Jessie's Expecting

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She wouldn’t believe him for one thing, and, for another, he couldn’t blame her. He’d made mistakes. He’d made some real whoppers. And now he’d gotten her pregnant—not a solo exercise by any stretch of the imagination—but certainly a result Jessica, the born career woman, couldn’t be doing handsprings about, overjoyed.

So, without telling her he’d be there for her, without asking her to marry him, without so much as hinting that he knew she was pregnant, he was here, in Ocean City, without a plan, without a prayer, and with only his stupid, apologetic speech to protect him.

He might as well be going into battle carrying an anchor.

Is anybody else feeling some sort of excitement in the pit of their bellies? Something’s coming. Someone’s coming. Something’s about to change.

Maybe everything is about to change.

And I’m feeling good, feeling really good. Must be some good stuff coming at me now, something sweet and cool that seems to be making Mom’s belly happy. Wish I could taste it.

She’s doing all the right things. Eating a lot, sleeping a lot. Getting plenty of exercise and fresh air. But still crying too much, and now even talking to herself.

She should talk to me. I am here, right? Yeah, she should be talking to me. I could tell her. Everything is going to be all right. She’ll see. I’ll take care of her….

Chapter Three

J essica heard a car pulling into the driveway and held her breath, waiting for it to back out again. The only drawback to living on the beach block was that it was a necessary dead end against the boardwalk, so that lost drivers were forever turning around in the driveway.

She was silly to be worried about a car, silly to think that this car had anything to do with her, that anyone in that car had anything to do with her.

But that was how she’d been, how she continued to be. Jumpy. Sometimes even a little irrational. About as far from her usual unflappable, reasonable, sensible self as possible. Wasn’t it enough that she was pregnant? Did she have to lose her mind, become nothing more than a supersensitive bundle of over-active hormones and an imagination to match?

It was just a car. Nothing to set off alarms in her head, set her ridiculously sensitive stomach to doing flips.

Only this car didn’t pull out, then head back up the street. She heard the engine die even as her heart leaped into a quick double-time beat. A car door slammed shut.

That couldn’t be a good sign, could it?

Maddy? She and Joe were back from their honeymoon, after all. It would be natural for her sister to ignore her plea to be left alone and come crashing in on her solitude.

The solitude that had seemed such a good idea at the start, but that was now rapidly driving her crazy.

It couldn’t be Allie. Allie never came to the shore until late September, after most of the tourists had gone home, leaving the beach empty enough for her to enjoy it. If her grandmother hadn’t barged in on her within days of her leaving Allentown, she sure wouldn’t come now, more than a week later. Too anticlimactic. It just wasn’t Allie’s style.

Who did that leave?

Ryan? No, not her brother. He had to be swamped at work without her there to help. Besides, Ryan rarely “played.” Like her, he was a sober Chandler, somewhat lacking in the fun-loving spirit of their grandmother and baby sister. Working bees, that was what she and Ryan were. Not that Maddy and Allie were drones.

They were natural queen bees.

All of which, Jessica reminded herself, wasn’t telling her whose car had just pulled into her driveway.

The process of elimination had left her with one name, one person, and she didn’t know if she’d be delighted or angry to see him. If she’d tell him to go to hell or fall into his arms. If she could look at him, remember what had happened—all that had happened—and not completely dissolve into a puddle of unrequited love, confusion and more than a little guilt.

Not that she was given time to sort through these possible reactions, for, as she walked off the porch and onto the grass, Matt was coming straight at her across the lawn, looking as bad as she felt.

So accustomed to seeing him in impeccably tailored business suits, she was always rather shocked by how good he looked in casual slacks and knit shirts, both of which skimmed his tall, slim body in most flattering ways. She liked his hair, black as a moonless night, but had never before seen it looking as if he was two weeks past a good trim.

There seemed to be an added purpose in his always confident stride, as if he had come on a mission of sorts, and she wished she could see past the mirrored sunglasses into his eyes, two blue pools she considered to be the window to his calm, cool, collected, almost analytical mind.

But she couldn’t see into his eyes. She could only see the tight set of his mouth, the long strides that were rapidly eating up the distance between them. Why, he almost looked angry.

Who was he to be angry? The nerve of the man!

Jessica tilted up her chin, ready to do battle. She’d give him what for, coming down here uninvited, barging in on her solitude…looking so damn sexy and irresistible.

