“Can I come in?”
She hesitated and then nodded, stepping away from the door.
He followed her through the formal living room, dining room and kitchen to the family room in the back of the house. He’d never understood why a woman who lived alone wanted so much space around her, but then, he’d never understood Elise, period.
Outside the office, that was.
A half-filled and perspiring glass of what appeared to be mostly juice and melted ice sat on the end table. The lamp was on. The large-screen television in front of the creamy white leather sofa was silent. There were no books, remote controls, or papers to indicate that his partner had been doing anything while she’d been sitting there.
Tucking her feet beneath her white skirt, she curled up on the sofa. And picked at her fingernails.
Her cats, Darin and Samantha, settled behind her on the back of the sofa.
“You mind if I get myself a bottle of water?” He wasn’t thirsty. Except, perhaps, for a shot of bourbon. Straight up.
He hadn’t consumed alcohol straight up since college.
“Of course not.” Her smoky gray eyes were more mysterious to him than usual as she glanced at him. Why did the woman’s expression so rarely show him what she was thinking, like everyone else’s did? “Help yourself.”
Retrieving a bottle from the top shelf of the refrigerator, he glanced around the kitchen. The red-and-gold-flowered canisters that matched the wall paper border topping the golden accent wall were all neatly in place. Salt and pepper shakers that went with the set were on the stove where he’d always seen them in the past. If she’d eaten anything, she’d already cleaned up. And dried the sink, as well.
She’d had Kelly and him for dinner on a regular basis when they’d still been married. Joe couldn’t remember her ever drying out the sink when she’d finished the dishes.
Hadn’t she eaten?
“So what’d you do today?” He tried for casual as he approached her again, unsure whether he should join her on the couch or remain standing.
Now her eyes were moist when she looked at him, as though, while he’d been perusing her kitchen, she’d been crying. Or was about to start.
This was new ground for him. In the almost fourteen years they’d known each other it had somehow always been her picking up the pieces for him. He stared at the polished gleam on his wing-tip shoes.
“Mostly I stayed home.”
Joe thought about the times he’d taken off work—they weren’t as rare as hers, but rare enough that the hours were filled to the brim.
“Mostly?”
Elise’s smile settled his nerves some. “It’s okay, Joe. You can go. I’m fine. Really.”
He wanted to go.
“You sure you’re okay?”
She nodded. Darin opened one eye and closed it again.
Joe drank the bottle of water, recapped it, planning to throw it in the trash in the kitchen on his way out. He had a frozen Salisbury steak and mashed potato dinner to get home to. And then was meeting a couple of bankers for drinks at nine, after their racquetball game. If all went well, he’d be signing on their chain of financial institutions, Michigan Local Banks, to begin payroll at the beginning of July. It was a ten-million-dollar account—a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year payout to B&R—his largest yet.
Joe glanced at his partner, the woman who’d been his buddy in college, challenging his thinking at every turn, challenging him to put his money where his mouth was and go into business, intimidating the hell out of him a time or two, listening to him whine and then curse when Kelly left him to make babies with a man who wanted them. She’d gotten drunk with him the day his divorce papers came through.
“I can’t go until you tell me what’s going on.”
That perfectly sculpted chin lifted again.
“I’m six-and-a-half weeks pregnant.”
Joe dropped his water bottle.
“I WON’T LET the business suffer.”
Shocked at the emotions running through him—anger at the man who’d done this to her, feelings of protectiveness—Joe loosened his tie and sat. Darin and Samantha both leaped from the sofa and scurried out of the room.
The idea of Elise pregnant was so far removed from his idea of reality he couldn’t quite get his mind around it.
“B&R didn’t even enter my head.”
“Well, it will, and I want you to know that I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to handle my responsibilities the same as I always have.”
He didn’t doubt her. And at the moment didn’t care.
Looking her in the eye, he sought to explain the inexplicable. “Who’s the father?” And why did he already hate the guy so much?
“I don’t know.”
Fire burned beneath his skin. How did a woman—at least the kind of woman Elise was—get pregnant without knowing the father? Unless she’d been raped. Could a woman go through something like that and never let on? Surely even Elise, as strong and unflappable and self-contained as she was, couldn’t do that.
And how did he tackle such a sensitive and intimate subject? He didn’t want to trigger a breakdown.
He thought of the times he’d seen her cry.
There weren’t any.
The times she’d come to him with a personal problem.
There weren’t any of those, either.
“When are you due?”
“Christmas.”
He couldn’t help a quick glance at her midsection. It was as flat as ever.
“I won’t let you and the business down, Joe,” she repeated.
“I’m not worried about me! Or the business.” Did she think he was that shallow?
“You’re obviously upset.”
“I’d like to kill the bastard who did this to you.”
“I did this to me.”
Had her expression not been so earnest, the situation so tragic, he would have chuckled. “My friend, you are the most self-sufficient woman I’ve ever met, but even you cannot produce the necessary male ingredient for procreation.”
“No, but I can buy it.”
Her
