hated being unprepared.
When he heard another footfall, his heart started banging in his chest. Swiftly he shoveled a hand through his hair, checked his jeans zipper, then glanced at his black sweatshirt to make sure there wasn’t as much pancake batter on him as there seemed to be on the floor. The sound of footfalls moved to the stairs. He braced as if he were imminently facing a firing squad of Uzi’s.
That’s exactly what went wrong the night before, Mac figured. He hadn’t been braced. He hadn’t been prepared. Technically there was nothing wrong with a hug, but he’d just never expected Kelly to suddenly wrap her arms around him. He still had no clue why she’d done it. Maybe every pregnant woman got a wild hair. Maybe she was tired and not thinking. Maybe she needed reassurance. Maybe she’d forgotten she was in love with his brother.
Mac hadn’t. Even if he’d tried, the family must have asked him forty times what would happen if Chad came home. They didn’t get it. Of course Chad was going to show up sometime—he always did after one of his playboy disappearing acts. Mac knew that perfectly well when he’d asked her to marry him, known she’d loved his brother, too. Those sticky complications didn’t erase the reasons for the marriage, but the opposite. Kelly had been in danger. Cut-and-dried. And Mac loved his brother, but he knew him. Painfully well. Whether Chad was snoozing on a beach in Jamaica or right here made no difference. Mac couldn’t trust his brother to protect Kelly or to do right by the child. Keeping her safe was up to him.
And that was precisely why his response to that damn hug was so inexcusable. Mac shoveled a hand through his hair. He remembered folding his arms around her, because he couldn’t just stand there like a lump, and hell, he didn’t want her feeling rejected or scared. Returning the hug seemed an okay thing to do, but after that it all got hazy. Sensations had bombarded him like bullets. Soft bullets... like her hair tickling his nose, and the feel of her tummy pressing against him, and the way her skin glowed so vulnerably in the firelight. She smelled like peach shampoo and soap and that teasing, illusive perfume she wore. It bugged him, those self-deprecating comments she made about being graceless and as big as an elephant. She wasn’t. She’d felt so small in his arms, so warm, so real. He remembered closing his eyes, remembered feeling gutpunched with a stupid, alien, childish wave of longing...he also remembered, too well, being aroused faster than a trigger-hot teenage boy.
He’d jerked back faster than a whiplash, hoping she hadn’t noticed. But all night long he’d seen the bathroom light go on and off. He’d worried about her pregnant kidneys, worried she was sick. But mostly he’d worried that she couldn’t sleep because she was in a strange house with her whole life turned upside down, and now he’d become a new kind of unknown worry in that picture for her, too.
He was just going to have to fix it, that was all. Hell, he’d handled multimillion dollar mergers, European stock crashes, hiring and firing staff in four countries. How much trouble could one pip-squeak-size pregnant woman be?
And then suddenly she was in the doorway. “Morning, Mac. You’re up so early. Whew, can you believe all this snow?”
“Good morning back and yeah, some of those drifts outside are really something.” Oh, God, one look and he could feel a sinking. Give him a stock crash anytime. He knew what to do about that kind of thing.
No matter how glaringly lit the kitchen was, she was still a brighter shock of color. She smiled at him through a sleepy yawn. Her hair was brushed—he was pretty sure—but it still fell around her shoulders in tumbled swirls. An oversize red sweatshirt burgeoned over her tummy, the color matching the two dots of color on her cheeks and her pants both. Unless he was mistaken, she was wearing fat fluffy hound dogs on her feet. It occurred to him that they must be slippers. And that five-hundred-watt sleepy smile suddenly disappeared—hell, had he already done something wrong?
She motioned around the kitchen. “Oh, Mac. You’ve gone to so much trouble—”
“No trouble at all,” he said swiftly. “I just figured you might be hungry for breakfast—”
“I’m always hungry, but I’m afraid I get a queasy stomach first thing in the morning. The most I can handle is a little juice and toast—”
“Toast.” The one thing, naturally, that he hadn’t thought of. “No problem, I know we’ve got bread around here somewhere—”
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