Page 20 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

CHLOE

Then I remembered I was pregnant.

And then I promptly forgot again.

When I threw up the chicken nuggets I’d eaten for lunch, I picked up my phone to let my advisor know I needed to cancel my afternoon clients before remembering I wasn’t sick, I was pregnant, and pregnancy wasn’t contagious.

I called my ob-gyn instead and made an appointment for Monday, the earliest day she could squeeze me in.

Every problem had a solution. But it was a lot harder to find a solution when I couldn’t seem to fully grasp the fact that I had a problem. Steven texted a couple times over the next few days to see how I was doing, and each time I was stunned anew with the realization that I was pregnant.

I wasn’t in denial.

I just couldn’t believe it was true .

Until the server set a mimosa in front of me at our post-sewing club brunch.

“I’m pregnant,” I said through that same hazy fog. I blinked and looked up, startled awake by my own words. “I’m pregnant ,” I said again, awed, like this was brand-new information to me.

James, Essie, Hannah, and Janie stared back at me with slack jaws.

“Well, shit,” Janie said.

“You don’t have to drink that,” James said next to me. She pulled my mimosa closer to her plate. “Should we get the server back? Ask her for plain orange juice? Unless you want a mimosa.” She pushed my mimosa back to me and blinked rapidly. “I mean…what are you going to do?”

“About the mimosa?” I asked stupidly.

“About the baby ,” Essie said.

“Oh.” I stared at the mimosa.

“Chloe?” Hannah nudged gently.

“Yeah.” I huffed and pushed the mimosa back to James.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have an appointment with my ob-gyn on Monday to confirm it’s viable.

Until then…it just seems fake, you know?

I mean…” I looked around helplessly. “This wasn’t supposed to be possible.

I’ve never had a normal cycle. Sometimes it’s long and bloody, sometimes it’s a trickle, and mostly it’s not there at all.

I could go a couple months without anything and then have two periods in three weeks.

Doctors have run tests and ruled some things out, but they never could give me a reason.

All they could tell me was that I would be very unlikely to get pregnant without intervention.

Even with intervention, it would be a long shot. That’s what they said .”

I felt like I had been lied to.

“Chloe,” James said quietly. She reached for my hand and squeezed it.

I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ve known this since I was fourteen. And at fourteen I was so busy helping with my brothers that being a mom sounded terrible, anyway. And then…I just never let myself think about it. Why hope for something you can’t have?”

Chewing my lip, I looked up and found nothing but love staring back at me.

“It would be selfish of me to have this baby, wouldn’t it?

The dad…We’re not together. He’s off riding his motorcycle across Argentina, so I can’t even talk to him about this.

I’ll try to call him after my appointment on Monday.

But I know I screwed up. I had drunk, unprotected sex. ”

Janie’s eyes narrowed. “So did he,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, yeah.” I waved dismissively. “In theory, it takes two to tangle and all that. In practice, women suffer the consequences, financially and physically, so in the end it’s our responsibility.”

Essie snorted. “Oh, honey. My husband is a lawyer and I’m unhinged. We can make him suffer consequences both financially and physically if that’s what you want.”

I laughed even though I knew she was completely serious. Fuck around with Essie Price or someone she loved, and you would find out. “He’s not a bad guy. I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want him to suffer. I just wish I knew what he wanted.”

James shook her head. “He doesn’t decide what you do with your body. Let him worry about what he wants. What do you want?”

A baby . This baby . The answer unfurled in my chest with feather-light softness. It felt like hope. Fragile, furtive hope.

I rolled my lips together, afraid to say it out loud, like if I admitted I wanted it, it would be taken away from me in some cruel cosmic reckoning.

“I never let myself hope for this.” I looked down at my stomach.

My hand pressed against my lower belly like I could make it stay.

“And now that it’s happening, it still doesn’t seem real, that I could actually have this.

Part of me feels like I shouldn’t even consider it because it’s not really mine to keep.

But I want—” My voice cracked, and I pushed the words out in a rush. “I want it.”

No one at our booth said a damn word. I could hear the low hum of indecipherable words from the tables around us, and somewhere in the distance a fork clattered against a china plate. And then?—

“We’re going to be aunts!” Essie crowed. She leaped to her feet and lunged across the table at me. She couldn’t quite reach for a hug, so instead she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.

“Don’t shake me!” I wheezed. “I can barely keep anything down as it is.” That made everyone lean away from me real quick. “And holy shit, keep your voice down. I haven’t told my parents or my brothers.”

Janie’s mouth hooked upward. “Don’t worry. I can keep a secret.”

I believed her. She wasn’t the one I was worried about.

“I won’t even tell Zack,” Hannah promised. “I love him, but if he knows, then everyone in Aspen Springs knows.”

Essie bobbed her head in agreement while sipping down her mimosa. “Brax, too. I swear the Hale brothers are thirteen-year-old girls in hot cowboy bodies.”

“Not Adam,” James said. “He’s like a vault. Me, on the other hand…I’m a terrible liar. How am I supposed to pretend I don’t know you’re pregnant?”

I did a quick mental calculation. “It’s only another five weeks until I’m in the second trimester.” If it’s real. If it stays .

James’s big brown eyes got even bigger. “Five weeks?” she squeaked. “You’re cooked, Chloe. Why is that a rule, anyway? It seems arbitrary.”

“Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester,” Hannah said, fiddling with the string of her teabag. “It’s not that you can’t tell anyone. It’s just a guideline to share your joy with the same people you would tell if you miscarried.”

