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“I see,” Kat said slowly, pressing her lips together. Marco would never lie to her—so was it all wishful thinking on Grace’s part? She frowned. Yeah, Grace liked to talk up all her relationships—that TV exec three months ago, the Russian writer, the ex-soapie star.
Then Marco abruptly turned on the couch, giving her his full attention, and she forgot all about Grace’s love life.
“Kat, this is me here. We talk about pretty much everything—”
“Not everything.”
He gave her a look. “Just stop avoiding the issue and talk to me now. Let’s think this baby situation over logically.”
She shook her head. “Were you not listening about the tests?”
“I didn’t ask that. I asked if you wanted to have this baby.”
“I am not turning this discussion into a pro-choice debate.”
He scowled. “I’m not trying to. All I’m asking is for you to consider all your options.”
Her insides ached. “That’s all I’ve been doing since I found out. Marco, please don’t do this. I can’t get attached, knowing there’s a possibility it will be carrying a fatal disease. Plus, I know women are supposed to have these ticking body clocks, supposed to be filled with a great burning need to be mothers, but I am telling you, I’m not one of them.”
And yet...there’d been a few moments where she’d allowed her imagination to drift, where her thoughts had been occupied by something other than work, her swish Cairns apartment and all those solitary nights stretching before her. She’d imagined an unfamiliar future consisting of a house, a garden, a husband and babies. A scary, scary thought that had her breath catching and her heart racing every time she let her mind wander there.
No.
She sighed. “I...I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
“Well, that’s a start. At least it means you’re not wedded to the idea of an abortion.”
“I’m not making any decision until the tests come back. I’m not going to...” She swallowed and glanced away. “Not going to get attached to the idea if they come back positive. And anyway, what on earth am I going to do with a baby? This is me we’re talking about here.”
His scowl deepened. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re a great person. You’re funny and gorgeous and smart, and you have people in your life who love you.”
She flushed under the unexpected praise. “But a mother?”
“Other women begin with a whole lot less.”
“But it’s a full-time job. A lifelong commitment.” She worried the edge of the pillow, picking at the stitching. “You can’t get a do-over with these things. What if I stuff it up?”
“Nobody’s perfect at parenting—just look at Connor’s family. I guarantee you’d do a lot better than them.”
Kat nodded. It was impossible to avoid the Blairs, especially when her father and Connor’s were business partners at Jackson & Blair. Unlike her relationship with Marco’s parents, she’d never warmed to Stephen Blair, a ruthlessly ambitious man with a penchant for blondes, and his wife, Corinne, a cold gym-junkie socialite with a Botox habit. Connor’s childhood was a perfect study in fractured family dynamics. A therapist’s dream...more so than her own.
“My dad isn’t much better,” she said now. “He’d rather hold a grudge about old headlines than dole out any praise.”
“At least they were happy, well, until...” He trailed off diplomatically.
Until her mother’s diagnosis. Kat silently filled in the sentence. They had been strict but fair, even when she’d stretched the limits with the usual teenage smoking, drinking and sneaking out to parties. Certainly not overly demonstrative in their affections. But after her mother’s diagnosis, her father had turned into an angry, bitter man, always judgmental, always unhappy. And Kat could never do anything right, from her decision to drop out of Brisbane University to her crazy, wild nights on the town that were her one respite from thinking about her mother’s disease.
Until one particular night when she’d stumbled home at sunrise in a highly drunken state and her father had been waiting for her, scorn pouring from every tense muscle.
“You’ve had everything we could give you, and look at you! Your mother is dying, so you throw in a perfectly good education to get drunk every weekend!”
“Maybe that’s the point!” she’d stormed back. “It’s in my head every single waking moment. I need some time to clear it out, to just forget, otherwise I’ll go crazy!”
His fists had clenched, and for one awful moment she’d wondered whether he’d give in to the temptation and actually hit her. Instead he’d cut her with words, his particular specialty.
A month later her mother had died and Kat had run away to France, where Marco was the current darling of French football. Where she’d slowly come to realize there was more to her tiny little world than short skirts, wild parties and free drinks.
Kat swallowed, pushing the memory aside. God, no wonder the press had loved to hate her. She’d been such a spoiled little rich girl.
“But you’ve grown since then,” Marco said now. “And he’s still stuck in the past, rehashing old arguments. We don’t have to be our parents. Not with our child.”
Our child. Those two words were like a blow to the chest, leaving a shallow breath rattling in her throat.
“Look, Marco, let’s be honest. You’ve worked incredibly hard to get where you are. You’ve got a great career and an amazing, wonderful life. No commitment, no ties—”
“Kat...”
“No, let me finish. You can jump on a plane at a moment’s notice and be on the other side of the world. You have your pick of women—and there are a lot of women.”
