Lyla couldn’t have begun to know how those words would haunt her.
The funeral went as well as a funeral could. Everyone had left the house, everyone except for her family, Drea and Josie, who had become fast friends with her mother, aunt, and cousins.
Lyla and Trick had done most of the hosting, the greetings and farewells. While Drea and Josie took care of the practical details like food and jackets.
The last neighbor had just walked off the porch and Trick put his arm around her shoulders. “You ok, babe?” he asked, kissing her head.
He’d been there every step of the way today and when his boys turned up to carry her father’s coffin, she hadn’t been able to stop the tears. None of them had ego, none tried to steal the show, they were all demure and respectful. They greeted her mother and Trick’s with kisses and comfort.
Todd was too short to carry with the others, but Trick made sure to put him front and center as the others did the heavy lifting. Watching her husband walk slowly, wearing that somber look on his face, she almost didn’t recognize him as the same man who’d first tried to kiss her.
“We have to go back to the city tomorrow,” she said, turning toward Trick to accept his arms around her.
“It can wait,” he said. “Until you’re ready.”
“My dad was big on taking care of our commitments,” she said. “And the kids have to go back to school and get back to normality… We can’t hide here forever.”
“I can take you away,” he said, holding her close and kissing her hair. “Anywhere in the world, we can take some time together, as much as you need.”
“You know what I want?” she asked. “I want to just get this damn show over with so we can live our lives. For real. So, I say let’s go back, do what they want us to do, keep our heads down, and get through it.”
“Sounds like fun.”
Letting her head fall back, she smiled at him. “I want to move back into your apartment. I want to sell my place and sleep in your bed every night.” Maybe it was surprise, but he said nothing. “Does that sound like fun?”
“Sounds damn close to perfect, but are you sure? You moved out fast. You were just gone.”
“I know and I’m sorry,” she said, feeling awful for how she must have hurt him. “I knew we didn’t want to share our relationship with them and I thought it would be impossible for us to live together without being intimate. I hurt you when I panicked and let them sucker me into their little plot. Maybe it was the alcohol in my system or my worry that they could hurt you with that stand-in nonsense, but I felt like I didn’t have a choice. I love being with you, Nairn. I want to be with you and if what we do naturally as a couple ends up on film, I’ll cope with that. I know you would never disrespect me.”
“Like Boys Night? That was hot, baby.”
“I wanted you,” she said. “And I liked taking control.” Loosening, she gave him control of her weight. “And there was no pressure, it was just us, you know, enjoying each other. I like having fun with you, Trick. But I don’t like being conned.”
“So, we do what comes naturally… and if we feel uncomfortable.”
“Blueberries.”
“Right,” he said and bowed to kiss her. “Blueberries.”
After another kiss, she took his hand to take him back inside. Trick closed the door and she carried on into the living room. Except as soon as she approached the back of the couch where the twins were sitting with their mother and hers, they all turned to look at her. Drea and Josie were on the loveseat and they looked just as pitying as her family.
“What is it?” she asked.
Avril pressed the mute button on the television and the volume came back up. Lyla hadn’t even looked at the screen until she heard the reporter speak. “…Ms. Levine has refused to confirm or deny the identity of the child’s father. But our station has been told by sources that it is without doubt Nairn Strickland, and given the recent footage of their getaway, we would say that’s a safe bet.” Pictures of Kira and Trick were shown on screen as well as images from Opposites Marry. “Also given that Ms. Levine is pursuing a civil case against the Prem channel, it seems certain that Trick, as he’s known to his friends and colleagues, is the perpetrator. While details of the suit are just coming to light, it’s understood that Kira asserts contraceptive protection provided by the show may have been tampered with, deliberately damaged to ensure failure. The accusation is serious and—”
Spinning around, Lyla gasped as she fixed on her stunned husband. “Oh, God, Trick,” she said.
“Trick,” Drea exclaimed. “Son, is it true? Is Kira pregnant with your child?”
“That’s not why Lyla’s upset,” he said, searching his wife’s face with concern. Lyla struggled to breathe in. “Baby, it’ll be ok.”
