The Secretary's Secret

Even if they could get past all of their differences, there was the problem of them wanting completely different things from life. In all the years he’d known her, she’d never once expressed a desire to have children. Not that he could blame her given her family history. But he’d grown up an only child raised by an aunt and uncle who’d had no use for the eight-year-old bastard dumped in their care. He’d spent his childhood in boarding schools and camps.

He wanted a family—at least three kids, maybe more. He just had to find a woman who wanted that, too. One who wasn’t more interested in climbing the corporate ladder than having a family. And definitely one who wouldn’t insist on a two week European honeymoon followed by mansion hunting in one of Detroit’s most exclusive communities.

Material things didn’t mean much to him. He was content with his modest condo and modest vehicle. His modest life. All the money in the world didn’t buy happiness. Thousands of dollars in gifts from his aunt and uncle had never made up for a lack of love and affection. His children would always know they were loved. They would never be made to feel like an inconvenience. And he sure as hell would never abandon them.

It had taken him years to realize there wasn’t anything wrong with him. That he didn’t drive people away. With a long history of mental illness, his mother could barely take care of herself much less a child, and his aunt and uncle simply had no interest in being parents. It would have been easy for them to hand him back over to social services when his mom lost custody. At least they’d taken responsibility for him.

If not for the lack of affection, one might even say he’d been spoiled as a kid. If he wanted or needed something all it took was a phone call to his uncle and it was his.

A convertible sports car the day he got his driver’s license? No problem.

An all-expenses-paid trip to Cancún for graduation? It’s yours.

The best education money can buy at a first-rate East Coast school? Absolutely.

But no one had handed him his education. He’d worked his tail off to make the dean’s list every semester, to graduate at the top of his class. To make his aunt and uncle proud, even if they didn’t know how to show it. And when he’d asked his uncle to loan him the money to start his company, the entire astronomical sum had been wired to his account within twenty-four hours.

They wouldn’t win any awards for parents of the year, but his aunt and uncle had done the best they could.

He would do better.

There had to be a Ms. Right out there just waiting for him to sweep her off her feet. A woman who wanted the same things he did. And hopefully he would find her before he was too old to play ball with his son, to teach his daughter to Rollerblade.

He stepped into Zoë’s office, trying to remember where in the file cabinet she kept the personnel files. Seeing as how she wasn’t exactly organized, they could be pretty much anywhere.

Despite the disarray, she somehow managed to keep the office running like a finely tuned watch. She’d become indispensable. He would be lost without her.

He started at the top and worked his way down, finding them, of course, in the bottom drawer. He located the file of a new employee, Mark O’Connell, to see if there was some reason why the guy would be missing so much work. Not to mention showing up late. Nick was particular when he hired new employees. He didn’t understand how someone with such impeccable references could be so unpredictable on the job.

He grabbed the file and was about to shut the drawer when he saw the edge of a brown paper bag poking up from the back.

Huh. What could that be? He didn’t remember seeing that the last time he looked in here.

He grabbed the bag and pulled it out. He was about to peek inside, when behind him he heard a gasp.

“What are you doing?”

Nick turned, the pharmacy bag in his hand, and Zoë stood in the office doorway, back from lunch, frozen. If he opened that bag, things were going to get really complicated really fast.

“I found this in the file cabinet,” he said.

When she finally found her voice, she did her best to keep it calm and rational. Freaking out would only make things worse. “I don’t appreciate you going through my things.”

He gave her an annoyed look. “How was I supposed to know it’s yours? It was in the file cabinet with the personnel files. The files I need to have access to, to run my company.”

He was right. She should have kept it in her car, or her purse. Of course, then what excuse would she have had for not using it? She walked toward him and held out a hand. “You’re right, I apologize. Can I have it back please?”

He looked at her, then at the bag. “What is it?”

“Something personal.”

She took another step toward him, hand outstretched, and he took a step back.

A devious grin curled his lips, showing off the dent in his right cheek. “How much is it worth to you?”

