Page 48 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

A ll night I have dreams that begin happily then bleed into nightmares. A nice moment with Charlie, down by the water, turns into discovering Margaret dead in an abandoned shack.

A baby is crying, and Margaret pats my hand and says, “That’s Millie’s, not ours.”

Kit’s getting married, but when the priest announces they’re husband and wife, it’s Charlie and that girl he danced with the night of the country club ball who turn toward the crowd.

I toss in bed and when I finally wake sometime just before dawn, my stomach is churning.

Charlie remains asleep beside me, not budging as I throw back the covers and race to the bathroom, barely skidding to a stop in front of the toilet before my stomach empties.

When it’s blessedly over, I let my face press to the cool tile floor, too weak and shaky to stand. I hope it’s simply food poisoning as opposed to the flu. There’s too much going on between my Marais & Wolfe contract and our final days at the house for me to be sick in bed all week.

I manage to brush my teeth, then slide back to the floor, too weak to continue standing.

A minute later, Charlie enters the bathroom, wearing not a stitch of clothing.

Even as sick as I am, I’m still able to appreciate what an absolute work of art he is: lovely and large and muscly. All mine for not much longer.

Yet another reason I can’t afford to lose any days to illness.

“Jesus, Maren, what happened?” asks Charlie, squatting beside me.

“I threw up,” I whisper.

He laughs as he lifts me into his arms off the floor. “Yeah, I put that part together, hon. Let’s get you back into bed.”

I weakly shake my head, then press my face to his cool chest. “I don’t want to get you sick. I should sleep somewhere else.”

“I’m far too strong and masculine to get sick,” he says.

I laugh shakily. “I’m no doctor, but I’m not sure it works that way.”

I’m too tired to fight him, however, as he tucks me back under the blankets and though I want to talk to him, I drift off to sleep, exhausted.

The next time I wake, the sun is out, and Charlie’s fully dressed with his hand on my shoulder. “Drink, Maren,” he says, his brow furrowed as he hands me a glass of something bright red. “You need electrolytes.”

Reluctantly, I accept the glass, though I really just want to go back to sleep. “I think I’m better. Just tired. It was the chicken. I was worried I hadn’t cooked it enough. You’re not nauseous at all?”

He pushes the hair back from my face. “I told you. I’m too manly to get sick.”

I give him a halfhearted smile. “Oh, right. I forgot.”

“If you weren’t sick, I’d have a very reasonable and not at all selfish way to make you remember.”

“Maybe you should do it anyway. Then you can claim I was healed by your cock. ”

“I intend to tell everyone that regardless,” he says. “You think you can eat something? I made soup.”

My heart swells like a cartoon character’s. “You cooked?”

“Don’t give me too much credit. I added one cup of water to a can of Campbell’s and shoved it in the microwave. I doubt it’s getting a Michelin star. But stay put and I’ll go get it.”

I push off the covers. “Honestly, I think I’m fine. I can go to the house.”

He rests a hand on my shoulder. “Stay in bed. Just in case. I’ll be right back.”

He rises and turns toward the door, and my eyes fill. Why can’t he want the things I do? Why can’t he want marriage? Why can’t he want to fill that big house with children? He’d be so good at it, at all of it, and there’s no one alive I’d rather do it with.

Not everyone gets a happy ending, yet I can’t seem to stop wishing I’ll get mine.

By midday, despite Charlie’s insistence that I remain in bed, I get up and persuade him to go for a walk around the lake with me. That night, he doesn’t succumb to my repeated assurances that I’m perfectly fine until I’ve undressed and climbed into his lap.

Eventually, he agrees that it was probably the chicken.

In bed, as we start to doze off, I list the things I want to get done tomorrow. So many things, to make up for how little I’ve accomplished today.

I fall asleep dreaming about measuring for the kitchen counters and wake drenched in sweat and gagging. This time, I remain in bed, hoping the nausea will pass so that Charlie doesn’t rush off to play Mother Hen again—not that I minded.

It does pass after a moment. But what the hell? I was fine yesterday afternoon but ate very little last night just to be on the safe side, and now I’m back at square one.

I run through every catastrophic possibility first, and quietly climb out of bed and splash water on my face in the bathroom.

I’m drawn and gray beneath my tan, with circles under my eyes.

I open the cabinet, wondering if we have anything for nausea…

and my gaze lands on the box of tampons I bought ages ago because my period was due.

It still isn’t opened.

What the fuck?

I’ve gone for so many years now hoping for a missed period, then didn’t even notice when it actually happened. I’m late. Three weeks late? Four weeks late?

I’m significantly late.

I reach up and cup my breasts. They’re tender. They’ve been tender for two weeks now, and I…I don’t even know what I thought that was. I suppose I assumed it was all the attention they’d been getting from Charlie.

