The Finnegan Sisters

“Are you saying you’re...?”

She nodded.

Pregnant? His ability to think rationally had disappeared. No way. Not possible. It had been one night. One night. They’d been careful. He had been careful. These things were not supposed to happen to people who were careful.

“You’re sure?”

Another nod.

He walked to the door, taking in the street, the buildings, the people he knew so well. Everything looked as it always had. Perfectly normal. He swung around and took a long, hard look at Emily.

“Completely sure?”

“One hundred percent.”

Just this morning he had thought Emily Finnegan was the kind of woman he could possibly, someday, maybe fall in love with. Now she was having a baby. His baby. He was going to be a father. And then his mother’s unwelcome voice penetrated his thoughts. A father who isn’t married to the baby’s mother. What do you think people are going to say about that?

“We’ll get married,” he blurted. “Right away, as soon as you want.” The declaration caught him completely off guard.

Emily gaped at him. “Married? Are you out of your mind?”

“What did you expect me to say?”

Emily sprang to her feet. “I don’t know. ‘How did this happen?’ ‘What are you going to do about it?’”

He couldn’t help himself. He grinned. “I know how it happened. I was there, remember?” Then he sobered. Why would she think he would ask what she was going to do about it? Unless...no. He moved toward her, but she ducked out of reach.

Okay, not exactly the response he would have liked.

“Are you planning to do something about it?” he asked.

She nodded. “Have it, raise it.”

Her declaration was meant to be defiant, but it had him breathing a little better. She might not make this easy, but he had to do the right thing.

“Okay, then. We’ll raise it together.”

“Right.” Emily rolled her beautiful brown eyes. “That’ll be easy for two parents who live three hundred miles apart. Easy, until the next big case comes along, and you forget all about us for months on end. Yeah, that’s going to work.”

“Come on, Emily. I’m sorry I didn’t call. I know you think I’m a thoughtless jerk, but I’m not. Give me a chance to prove it.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

He couldn’t believe he was about to say what he was about to say. “We’ll get married. You can move to Chicago. I’ll take care of you and the baby and...”

Horrified didn’t come close to describing her expression.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, gee. Let me see. There is no way I’m moving to Chicago, and we hardly know one another, so I am not going to marry you.”

“Emily, we’ve known each other for years.”

“We’ve been acquainted for years. Big difference.”

“They’re basically the same things.”

“All right, then,” she said, offering up a challenge. “What’s my favorite color?”

He looked her up and down, as though her wardrobe might offer up a clue. “Yellow?”

“Wrong.”

“What’s my middle name?”

Hmm. Should he know this? Had it been mentioned during her nephew’s baptism, when the two of them had become godparents? Emily...? Emily...? He had no idea.

“When’s my birthday?” she asked, relentlessly hammering her point home.

Again, no idea. None whatsoever.

“See? You don’t know anything about me, but you think getting married is a good idea. You think I should walk away from my family and my job and everything I’ve ever known, follow you to Chicago and sit around in an apartment...or a house or wherever you live...waiting for you to get unbusy enough to be a husband and a father?”

“I don’t know, Emily. We’re about two minutes into a conversation I never expected to be having. We’re going to be parents, and I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“A marriage between two people who don’t know one another is not the right thing, so it can’t possibly be the best thing for the baby.”

Was she serious? “What do you suggest?” he prompted. “I ask you out on a date, so we can ‘get to know’ each other?”

“That would be a start.”

She was serious. “You want me to take you out to dinner and a movie? Drive you home? Leave you at the front door with a good-night kiss?”

She sucker-punched him with her smile. “That’s as good a place to start as any.”

Oh, man. She was dead serious. Women. Heaven help him. He would never understand them.

“Fine. We’ll do this your way. I’ll pick you up at six o’clock.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s a date.” Lamest idea ever, but if this was how she wanted to play it, then this was how they would play it, because in spite of her objections, he was going to convince her to let him do the right thing. Case closed.

* * *

EMILY PACED BACK and forth across her apartment’s tiny, cluttered living room. In Riverton’s early days, these second-floor spaces above the storefronts on Main Street had mostly been used as offices. This one, above what had long been home to the Riverton Gazette, had at various times been the office of a barrister, a land surveyor and an accountant. About twenty-five years ago, it had been converted into an apartment by removing most of the partitions to create an L-shaped living/dining/office area, separated from the single bedroom by a minuscule galley kitchen and an even smaller bathroom.

Emily had fallen in love with the place the instant she saw it. She was close enough to her family that she was never, ever homesick, and far enough away to feel like the independent career woman she had imagined being.

“What were you thinking?” she asked, her cell phone pressed to her ear. “You should not have texted me to come to the shop without telling me he was there.”

“I’m thinking you should be grateful,” Fred said.

Grateful?

She stopped in front of the hamster cage that sat on a low bookcase next to her desk, and tossed in a peanut. Tadpole pounced on it, grasped it with tiny paws, her black, beady eyes bright with anticipation, and attacked the outer shell with her incisors.

