Chapter Twenty-Three

Kelly

One Month Later

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Who was it you said, again?”

Kelly stifled a sigh and answered the question for the umpteenth time. “Yes. I’m trying to reach Blake Parker.” The owner of the company. Maybe you’ve heard of him?!

“This isn’t Mr. Parker’s preferred method of contact, ma’am. He has a designated secretary for his business dealings—”

“No, this has nothing to do with business,” Kelly cut in. “I’m just an old … friend of his.” And even that was a lie at this stage. Friends occasionally answered each other’s messages, she’d been brought up to believe. “If you could be so kind as to tell him that I called and I am eager to reach him. There is something important that I need to speak with him about.” Again, she paused, listening to the official voice on the other side of the line.

She’d been through multiple voices in the month since he’d left Element Island. So many voices that she’d thought she knew all the talking heads at Parker Industries, until this new one had surprised her.

“This is highly irregular, ma’am. May I take a message and convey it through the problem channels?”

“No, I don’t want to state what it is over the phone.” She barely kept a snarl of frustration out of her voice. It wasn’t this lady’s fault. “Yes, I understand that, but if you could just please do me a favor and let him know that I called. Please. It’s important. Very very important. Very. Urgent, actually. Kelly Landor, that’s right. Thank you.”

Kelly let out an exasperated sigh when she hung up the phone, and she tossed it on the counter.

She walked over to the chair and plopped down in it before looking at her phone in disgust. She’d lost count of how many times she’d texted, emailed, and called Blake in the days following his accent. Had it done been for Hawk texting her to let her know that Blake was recovering slowly but steadily, Kelly might honestly have thought he was dead. She’d known he would cut off contact, but somehow a part of her had apparently still assumed he cared just a little bit.

“What is going with you, Blake?” she said to no one, slouching lower in the chair and rubbing her temples, fighting an incipient headache. “Friends return other friends’ urgent messages. Even shitty friends.”

She wondered whether he had known that she’d been at his bedside and left before he woke up. Yeah, Hawk had probably told him. He might be angry with her for that, but somehow, Kelly didn’t think that was what was preventing him from answering her calls. It seemed more and more like he just didn’t want to talk to her, and that meant that she had done the right thing by leaving the hospital that day. If she had been the one to walk into his room as he recovered, it probably would have only brought him more stress.

At least she knew for sure where she stood with him—and it wasn’t anywhere good. She could admit to herself that she was angry with Blake. Grateful as she was that he was recovering physically, she was furious that he had led her on, shut her out, and then abandoned her. But she was angry with herself too for letting it happen.

Her phone rang and she sighed as she dragged herself up and saw the name on the Caller ID. “Hey, Anna.”

Her friendly immediately began to prattle on and Kelly partially tuned her out, making the rights sounds in the right places as her brain continued to whirl. Yeah, okay, that was also being a shitty friend. But damn it, wasn’t she just a little bit entitled?

The secretarial job had turned out to be a bust. Her boss had been a predator who’d tried to get handsy from day one, until Kelly had woken up one day and just never gone back to work. Instead, she’d taken a gamble, pulled up stakes, and moved to New York. Not because of Blake. She told herself that repeatedly.

“Kelly …”

“I’m listening. Alexi’s a lying, cheating rat’s ass.”

As Anna went on, Kelly got up and walked into her gym. Yes, her gym. She had arrived in New York with absolutely nothing and, while staying at a hostel that wouldn’t eat up her life savings even if it wasn’t exactly homey or cozy, had taken a gamble with some of her art. It had paid off and she’d been hired as a curator to a local gallery.

She’d thought she’d done so well on her own, being able to pay for her own nice two-room apartment in decent part of Manhattan, and not having to skip meals, wait tables, or escort anyone to keep a roof over her head. Then she’d found out that—

“Blake.”

Snapping back to reality, Kelly asked, “Huh? What?”

“Caught you,” Anna said dryly. “You’re still pissed that he put in a good word. Aren’t you. Don’t be an idiot, Kelly. He owed you that much. It’s not like he outright gave you the money …” and Anna was off again, while Kelly drifted once more.