He hadn’t teased her in weeks. Now was not the time to start acting like his pain-in-the-behind old self. “That isn’t funny, Nick. Give it to me.”

He held the bag behind his back. “Make me.”

How could a grown man act so damned juvenile? He didn’t have kids, so what, he’d act like one?

She stepped toward him, her temper flaring, and held out her hand. “Please.”

He sidestepped out of her way, around her desk, thoroughly enjoying himself if his goofy grin was any indication.

She felt like punching him.

Couldn’t he see that she was fuming mad? Didn’t he care that he was upsetting her?

Heat climbed up her throat and into her cheeks. “You’re acting like an ass, Nick. Give it back to me now.”

The angrier she became, the more amused he looked. “Must be something pretty important to get your panties in such a twist,” he teased, clasping the bag with two fingers and swinging it just out of her reach. Why did he have to be so darned tall? “If you want it so badly, come and get it.”

She slung her hands up in defeat. “Fine, look if you have to. If you find tampons so thoroughly interesting.”

Tampons. Didn’t she wish.

He raised a brow at her, as if he wasn’t sure he should believe her or not. As he lowered the bag, uncurling the edge to take a peek, she lunged for him. Her fingers skimmed the bag and he jerked his arm back, inadvertently flinging the test box out. In slow motion it spiraled across the room, hit the wall with a smack and landed label side up on the carpet.

Uh-oh.

For several long seconds time seemed to stand still, then it surged forward with a force that nearly gave her whiplash.

Nick looked at the box, then at her, then back at the box and all the amusement evaporated from his face. “What the hell is this?”

She closed her eyes. Damn, damn, damn.

“Zoë?”

She opened her eyes and glared at him. “What, you can’t read?”

She grabbed the bag from his slack fingers then marched over and snatched the box from the floor.

“Zoë, do you think you’re—”

“Of course not!” More like, God, she hoped not.

“Are you late?”

She gave him a duh look.

“Of course you are, or you wouldn’t need the test.” He raked a hand through his hair. “How late are you exactly?”

“I’m just a little late. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“We slept together over a month ago. How late is a little late?”

She shrugged. “Two weeks, maybe three.”

“Which is it, two or three?”

Oh, hell. She slumped into her desk chair. “Probably closer to three.”

He took a long deep breath and blew it out. She could tell he was fighting to stay calm. “And why am I just hearing about this now?”

“I thought maybe it was a virus or an infection or something,” she said, and he gave her an incredulous look. “I was in denial, okay?”

“Missed periods can happen for lots of reasons, right? Like stress?”

She flicked her thumbnail nervously back and forth, fraying the edge of the box. Stressed? Who me? “Sure, I guess.”

“Besides, we used protection.”

“Did we?”

He shot back an indignant, “You know we did.”

She felt a glimmer of hope. Condoms could fail, but the odds were slim. Maybe she really wasn’t pregnant. Maybe this was all in her head. “Even the last time?”

There was a pause, then he asked, “The last time?”

Suddenly he didn’t sound so confident. Suddenly he had an, Oh-damn-what-have-I-done? look on his face.

Her stomach began to slither down from her abdomen. “You know, against the wall, by the door. We used a condom then too, right?” she asked hopefully, as if wishing it were true would actually make it true.

He scratched the coarse stubble on his chin. The guy could shave ten times a day but he was so dark he almost always had a five o’clock shadow. “Honestly, I can’t remember.”

Oh, this was not good. She could feel her control slipping, panic squeezing the air from her lungs. “You can’t remember?”

He sat on the corner of her desk. “Apparently, you can’t either.”

He was right. That wasn’t fair. This was in no way his fault. “I’m sorry. I’m just…edgy.”

“If I had to guess, I would say that since I have no memory of using one, and my wallet was in the other room, we probably didn’t.”

At least he was being honest. Obviously they had both been too swept away by passion to think about contraceptives. But that had been what, their fourth time? Didn’t a man’s body take a certain amount of time to…reinforce the troops. Were there even any little swimmers left by then?

