came as soon as I could,” he said briskly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral. I was in Hong Kong and I had to go to Japan before I came home.”
“Of course.” Josie picked up a carnation and with great care added it to one of the bouquets. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t say anything else. Not, How are you? Not, I’ve missed you.
The clock ticked. An airplane thrummed overhead. Sam drummed his fingers against his thigh.
“I should have been here for her. I should have come at Christmas. I didn’t because...because...” Of you.
No, he couldn’t say that. He sucked in a breath and tried again. “The last time I was here... I’m sorry about...”
He stopped there, too.
He owed her an apology, certainly. But she hadn’t exactly been unwilling! He remembered that much. He wished to hell she’d look at him now, give him some indication of what she was thinking.
Sam Fletcher, who had once been told he “oozed charm through every pore,” felt that at the moment he was oozing only sweat.
“About that night,” he said finally, deciding that bluntness was the best policy. “It was a mistake. A big mistake...asking you to have a drink with me. And af ter...well, after...” He paused. Damn it, at least look at me.
She did. It was no help. Her face was so expressionless he didn’t have a clue what she thought. Still, whatever he’d said so far, clearly it wasn’t enough.
“I didn’t mean... I never meant for what happened to... to happen.” He stopped, flushing in the face of her total silence. “It was the whiskey talking...”
“I assumed as much.” Josie’s voice was flat. toneless. She turned to stare out the window.
“I tried to see you the next morning. I got a call from Elinor. I went to see you then, to tell you, before I left...but Hattie said you’d gone out with Kurt...” He looked at her for confirmation.
Her profile nodded.
So he hadn’t screwed up her life. Thank God for that. He grinned shakily and breathed an enormous sigh of relief. “I’m glad.”
“Are you?” She picked up the two vases in front of her and moved to put them on a cart. Sam watched, hoping she was wearing shorts so he could see those long, wonderful long legs—legs that had once wrapped around him and—
He didn’t even notice her legs.
Only her belly.
Josie was pregnant!
And not just a little pregnant, either. She was huge.
“You’re having a baby!”
Josie set the vases on the cart.
She was having a baby and—“And Kurt still hasn’t married you?”
Suddenly Sam was furious. It was bad enough the jerk stood her up all the time! It was worse that he expected her to drop everything to type his damn papers! But this was ridiculous! “Just exactly how irresponsible is he?”
Josie turned to face him. “Why should he marry me? It’s not his child.”
“Not—?” Sam gaped, stunned. Not Kurt’s child?
He scowled furiously, his mind ticking over, processing this new bit of information, trying desperately to sort things out, to put it together with what he knew about Josie Nolan.
He hadn’t thought she was the type to sleep around! She’d always seemed so quiet, so dedicated. Sweet. He’d always liked Josie Nolan, respected her, had always thought she’d got the short end of the stick in life and even in her choice of fiancés.
He’d felt sorry for her that night last autumn, had wanted to comfort her. Maybe he’d been wrong. His jaw locked. Just how the hell promiscuous was she?
“I trust you know who the father is?” be said acidly.
Josie’s eyes widened. She went rigid. Her chin tipped up and Sam saw color flush her no longer expressionless face.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said flatly. “You.”
CHAPTER TWO
OH, WAY to go, Josie congratulated herself. Such tact. Such subtlety.
But it was hard to be subtle when you were as big as a rhinoceros.
Carefully, deliberately, she suppressed a sigh and strove to look as indifferent as she could. It wasn’t easy. It was, in fact, even harder than she’d imagined.
For the last six months—ever since she’d realized that the night she’d spent with Sam Fletcher last September was going to have lasting repercussions of a more than emotional kind—she’d known this moment was coming. She’d put it off, resisting Hattie’s continual exhortations to tell him, instead preferring to “stick her head in the sand,” as Hattie called it.
Josie called it self-preservation.
What else would you call facing a man with the news that he was going to be a father when he was obviously unhappy about facing her at all?
Their night of intimacy had been “the whiskey talking.” Hadn’t he just said so? Of course he had. She’d known it at the time. She’d just been powerless to resist.
Josie Nolan had loved Sam Fletcher unrequitedly and hopelessly since she was fifteen years old.
A realist, Josie had never expected a drop-dead gorgeous millionaire jet-setter to fall madly in love with the foster-daughter of his aunt’s next door neighbor. She might now be Hattie’s protégée and innkeeper, but she’d started out as her cleaning girl. Josie had read Cinderella, but that didn’t mean she was a fool.
But something must have.
Because when Sam Fletcher had appeared at her door the night of her twenty-fifth birthday, all misery, commiseration and gentleness, she’d been powerless to shut it in his face.
And so she’d spent the last six months trying to figure out how to tell him about the results of that night.
There had seemed no good way. Only ways that would have him think of her as a scheming hussy out to trap him into a marriage he didn’t want.
At times—in the dead of night, for example, when she was remembering the tenderness of his touch, the urgency of his need, the firm persuasiveness of his lips—she tried to delude herself that there really had been something between them, that he’d welcome the news, that when he’d gone back to New York he’d missed her as much as she missed him.
In the clear light of day she knew that was so much hogwash.
But as long as he didn’t show up and say it had been a mistake, she’d dared to hold on to a tiny ray of hope.
Not any longer.
“I
