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He didn’t answer, his gaze fixing for a moment on her face before it dropped again to her six-months-pregnant belly. Under his scrutiny, a nausea kicked up that rivaled her eight weeks of morning sickness. She had to resist the urge to shut the door in his face.
His perfect patrician brow furrowed. “We used a condom.”
She tried to smile, but her face felt too stiff. “Best-laid plans.”
His gaze locked with hers. “Why did it take so damn long to tell me?”
“Everything about that night was a mistake. I wasn’t keen to revisit it.”
His jaw worked. “I still had a right to know.”
She should have called him the moment the test stick turned blue. But sometimes she could hardly believe that night had actually happened, that two near strangers—barely friends—had burned for each other that way. Then, after the ultrasound and Dr. Karpoor’s startling news, she’d needed time to wrap her mind around her predicament, time to get past the panic. It had taken her this long to get up the courage to call.
Even now she was reluctant to share the miracle inside her. “How do you know it’s yours?”
He didn’t even blink. “It’s mine.”
She dug her heels in at his arrogance. “How can you be sure? I wasn’t a virgin.”
He fixed her with his dark eyes. “You might as well have been.”
While she reeled at that bald assessment, he looked past her into the house. “Can I come in?”
Again the impulse surged inside her to shut the door. If she ignored him, maybe he’d leave, then she could pack everything up in her bug and disappear. She certainly had enough experience disappearing.
But things were different now. She started teaching at Hart Valley Elementary in another week, had a classroom full of second-graders to educate. It was what she’d trained for these past several years at Berkeley. Not to mention Sara and her new baby. How could she leave her sister and nephew behind?
He put a foot up on the threshold. “We need to talk about this, Ashley.”
She imagined Jason stepping inside, the small space filled with his presence. Back at Berkeley—until that night—she’d never entertained the least lascivious thought about Jason. But now memories crowded her mind, his skin against hers, his mouth everywhere. The images overwhelmed her. She would be an idiot to allow him into the close quarters of her quirky octagonal house.
She needed a chance to get her head on straight again, to reestablish Jason as the prickly, straitlaced man she recalled from school. Anything else she might be feeling was just hormones and not worth crediting.
Pulling the door shut behind her, she squeezed past him onto the deck of the front porch. “Let’s take a walk.”
He followed her down the porch steps and toward the pasture and paddocks where the horses dozed. As they passed the tack room, she grabbed the brand-new bucket of treats Sara had left there. Before she’d gone more than a step, Jason plucked it out of her hand. “You shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.”
She tried to take it back. “It can’t be more than five pounds.”
He pulled it out of her reach and read the label. “Five point five.”
She would have wrested it from him, but the last thing she needed was a tug-of-war. Giving up the battle, she continued toward the paddocks. He gestured for her to go first when the walkway narrowed around the corner of the covered arena, and she made sure to keep her distance. Up the hill, the horses had noticed their approach and stood at attention in their paddocks.
In early September, the Sierra foothills still shimmered with heat. The grass on the rolling pasture that had glowed a vivid green in the spring lay drooping and yellowed now. September’s shorter day was a relief, but at four in the afternoon, sunset was still a few hours away.
They arrived at the first gate to the pasture area. He put a hand out to stop her as she reached for the latch. “How far along?”
She bit back her irritation. “You can count as well as I can.”
He pushed open the gate before she could. “Six months, then.” He studied her swollen belly. “You’re pretty big.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
When she reached to shut and latch the gate again, he stood in her way to do it for her. The temptation to give him a poke rose up inside her, but that would mean touching him. She wasn’t touching him. “I’m not an invalid, for heaven’s sake.”
“I know.” His gaze moved from her face down the length of her, and despite her swollen body, she felt a trace of heat in the wake of his scrutiny. She’d heard sometimes women were more easily aroused during pregnancy, but she hadn’t believed it, until now. Maybe rampant prenatal hormones explained the baffling attraction she felt for him.
Not that he wasn’t easy on the eyes. He was as close to beautiful as a man could be, lean but muscular, with high cheekbones and deep brown eyes that had always fascinated her. There were lines bracketing his full mouth that hadn’t been there back at school and a new burden on those broad shoulders. She suspected she knew what weighed him down but wanted to see if he’d bring it up on his own.
One of the horses nickered, then the other five joined in. “They’re waiting,” she said, hand outstretched for the treats.
He pulled them out of reach. “I’ve got them.”
Resolute, she grabbed the handle and tugged, but he wouldn’t relinquish the bucket. They might as well have been a couple of two-year-olds fighting over a toy.
“I can carry it,” she said through gritted teeth.
With his free hand, he loosened her grip. As she lost her purchase on the handle, she tried to hold on to her irritation, but his warm touch distracted her. His fingers enfolded hers and his thumb traced one slow circle on her palm. She felt his arm tense as if he intended to pull her closer.
Then one of the horses called again and he dropped her hand. “Sorry.” Turning on his heel, he strode toward the paddocks. Her heart hammering, Ashley headed up the hill after him.
Once he had the bucket open, she gathered up a handful of treats and walked along the line of horses. As the white pony neatly lifted a treat from her palm, the question that had been burning inside her worked its way out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
His dark gaze fixed on her. “Tell you what?”
She wanted to pound her fists on his chest. “About your father.”
Not a speck of emotion in his face. “What would it have mattered?”
“We were friends.”
“We were barely that.”
It was true, wasn’t it? But it cut so deeply. Especially considering the life growing inside her. “But you just left without a word.”
