Wedding Rings and Baby Things. Teresa Southwick
Kelly shook her head at his smoothness. He was as cool as they came. She had found out the hard way how he could lie without batting an eye. “Panicked?”
“Believe it or not,” he said in that affable, self-effacing way that had charmed her once. “You don’t know what it’s like to hear that you’re going to be a father.”
“That’s typical, Doug. It’s always about you. Did you stop to think how I felt finding out I was going to be a mother?”
“That’s why I’m here now.”
Her eyes widened and she wanted to laugh in his face, or slap it. “I’m six months pregnant. Took you long enough.” Her chest tightened with anger. “During all that time did you think about what would happen to me? Whether or not this would affect my life, my job?”
“Has it?”
“You bet it has, buster. I don’t have a job as of June.”
His eyebrows pulled together and, if she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was genuinely sorry.
“Then it’s fortunate I’m here.”
“Why?”
“Kelly, I want you to marry me. I want to be a father to our child.”
Kelly’s jaw dropped. She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t this.
Her reaction was knee-jerk, and she should have put it exactly where Mike and her brother had taught her. Instead, she clasped her shaking hands together and tried to control her astonishment, then the surge of anger that followed.
“I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”
There was no reaction on his face, no indication whether her words had hurt him or not. “Think about this carefully. You just said you’ll be out of a job come June. How are you going to support yourself, let alone a kid?”
A kid? The baby was just an impersonal, nuisance kid as far as he was concerned. She didn’t want him anywhere near her child, not to mention raising him. “I’ll work it out. Alone,” she added firmly.
“If you marry me, I can take care of you both. I’m up for a partnership in the law firm—”
“I smell a rat,” she said, her eyes narrowing. With time and distance, she had realized Doug never did anything for anyone else unless there was something in it for him. Besides, he’d never said a word about loving her. If she hadn’t been so upset, it would have been funny. Two proposals in two days. Must be some kind of record for a pregnant lady. She’d been tempted to take Mike up on his offer, but Doug’s left her cold.
He looked down for a moment, then met her suspicious gaze. “You know the firm is very conservative and traditional. I don’t want to say that I’m not concerned about my success. But that’s not the reason I asked you—”
“Stuff a sock in it, Doug. Of course that’s the reason.” She took a deep breath. “Now I want you to listen, because I’m only going to say this once. I should have known that a lawyer who would sleep with his client couldn’t be trusted. You’re a liar and I’d be a fool to ever trust you again. There’s nothing you could say that would persuade me to marry you.”
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