Linking her fingers, Lyla pressed her hands to her abdomen as he came to her and scooped his hand around the side of her head. “Nairn,” she whispered.
“We’ll deal with it, ok?” he said, fixating on her eyes and smiling. “We’ll deal with it. I love you. It’ll just be a little ahead of schedule, that’s all.”
“I don’t get it,” Josie said. “She’s not upset that you slept around?”
“He didn’t sleep with Kira,” Lyla whispered, calming as she focused on her husband. When she could breathe normally again, she spun around to look at her sister-in-law. “We used their condoms.”
“Honey, where’s your wallet?” Lyla asked.
Lying on her stomach on Trick’s bed, she had his laptop open in front of her. She’d just peed on the stick and was trying to distract herself as they waited for the results to develop. Trick was clearing space in his closet that he said hadn’t been cleaned out since he moved in.
It had taken her a while to get to sleep last night, but Trick had been great at calming her down. The mood in her mother’s house when she left was somber. Cece would miss having her there, but the sooner they all returned to their lives, the sooner they could start to process how life would be now that her dad was gone.
Lyla knew it would take time to grieve for her father, but she also knew he wouldn’t want them all sliding into a pit of depression and stopping their lives. At every low moment she’d had since her first breakdown, Trick had been there for whatever she needed and he was still here now as they prepared his apartment for her officially moving in. Permanently.
It would just take a couple of minutes to find out if they were going to have a third, tiny, roommate moving in too.
Trick came out of the closet and pulled his wallet from his back pocket to toss it to the bed. Picking it up, Lyla sat to cross her legs and began to look through it. When she found the condom he’d put in there on the night of his party, she looked at it for a second and then tossed it to the trash can beside the door.
When it went in, she raised both hands up and Trick laughed. “Nice shot, baby.”
It was a fluke, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. So, she just went back to peeking at his cards. “Which credit card can I use?”
“The black one in front,” he responded. Staying in the bedroom, he frowned at the inside of his closet. “What are we buying?”
Pulling the card out, she tossed his wallet aside and began to type in the numbers. “Porn,” she said.
“Hmm, cool,” he said, doing a double-take. “Wait, what?”
Lyla was only halfway through the number when he came over to sit on the bed beside her. Instead of looking at the screen, he pushed her hair aside and leaned in to kiss the side of her neck.
When he snaked his hand under her skirt, she laughed and pulled it out before he could touch her. “Don’t distract me.”
“You need some loving, you don’t need to pay for it,” he murmured and put an absent hand on the top of the laptop screen, but she caught it before he could close it and opened it again. “Your man’s right here, baby.”
Taking her hand, he guided from the computer to his lap and began to rub it against his groin. “I want to see this,” she said, sliding her hand out of his to put another couple of numbers into the screen.
“See what?” he asked, flipping onto his front. “What the hell can be so interesting that—”
“Us,” she said. “We’re live right now.”
“We are?” he asked, glancing around the room.
There were still cameras here, but they wouldn’t be linked to this low budget website. “Yep, we’re live having crazy, wild sex apparently,” she said. “I want to see us having sex.”
“We’ll make a sex tape,” he said.
Lowering, she rubbed her mouth in his hair. “We don’t have to, because this website says we’re having sex right now.”
“Then I’ve been doing it wrong for a long time,” he said and she laughed as she put in another number.
“I want to see this… especially since some of these tags are things I’ve never heard of… what is bukkake?”
“Ok, we don’t want to watch that,” he said and this time succeeded in closing the laptop.
“Trick,” she whined.
He rolled to his back and began to stroke her thigh. “It’s a con, Malloy,” he said. “You put in your card details and they take all your money to show you some grainy video of crappy porn actors wearing bad wigs and reciting lines from the show.”
Laughing, she bowed and kissed him. “Is that the voice of experience?”
“Watching porn? Sure, I’ve watched porn,” he said and grinned. “Got an offer to star in one once.”
“Really?” she asked, climbing on top of him. “Did you consider it?”