Damn! Her chin wouldn’t stay still; it began to wobble. Ready tears, always on standby lately, sprang into her eyes, stinging them.

Deserted by her courage, betrayed by her rampantly out-of-whack emotional responses to every stimulus from ice cream to a robin’s morning song, Jessica did something brilliant. She turned on her heels and all but ran back toward the door to the kitchen. Safety.

A bolt-hole and denial—they weren’t much, but they had worked so far, hadn’t they?

“Jessica, wait,” Matt said. “Please, Jessica.”

It was probably the “please” that stopped her. Either that or the defeated, yet still faintly hopeful, tone in his voice.

Without turning to face him, she allowed her shoulders to slump and said, “What do you want, Matt? Because if you feel some burning need to apologize to me again, I have to tell you you’ve wasted a trip. I don’t want to hear it.”

The next time he spoke, he was right behind her. She could feel the heat of his body, the warm brush of his breath against her bent neck. “How about if I apologize for apologizing? Would that work?”

Matt winced as he heard his own words, which sounded miles too flippant, even as he meant each word with every fiber of his being. He watched Jessica square her shoulders as she resumed her usual perfect posture, then whirl around to face him.

“Do you know how you made me feel, Matt?” she asked, not able to guard her own words or even to remember that they were standing in the side yard, the one facing the sidewalk and the dozens of passing tourists on their way to and from the boardwalk and beach.

“Pretty lousy, I’d imagine,” Matt answered truthfully, taking her by the elbow and trying to, gently, steer her back under the semiprivacy of the canvas-covered porch.

She shook off his arm, an expression of temper that was as out of the ordinary for Jessica as it would be for her to chew gum with her mouth open. As if Jessica Chandler had ever even chewed gum. “Lousy?” she repeated loudly. “Did you say lousy?”

Belatedly, Jessica realized that they had an audience of three small children and their quite interested mother, who was probably delighted to have some excitement in a day otherwise filled by sand stuck to her sunscreened legs, kids crying because they didn’t want to leave the beach, and the prospect of having to wash all the beach towels before returning to the beach after lunch.

Well, too bad. Jessica wasn’t feeling much like putting some high drama in the woman’s life. Let her find her own and see just how much fun it was—not.

Now it was her turn to take hold of Matt’s arm, pull him along behind her as she headed for the porch, the screen door and the privacy of the kitchen.

“Lousy?” she said yet again, as the screen door slammed back into place. “You know what? That’s the perfect word. Lousy. We made love, you regretted it the next morning, and told me so. How do you expect me to feel about something like that, Matt? Flattered?”

“I know, Jessica, I know,” Matt said, silently marveling at the sudden color in her usually pale cheeks, the hint of fire in her usually placid, blue eyes, the way her hair swirled around her face.

She looked…disheveled. He’d never seen her disheveled. She looked cute rather than coolly, icily beautiful; and eminently touchable.

He rather liked it.

“If I could have kicked myself all the way here, Jess, I would have,” he continued quickly. “The moment the words were out of my mouth I knew they were wrong. Clumsy. I meant to apologize for taking advantage of you, of your sympathy for me…and I ended up sounding like some stiff-necked, jackassed idiot.”

“No kidding!” Jessica responded, even while marveling in the new freedom she felt; the freedom to be angry and let him know she was angry. Hey, maybe some of these new, enhanced hormones weren’t so bad after all. “I think the words that really put the capper on it were when you promised me it would never happen again. Like, hey, I was sort of drunk, feeling pretty abused, so I grabbed the first woman who offered herself to me, the closest one, and used her. Do you really think I can be used, Matthew Garvey, that I would allow myself to be used? Do you know how insulting that is?”

Matt opened his mouth to say something and she rescued him, knowing he was going to put his foot in his mouth again by saying “I’m sorry, Jess.” If he had said that, he’d be history, out the back door before he knew what hit him.

But Jessica did interrupt him, did save his hide with her next words, words that popped out of her mouth before she could rethink them, edit them into something less revealing. “Well, you know what, buddy, I’m not sorry it happened. I’m not the least bit sorry. Now, what do you have to say to that?”

Matt smiled, slowly, letting the smile pass above his mouth, enter his eyes. “Thank you?” he offered, then pretended to duck.

All at once all the anger in Jessica evaporated, like dew on a hot summer morning. “Idiot,” she said, walking over to one of the cabinets and pulling out two glasses. “Want some lemonade? It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive here from Allentown. You’ve got to be thirsty.”