“Kat—”
She ignored the warning growl in his voice and kept going. “I’m not going to force you to change, and a baby does that, in ways you can’t even imagine. The media frenzy will affect both our lives and careers.”
“If you choose to keep the baby, then I’ll do the right thing.”
She blinked. “The right thing? What, are we living in the 1950s now? You don’t have to marry me because I’m pregnant.”
He paused, a second too long. “Who said anything about marriage? I’m talking about being here for you. As your friend.”
She frowned, the unexpected sliver of disappointment stabbing hard. Oh, so now she wasn’t good enough to marry, was that it? But just as she was about to open her mouth and say exactly that, she snapped it shut. That was manipulation of the worst kind, and she refused to do it. She couldn’t put Marco in that position—she wouldn’t. And marriage was the last thing she wanted.
“Good thing, too. I suck at relationships,” she said lightly, her hand tight on the coffee cup. “I’ve tried too many times, but I just don’t have that particular gene. They’re messy, they’re painful and they always end in disaster. I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”
“You don’t suck. You didn’t force James to cheat. You didn’t hand the press those photos.” Marco’s brows took a dive, his expression dark. “And as for Ben...”
“Please do not remind me.” If there was a Disastrous Relationship Museum, hers would take front and center as prime exhibit number one: her first marriage to Jackson & Blair’s publicity manager, Ben Freeman, when she was twenty-two. He’d turned out to be a selfish, misogynistic bastard. Her second marriage five years later, a quickie Bali wedding to Marco’s teammate, annulled after just seventy-two hours when she’d caught James screwing a waitress in their bridal suite. And then her engagement to Aussie Rules’ wild child Ezio Cantoni barely a year ago. He’d taken nude shower shots of her then “accidentally” leaked them to the tabloids.
She was done with the scrutiny, the uncertainty, the angst. It was painful and humiliating and downright tiring. For her sanity and self-respect, it was just not worth the effort. And now she was bringing a child into that?
Kat sighed, shifting on the sofa. “And honestly, Marco, how are you going to be involved? Weren’t you planning to move back to France after the Football Federation of Australia’s awards in three weeks?”
“That was one option.”
Her brow ratcheted up. “That’s not how you talked about it a few months ago.”
He sighed and cast an eye to the shuttered window. “I’ve got a lot of things going on—the coaching clinics, the sponsorship stuff. Plus my network contract is up for renegotiation next month. I haven’t decided about France yet.”
She paused for long, drawn-out seconds. “Oh, no. Don’t you dare start to rethink anything. I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow it?”
“No.” She ignored his irritation with a wave of her hand. “We’re not married. Hell, we’re not even a couple. Just...best friends who may be having a baby.”
He said nothing, just looked toward the shuttered windows and then the wall clock that read quarter past one. “It sounds to be getting worse outside.” He stood. “We should go downstairs.”
She paused, glancing toward the windows, then nodded. “Okay.”
He offered his hand and she automatically took it, the sudden urgency of the moment pushing their discussion into the background. The innocent warmth of his fingers wrapped around hers created a frustratingly intimate sensation that she was loath to give up. He took her down the hall, to a door that led to the basement and his wine cellar, which he’d modified with this kind of situation in mind.
The wine was stacked neatly to the left of the small room, and to the right sat a couch, a fixed, fully stocked bar fridge and a small generator that powered the soft lamps that were now lit in preparation.
She hesitated at the door, scanning the room as reality flooded in.
“Don’t worry, chérie,” Marco said beside her, giving her fingers a reassuring squeeze. “We’re perfectly safe.”
Again, that word. The door was heavy but he closed it with ease, and when he turned to her, she swallowed the panic and offered a shaky smile.
They settled quickly in the room, Kat automatically going over to prepare coffee, Marco checking the small ventilation window high on the far wall and then the lights. After a few more minutes, they sat on the couch, Marco pulled out a pack of UNO cards and they settled in for the night.
“So how’s working for Grace going? Still a pain in the butt?” Marco asked casually as he shuffled the pack.
“Oh, she’s not that bad.”
“Hmm.” His expression was skeptical as he dealt them seven cards apiece.
She sighed. “Actually, I miss my old London job.”
“What, the one you took up between Ben and James?”
“Ugh.” She made a face. “My life’s most significant moments reduced to a ‘between exes’ reference.”
“Sorry.” Marco’s expression looked anything but. “Let me rephrase. The Oxfam job you took at the age of twenty-five when you spent a couple of years living and working in London in blissful anonymity.”
She gave him a look, not entirely convinced he wasn’t being sarcastic, before finally nodding. “It was only a year, but I felt better about that job than anything I’ve ever done. I felt like I should—” She cut herself off abruptly, her thumbnail going to her mouth, teeth worrying it.
