and a T-shirt that his chest and broad shoulders stretched to capacity. His penetrating brown eyes seemed to be able to see the whole way to her soul. He was so attractive it almost hurt to look at him. She swallowed.
“This doesn’t have to be complicated. If we tell your dad we’ve been secretly dating and you’re pregnant so we’re getting married, nobody will blink an eye. And it’s not like we have to be ‘really’ married. You work in Pittsburgh. I live in Virginia. We don’t even have to see each other except for a few weekends to make the situation look believable. We can divorce after the baby’s born and once again I’ll bet nobody will even blink an eye, if only because with you working in Pittsburgh and me living in Virginia everybody will say our marriage was doomed from the start.”
What he said made a lot of sense. They could pretend to be married without having to live together because of her job. Plus, not seeing much of each other was a built-in explanation for why the marriage would fail. Oddly enough, it was the perfect way to hide the bad part of their situation while revealing the good parts. Her parents didn’t have any grandchildren. A wedding and a baby right now might be a calming influence. At the very least, a baby and a wedding could make her parents happy.
“Okay. We’ll get married.”
“Okay.”
The foyer became incredibly quiet. They spent the next few seconds staring at each other and it sunk in for Tia that she was marrying the guy she’d dreamed about from the day she’d met him when she was fourteen. Unfortunately, the wedding wasn’t happening anywhere near the way she’d envisioned it. And, even more unfortunately, Drew Wallace wasn’t the Prince Charming she had imagined in her teenage fantasies. In fact, he was pretty much the opposite of the sweet, sincere gentleman she had pictured him to be.
Drew suddenly turned and grabbed his Stetson from a peg by the door. “Let’s go tell your parents.”
Her gaze jerked back to his. “Now?”
“If we don’t do this now, we’re both going to lose courage. Or we’ll try to talk ourselves out of it. Trust me. When it comes to ugly situations like this, I know exactly how to get out of them.”
A quiver of misgiving shuddered through Tia. She wasn’t so naive as to think that a man as handsome and sexy as Drew got to be thirty-six without being involved with other women. Maybe even lots of women. But she’d never thought of him as needing to “get out of things.” Worse, she’d never thought far enough ahead to consider that he might actually be involved with somebody right now.
She rose from the step. “I’m not about to be confronted by an angry woman for stealing her man, am I?”
With his hand already on the doorknob, Drew let out a gust of air and faced her. “You’re not stealing anybody’s man.”
“Because you don’t have somebody?”
“Because we’re not staying married.”
“So this marriage won’t even be a bump in the road for you?”
Drew looked at her as if she were crazy and she said, “Never mind.” She stepped out onto the porch ahead of him and ran down the steps to the sidewalk, knowing that for the next several months, maybe even year, she was stuck with the grumpiest man on the face of the earth. “This is going to be fun.”
“It doesn’t have to be fun. It doesn’t have to be much of anything since we only have to spend enough time together that your parents don’t suspect the marriage is fake.”
“As I said, sounds like a barrel of fun.”
After crunching across the gravel to the big black truck he had parked in front of his garage, Drew opened the door to the cab and gestured for Tia to climb inside. “And as I said, it doesn’t need to be fun. Only official.”
Tia walked past him. She was pregnant with his baby and had conspired to enter into a fake marriage with him, yet he was barking orders as if he still saw her as a child.
“I’ll take my own car, thanks,” she said, her voice prim and proper. “There’s no reason for me to drive back here just to pick it up.”
He slammed the truck door. “Good point.”
“Whatever,” she said, and marched to her little red sports car.
She got inside, closed her door with enough force to rattle the windows and had her vehicle roaring down the lane toward the main highway before Drew turned to walk to the driver’s-side door.
Anger ricocheted through Drew. He kicked both front tires of his truck on his way around each fender and slammed his door, too.
His only consolation was that he knew Tia wasn’t really driving too fast. Her sports car had a big engine that would roar anytime anyone hit the gas even slightly. But occupying his brain with anger about her driving was much better than thinking about telling his mentor and friend that his daughter was about to have a baby. His baby….
Drew paused and, dropping his head, let his forehead bump against the steering wheel. His baby.
Dear God. He was going to be a father.
Even as the thought filled him with an emotion that made his heart feel as if it was surrounded by warm oatmeal, it also struck pure terror in that same heart. Not because he thought he couldn’t handle being a dad, but because he knew he could not handle being married. One incredibly ugly divorce had taught him that lesson. His ex-wife had bled him dry. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was discovering, after he’d literally sold his share of his first business to his partner to pay her settlement, that she just happened to be having an affair with that same partner.
Drew squeezed his eyes shut, angry with himself for thinking of things so far in the past, but he couldn’t stop the memories. Sandy hadn’t been his first love. He’d had girlfriends, been in love, and even lived with someone for a few months before he’d met Sandy, so he wasn’t naive. But Sandy had been special. She was funny, interesting, smart and one of the most wonderful women he had ever met. He remembered some nights just watching her sleep, totally grateful that she was his.
Her request for a divorce had come out of the blue and had blindsided him. When he had opened the envelope from the process server he was sure he and his partner were being sued by one of their contractors. That would have been stunning enough. But to see in print Sandy’s name and his name and the word divorce on the same page, when he hadn’t even known there was trouble in paradise, had paralyzed him.
Figuring that it might be a joke or a mistake, he had raced home to talk to Sandy, but she had coldly assured him that it was neither a mistake nor a joke. He had begged her to let him make it up to her—though he hadn’t really understood what he’d done wrong. She had handed him a suitcase, told him she was changing the locks and escorted him to the door.
And he’d stood there. On the front stoop of the brand-new house they were supposed to share. Probably for a half hour. Numb and confused.
After the divorce, he had wished he’d stayed numb. Because when he had learned his wife had kicked him out so she could marry his former partner, he had gotten so angry he’d punched Mac Franklin. That cost him a night in jail.
But even that wasn’t the worst. The worst had been loving somebody who didn’t love him. The worst had been living in the same town when the