“It’s Saturday, Jessica,” he reminded her, willing to change the subject for the moment, watching as she retrieved a glass jug from the refrigerator and poured them each tall, cold glasses of pulpy, homemade lemonade. “I started out before six and I’ve been on the road for four hours, mostly following minivans with jammed roof racks and bicycles tied to the back bumpers. I guess I forgot that Saturday is the traditional starting date for most people’s vacations. But once I found out where you were, which was yesterday, by the way, I couldn’t think of anything else except getting here.”

“How flattering,” Jessica said, handing him a glass, then sitting down at the large pine wood table with her own glass. “And you’ll notice that I’m not asking you who gave you that information.”

Matt chuckled, relaxing even more. He was here, he was in the house, Jessica wasn’t killing him, and he might just get to stay. “What did we used to say as kids? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count? Yeah, I’m sure that was it.”

“Allie,” Jessica said, sighing as she took her first swallow of the wonderfully tart liquid. She’d had her quota of milk for the day and deserved a treat. “Tell me, did she draw you a map, too?”

He shook his head. “No need. Remember, I’ve been here before.”

Jessica stiffened perceptibly and Matt quickly thought, There’s another old saying you forgot, you jerk. Two steps forward and one back. Sure, he’d been to the Chandler summer home before today. With Maddy, right after their engagement had been announced. They’d had a fairly large engagement party in this house, as a matter of fact.

“Oh, yes,” Jessica said after a moment. “I forgot. Maddy and Joe are back home, aren’t they?”

“They arrived the day after you left,” Matt told her, trying to pretend he didn’t notice the two new flags of hot, rather embarrassed pink in Jessica’s cheeks. “Tanned and happy and already tearing into the dozens of crates they’d sent back from overseas. I don’t know if their house is going to be Restoration or Victorian England, but they surely did ship home enough antiques to open their own branch of Sotheby’s.”

Jessica smiled a little at this, knowing her art-history-major sister’s tastes that ran from the finest antiques to garish neon lava lamps. “I think we can safely say the furnishing will be eclectic. And she probably sent home a ton of cookbooks and any kitchen gadget she could find. Joe doesn’t know it, but he’s married himself quite the domestic goddess. I’ll bet he’s overweight within six months unless he works out.”

Then her smile faded as she asked, “How are you doing, Matt? Is it uncomfortable for you…seeing Maddy and Joe together, that is?”

Now here was a perfect time for the truth. The time to tell Jessica what her brother, Ryan, already had guessed. What Allie had somehow figured out months earlier, so that she made sure Joe had come back into the picture. The perfect time to tell Jessica that he had been about to call off the wedding when Maddy had come to him and confessed that she’d been engaged to Joe O’Malley a few years ago, that he was back in her life and that she loved him.

However, the moment he told Jessica that, she’d have to realize that he hadn’t taken—that ubiquitous word—comfort from her that night in the gazebo because of his broken heart.

He might have been able to do that, weeks ago. Before those impulsive, heart-shattering moments in the gazebo.

But not now. Not when he knew Jessica was carrying his child.

She would never believe him. She might think that he’d taken advantage of her. The fact that he had taken what she’d offered so sweetly, without confessing his love for her, wasn’t much comfort to him.

She might even think that Almira had told him about the pregnancy, and that was why he was here now, to pretend to have fallen in love with her, to marry her out of guilt or pity or some other equally despicable motive.

So, knowing Ryan would never betray him, and praying Maddy would keep her mouth shut, he did the most obvious thing. The most logical thing. The most damning thing, but for all the best reasons.

He lied, played the pity card. Shamelessly.

“I’m okay, Jess. I’m beginning to see that Maddy made the right choice,” he said, avoiding Jessica’s eyes.

Jessica sucked in her lips, wet them with the tip of her tongue. “I see. Always the gentleman, Matt, aren’t you? Maddy waited until a few days before the wedding, then told you she was in love with another man. A near billionaire, if the news magazines are right, not that Joe was anything near to wealthy when Maddy first fell in love with him.”

She cocked her head to one side, looked out at him from between slitted eyelids. “Joe’s money doesn’t matter to Maddy. But maybe it matters to you?”

