Because Of The Baby

Beside him Melissa stared thoughtfully out the window.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, wanting distraction from his own ruminations.

“Barbara. I didn’t realize we were so obvious. No one noticed anything before.”

“Last summer, you mean.” No one had noticed anything different between them after they’d made love.

She nodded.

So now they were no longer able to act normal together—the way they had for months.

They were having a baby. Unlike the single night they’d shared, this wasn’t a discrete event that could ever be finished, ever be ignored. The shape of Melissa’s body would soon reveal what was going on inside her. In the spring she would give birth. And their child would remain in their lives.

The knowledge had to affect their behavior. If Barbara had perceived a change, others might, too.

“Maybe my eyes were red,” she said. “Maybe that’s what caught Barbara’s attention. She could tell I’d been crying.”

“I don’t think so,” Kyle said. “Your eyes looked fine…You still think we should get hitched?”

She nodded. “You?”

“Nothing’s changed in the past hour or two. I still can’t see it.”

“Not to mention you’re a confirmed bachelor.”

“Not to mention that.”

He couldn’t believe Melissa had come up with the idea. She’d always been even more terrified of marriage and having a family than he was.

Even more self-protective.

And he didn’t blame her. Who wouldn’t be after what she’d gone through? The accident, losing her mother and brother, surviving when they hadn’t. And afterward her father’s grief, his longing to kill himself. Kyle didn’t know how Melissa had found out about it—he hadn’t had the heart to ask—but he’d often thought about what that knowledge would do to a kid.

His own experience with suicide made it easy for him to imagine.

And now Melissa worked in an E.R. Not a place to let her forget about human tragedy—or make her give up her emotional defenses.

Kyle frowned as he stared at the road in front of them. Perhaps her idea wasn’t so surprising after all, he told himself.

A marriage of convenience, she’d called it. Not a regular one. A much less messy kind of partnership. No unruly emotions, no romantic love to complicate the arrangement.

Oh, Mel. Only you.