“Oh,” James said softly. She looked at me. “So…us?”

“You,” I agreed, and damn those pregnancy hormones because my eyes got misty.

She nodded firmly, like she was making an oath. “I’ll keep my mouth shut even if I have to use duct tape.”

Janie cocked her head, studying me. “You’re not going to tell your family yet?”

Hell no! my brain shouted.

“I wouldn’t want to trouble them if it doesn’t work out.” I said it as lightly as I could, but the thought of telling my mom I had miscarried the only grandbaby my body might be able to conceive sat like a lead brick on my chest.

Back when we were making the rounds from doctor to doctor, trying to get an answer as to why my periods were so wretched, Mom had taken the news about my fertility—or lack thereof—much harder than I had.

I had locked the information away in a dark corner of my mind where it couldn’t hurt me. My mom couldn’t do that.

Mom had always wanted a daughter, and she was so damn glad to have had me first. So of course she’d also dreamed of being a grandmother to her daughter’s daughter.

Sure, her sons might one day have children of their own, but it wouldn’t be the same, in her mind.

She had cried when the doctor told us I probably couldn’t have kids.

Not just for my sake, but for her own. For the loss of her dream.

If I told her that dream might actually come true after all, only to snatch it back later, she would be devastated.

And then there was this, too: My mother would tell my grandmother, and my grandmother would say nothing. That would be bad enough, but it would be even worse if I then lost the baby. My mother would weep, I would comfort her, and my grandmother would still say nothing.

Our family would never recover from that, and we had already been through so much. Too much.

I must have been making a face because Hannah’s mouth twisted in a sympathetic grimace. “Families are complicated. I wouldn’t tell my parents, either,” she said in the understatement of the year.

“Well, no shit, you wouldn’t,” Essie said. “They illegally married you off to your uncle when you were still a kid. Assholes,” she muttered under her breath. “I’d tell my mom right away. My dad…I guess I’d text him eventually. If I knew where he was.”

I blinked down at my soft, but still relatively flat belly. There was an innocent bundle of cells in there. “So many ways to fuck up a kid. Maybe I should worry less about who I tell and focus more on being the kind of parent who gets told.”

James nudged my shoulder with hers. “That’s why you’re going to be a great mom, Chloe.”

“Maybe.” I blew out a shuddery breath. If it’s real. If it stays . “I hope so.”

We fell quiet as the server reappeared with our food.

Waffles for me because it seemed like the brunch equivalent of a Saltine cracker, avocado toast for James, French toast for Janie and Essie, and an omelet for Hannah.

The sudden array of smells hit my stomach immediately after my nose, and not in a good way.

“Can I get a ginger ale?” I asked the server as she set down the last plate.

“Sure, hon. Coming right up.” She spun away again, heading back to the kitchen.

“Morning sickness?” Janie asked sympathetically.

I nodded queasily. “More like all-fucking-day sickness. I’ll be fine. Just keep talking. The distraction helps.” I took a tiny sip of water and an even tinier bite of waffle. I was starting to learn that an empty stomach only made the nausea worse.

“Tell us everything,” Essie said, digging into her stuffed French toast. I tried not to gag as cream cheese filling oozed out. “Who’s the dad? How long have you known?”

“The dad is…” My voice trailed off as I thought better of it. “Actually, I’m going to keep that to myself for now. I’ll tell you after I tell him, okay? I don’t think he should be the last to know he’s going to be a dad.”

“Fair,” James said. “So how did you find out you were pregnant? How long have you known?”

“A couple days. I…um…” Shit. Steven. She hated Steven, as much as James was capable of hating anyone.

I couldn’t just say, oh, hey, remember that guy who purposefully startled your horse so you would fall off and then threatened to sue the ranch?

Funny story, he came over in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t have to take the test alone .

Which might beg the question: why?

A reasonable question, because I hadn’t told them about any of it.

I hadn’t told them about Stevie the Pig and our roadside rescue, or that he had bought me coffee, or that he was working for my dad, or the 3 a.m. text conversations.

I definitely hadn’t told any of them that he’d caught literal vomit in his bare hands to protect the shoes they had embroidered for me.

I hadn’t told them that of all the people who could have been there, I wasn’t mad that it was him. Maybe I was even glad it was him.

Another wave of nausea hit, but I was pretty sure this one at least had more to do with my guilty conscience than growing a baby inside me.

“Here’s that ginger ale.” The server placed it in front of me and then backed up a step. “Anything else I can get you, ladies?”

“No,” we chorused.

I stuck my nose into the glass and breathed in the spicy-sweet smell. The bubbles tickled my nose, and I coughed, but my nausea dissipated somewhat.

I looked up at my friends, who were still waiting for an answer.

“The nausea sort of gave it away.” That was true.

“It had been about two months since my last period, which was still within the normal range for me, but I took a test anyway, fully expecting it to be negative. It wasn’t. ” Also true. “And here we are.”

They didn’t need to know the Steven parts.

We weren’t dating. We weren’t even really friends.

We had just…accidentally stumbled into each other’s lives for a moment, that was all.

Now we would stumble right out again. Heck, I hadn’t even responded to either of his last two texts—the first one being “You need anything?” and the second being “Hey”—and that was three days ago.

I should text him. Just so he knew I was okay, and I wasn’t his problem. I wasn’t anyone’s problem, but really and fucking truly, I wasn’t his. I should tell him that.

And then we’d never speak to each other again.

That was the truth.

So why did it feel like another lie?