“My life was a porno back then,” he said. “I probably would’ve done it if someone had dared me.”
“You’ll do anything on a dare,” she said, pushing up his tee-shirt to expose his torso. The sight of his form made her whimper. Man, he was hot. “You know if I get fat we’re not having sex.”
“Fat?” he asked. “I don’t care if you put on weight… and I’m confident in my ability to get into your panties. But why would you get fat?” Turning to look toward the bathroom, Lyla figured that the stick would probably be ready by now. “You don’t mean fat, you mean pregnant.”
Pressing his hands to her belly, Trick drew her attention back to him. “I’m nervous,” she whispered.
“If you’re pregnant, we’ll deal with it. It’s not a disaster. We talked about having kids.”
“Yeah, in the future,” she said. “Not today.”
“Nine months is in the future,” he said. “We only used their condoms those first three times, after that they were all ours.”
“I say we throw out every condom anyway, just in case,” she said.
“We don’t need them now,” he said. Wearing that mischievous glint in his eye, he picked up her skirt. “Slide that pussy on up here, baby, and we’ll go live right here.”
He flicked his tongue at her, but she bent over him to press a hand over his mouth. “We have to be in the studio in an hour. What are we going to do if they got us pregnant? I guess… we don’t know where Kira got her information from… And you said she was on an IUD, how can she be pregnant? They can be removed… and I guess no contraception is a hundred percent effective. Oh, God, Trick,” she sighed out his name and collapsed on top of him, tucking her head under his chin.
When his arms closed around her, she started to feel better. “If they got us pregnant, we sue them,” he said.
But Lyla shook her head. “How would our baby feel if we did that? It would be like we didn’t want him.”
“Then we’ll settle for an undisclosed sum,” he said. “Whatever you want, babe. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Anything?”
“Anything,” he said. “Especially if it involves punching Bunny in the face.”
Smiling, she thought about how nice it would be to see Bunyan taken down. But that was a dream, not a reality. “Then he’ll sue us.” Sitting up, she planted her hands on his chest. “You’ll do anything?” He nodded and caught the ends of her hair between his splayed fingers. “Will you check the stick?”
His playfulness lessened as he got serious. Driving his fingers into her hair, Trick pulled her down for a long kiss. Turning her onto her back, he stroked her face, and kissed her again before rolling away to climb off the bed to head for the bathroom.
Risk jumped up on the bed and she reached for him, he bunted her hand and came over to rub his face on hers. “I love you too,” she murmured, picking up the cat as she sat up to look at the bathroom door. The stick wasn’t difficult to read. It said pregnant or not pregnant. But Trick hadn’t come back. “Nairn?”
He came into the bathroom doorway and lifted the stick. “Not,” he said, “we’re good.”
Flopping onto her back, she gave Risk a kiss before letting him go. The cat wandered off and she put both hands over her heart. Trick came to the bed and sat beside her. Throwing the test across the room, he got it in the trash can and then rested a hand on her belly.
Grabbing his hand, she squashed it against her lips. “I’m disappointed,” she said, uncertain as she sought his eyes, but when she did, his were smiling.
“Me too.”
“Gosh, it’s so weird.”
Curling around him, Lyla put her face in his lap and brought her knees up at his back. “It’s ok,” he said, stroking her hair. “The next one will be positive and we’ll be ready.” Nodding, she pressed her mouth to his thigh. “Babe, if you’re really upset, we’ll get you pregnant.”
Tipping her face, she looked up at him. “We have a meeting.”
“Malloy,” he said, catching her wrist as she rose.
Looking back at him, she smiled. “I’m ok,” she said. “Next time.”
It was nuts that she was this disappointed. They weren’t trying for a child, they hadn’t failed at anything. Now wasn’t the time to have a baby. The show was still going on. The studio was on them every minute. They needed breathing room to get to know each other.
Lyla had to focus on being the best wife she could be. On her parents’ porch, she and Trick had agreed to be themselves, to do what came natural and to have fun, and that was what she was going to do.