Leave it to her to have unprotected sex with a guy who had super sperm.

“I guess there’s only one way to find out for sure,” he said. “Taking the test here would probably be a bad idea, seeing as how anyone could walk into the bathroom. So would you be more comfortable taking it at your place or mine?”

This was really happening. With Nick of all people.

When she didn’t answer right away he asked, “Or is this something you need to be alone for?”

Being alone was the last thing she wanted. They were in this together. She didn’t doubt for an instant that he would be there for her, whatever the outcome. “We’ll do it at my house.”

He rose to his feet. “Okay, let’s go.”

Her eyes went wide. “You want to go now? It’s the middle of the workday.”

“It’s not like we’re going to get fired. I own the company. Besides, you know what they say.”

She thought about it for a second then said, “Curiosity killed the cat?”

He grinned. “There’s no time like the present.”

Three

Nick drove them the ten minutes to Zoë’s house in Birmingham. They didn’t say much. What could they say? Zoë spent the majority of her time praying, Please, God, let it be negative.

How had she gotten herself into this mess?

Her devout Catholic parents still believed that at the age of twenty-eight she was as pure as the driven snow. If the test was positive, what would she tell them? Well, Mom and Dad, I was snow-white, but I drifted.

They were going to kill her. Or disown her.

Or both.

And this would surely be enough to send her fragile, ailing grandmother hurtling through death’s door. She would instantly be labeled the family black sheep.

It didn’t matter that her parents had been nagging her to settle down for years.

When are you going to find a nice man? When are you going to have babies?

How about never?

And if the man she settled down with was Nick they would be ecstatic. Despite the fact that he wasn’t Catholic, they adored him. Since the first time she’d brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner they’d adopted him into the fold. And Nick had been swept up into the total chaos and craziness that was her family. He loved it almost as much as it drove her nuts.

So, if she were to call home and tell them she and Nick were getting hitched, she’d be daughter of the year. But the premarital sex thing would still be a major issue. In her parents’ eyes, what they had done was a sin.

She let her head fall back against the seat and closed her eyes. Maybe this was just a bad dream. Maybe all she needed to do was pinch herself real hard and she would wake up.

She caught a hunk of skin between her thumb and forefinger, the fleshy part under her upper arm that the self-defense people claim is the most sensitive, and gave it a good hard squeeze.

“Ow!”

“What’s wrong?”

She opened her eyes and looked around. Still in Nick’s monster truck, rumbling down the street, and he was shooting her a concerned look.

She sighed. So much for her dream theory.

“Nothing. I’m just swell,” she said, turning to look out the window, barely seeing the houses of her street whizzing past.

“Don’t get upset until we know for sure,” he said, but she was pretty sure he, like her, already knew what the result would be. They’d had unprotected sex and her period was late. The test was going to be positive.

She was going to have Nick’s baby.

When they got to her house, he took her keys from her and opened the door. He’d been inside her house a thousand times, but today it felt so…surreal. As if she’d stepped onto the set of film.

A horror film.

She and Nick were the stars, and any second some lunatic was going to pop out of the kitchen wielding a knife and hack them to pieces.

She slipped her jacket off and tossed it over the back of the couch while Nick took in her cluttered living room.

Last night’s dinner dishes still sat on the coffee table, the plate covered with little kitty lick marks from Dexter her cat. Newspapers from the past two weeks lay in a messy pile at one end of the couch.

She looked down at the rug, at the tufts of white cat fur poking out from the Berber and realized it had been too long since she’d last vacuumed. Her entire house—entire life—was more than a little chaotic right now. As if acting irresponsibly would somehow prove what a lousy parent she would be.

Nick looked around and made a face. “You really need to hire a maid.”

She tossed her purse down on the cluttered coffee table. “I am so not in the mood for a lecture on my domestic shortcomings.”

He had the decency to look apologetic.

