As soon as Adam headed out of the clinic parking lot, Kylie sank into her chair at the front desk and just stared off into the distance, the vaguest pretense of being fine disappearing without a trace.

What a hellacious night.

She hadn’t slept well, she’d cried her body weight in tears and then some, and then this morning, all she could think was that Adam deserved so much better than her.

In fact, as soon as he knew she was pregnant with a married man’s baby, he’d never want to talk to her again. No one would. Dammit all, this was a small town. People didn’t forgive or forget easily.

And, by convincing Adam to hire her without telling him the truth, she’d dragged him into her disaster of a life, and knowing some of the judgmental asses out there, she might actually cost him some business with this little stunt of hers. Some rancher could totally choose to use a vet out of Franklin or Copperton rather than associate with a business who hired people like her.

Her being unmarried was bad enough, but the unforgivable part was the fact that the father of the baby wasn’t unmarried. That was the part that would earn her the most scorn and judgmental looks.

The hardest part of all was that Kylie had been so damn naïve not to have seen it before the pee stick came back with a plus sign. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, would she have ever found out about Norman’s other life? How long would she have continued on in ignorance, thinking that he was going to propose to her any day now?

And, oh God, if he had…she would’ve said yes in a heartbeat. She really thought she loved him.

Truthfully, she really ought to be locked up for her own good.

She dragged her ass out of her chair and forced herself to start working on putting the office back to rights. If someone came walking in and saw this mess, they’d think Adam was a terrible vet, or at least had terrible taste in employees. She couldn’t let herself sink into a funk and do nothing but keep her chair from floating away all day. It wasn’t fair to Adam.

She made a quick stop in the employee bathroom, scrubbing her face with cold water before redoing her ponytail. The first iteration had more closely resembled the hairdo of someone who’d just stuck a fork into an electrical socket, rather than the secretary of a veterinarian clinic. She couldn’t embarrass Adam by looking like that in front of his clients.

And then, she got to work.

The more she worked, the better she felt. The raw, rough feeling of the lining of her eyelids disappeared, and they no longer felt like they were made of sandpaper. She got a rhythm going, her heart pumping and her breath quick as she scrubbed and swept and shoved the worn furniture where it needed to go.

When she’d finally finished, she sat back with a critical eye and then smiled to herself. The smile grew into a grin. The office looked amazing – a thousand times better, and she felt a thousand times better.

This was the second time she’d allowed herself to drown in self-pity because of Norman and this pregnancy, but screw it, it was gonna be the last.

She was a doer, through and through, and just sitting around and thinking and whining to herself about poor, poor pitiful Kylie VanLueven, taken advantage of by an older, wiser man…

Well, it just wasn’t her, and she wasn’t gonna let it be her in the future. She owed Adam an apology for her surly attitude that morning, for starters, and that evening when she got home from work, she promised herself that she’d get started on the Keep Adam Fed project. Bringing some muffins to work the next morning would help make up for the start of today.

She gnawed on her lower lip with worry. When Adam came back at five and was met with a cheerful, upbeat Kylie, he was gonna think that she was bipolar, and she couldn’t blame him one bit.

How could she explain pregnancy hormones to him without, you know, mentioning being pregnant?

Dammit, she needed to just tell him. Sure, it’d only been a little over two weeks since he’d hired her and she’d been hoping to make it longer than that before having to confess the truth, but after all that he’d done for her, he deserved to find out from her before he somehow found out from someone else.

God forbid.

It was just her and her mom who knew, but still, this sort of thing tended to spread through whispered rumors and sideways glances when waistlines began to change shape. Kylie had gone to school with a gal who’d gotten pregnant their junior year, and the rumors were flying fast and thick way before she officially told anyone. She ended up dropping out of school and marrying the baby’s father, some guy from Franklin, in the middle of what should’ve been their senior year.

They got a divorce two years later, the stress of marrying too young and caring for a newborn baby destroying whatever love they’d once felt for each other. At the time, Kylie had been a little smug – how did you accidentally get pregnant in an age of condoms and birth control pills? Hadn’t anyone explained the birds and the bees to her?

