said calmly. “It looks like I’ve gone a little nuts. But I haven’t. In spite of the dizziness and the rest of the pregnancy annoyances, I feel good about this baby. I feel better than I’ve felt since Jack died and I can’t believe that’s anything but positive, so that’s how I’m going to look at it. If you have qualms—”
“Keep them to yourself,” Wyatt advised.
“I was going to say get over them, but that’s good, too,” Marti said. “And as for staying in Northbridge a while to be with Gram, and checking out the site Wyatt found for the new store here, I’m as capable of doing all of that now as I was before I was pregnant. End of discussion!”
Neither of her brothers looked convinced. They both just sat there with worried expressions on their faces.
“I appreciate that you guys care. I really do. But I haven’t gone off the deep end. It was just meant to be that I have a baby at this point—with Jack or without him,” she said, pushing on to get through this. “Yes, it’s sad that it isn’t Jack’s baby or that he isn’t here to have it with me and make up the family we thought we’d have…” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with this new path. It’s just a new path.”
And with that she couldn’t possibly have said another word on the subject without breaking down. So she stood and said she was tired and was going to bed.
She’d made it to the bottom of the stairs when she heard Ry say to Wyatt, “I told you, ever since the Expo she’s been different.”
Marti pretended she hadn’t heard and went up the creaky old stairs, maintaining her air of confidence until she was behind the closed door of her current bedroom.
The first floor was beginning to show signs of im provement and after the wedding Marti intended to move into the downstairs den. But until then she was staying upstairs in what had been her grandmother’s room as a girl, and almost nothing had been done to that. While the room was clean, it showed its age in the canopy bed that was missing its canopy due to decay, an ancient, scarred bureau and matching dressing table and a large cheval mirror that was cracked in one corner.
Marti went to the bed and collapsed in a heap, letting a long sigh deflate that phony facade she’d been keeping up for the last few days since she’d invented the artificial insemination story for her brothers. The facade she’d had to kick up a notch since that afternoon when yet another curveball had been tossed at her in the form of Noah Perry.
“Am I the only one you can knock around?” she muttered to whatever unseen forces seemed to be at work in her life for the last nine-and-a-half months.
Regardless of how she was presenting everything to her brothers, underneath it all she was a wreck.
She’d hoped never to go through anything more stressful than the death of her fiancé. But the last few weeks had rivaled it.
Pregnant. She’d done one dumb thing in her life and had she been allowed to just get away with it? No. She’d gotten pregnant!
It wasn’t as if she’d planned to go to Denver that last weekend in March and sleep with a stranger. It wasn’t as if it had even crossed her mind. She’d volunteered to oversee the Hardware Expo just to escape for a few days. To escape the constant reminders of Jack everywhere she looked, everywhere she went, every which way she turned. To escape all the well-intentioned sympathy and pity of friends and family. To escape the awkward position of being a sort-of-but-not-really widow.
She’d just wanted a few days without anyone tiptoeing around her or being overly solicitous of her. A few days of not needing to assure everyone she spoke to that she was okay. A few days to interact with people who didn’t know her or Jack or what had happened. People who were just going about their lives the way they always had.
Which was exactly what she’d found and for the whole three days of the Expo she’d felt as if at least half of the weight on her shoulders had been lifted. It had actually been easier to endure the bouts of grief without all the coddling and fussing.
Bouts of grief—she realized as she thought that that’s what the grieving was becoming. That it wasn’t the constant, ever-present entity that it had been at the beginning. That now she was doing what Wyatt had said she would—that the times when she felt better and more able to cope, more as if she really was going to get through it, were increasing. That the times when she was blinded by it were becoming fewer and further between.
And the Expo had helped that along.
And so had Noah Perry…
She’d encountered him on several occasions over those three days. Not that she’d known his name. Until the night in the coffee shop he was just another face among the gazillion faces that had passed through Home-Max’s displays or visited the hospitality suite.
And yet here she was, having his baby.
Overwhelmed by that all over again, she lay on her side on the bed with her feet still on the floor.
The image of Noah’s face had stuck with her at least, she thought in a feeble attempt to somehow make this seem less awful than it did. He was memorably handsome, though. Which was why she’d noticed him even among the crowd at the Expo and amid a sea of other faces in the suite when he’d passed through.
He had rugged good looks—a sharply defined bone structure that gave him a square brow, high cheekbones, a razor-sharp nose and a jawline that was strong and prominent.
But it was his hair and eyes that had really stuck with her. There was nothing common or ordinary about them.
He had great hair. Dark and thick and wavy. And although he wore it a little longer than she’d liked Jack to wear his, it suited this guy. Full and carelessly combed away from that chiseled face, it touched his collar in the back and gave him an untamed, bad-boy air.
And his eyes—they were the color of melted bittersweet chocolate, shining and penetrating and patient. Eyes that looked as if they had intelligence behind them. That seemed to see past the surface.
She’d already thought that if her baby was born with its father’s hair and eyes it would be beautiful…
But she hadn’t just taken one glance at the man and said, “take me, I’m yours,” because he looked good…well, better than good, great. Still, that hadn’t been enough for her to spend the night with him. No, that had come out of a combination of things, including a few cocktails too many and an apparent weakness for the cute guy she’d repeatedly seen around the trade show.
Would she have agreed to join him for a bite to eat if her inhibitions hadn’t already been compromised?
Probably. Because in a way, by then the man she’d been thinking of for three days as The Cute Guy had become a part of the reason she’d gone to the Expo in the first place. He’d treated her normally.
He’d joked with her. He’d been friendly. He’d been funny and charming and clever. And yes, he’d even flirted with her a little.
Not that she’d wanted someone to flirt with her, but when he had, it had felt good. It had also felt good to discover that she could even flirt back—something she hadn’t known she could do with anyone but Jack. So she’d opted to allow herself one last brush with that before returning to reality in Missoula and had had a sandwich
