came out on an exhaled breath. “I’d had a bad cold, thought maybe that screwed up my cycle.” She gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Okay, I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.”
The sun nestled a little closer to the horizon as they stood there, not looking at each other, not saying anything. One of the dogs sat down to scratch, jangling his tags; a couple of mares decided to get up a game of tag, their pounding hooves raising a cloud of dust. Cal kept thinking he was supposed to say something, to come up with some sort of solution. Instead, he could practically hear the wind whistling through the cavity where his brain was supposed to be.
“I guess you’re sure—”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sure. And yes, I’m having the baby. And keeping it.”
Her eyes darted to his, then away, as his stomach screeched to a halt a breath away from splat! “So you never considered—”
“I didn’t say that.” At what must have been his horrified expression, she pushed out a breath. “To be honest, my first thought was this can’t be happening. And my second thought was how can I make it unhappen? So I went for a walk. A long walk. A walk that took me past a family planning clinic. On purpose. And I stood there, staring at the door, visualizing walking up the steps, making an appointment…” Her eyes went wide, the words shooting from her mouth like a flock of freaked birds. “I’d never even thought about having a baby, Cal! Let alone like this! Who knows what kind of mother I’ll make? For all I know, this could be a major disaster in the making—”
She let out a little yelp when Cal grabbed her by the shoulders. “And you can stop that kind of talk right now! You’re gonna make a dynamite mother. Maybe not a normal one, but a damned good one.”
She rolled her eyes, then said, “And you know this how?”
“Because I know you. Or at least, I did. And the Dawn I remember never did anything half-assed.” Purely from reflex, his thumbs started massaging her shoulders. Purely from reflex—he assumed—she shivered slightly. “I’d be real surprised to find out you’d changed.”
“Yeah, well, raising a kid isn’t the same as acing a course. Or even winning a case. Which I don’t always do, by the way.”
“But—” He actually caught the thought before it sailed out of his big mouth, but only long enough to examine it and let it go, anyway. “But you were all set to get married.”
“Oh.” She sighed. “That. As it happens, Andrew wasn’t all that hot on parenthood. And to be honest, I was ambivalent. About having kids, I mean.”
“You got any idea why?”
That got a shrug. “Maybe because so much of my work revolves around children. I don’t know.” At his frown, she said, “I do a fair amount of pro bono work for the firm, most of it involving family issues. Many of the kids I see have been knocked around pretty badly. By life, by The Man, by—all too often—their own parents. And the looks on their faces…” The expression on hers twisted him inside out. “Oh, God, Cal, they’d break your heart. The way they want to trust so badly, and are so afraid to…”
Tears shone in her eyes. “Everybody says, don’t get involved, don’t let it become personal. Except that’s the reason I became a lawyer to begin with, to try to make a difference. Lame as that might sound,” she added with a wry smile. “But having a kid of my own…” She let loose another sigh, this one long and ragged. “I’ve never been one of those women who gets all mushy when they see someone else’s baby or feel a pang of envy at seeing a pregnant woman, okay? I’ve never felt that having a child would complete me, because I never felt anything was missing to begin with. But here I am, pregnant. Pregnant and confused, and sick half the day, and scared. That’s about all I know. And that I had to tell you. Beyond that, it’s a blank. A very screwed-up, messy blank.”
Their gazes danced around each other for a second or two, then she took off for her car, leaving Cal so tangled up in his emotions, he had no idea which one prompted him to yell out, “We could get married.”
She spun around, her mouth open. Then she burst out laughing.
“It wasn’t that dumb a suggestion,” he muttered, closing the space between them.
She crossed her arms when he reached her, that pitying look in her eyes again. “Who’d you vote for in the last election?”
He told her, and she laughed again. The car door groaned when she opened it. “We’d never survive the next presidential campaign. Besides, even if I was sticking around, you know as well as I do shotgun marriages rarely work out.”
He couldn’t argue with her there. Of the three couples they’d gone to high school with who’d “had” to get married, only one was still together.
“Hold on.” He clamped hold of the top of the door. “What do you mean you’re not sticking around?”
Her brows shot up. “You honestly don’t expect me to move back here just because I’m pregnant?”
“I didn’t expect anything. But I sure as hell didn’t think you’d drop a bombshell like this and just take off again!”
“I’m not. I’ll be here until the end of the week.”
“Oh, well then. That’s different.”
“Dammit, Cal…” She smacked a loose hair out of her face.
“I know your life is here. But mine isn’t. And hasn’t been for a long time. I’ve invested far too much in my career, and Mama sacrificed too much to help me get there, to just drop it because I’m—we’re—going to have a baby.”
Her words only added to the debris-laden whirlwind swirling around inside his head. Yes, he’d always accepted, even if he hadn’t fully understood, that Haven could never provide Dawn with whatever it was that fed her soul, something he assumed she’d found in New York. And an hour ago he didn’t even know about this baby. Yet he already knew not being able to see this child grow up, day by day, minute by minute, would kill him.
“And if you think I’m gonna settle for being an e-mail daddy,” he said sharply, “you’re more off your nut than I thought. You can be a lawyer anywhere. Even here.”
“Right. As if there’s room for more than one attorney in a town with a population of nine hundred.”
“Hey, we’re up to nine hundred and nine now. At least three people had babies last year, nobody died and a new family with four kids bought Ned MacAllister’s property and are building on it. And besides, I hear Sherman Mosely’s thinking of retiring. That heart attack he had last year put the fear of God in him. So maybe there would be—”
“And what kind of work would I do here? Help people make out their wills? Write up contracts? My life isn’t something out of Ally McBeal. I don’t spend my days handling frivolous cases and my nights boogying in some bar.”
“I didn’t figure you did.”
“Then you should understand that I need to be someplace where I can make a real difference in people’s lives. Those kids I told you about? They need me, Cal. And if I make partner, I can help them even more.”
“In other words,