Is it possible? After years and years of trying, have I wound up pregnant with the last man in the world who’d want me to be?

It doesn’t seem possible. How could it be? The fertility doctor ran a nearly infinite number of tests and told me point-blank it couldn’t happen on my own. Did he lie? Was he mistaken? Or is this some magic created by the house?

Maybe it’s one of those pregnancies women get where it’s all in their head. Except those happen to women who were actively thinking about pregnancy, whereas I’m someone who basically forgot about it for six weeks straight.

And there’s also this quiet joy inside me anyway—a joy that says by some miracle…it’s actually true this time.

There’s no way I’m going back to sleep. I grab my clothes and sneak out of the cottage, changing in the predawn light before I go out to the car.

The Stop-n-Shop is open already. Martha is almost always there, and I trust her. She’ll have plenty of opinions about this, but she won’t share them beyond the two of us .

I wave to her and go to the back of the store where the pregnancy tests are kept.

She smiles when I reach the register. “Well, this is an interesting turn of events.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I argue. Mostly because if she gets excited, then I’ll get more excited, and it’ll hurt that much more when the second pink line never appears. I’ve lived it so many times over the past few years I don’t know how it’s even upsetting when it happens.

“It’s not nothing,” she says, squeezing my hand. “I’ve been wondering for weeks. I figured you were just keeping it a secret.”

I freeze. “How? How could you know?”

She shrugs. “You’ve just got that look. Definitely having a girl.”

She couldn’t possibly know any of this, but yeah…I think she’s right. I think I might be pregnant, and I sort of feel like it’s a girl too.

I take the test in the powder room of the main house.

I’ve taken a million tests at this point in my life for no reason at all.

My period would be a day late and I’d be rushing off, too excited not to check.

I hold the stick under the stream of urine, counting to five.

And when I’ve finished counting, I pull the test back into view, watching as pink washes over the white screen.

The control line appears immediately and I’m waiting for that other line as if my life depends on it.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Maren. It probably means nothing, and it’s for the best if…”

My brain goes silent. I didn’t have to wait a minute. There’s a second line, as dark as the first, almost instantaneously.

I am pregnant. I am definitely pregnant.

After all my years of doing everything right so that I’d have the perfect pregnancy, it happens now?

I’ve been drinking, I’ve been running, I’ve been eating like shit.

“You’re already a terrible mother, and it’s barely begun,” I whisper, and I’m weeping but smiling at the same time.

It’s really going to happen. Maybe. I’ll need to take a blood test. I guess I’ll need to see a doctor. I’ll need to discuss it with…

Charlie.

God. How the hell am I going to tell Charlie?

He comes into the house with a brow raised, glancing at the table laid out with enough food for ten people.

“I made breakfast,” I tell him.

He pulls me against him. “I see.” His mouth presses to the top of my head. “How do you feel? All recovered?”

My breath catches. I could tell him now. I should tell him now. But he’s just woken up and it can wait, right? It can wait until he’s fully awake, and he’s had some food.

“Totally fine,” I reply.

His hand palms my ass, and he gives it a light slap. “Then you really ought to be back in bed instead of in here, fully dressed. We’ve only got thirty minutes until the guys arrive.”

I laugh. “Breakfast will get cold.”

I know he’s thinking he’d rather get laid than fed, but he gives in with a reluctant smile and sits at the table.

I take a seat across from him, forcing down a little fruit, though nerves have demolished any appetite I might have had.

I watch the way his long fingers lift the fork, the way his beautiful mouth closes around it, the way his blue eyes catch mine.

If I could pick anyone in the world to be my child’s biological father, it would probably be him, and if he could pick any outcome in the world, it would be to not father anyone at all.

It’s a miracle, and it’s also deeply unfair to him—he thought I was this sure thing.

It’s as if I’ve tricked him. Hopefully he won’t actually believe that but God, who knows ?

I’ll offer him the option of bowing out.

As much as it hurts to imagine leaving him, if he doesn’t want to be a part of this, I’m not going to force his hand.

I’d go elsewhere, claim I conceived through IVF, and he’d need never get involved.

Except we aren’t two strangers who’d never see each other again.

There’d be holidays and family dinners and every occasion in between.

Kit’s wedding, the birth of her children, our parents’ birthdays.

Is he really going to watch his own child—a child who might look just like him—running around the room at Christmas and pretend it isn’t his?

Of course he won’t. He’ll feel duty-bound to help raise the kid, and probably to make an honest woman of me, too, once I’m no longer married to someone else—and that would make me so incredibly happy, but only if it wasn’t going to make him incredibly miserable.

Which it obviously would.