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“You said you had a job.” Back in his hotel room, when he’d been sober, and the harsh lights of the hotel bathroom had ripped the dream away, he’d accused her of marrying a stranger for money. She’d told him to keep his damn money and that maybe there was room for it wherever he stored his ego. She’d said she had a job and didn’t need to have sex in exchange for handouts.
“I lost it.” She kept her hands on her stomach, the twisting of her fingers another sign of her nerves. “I will find another—I was hoping to find one in Chicago—but until then, I need health insurance. The baby needs health insurance. I have no other place to go.”
Karl did some quick math in his head. They still had four days to get Vivian and the baby on his health insurance. “I’ll need the marriage certificate.”
“Just like that?”
“Double,” the bird squeaked, then whistled.
“Do you want health insurance?” At one time in the distant past, he’d thought he understood women. Exposure had cured him of such idiotic thinking.
“Yes, but, you didn’t say so much as ‘hi’ to me downstairs. You accuse me of trying to sell you a pig in a poke, insinuating I’m some kind of slut who bangs tourists for fun, but when I say I need health insurance for a baby you don’t believe is yours, you say ‘sure’?”
“Even if that baby isn’t mine, you should have insurance while you’re pregnant. And you are my wife. If the baby is mine, I can provide it with health insurance and child support. If it’s not mine, I can provide it with health insurance until you are able to provide for it yourself. I won’t force a fetus to get less care than I can provide because I don’t trust its mother.”
“I can get a DNA test done while pregnant, as early as the ninth week.”
“Where are you staying?”
She turned her head to look out the windows of his apartment, the first time she’d not been willing to meet his eyes since he had walked into the lobby of his building. “I was hoping to stay here.”
“You don’t have another place to go?”
She faced him again, the pertness of her chin softened by her full, pale pink lips. How had he not remembered the lushness of her lips? “I have ten dollars, three suitcases and a parrot to my name.”
“Family?”
“They’re not available.”
When he’d considered her presence punishment for his behavior, he’d lacked the imagination to envision how the situation could get worse. If mother and child needed medical care, they also needed a roof over their heads. Not to mention the little bird she called a parrot. Chicago had enough wild parakeets without him adding to the population.
“What did you do in Las Vegas?”
“I wasn’t a prostitute.”
Any twinge of guilt he’d felt over accusing her of that the morning he’d woken up married to a stranger had long since vanished. Three weeks ago he’d hurled accusations at her, but he hadn’t asked what she actually did. He wasn’t going to ask more than once now. If he was silent long enough, she would share. She needed a place to stay and didn’t know him well enough to know he’d offer her a bed regardless.
She blinked first. “I was a table dealer. Craps, blackjack, roulette.”
God, how much had he had to drink to take her up to his room? At least she wasn’t a stripper.
“At Middle Kingdom?” His assistant had booked him a room at the Chinese-themed resort instead of the conference hotel. Greta had thought it would be good for him to have a minivacation—her words. But he’d ignored the brochures about the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon she’d tucked into his work papers in favor of overpriced hotel whiskey. If he’d listened to Greta, he would’ve come back with a couple of postcards instead of a wife.
Though postcards wouldn’t have looked nearly as pretty sitting on his couch in a pink cable-knit sweater and cowboy boots.
Thoughts like that had prompted him to engage Vivian in conversation, to fall under the spell of her mysterious smile and be hypnotized by the rise and fall of her breasts when she breathed. If all he’d done was invite her up to his room, the night in Las Vegas would make more sense, but he’d been thinking about marriage and families, and in his drunken haze had decided he wanted to wake up with her warm skin pressed against his for the rest of his life.
Reality had intruded the next morning and, almost a month later, was sitting on his couch.
“And you’re not working there anymore because...”
“My supervisor disagreed with a decision I made.”
“Was I your decision?” She wouldn’t have been the first woman unfairly fired because of sex, and she wouldn’t be the last.
She turned her head to look out the windows again. An effective nonanswer, which he let go for now. She was—the fetus was—his responsibility for another eight months. He’d get his answer eventually.
“I have a guest bedroom. You can sleep there for now.”
She closed her eyes, the light pink of her eye shadow sparkling in the lamplight, and exhaled. The wool of her sweater must be stiffer than it looked, because even though she went boneless with relief, she didn’t sink into the back of the couch. “Thank you.”
“Have you eaten dinner?”
“I’m fine.”
He took that as a no and didn’t ask how long it had been since she’d eaten. The worry lines at the corners of her eyes said it had been too long. “What do you like?”
“I’m fine,” she said again, as though hoping if she said it enough times he would believe her. Or maybe she hoped to believe it herself.