“Sorry.” He reached inside his leather bomber jacket and pulled out the test kit. “I guess we should just get this over with, huh?”

“We?” Like he had to go in the bathroom and pee on a stick. Like he had to endure months of torture if it was positive. A guy like him wouldn’t last a week on the nest. He may have been tough, may have been able to bench press a compact car, but five minutes of hard labor and he would be toast.

Her mother had done home births for Zoë’s three youngest siblings and Zoë had had the misfortune of being stuck in the room with her for the last one. She had witnessed the horror. Going through it once seemed like torture enough, but understandable since most women probably didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into. But nine times. That was just crazy.

“I’m afraid to go in there,” she said.

Nick reached up and dropped one big, work-roughened hand on her shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’re in this together, Zoë. Whatever the outcome. We’ll get through it.”

It amazed her at times, how such a big, burly guy who oozed testosterone could be so damned tender and sweet. Not that the stubborn, overbearing alpha male gene had passed him by. He could be a major pain in the behind, too. But he’d never let her down in a time of need and she didn’t believe for a second that he would now.

“Okay, here goes.” She took the test kit from him and walked to the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind her, her stomach tangled in knots. She opened the box and with a trembling hand spilled the contents out onto the vanity.

“Please, God,” she whispered, “let it be negative.”

She read the instructions three times, just to be sure she was doing it right, then followed them word for word. It was amazingly quick and simple for such a life-altering procedure. Too simple.

Less than five minutes later, after rereading the instructions one more time just to be sure, she had her answer.

Nick paced the living room rug, his eye on the bathroom door, wondering what in the heck was taking Zoë so long. She’d been in there almost twenty minutes now and he hadn’t heard a peep out of her. No curdling screams, no thud to indicate she’d hit the floor in a dead faint. And no whoops of joy.

It was ironic that not five minutes before she stepped into her office he’d been thinking about having children. Just not with her, and not quite so soon. Ideally he would like to be married, but life had a way of throwing a curve ball.

At least, his life did.

He let out a thundering sneeze and glanced with disdain at the fluffy white ball of fur sunbathing on the front windowsill. It stared back at him with scornful green eyes.

He was so not a cat person.

He sat on the couch, propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on his fisted hands.

So what if she was pregnant?

The truth was, this was all happening so fast, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. What he did know is that if she didn’t come out of the damned bathroom soon, he was going to pound the door down. It couldn’t possibly take this long. He remembered the box specifically stating something about results in only minutes.

As if conjuring her through sheer will, the bathroom door swung open and Zoë stepped out. Nick shot to his feet. He didn’t have to ask what the results were, he could see it in her waxy, pasty-white pallor. Her wide, glassy-eyed disbelief.

“Oh boy,” he breathed. Zoë was pregnant.

He was going to be a father. They were going to be parents.

Together.

She looked about two seconds from passing out cold, so he walked over to where she stood and pulled her into his arms. She collapsed against him, her entire body trembling.

She rested her forehead on his chest, wrapped her arms around him, and he buried his nose in her hair. She smelled spicy and sweet, like cinnamon and apples. He realized, he’d missed this. Since that night in the hotel, he’d been itching to get his arms around her again.

He’d almost forgotten just how good it felt to be close to her, how perfectly she fit in his arms. Something had definitely changed between them that night in the hotel. Something that he doubted would ever change back.

For a while they only held each other, until she’d stopped shaking and she wasn’t breathing so hard. Until she had gone from cold and rigid to warm and relaxed in his arms.

He cupped her chin and tilted her face up. “It’s going to be okay.”

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“Well, I guess we’re going to have a baby,” he said, and felt the corners of his mouth begin to tip up.

Zoë gaped at him, her look going from bewilderment to abject horror. She broke from his grasp and took a step back. “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“You’re smiling. You’re happy about this.”

Was he?