“Jessica, can’t we drop this? I don’t see what any of this has to do with—”

She raised a hand, waved him to silence as she thought over what he’d said, how she’d answered. And then she got this funny little tingle inside her, and her hyperactive feminine intuition went into over-drive. “And you’re beginning to see that she made the right choice? What does that really mean, Matt? This isn’t as if she chose fish over meat or red wine over white. This was supposedly to be a marriage, two people in love, remember?”

“We were compatible in many ways, Jessica,” Matt answered, backpedaling into truth, at least part-way, knowing his words made him sound cold, logical and entirely too businesslike to be a loving groom. “We had the same goals.”

“Goals? How romantic, I’m sure. Did you ever love my sister, or was she some sort of business deal? Now that she’s found a better one, you’re beginning to see she made the right move, the right merger? That’s pathetic! Come on, Matt, tell me. Am I being irrational to begin thinking now that your reasons for marrying my sister were pathetic? That my worry for your feelings, my following you to the gazebo that night was even worse than pathetic? God! Does my sister know how lucky she was, to escape your idea of marriage?”

Was she being irrational, as she’d asked him? He didn’t think so.

Matt looked at Jessica for a long time, trying to remember that she was pregnant and that pregnant women could be irrational. It was just that Jessica Chandler had never been irrational. She was the calmest, most levelheaded woman he’d ever met. She was even being rational now, in some twisted way—using both her intellect and her emotions to come to logical conclusions that made him look less than terrific.

Yes, Jessica had always been logical, rational. Until the night in the gazebo, when she had shocked him with her gentle giving, her warm passion.

Logical. Until this moment, when she had just about accused him of being a cold, heartless man who’d proposed to Maddy because it made good business sense, without really caring for her at all. Or did she really believe he was that cold, that calculating? Had all the reasons she’d come to him, all that they’d both felt—at least, he had felt it—that night in the gazebo, evaporated from her mind, to be replaced with this low opinion of him?

Didn’t she know him at all? Didn’t he think he knew her?

He still recognized the Jessica he knew, the Jessica he admired, the Jessica he had fallen in love with, the Jessica who had her eyes set on corporate success, her all-consuming career.

But here she was, sounding like a woman, looking like a woman—very much like a woman—and confounding the hell out of him as he sought to protect her with lies and damning partial truths he now couldn’t take back.

Stupid! Had he always been this clumsy? Maybe the all-American Boy Scout in him just made for a lousy liar. Very well. He’d give her a little truth and then change the subject.

“I’m not going to answer those last questions, Jess,” he said finally, taking his empty glass to the sink, running water in it so that the pulp didn’t dry out, stick to the sides. His hands shook as he performed the small task. “In fact, I’m not going to say another word right now, because if I do, we’re going to have one hell of an argument, and that’s not why I came here. I’ll only tell you that what seemed like good reasons to marry—to both your sister and myself, by the way—no longer seemed quite so valid. Maddy called off the marriage because she loves Joe more than she felt comfortable and safe with me. She’s happy. I’m happy she’s happy. End of story. Now, tell me which is my bedroom, okay?”

His last words threw Jessica for the proverbial loop. “Your…your bedroom? Who said you’re staying here?”

He rather liked the sudden squeak in her voice. “Allie, for one. Ryan, for two, and Maddy, for three. As they all own equal shares with you, you’ve been outvoted. Considering that you’d probably vote against the arrangement, that is. Isn’t democracy grand?”

Jessica fought the urge to throw her glass across the room, aimed straight at Matt’s head. Being a practical sort, she knew she’d just have to clean up the mess, both the glass and lemonade and any injury to him, and that took a lot of the satisfaction out of such a mad, impulsive gesture.

“I don’t want you here, Matt,” she said instead, carefully putting down her glass and stepping away from it. “Does that count for anything?”

He pretended to consider her question. “No, I don’t think it does. You shouldn’t be alone.” He’d almost added “at a time like this,” but thankfully caught himself before he could shove both feet in his mouth. “Besides, since I didn’t get to have a honeymoon, I’m overdue for a vacation. I’ve taken the whole month, by the way. Not a bad job, being the boss.”

“A month,” Jessica repeated hollowly. “I’ll go upstairs and pack.”

He let her take three steps toward the hall before he stopped her by saying, “Running away yet again, Jess? That’s so unlike you. Totally out of character.”

She whirled around, fire in her eyes. “Oh, really! And how would you know what’s in character for me? You don’t know me at all!”