had flushed pink and a few strands of her long, curly hair had gotten loose from the golden mass and coiled over her left eye. He lifted his hand to tuck them behind her ear.
She caught his wrist, her grip fierce. “It’s yours,” she said, hitching her delicate chin high. “It’s yours and I’m keeping it.”
He waited until she let go, and then he continued the action, catching the soft strands, guiding them back into place. “Okay.”
Her honey-brown eyes flashed at him. “Okay? That’s all? Just…okay?”
“Crystal…” He wanted to comfort her somehow, or at least to reassure her that he would be there, that she could count on him.
But before he could find the words for that, she demanded, “Okay, you believe it’s yours—or it’s okay with you that I keep it?”
“Look, I…”
“What?”
“Both, okay? Both.”
“Both,” she whispered, doubting. Defensive.
“That’s right.”
A silence. Her full lower lip quivered. “I…I’m sorry. Suddenly, I’m kind of being a bitch about this, for no reason I can think of.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. I can take it.”
“It’s just…” She heaved another ragged breath. “I’ve been trying to tell you for two weeks now. I was beginning to think I’d never work up the nerve. And now, all of a sudden, it’s out, I’ve said it. You know.” She stared at him, as if trying to decide what to say next. And then she added, “I’m sure it’s…hard to accept.” Strangely, it wasn’t. She added, “So, if you want a paternity test—”
“No. I don’t.”
She blinked. “Just like that. You believe that it’s yours?”
“I do.”
It was more than mere belief. Tanner knew the baby was his. Because he knew Crystal. Yeah, she could be irresponsible. She really ought to take life more seriously. As of today she was out of work and he doubted she had more than a few hundred dollars in the bank. She never talked about her family, about her life before she met and became friends with Tanner’s brother-inlaw, Mitch Valentine, down in L.A. Tanner knew she kept secrets. But she wasn’t a liar. If she said the kid was his, it was.
A kid. His kid…
How incredible was that?
She backed up against the sink counter. “We should…sit down, don’t you think? Talk about this a little?”
“Right.” He headed for the futon again. Aside from the dinner table with its two mismatched chairs, it was the only place to sit in the living area. She claimed she owned real furniture—she’d just left it behind for six months when she sublet her Hollywood apartment.
She trailed after him. They sat at either end of the long, lumpy blue cushion. The day was fading and shadows filled the corners of the room. She turned on the lamp that she’d borrowed from his sister.
Then she slumped into the cushion, letting her head rest on the back of the futon, and folded her hands on her still flat stomach. “I…sheesh. I hardly know where to start.”
He felt the same. But then he realized he did have a question. “Who else knows?”
It was a reasonable thing to ask. His sister, Kelly, was Crystal’s best friend—and had been almost from the first day Crystal appeared at Kelly’s front door looking for Mitch. Crystal considered Mitch to be the brother she’d never had; she claimed she’d packed up on the spur of the moment and moved to Sacramento because she “sensed” that Mitch needed her. So she very well might have told either of them—or both—that she was pregnant before she told Tanner.
Until then, she’d been keeping her eyes straight ahead, in the general direction of her small TV screen, which was flanked on either side by brick and board bookcases filled with books on things like reading tarot cards, feng shui and natural healing.
But now she rolled her head his way. “No one else knows yet. Just you.”
Her answer pleased him in some mysterious, deep way. “Well, okay.”
That curl of hair had settled over her eye again. She reached up and swiped it aside. “You keep saying ‘okay.’”
He shrugged. “It’s all pretty new. You could say I’m at a loss for words.”
“Oh, yeah. I hear you there.” She was nodding, her irritation of a moment before gone as fast as it had appeared. “And now that you mention it, well, we are going to have to tell them, sooner or later….”
From the first time they ended up in bed together, Tanner and Crystal had agreed to keep this thing between them a secret. It had made perfect sense to both of them all along—after all, each time it happened was supposed to be the last time. And since Crystal hadn’t told either Mitch or Kelly about the baby, chances were the other couple was still in the dark about the two of them.
It was just too damned weird to try to explain to the family that he and Crys didn’t want to go out with each other, that they had nothing in common, didn’t want to get anything started when it was so clear it was going nowhere—and yet somehow they couldn’t help ending up naked together every time they saw each other.
He suggested, “Maybe we should wait until they get back from their trip to say anything about this.”
“Agreed,” Crystal said. “And I think I’ll wait to mention losing my job, too. After all, it’s their honeymoon. It’s a time that’s supposed to be all about them.”
Kelly and Mitch—recently reunited after years apart—were leaving the next day for two weeks on an island paradise somewhere east of Madagascar. Though they’d tied the knot a month earlier, it had taken Kelly several weeks to clear her calendar at work for the trip. Crystal would be staying at the house while the newlyweds were gone, looking after Tanner’s niece, DeDe. Tanner, whose job often took him away from Sacramento for days at a time, was supposed to be helping out Crystal whenever his schedule allowed.
Crystal stared glumly at the dark TV again. “Strange. For two weeks, all I’ve thought about is how I had to tell you. And now that I have, I feel…I don’t know. Limp. Numb. Like I don’t know what to do next.”
“It’s—” he almost said okay, but stopped himself just in time “—all right.”
She looked at him, forced a smile. “Just think. If I’d only kept my mouth shut, we could be having great sex right now, instead of sitting here on this futon not knowing what to say to each other.”
“I’m glad you told me,” he said gruffly.
Another silence fell between them. He heard her sigh. She stared across the room again as he considered the question of what to do next.
To Tanner, family was everything. And now this woman was having his baby. She wasn’t the