Karl stood and walked over to the small table in his entryway. He riffled through the menus in the drawer until he found the one he was looking for, then he handed it to Vivian. “Pick out what you want.”
She looked up at him, one thin black eyebrow raised. “Chinese?”
He ignored the uncomfortable reference. “They have the fastest delivery.”
“Buddha’s vegetable delight. Brown rice, please.”
“Soup? Egg rolls?”
Her stomach growled, betraying the casual look on her face and making a lie of her insistence of being “fine.” How long had those ten dollars been all she had to her name? Had she had no savings? All things he could learn tomorrow, after she’d eaten and had a good night’s sleep. He called in her order and his, adding enough extra food to give them leftovers for days. He didn’t know if she could cook, and he sure as hell didn’t. If not for takeout, the baby might starve.
“Let’s get your bags put in the guest room.”
* * *
FOR ALL ITS personality, the guest room might have been in a hotel. There was less glass and more wood than in the living room, but that was because the single piece of furniture in the room was a large, wooden platform bed with a built-in nightstand. The bedspread wasn’t white or black, so Karl must at least know color existed, but the geometric pattern and primary colors didn’t invite Vivian to snuggle. Still no curtains. What did this man have against curtains?
“There’s a dresser in the closet.”
“Thank you.” Thank you for acknowledging I might be here longer than just tonight. “Is there something I can put Xìnyùn’s cage on?”
“Who?”
“The parrot’s name is Xìnyùn. It means luck in Chinese.”
He eyed the cage sitting on the floor. Xìnyùn eyed him back nervously. “Are you sure it doesn’t mean bad luck?”
She picked the cage up off the floor and opened the closet doors to find the dresser to set the cage on. Parakeets didn’t like humans to loom over them and Karl loomed as naturally as most people breathed.
“Double,” Xìnyùn whistled in approval.
She was pregnant, unemployed and homeless. Her father had fallen off the face of the planet and taken her life savings with him. Xìnyùn, at least, was happy to be off the floor. “At this point, I’m not sure of anything.”
He nodded, left the room for a moment and returned with a small table. “Here’s a table for the bird.” He had his hand on the doorknob, about to leave the room, when he turned back to face her, his eyes in shadow and his expression unreadable. “How did you get to Chicago?”
“I drove.” As her gas gauge edged toward empty and the ten dollars felt lighter and lighter in her pocket, she’d turned the dial on her radio until she found a country music station and Carrie Underwood singing “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” She hadn’t run out of gas, even if she had coasted into Chicago on wishes and a prayer.
“Where’s your car?”
She described where it was parked.
“Give me your keys and I’ll move it into the garage. I’ll leave money for dinner with the doorman and bring it up when I return.” Without so much as a goodbye, he closed the door, leaving her alone with the skyline.
Inviting or not, all she wanted to do was curl up on the bed and sleep until the nightmare of her life was over and she woke up single, employed and not pregnant. Impossibilities. Time didn’t travel backward.
She picked up one suitcase and hefted it over to the closet, which—except for the dresser and some hangers—was completely empty. Karl didn’t accumulate crap. Or, if he did, he didn’t store it in the closet of his guest bedroom. The room gave her nothing to judge her husband by, other than that his decorating sense was as cold as his hands and as lacking in expression as his face.
No, she was being unfair. She opened a small drawer and shoved underwear in. He’d invited her—a near stranger, no matter that the marriage certificate said otherwise—to stay in his home. He was moving her car and buying her dinner. And the morning she’d woken up naked in a hotel room with him calling her Vivian Milek and asking her if she was a prostitute, he’d handed her a cup of coffee and gotten her a robe.
Maybe he wasn’t as unfeeling as his language and his composure made him seem.
She tossed some hangers on the bed and unpacked the rest of her clothes. When she was finished, she turned back to the other suitcase on the floor. Even if she’d wanted to unpack her mementoes, there wasn’t a flat surface in the room to hold them. She shoved the last suitcase, without bothering to open it, into the closet and shut the door on her past.
Too melodramatic, Vivian. You just don’t want it to look like you’re moving in.
CHAPTER TWO
KARL RETURNED TO the apartment later than he’d planned. Her little convertible had been easy enough to find. It’d been parked exactly where she’d said it would be and the Nevada plates gave away that it was hers. So had the pile of fast food containers on the floor of the passenger side. The blankets and pillows in the backseat had been a surprise. As had the empty gas tank. He’d thrown the trash away when he’d filled up her tank. The blankets and pillows he’d left in the backseat, though he’d left them folded rather than in a heap.
Riding up the elevator with bags of Chinese food and a growing sense of unease, he prepared to face his wife.
