laurel lost no time in dismounting from the stirrups and sitting up. She tried her best to pull her dignity to her and ignore the goose bumps forming on her flesh from the room’s cold temperature.
When she raised her eyes to Dr. Kilpatrick’s face, she saw that her gynecologist was frowning.
Not a good sign, Laurel thought. The queasiness in her stomach increased, reminding her that the cereal she’d had for breakfast was not resting well. But then lately, very little had. She chalked it up to stress and told herself it would pass.
Dr. Kilpatrick pushed the stool she’d been sitting on back into the corner. She held Laurel’s file against her chest and moved closer to the examination table, and to Laurel.
Her eyes were kind as she asked, “How have you been feeling lately, Laurel?”
Laurel bit back a flippant answer. Whenever she was nervous, she tended to make jokes, a habit that drove her husband, Jason, and her sons, crazy. This time, she shrugged.
“Okay, I guess. A little run-down but that’s to be expected. I’m not twenty anymore.” Her suspicions began to multiply, conjuring up awful images. Her neighbor, Alexis Curtis, had been feeling run-down and she was diagnosed with cancer. The chemo treatments had made her chestnut hair fall out.
Laurel sat up straighter, drawing her shoulders back. “Why? Is something wrong? Tell me if something’s wrong,” she requested, hoping that wasn’t a tremor she heard in her voice. “I can take it.” She scrutinized her doctor’s face, trying to uncover what the woman was thinking.
Dr. Kilpatrick took in a slow breath, as if bracing herself to rip a Band-Aid from her patient’s arm. “Well, Laurel, as they used to say in the old days, you’re with child.”
“With child,” Laurel repeated, dazed. Numbed. Confused. She cocked her head, as if that would somehow shift everything in her head and make her better understand the words. “Whose child?”
Dr. Kilpatrick smiled, amused. “Your child, I’d imagine.”
Laurel heard the words clearly, but somehow, they just didn’t seem to register. She shook her head, confused. “I’m not getting this.”
An almost wicked smile curved the physician’s lips. “Apparently, you are, or at least did.” Leaning over, Dr. Kilpatrick placed her hand over Laurel’s. “Laurel, you’re pregnant.”
Laurel thought it was a miracle that she didn’t swallow her tongue from the shock. But then, this was a joke, right? Some bizarre April Fool’s prank just a couple weeks shy of its mark, since it was the middle of April. The doctor was apparently running behind in her attempt at humor.
Very emphatically, Laurel shook her head, never taking her eyes off Dr. Kilpatrick’s face. “No, I’m not.”
“You just left a specimen of your urine before the exam.” Dr. Kilpatrick flipped over a page to show her the results the nurse had gotten. “The test says you’re pregnant. Tests don’t lie.”
Again, Laurel shook her head, this time even more adamantly, refusing to accept this docilely. There was a mistake. This was all wrong. She was exhausted, she had the flu, maybe even walking pneumonia. There was a whole list of possibilities for her condition that didn’t have the word “baby” attached to it.
“Test me again,” Laurel pleaded. “I need a do-over. I was always careless on tests, always got the wrong answer the first time around.” She placed her hand on the doctor’s arm. “Please.”
“I don’t have to take another sample from you, Laurel,” Dr. Kilpatrick told her softly. “Your color’s changed.”
Laurel pressed her hand against her cheeks. Was she running a fever? Well, small wonder. The doctor had just scared her to death. “My color?”
The doctor’s smile turned into a broad grin. “Not there.” She indicated Laurel’s face. “There.” With a nod of her head, Dr. Kilpatrick glanced toward the blue “paper towel” that was inadequately pooled about her patient’s thighs, indicating the area she was referring to.
Laurel shifted uncomfortably, as if she could actually feel what the doctor was talking about. “It could still be a mistake.”
There was sympathy on the doctor’s face. “Could be,” she allowed skeptically. “But it’s really highly doubtful.”
Laurel blew out a breath. “Pregnant,” she said, still unable to absorb the implications behind the eight-letter word. Still holding it at bay with the last ounce of her strength.
The expression on Rachel Kilpatrick’s face was pure sympathy. And perhaps, just a touch of envy. “Yes.”
“Me.”
The doctor lifted her shoulders, then let them drop. “You’re the one on the examination table.”
Laurel laughed shortly. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t possibly be pregnant. She raised her eyes to meet the doctor’s. “I’ll gladly switch with you.”
“Laurel, this is a wonderful thing.” The doctor gave her hand another warm squeeze. “A miracle.”
Miracles were things that you hoped for, prayed for, Laurel thought haplessly. Miracles were things that happened despite impossible odds because you wanted them to. Never in her wildest dreams had she ever wanted to be pregnant at forty-five.
