The Marriage Solution. Brenda Harlen
and Barb MacIntyre had breasts.”
Tess shook her head, but she was smiling now, too. “You should have been paying attention to the skinny kid with the bat.”
“I’d never known a girl who could smack a line drive like that,” he told her, wincing a little at the memory. But he’d sure as hell paid attention after that. Not just because he’d been impressed by Tess’s athletic abilities, but because something in her wide blue eyes had tugged at him when she stood over him—as he’d lain bleeding all over the dirt at third base—and asked if he was going to die, too.
Several weeks later, he’d learned that was the same day she’d buried her mother—and been taken directly from the funeral to her new foster home. She was a fourteen-year-old orphan with more guts and attitude than he’d ever seen, but he recognized that the stubborn tilt of her chin and the angry glint in her eyes only masked the pain she carried inside. And he knew— even then—that she would wreak havoc on his life. What he didn’t know and couldn’t have guessed, was that she’d also become the best friend he’d ever had.
He rubbed a finger over the bump on the bridge of his nose.
Tess’s eyes followed the motion and the corners of her mouth twitched as she tried, not entirely successfully, to hold back a smile.
“You’re not still mad about that, are you?” she teased.
He shook his head. “That broken nose was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I didn’t think so at the time, of course,” he confessed. “But in retrospect, I can appreciate that it’s the reason we became friends.”
“What does any of that have to do with now?”
“I think in another fifteen years we’ll look back on this and realize your pregnancy was the best thing that could have happened.”
“I already know it is,” she confessed softly.
“Then why is it so hard for you to imagine that us getting married could be another one of those things?”
He didn’t quite manage to disguise the impatience in his voice, and Tess sighed.
“It’s not that I can’t imagine it,” she admitted.
In fact, it was almost too easy to picture herself married to Craig, sharing the joys and responsibilities of parenthood with him, building the family she’d always wanted with him.
But although her heart yearned for the whole fairy¬ tale package, she knew it could never exist outside of her dreams. Because he wasn’t her Prince Charming and her pregnancy wasn’t something they’d planned for or dreamed about together. As far as she knew, Craig didn’t even want kids—it was just his deeply-ingrained sense of responsibility that refused to let him walk away from their baby.
“Then what is it?” he demanded.
She didn’t know what to say, how to explain the battle that had been waging inside her since she’d seen those two lines on the stick. She could do what was easy—or she could do what was right. And she really wanted to do what was right.
The buzz of the intercom saved her from answering, at least for now.
“Carl’s on line three,” Elaine, the receptionist, announced.
Carl Bloom was one of the owners of SB Graphics and, therefore, one of Tess’s bosses. Which meant she needed to get Craig out of her office and her mind back on the job.
“Thanks,” Tess replied. Then to Craig, she said, “I have to take this call.”
“I can wait,” he said.
“I’d rather you didn’t. This is probably going to take a while and I have a meeting with Owen Sanderson—” Carl’s business partner and her other boss “—later this afternoon that I still need to prepare for.”
“We need to finish this conversation,” he said.
“I know,” she agreed. “But not now.”
“Then come to my place tonight for dinner.”
She stared at the blinking light on her phone as she considered his invitation, the light flashing like a neon “danger” sign inside her head. But what was the danger in sharing a meal with a friend?
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll see you later for dinner.”
“Seven o’clock,” Craig said as he rose from his chair. “I’ve got steaks we can barbecue—red meat has lots of iron, it’ll be good for both you and the baby.”
She shook her head as he walked out the door.
When she’d first suspected she might be pregnant, she’d worried about telling Craig. She’d tried to anticipate his reaction and had guessed that he would either balk at the idea of being a father and slowly but inexorably distance himself from her and the child she carried, or he would resign himself to the consequences of their actions and fulfill his responsibilities with respect to child support and weekly visitation. She hadn’t expected him to embrace the idea of parenthood.
Then again, the idea might be easier for him to embrace than the reality. Once their child was born, he might change his mind about what he wanted.
Or he might not, she admitted on a sigh. And that was an even greater concern for Tess, because she’d never known Craig to give up on something he really wanted.
She pushed these disquieting thoughts aside and reached for the phone to talk to her boss.
The software program Tess was revising was being especially stubborn, and the last couple hours of fighting with it had caused her hands to cramp from too much keyboarding. She raised her arms over her head to stretch out the tight muscles and glanced at the clock above her desk, surprised to note that it was already quarter to seven. She was supposed to be at Craig’s for dinner in fifteen minutes.
She saved the program, then shut down her computer and called to let him know she’d be there soon.
Making a quick trip to the ladies room, she wasn’t surprised to find that all her coworkers had gone and the outer office was empty and dark. When she’d first graduated from DeVry University, she’d accepted a position at a huge software company in Arizona. She’d enjoyed her work there, but the hours had been long, her bosses demanding. She’d come back to Pinehurst even knowing that her chances of landing a job as a programmer were less than slim because she’d wanted to have a life outside of her work and because she’d wanted to be closer to her stepsister’s family and Craig. She’d been thrilled—and very lucky—to find SB Graphics.
SBG was a digital animation software company which had been started almost twenty years earlier by Owen Sanderson and Carl Bloom, both MIT graduates. Although the partners had talked about moving the business to Los Angeles, they’d come to realize they could compete with the big corporations on the west coast from their location in Pinehurst.
They were both family men who not only appreciated that their employees had lives outside of the job but insisted upon it. In fact, when Deanna, one of the team leaders, had given birth to her first child last year, the bosses had encouraged her to take whatever time she needed at home with her baby. Then, when she’d made the decision to come back, they’d let her work from home or bring the baby into the office as required when day care was a problem.
Tess hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but now that she was expecting a child of her own, it was a huge relief to know that her employers understood and were sympathetic to the demands of parenthood. She could only hope that the father-to-be would be as considerate and accommodating of her needs.
We should get married.
As if the words hadn’t been surprising enough, the conviction with which he’d spoken them had completely unsettled her. She knew, probably better than anyone, how unyielding Craig could be once he’d made up his mind about something. For some reason, he’d decided marriage was what he wanted.