But now…

The phone rang, pulling Kylie out of her swirling thoughts, and she hurried across the office to the landline. “Whitaker’s Veterinarian Clinic, this is Kylie speaking,” she answered, trying to hide being out of breath.

“Hey, sugar!” her mom said cheerfully. “How are things going?”

For a moment, Kylie felt the burn of unshed tears well up in the corners of her eyes, but she quickly blinked them away. Damn pregnancy hormones. She didn’t used to cry this much, truly she hadn’t.

“Pretty good,” she said, trying to hide the warble in her voice.

She failed, of course.

“What’s going on?” Her mom pounced immediately. Trying to hide this sort of thing from Carol VanLueven was an impossible task, frankly. “Do you need some money?”

Kylie wanted to laugh a little to herself. It wasn’t hard to notice what her mom wasn’t offering: A place to stay.

“No, no, I’m good. Adam took me grocery shopping this weekend, and I have enough to get through to payday. Life is good, I promise.”

Her mom paused for a moment, and Kylie could see, clear as day through the phone line, that she was debating whether or not to press the point. She held her breath, hoping that her mom would just let it go. She didn’t want to tell her mom about last night. She’d start crying all over again and she was done with crying.

Done.

“Welllll,” her mom finally said, deciding to leave the topic alone, at least for the moment, “I was calling to find out if you wanted to attend the Knit Wits meeting with me tonight. I was thinking about it earlier today and started to worry that you’re out there in that house all by yourself. Maybe it’d be fun to get out and socialize.”

The Knit Wits? Kylie debated her choices.

If she started baking as soon as she got home from the clinic, she could probably get the muffins made and on the counter to cool before the start of the monthly meeting of her mom’s knitting club. That way, she could get her Keep Adam Fed project going right away, and God only knew, after her performance that morning on the way to work, Adam deserved whatever kind thing Kylie could think of to do for him.

But on the other hand, her mom’s idea of socialization…? It wasn’t exactly thrilling. Unless things had drastically changed in the last four years since Kylie’d left for college, Mom was the youngest knitter in the group. Kylie would be young enough to be the granddaughter or even the great-granddaughter of every other knitter there.

Honestly, though, her mom was trying to be helpful, and really, an evening spent with a bunch of kindly old grandmas wasn’t a half-bad way to pass a couple of hours. It sure beat curling up in a ball on a hardwood floor and crying a flood of tears.

Not that that was much of a benchmark, but Kylie was setting the bar low.

“That’d be great, Mom,” she finally said. “Could you pick me up and drop me off? Adam hasn’t finished working on Ruby’s car yet, so I’d need a ride into town.”

“Absolutely,” her mom reassured her. “I’ll be by a little before seven. We meet at the Muffin Man and everyone buys a dessert and a drink to thank him for being open later for us, but I’ll pay for yours.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Kylie said gratefully. She really didn’t want to spend her precious cash on something as frivolous as coffee and a donut from a bakery, and as always, her mom was thinking ahead.

She really had been blessed with a wonderful mother.

She hung up with a grin on her face, feeling roughly a million times more cheerful now than she had been that morning. As she looked around the clean office, smelling like lemons and glass cleaner, every surface polished to a high shine, she decided that she’d tell Adam the truth about being pregnant in the morning. She’d make him muffins tonight after work and have them ready for him to eat tomorrow morning when he came to pick her up; tell him the truth while he was still grateful that she’d cooked for him.

It was just as good of a plan as any, and a large part of her was thrilled at the idea of having the truth out in the open. Lying, even through omission, wasn’t right, and even if she’d done it for a good reason, it’d still been bothering her, like a sliver under a fingernail.

She celebrated her decision by getting to work on the cramped employee bathroom. She could put in some elbow grease there, too, and really surprise Adam. If she worked hard enough, he wouldn’t even care about the rest of it.