Michelle sighed.
“Do you want to tell them, babe?” he asked Brooke.
Brooke nodded, looking more than a little misty. She had a certain glow about her, something Michelle had failed to notice until now. She could almost guess what was about to come, but the thought was unfathomable. Brooke would have told her something so important. Something so life altering.
“We’re going to have a baby,” Brooke said with a laugh.
Michelle stood stunned as Jared drew Brooke into a lingering kiss. Hurt shot straight through her heart, keen as a butcher knife, twice as painful. Why hadn’t Brooke told her first? Why had her sister—the closest person in her life—waited until now to make an announcement that should have been made in private to her family first?
Deep down, Michelle recognized she should be happy for Brooke and Jared. She should be doing back handsprings across the yard and cheering with the rest of the folk, including her mother who was hugging Brooke and crying, and her dad now doling out pats on Jared’s back. But she couldn’t.
Her fear and hurt wouldn’t let her. Hurt because Brooke hadn’t told her the news first. Fear for her sister’s health: the asthma that had plagued Brooke for so many years couldn’t be good for a pregnancy.
Michelle teetered on the brink of losing it. She hated crying. Hated that she even felt a need to cry. How much more selfish could she be?
She had to get away while she still could. Escape before all that hurt and self-admonishment came out on a rush of bitter tears. Turning on her bare feet, she slipped past the milling crowd and into the double patio doors, thankful she was alone. Thankful, for once, that her mother was occupied with Brooke and not playing chief cook and bottle washer.
Inside the ample kitchen a current of emotion swamped Michelle like a swollen river. So did the tears.
She allowed them only a moment before she started cleaning away the remnants of lunch like a mad maid on a ticking time clock. Like her mother. She scraped the paper plates clean into the disposal then threw them in the trash bin. She dumped liquid from myriad cups before tossing them into the overflowing sink. She picked up a plastic fork that had slipped from her hands and hurled it like a missile across the room where it landed near the dinette.
Slowly she walked to the table, grasped the back of one chair and knelt to pick up the utensil. She paused to swipe at her face damp with tears of frustration.
A pair of sandaled feet came into view. Two bare, tanned legs dusted by dark masculine hair shot upward from the feet, thighs slightly exposed before being covered by blue swim trunks. Two equally well-defined, bronzed arms dangled at the sides of the trunks, attached to an all-male torso covered by a white tank top. As Michelle visually progressed past the strong column of his throat and on up to his brown eyes, she knew she was truly in dire straits.
It was him.
Of all the people to join her pity party, Nick Kempner would have been the last to receive an invitation.
She stood with the fork clutched in one palm, the other hand still braced on the chair. His trademark grin faltered when he met her gaze, and Michelle wished she could just dissolve into the puddles of pool water on the floor.
She was an emotional wreck, and he had the nerve to look sympathetic. Why, oh, why, hadn’t she left an hour ago? What had she done to deserve Nick Kempner’s compassion? And how in the heck was she going to explain?
Michelle didn’t need to explain why she’d been crying, but Nick shored up for an explanation, anyway.
“You’re here,” she said, shattering his expectations.
“Yep, I’m here.” He tugged a napkin from the stack set out on the end of the dining room table and handed it to her.
She hesitantly took it and dabbed at her eyes. “You probably think I’ve totally lost it.”
No, but she was obviously distressed, and he wanted to know why. “Care to talk about it?”
She flipped the napkin clutched in her hand. “It’s nothing, really. Just the usual hormones. I’m feeling a little testy at the moment.”
He pointed to the towel slung low on her hips. “Do you have a weapon tucked away in there?”
At least that earned him a smile from her. “No, just this.” She held up the plastic fork she’d been retrieving from the floor when he’d walked into the room.
He grinned. “I guess I should be grateful.”
She set the fork aside and asked, “Did you hear the news?”
“Nope. Just got here. What news?”
“Brooke’s pregnant.” She didn’t sound happy.
Nick curled his hand on the back of the chair and leaned into it. “Well I’ll be damned.” He didn’t dare tell her that Jared had informed him yesterday about the baby. Obviously, Michelle hadn’t been afforded that courtesy.
He understood all too well how unexpected news could shake a person up. Case in point, Bridget’s classic divorce-paper delivery at his office, the first he’d known about it. A lie. He’d known it was inevitable. He just hadn’t wanted to deal with the possibility.
Yeah, he could relate to Michelle’s anguish.
Michelle sniffed again. “Pretty incredible, huh?”
“Yeah. Pretty incredible. Do you want to sit down?”
He pulled back the chair from the table. Without a word she collapsed in it like a punctured balloon.
Taking the chair beside her, he scraped his mind trying to come up with something appropriate, something halfway consoling to say. He couldn’t think of one damn thing.
Nick allowed her some silence and wondered if he should leave. Maybe she wanted to be alone. Maybe she needed to be held. He could do that, although with her wearing a bikini and a fresh set of tears, that probably wouldn’t be a good idea. The tears affected him more than her lack of clothing at the moment. He hated to see a woman cry, and he figured a strong woman like Michelle Lewis didn’t take emotional outbursts lightly. Neither did he. But he wasn’t too good with comfort, at least not the kind she needed. Medicine had taught him that. Bridget had reminded him of that more times than he could shake a stick at.
The patio door slid open, and Jeanie Lewis, Brooke and Michelle’s mother, stepped in with Nick’s four-year-old daughter, Kelsey, braced on one hip. During those times Nick and Kelsey had joined the Grangers and Lewises for dinner the past few months, Kelsey had adopted Jeanie as a surrogate grandmother. Unfortunately for Nick, Michelle had never made it to those get-togethers, probably in avoidance of facing him after the wedding fiasco.
“Here he is, Kelsey,” Jeanie said, then sent him a mother’s smile. “She’s been looking all over for you. Jared said you might be in here.”
His daughter’s eyes, much like his own, lit up with pure kid joy. “Look, Daddy. I’m gonna swim with Auntie Jeanie.” She held out her arms, both wrapped in lemon-yellow floaties.
“You bet, punkin.”
Nick