“Why should I be grateful, Fred? I wasn’t expecting to see him, and I sure wasn’t prepared to tell him about the baby.”

“And you were going to be prepared...when exactly?”

He had a point.

“Still, you could have given me a heads-up.”

“Right. And given you a chance to cook up an excuse to avoid seeing him.”

Fred knew her too well.

“So? How’d he take it?”

“Better than I expected.” Jack had been kind of amazing, actually, but he might not be so accepting once the shock wore off and he had time to think things through. “He even said...” No. She wasn’t ready to say that out loud, either.

“He said...?”

Emily watched Tadpole break through one end of the peanut shell and stuff the first nut into her cheek pouch. Life for a hamster was so easy. Eat. Run on your wheel. Sleep. Get up and do it all over again. Boring, but easy.

“Come on, Em. You’re killing me here.”

She sighed, knowing Fred wouldn’t let this go. “He said we should get married right away.”

A moment of stunned silence was followed by stammering. “He... Seriously?”

“Hey! Why so surprised? I’m a total catch.”

Fred laughed. “Of course you are.”

“I am!”

“I’m agreeing with you.”

“No, you’re not. You’re being patronizing.”

“Sorry, Em. I figured he’d be more freaked out, that’s all. Do the typical guy thing and carry on about how you were trying to trap him.”

She had half expected that reaction, too. Now she didn’t know what to think. Since taking the test that morning, she had roller-coastered through every emotion imaginable. This minute, she was a wreck.

With the phone still to her ear, she stepped into the kitchen and filled the electric kettle for tea. “Under that cool-as-a-cucumber exterior, I’m sure he is freaking out, but he didn’t go ballistic.” Which was what she had expected.

“Good. When’s the big day, then?”

She switched on the kettle. “There isn’t going to be a big day. I said no.”

Another moment of silence. “You said no? Em, are you sure? You’ve had a crush on this guy since we were kids.”

Being best friends with Fred for most of her life meant he knew pretty much everything there was to know about her. Sometimes that was a good thing. Other times, like now, it was definitely annoying.

She eyed a package of coffee longingly before shifting her attention to an assortment of teas. Mint, which Annie had once recommended for an upset stomach and was mildly palatable with a spoonful of sugar. Echinacea, for the time she’d come down with a cold last winter. However, all it did was make her tongue tingle. Red rooibos, which was supposed to be good for everything and tasted worse than all the rest put together. Mint it was, she thought, dropping a bag into her favorite coffee mug and returning to the living room to wait for the water to boil.

“I had a crush on Jack when I was fourteen, not since I was fourteen. Either way, that’s no reason to rush into anything.”

Fred made a big production of clearing his throat.

“Don’t you dare say it.” She could read him like a book. “I did not rush into this thing with Jack. It just happened, and now I’m being rushed into motherhood, and I’m not ready for it, so I’m not rushing into marriage.”

Tadpole cracked the remaining shell, crammed in the second nut, one cheek pouch bulging, and sniffed around the cage for more. The little critter’s face, now comically distorted, made her smile.

“Your two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right analogy is all well and good,” Fred said. “But what about your family, Jack’s family? Everyone will have something to say about this.”

Everyone in town would have plenty to say about plain-Jane Emily Finnegan having Jack Evans’s baby. Maybe she should move to Chicago. “Trying to avoid gossip is not a good reason to rush into marriage.”

“Fair enough. I hope you’ve talked to your sisters. I still can’t believe you told them I was the father.”

“Not yet. I need to do that in person.”

“You can’t call them?”

“No way. They’ll want to know who the real father is, and I’m not explaining that over the phone.” With her free hand, she pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it on her desk beneath the window overlooking Main Street.

“You can’t run out there this afternoon?”

“No time. I have to get ready for my—” Hmm. She hadn’t meant to let that slip.

“Ready for your...?”

Fred would find out sooner or later. Probably sooner, since it seemed the barbershop was the hub of Riverton’s rumor mill. “Jack and I are going out for dinner.”

Fred let out a long whistle. “A date. Interesting.”

“It’s not a date. We have things to talk about, stuff to figure out.” Fred did not need to know about the getting-to-know-each-other portion of the evening.

“And you plan to do that at the Riverton Bar & Grill? Gee, that won’t attract any attention at all.”

“That’s not where we’re going.” And if Jack suggested that’s what they do, she would veto it.

The whistle of the kettle drew her back to the kitchen. “I have to go,” she said, filling her mug and inhaling the fragrant minty steam rising from it. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Right after you’ve straightened out this mess with your sisters.”

“I’ll call you. Goodbye, Fred.” She disconnected before he thought of another reason to prolong the conversation. She should work on an article for the paper and update her blog. Most important, she needed to figure out what to wear tonight. She hadn’t wanted to admit to Fred that it was a date, but it was. Jack had said so.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.