“Like you should what?” He picked up his cards and fanned them expertly.
“Like I should do something more. Donate to charity or start up a foundation or something.”
She waited for him to voice doubt, to echo her father’s familiar refrain about giving up a perfectly good job for an uncertain dream when she’d casually mentioned the subject a few months ago. Instead he just looked at her and said, “You’ve never mentioned that before.”
She shrugged and overturned the first card on the top of the deck. “I stopped thinking about it after I told my dad.”
“Let me guess—he said you don’t know a thing about running a charity, it’s too expensive, why chuck in a perfectly stable job for a dubious flight of fancy in this economy when you’ll lose interest in the first year?”
“All of the above.”
He sighed and placed a yellow two on the pile. The sudden silence sat heavy in the air now, until Marco finally spoke. “Have you done the figures? Worked out how much it would take to do something like that?”
“No.”
“So work it out. Make a business plan. Talk to your old workmates. Call your accountant. Screw your father. I mean that in the nicest possible way,” he added with a thin smile and placed the first card down on the table. “You’re smart and clever and you have experience. You can work a crowd, raise funds and know how to handle the press. Whatever happens with those tests and the baby, you can still do this.”
She stared at her hand, rearranging the cards by color as her mind worked furiously. Oh, she wanted to. In between the many fluff pieces and gossip segments Morning Grace aired, the human-interest stories drew her the most. The burning compulsion to do something herself, to help ease someone’s burden, to bring a little joy into the lives of people who really needed it, got her every time. She always ended up donating to every cause she sourced. Every time.
“This’ll be bigger than a ten-minute segment,” Marco said now. “You’ll be able to give things more media coverage, follow it through, devote more time. Really make a difference.”
She put a Draw Two on the pile and murmured something noncommittal, signaling the end of the discussion.
Marco said no more and for the next half hour they played cards and pretended everything was fine, even though the faint sounds of the creaking house and the wind as it picked up forced their attention from the game a dozen times. Finally Marco turned on the small radio and the room was filled with a steady stream of weather updates.
When the lights suddenly went out, Kat jumped. Yet when the generator kicked in seconds later and the lights clicked back on, it did nothing to assuage her growing panic.
“What are we even doing here?” she muttered, flicking her thumb along the edge of her cards, eyeing the lights, then the generator. “We went out in a cyclone warning, for God’s sake! This is stupid, not to mention dangerous.”
“We’re not in its direct path. Would I honestly do something to put us in danger? Trust me. We’re safe.”
When she shivered, he handed her the blanket from the couch, draping it around her shoulders, tucking it close. She half expected a tender forehead kiss to finish. Damn, she was actually wishing for it. He’d kissed her before, an I-love-you-you’re-my-best-friend kiss on the cheek or the forehead. And they’d hugged more frequently than she could count. But tellingly, he’d never kissed her on the lips. Until That Night.
For the next twenty minutes they kept playing cards as the rain and howling wind picked up, the updates morphing into location reports and interviews of people in organized shelters and those who chose to stay in their homes and see the storm through.
* * *
Half an hour later, it hit.
Card game now forgotten, they sat in tense silence, hip to knee on the couch, glued to the radio. The wind screamed past the house, ripping through the trees and banging the shutters in their frames. From inside their refuge, they could hear the rush of air, the snap and crack of trees bending and breaking under the raw elements, debris being thrown around. The house remained firm but the wind and slashing rain was a constant, picking up in waves then petering out until the minutes stretched like hours.
The radio spat out crucial information as the cyclone careened across the coast, and as time crawled into an hour, then two, and the cyclone finally passed through Cairns and headed south before dying down a few miles out to sea, details began to trickle in. Details of devastating damage, heart-wrenchingly revealed via the mainland survivors.
“We’re gonna have to start over. We’ve lost everything.”
“We have family, friends, community. We’ll survive this.”
“I don’t know whether we can rebuild. We weren’t insured.”
“Well, you just pick up and move on, don’t you? You just get it done.”
“Please, help us. Our house...everything. It’s gone. We need help.”
Kat’s breath caught, the sob forming low in her throat as she listened to that last one, a woman and her family who’d been right in the storm’s path. It ripped at her like claws, and she unashamedly let silent tears well as the extent of the damage was slowly and thoroughly detailed over the course of an hour.
When Marco’s hand went to her knee, patting reassuringly, she jumped, eyes flying to his.
The look on his face undid her, a mix of sorrow and understanding that reflected everything she’d tried to keep inside. She watched him swallow, her gaze following his thumb as he leaned in to gently wipe away her tears.
“Don’t cry,” he said softly, knuckles and thumb resting firmly on her cheekbone. “It’s okay.”
Her breath jagged. “But all those people...”