The smile spread to encompass his entire face. He tried to stop it, then realized it was impossible. He really was happy. For five years now he’d felt it was time to settle down and start a family. True, this wasn’t exactly how he planned it, and he sure as hell hadn’t planned on doing it with Zoë, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. That didn’t mean they shouldn’t at least give it a shot.

He gave her a shrug. “Yeah, I guess I am. Would you feel better if I was angry?”

“Of course not. But do you have even the slightest clue what we’re getting into? What I’ll have to go through?”

She made it sound as though he was making her remove an appendage. “You’re having a baby, Zoë. It’s not as if it’s never been done before.”

“Of course it has, but have you ever actually witnessed a baby being born?”

No, but he definitely wanted to be in the delivery room. He wouldn’t miss that for anything. “I’m sure it will be fascinating.”

“Fascinating? I was there when my mom had Jonah, my youngest brother.”

“And?”

“Have you ever seen the movie, The Thing?” she asked, and he nodded. “You remember the scene where the alien bursts out of the guy and there is this huge spray of blood and guts? Well, it’s kinda’ like that. Only it goes on for hours. And hurts twice as much.

“And that’s only the beginning,” she went on, in full rant. “After it’s born there are sleepless nights to look forward to and endless dirty diapers. Never having a second to yourself…a moment’s silence. They cry and whine and demand and smother. Not to mention that they cost a fortune. Then they get older and there’s school and homework and rebellion. It never ends. They’re yours to worry about and pull your hair out over until the day you die.”

Wow. He knew she was jaded by her past, but he’d never expected her to be this traumatized.

“Zoë, you were just a kid when you had to take care of your brothers and sisters. It wasn’t fair for your parents to burden you with that much responsibility.” He rubbed a hand down her arm, trying to get her to relax and see things rationally. “Right now you’re still in shock. I know that when you take some time to digest it, you’ll be happy.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m not ready for this. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready for it.”

A startling, disturbing thought occurred to him. What if she didn’t want to have the baby? What if she was thinking about terminating the pregnancy? It was her body so, of course, the choice was up to her, but he’d do whatever he could to talk her out of it, to rationalize with her.

“Are you saying you don’t want to have the baby?” he asked.

She looked up at him, confused. “It’s not like I have a choice.”

“Every woman has a choice, Zoë.”

She gave him another one of those horrified looks and folded a hand protectively over her stomach. He didn’t think she even realized she was doing it. “I’m not going to get rid of it if that’s what you mean. What kind of person do you think I am?”

Thankfully, not that kind. “I’ve never considered raising a baby on my own, but I will if that’s what you want.”

“Of course that’s not what I want! I could never give a baby up. Once you have it, it’s yours. My brothers and sisters may have driven me crazy but I love them to death. I wouldn’t trade them in for anything.”

He rubbed a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “You’re confusing the hell out of me.”

“I’m keeping the baby,” she said firmly. “I’m just…I guess I’m still in shock. This was not a part of my master plan. And you’re the last man on earth I saw myself doing it with. No offense.”

“None taken.” How could he be offended when he’d been thinking the same thing earlier. Although maybe not the last on earth part.

She walked over to the couch and crumpled onto the cushions. “My parents are going to kill me. They think I’m still a good Catholic girl. A twenty-eight-year-old, snow-white virgin who goes to church twice a week. What am I going to tell them?”

Nick sat down beside her. He slipped an arm around her shoulder and she leaned into him, soft and warm.

Yeah, this was nice. It felt…right.

And just like that he knew exactly what he needed to do.

“I guess you only have one choice,” he said.

“Live the rest of my life in shame?”

Her pessimism made him grin. “No. I think you should marry me.”

Zoë pulled out of Nick’s arms and stared up at him. “Marry you? Are you crazy?”

Dumb question, Zoë. Of course he was crazy.

Rather than being angry with her, he smiled, as if he’d been expecting her to question his sanity. “What’s so crazy about it?”

If he couldn’t figure that out himself, he really was nuts.

“If we get married right away, your parents don’t have to know you were already pregnant. Problem solved.”