His gaze drifted to the trees beyond the paddocks. “You left first.” He said it matter-of-factly.
“I left your bed that night,” she conceded. “But you left school.”
He pinned her with his gaze, his expression opaque. “I had business to attend to.”
“I had to find out in the newspapers that your father died.” Shock enough that he had left without a word, doubly painful that he hadn’t shared the reason. “If I’d known—”
“What? You might have stayed until morning?”
If she didn’t know better, she’d think it mattered to him. But she knew nothing scratched very deeply beneath Jason’s surface.
Typical Jason to put her on the defensive. “I needed to think things through. We had one kind of relationship and then…” Their passion that night had completely knocked their casual friendship off its tracks. “I thought I’d have time to find you, to talk to you.”
His jaw worked as he looked past her at the pines and cedars beyond the paddocks. “So did I.”
When she’d fed the last horse his second share of treats, she brushed her hands off and started back toward the gate. She didn’t even bother trying to open and close it herself, just waited for Jason to do it for her. With so much unfinished business prickling between them, she didn’t want to add to the tension by fussing over the trivial.
Despite his abrupt departure from school six months ago, she had only to glimpse the rigid determination in his face to realize Jason wouldn’t just vanish from her life today. Likely he’d want some kind of resolution in triplicate detailing every iota of his obligation.
What had she expected? She’d called to invite him here, to inform him she was pregnant because she thought he ought to know. He was here, they’d hash out whatever details they had to hash, then he’d leave again. The sooner she got to it, the sooner he’d go.
Ashley forced a smile. “Would you like something to drink?”
“Are we going to talk about this?”
“Of course.” Her jaw ached from clenching it.
He returned the treats to the tack room as they passed, then continued on with her toward the house. He paused at the porch steps. “It looked octagonal from the front.”
“It was, when Sara lived here.” She moved past him toward the front door. “Then her husband, Keith, added the back bedroom.”
Ashley had originally planned to make that room the nursery, but after the doctor’s bombshell, she’d realized it would be too small. So she’d regretfully given up the larger bedroom, knowing that the nursery would need the bigger space.
Jason followed her into the coolness of the house, his presence as imposing as she’d known it would be. As he took in the comfortable, well-worn sofa and recliner in the living room and the red vinyl chairs and Formica table in the breakfast nook, Ashley edged past him into the small kitchen.
Digging in the refrigerator, she unearthed a can of cola from the back. When she turned to hand it to him, he was right behind her. Her arm brushed against him before she could take a step back.
“Sorry,” he said, although he didn’t move. If she wanted some space, she’d have to make it herself. But his fingers grazed hers as he took the soda can, and she leaned toward him instead of away.
The pop of the can tab jolted her out of her daze. Sidling past him, she headed for the living room, where she’d left the bottle of water she’d been sipping while she and Sara visited. Her throat felt dry as dust.
Jason followed and stationed himself in the middle of the living room. Not sure what to do next, Ashley took a long swallow of water, then stood with the bottle chilling her hands.
His gaze dropped to her belly. She couldn’t blame him. Its size astounded her, too, when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Not exactly what she’d intended for her first year of teaching.
He lifted his gaze to her face. “Six months, Ashley. Why so long?”
“You disappeared. I couldn’t find you.”
“You knew how to contact me.”
She did. As the young CEO of high-flying Kerrigan Technology, Jason wasn’t exactly low profile. “When I found out…I wanted to wait a few weeks, to make sure.”
“And then?”
Then she saw the ultrasound. And for a week she could barely think at all. “You left, Jason. I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“And neither did we, is that it?”
“The reason I left had nothing to do with you and me.”
“There was no you and me.” She felt faintly ill, but it had nothing to do with morning sickness. “We both know that.”
He just stared, jaw taut. “I had to handle my father’s estate. Things were complicated.”
She waited for more, but it seemed that was all he was willing to reveal. “So where do we go from here?”
He took a drink of his soda. “How long will it take you to pack?”
Of all the questions she might have expected, that wasn’t one of them. “Pack?”
“You’ll only need enough to tide you over for a week or so. I can send movers to pick up the rest.”
A string of memories flooded her mind—Sara coming home in a panic, dragging Ashley along as they packed up everything they owned. Piling it all in the car and racing out into the night, a day away from danger or only an hour.
But those times were over. “I’m not moving anywhere.”
“Of course you are. To San José with me.”
“No. I live here.”
“How else can I take charge of you and the baby?”
She took a breath. “I don’t need you taking charge.”
His hand tightened on the soda can, bending it slightly. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I can handle this on my own.”
He stared at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. “I seem to recall I was in that bed with you.”
A startling heat suffused her at the memory—his body over hers, his mouth, his hands touching her everywhere. She chanced a look his way and saw he was remembering, too. His brown eyes darkened, nearly black as his gaze dropped to her mouth.
She suppressed the erotic images. “I’m prepared to take care of everything.”
He took a step toward her. “I’m just as responsible for this child as you are.”
She should have backed away, but she held her ground. “You don’t have to be.”
“Of course I do!” Another step closer. “This is my baby just as much as yours. You expect me to turn my back on it?”
“No, I just…”
Somehow his hand was on her arm, his fingers curling around, his thumb stroking. His focus had returned to her mouth, and she was certain if she didn’t break that visual contact, he’d kiss her.
She backed out of reach. “You’re right. You need to be involved.”
“Then you’ll come to San José.”
“Absolutely not.”