Vivian had set the table he never used with the place mats, white cotton napkins and flatware he also never used. Jessica, his ex-wife, had bought them. She hadn’t taken them with her when they’d divorced. Neither had she taken the apartment nor the BMW. All were status symbols he was certain she’d considered more important than their marriage, but not important enough to possess after the divorce was final. An indication, he’d felt when he’d signed the divorce papers, of the low regard in which she had held their marriage.
Time allowed him to be more generous with his reflections. Marriage to him hadn’t given Jessica anything she’d really wanted, so why keep the trappings? Leaving the flatware, china and linens in the apartment with her ex-husband, she was free to start fresh.
He wondered if Vivian had been married before. Did she have an apartment, friends or a book club? Why had she estranged herself from her life to drive halfway across the country in search of an unknown husband? After setting the bags of food on the counter, he looked around the room for her. He could learn the answers to his questions later. Eventually, people always told him the information he wanted.
Just as he determined that the living room was empty, he noticed Vivian leaning against the rail on his terrace, looking north over the skyline of Chicago. With the room lit up against the dark night sky, Karl could only make out contours of her slim body. When he turned off the lights in the living room, her form gained substance. She reached up with her arm, pulling her hair off her neck and over her shoulder, exposing skin to the cold.
The night they’d spent together existed in a dream world, but his memories of the morning after were clear and sharp. He remembered waking up to find her sleeping, her black hair spread across the pillow and her neck exposed. He remembered looking at the knobs of her spine as they trailed from her nape down her back and under the covers. How kissable those knobs had looked. But then he’d gotten out of the bed to make coffee, found the marriage certificate and any thought of kissing her neck was gone.
Stepping outside into the cold pushed away those memories. They were married, she was in Chicago, and kissing the slim line of her neck had never been further away from possible. “Do you have a winter coat?”
She was standing outside in jeans, her sweater and pink argyle socks. “I’m not cold.”
Even in the hazy moonlight he could see goose bumps dotting her neck, but she didn’t shiver or tuck her hands around her body for warmth.
“I bought the apartment for this view,” he said, folding his arms on the railing of the terrace and leaning forward to look out over the city with her.
“What are the names of some of the buildings?”
He pointed out the Aon Center and Smurfit-Stone Building. “If you’re still here in the summer, maybe you can go on an architecture boat tour. Or they have walking tours year-round.”
“You don’t have curtains.”
“No.” Removing the curtains was one of the few changes he’d made when Jessica had moved out.
“Not even in your bedroom?”
“I value openness.”
“You should come west.”
“I’ve been to Vegas.” He slid closer to her on the terrace. Not so close that their arms touched, but close enough to feel her presence. She still smelled like jasmine.
“Not Vegas. Vegas is the flashy west. I mean southern Idaho, where you can see for miles in every direction and there’s nothing but sky and canyons.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“I graduated high school in Jackpot, Nevada. It’s right across the border.”
He’d married a blackjack dealer from a town called Jackpot. The world had an unfortunate sense of humor. “It would’ve been a shorter drive from Vegas to Jackpot.”
She turned her head to the side to look at him, the corners of her mouth turned up in a mysterious smile. “Shorter, yes, but there’s nothing for me in Jackpot. Plus, it would be wrong not to let you know you’re going to be a father.”
“A phone call would’ve sufficed.”
“Would you want to learn that you’re going to be a father with a phone call from a stranger?” She didn’t slip again and admit to not being able to go home, as she had when they’d been talking in the living room.
He didn’t have an answer to that question. If asked this morning, he would’ve said yes. Now, standing next to Vivian on his terrace, looking at the lights sparkle across Grant Park and smelling her jasmine perfume, he wasn’t so sure. Her neck was even more kissable up close.
“Dinner’s getting cold.” He pushed off the railing and walked back into the apartment, not looking to see if she followed.
* * *
KARL WASN’T MUCH for words, Vivian thought, as she picked up the plates after dinner. They were strangers, sure, but they were married strangers who were having a child together. Even after they finalized the divorce, they would still have a child to raise together. The least they could do during the next eight months was to get to know each other.
But based on his terse responses over dinner, he didn’t agree. She heaped the utensils on the stacked plates and took them into the kitchen. When she turned, he had followed with the cups and trash.
“I’ll get those.” She took the glasses from his hand and loaded them into the dishwasher. “Don’t worry about the plates,” she said when he started rinsing them. “Go sit down. I’ll clean up.”
“I’m not letting you stay here so you can clean up after me.” He didn’t stop rinsing the plates, but did let her load them into the dishwasher. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves before turning on the water, and light brown hair dusted his forearms.
She blinked, uncomfortable after catching herself staring at his arms. The plates clinked against one another as she used a little too much force to close the dishwasher.
“I know, but...” She didn’t want to finish that statement.
“But?”