She’d communicated with Hawk while Blake was in the early stages of recovery, and she’d made the mistake of mentioning her secretarial failure and plans for New York. Hawk had been the one to recommend the art gallery. And Blake had been the one, apparently, to give her an outstanding reference which had earned her the job.

“It didn’t earn you anything,” Anna insisted, reading her mind. “You earned it. He just saw how talented you were and told somebody. Like a job reference.”

Kelly muttered a noncommittal reply that sufficed to keep Anna talking.

She was grateful, obviously, but at the same time she resented the fact that Blake apparently thought her career meant more to her than him. Or maybe he never thought she’d found out. Either way, the dramatic change in her life was incredible, but it was all hollow without him in it. She had never wanted him for what he could do for her, but for who he was. The fact that he had apparently not understood that left a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Kelly!”

Hearing Anna’s irritation, Kelly apologized quickly. “Sorry. I’m really sorry, Anna. I’m every bit as bad as he is.”

“No kidding,” Anna muttered.

“Sorry,” Kelly said again. Anna had been a good friend to her from day one on the new job, and she’d quickly learned that good friends were hard to come by in a city as fast moving as this one, especially if she didn’t go out all that much. Frankly, she’s spent so much time at bars and clubs on Element Island that she’d lost interested in them.

“So what are you going to do about Alexi?” Kelly asked, trying to make it up to her friend.

“Forget that,” Anna retorted. “How are you feeling?”

“Sick as a dog, except I don’t know how sick dogs can be. Hopefully pretty damn sick,” Kelly admitted, sprawling out on the couch with a wastebasket nearby in case she had to make a dive for it, which was often the case these days.

Anna commiserated for a few minutes before getting interrupted—surprise—by the rat’s ass hammering on her door, so she hung up and left Kelly to her queasiness and rambling thoughts.

***

Kelly stared up at the ceiling of apartment, thinking back to how it had started. She’d initially chalked the exhaustion up to the move. She’d left everything behind and had started in an entirely new city that might as well have been Mars for how different it was from South Caroline. The weather, the food, the people, the subways, the pace of life—it was all an entirely new game, and then there was learning a whole new job. She’d figured being tired came with the territory.

But then she’d started frequently queasy, not throwing up at first, but never quite sure food would stay in, even if something the previous day had tasted just fine. In tandem with her constant nausea came a bizarre sensitivity to smells, to where she’d had to quit wearing her favorite perfume because she suddenly hated it, and certain whiffs of deodorant on a subway—or other whiffs, for that matter—sent her running for the nearest bathroom or trashcans. And her moods. God. Sometimes she would want to cry for no reason at all. Other times she would get angry over things as insignificant as her usual coffee place running out of the particular sweetener she liked to add to her morning cup of joe.

Some coworkers suggested that she might be pregnant, but Kelly knew that was impossible. She was on the pill and had taken it with regularity throughout all the time that Blake and she had been sleeping together. There was no way that she could be pregnant, and she was more inclined to think that even the pill itself was maybe making her sick, messing with her hormones or something.

She planned to go to the doctor and describe her symptoms, but one day when Kelly had to run out of a meeting to find the nearest bathroom stall, Anna chased her down and wouldn’t let her get away.

Kelly replayed the scene in her mind as her stomach suddenly lurched and she lunged for the wastebasket.

“Listen,” Anna said, standing outside the stall as Kelly tried to recover from throwing up her lunch. “I know how scary it can be to deal with the fact that you might be pregnant, especially when the father is no longer in the picture. But it’s better to know. Every day that goes by that you’re not taking a prenatal vitamin is a problem. Every cup of coffee or glass of wine you drink—it could be a problem. You have to do the smart thing here, Kelly. It might not be just about you anymore.”

Kelly groaned, resting her head on her arm that was slung over the base of the toilet. She didn’t want to admit it, but she knew Anna was right.

“I’m scared,” she said quietly. “I didn’t plan on a baby. I can’t have a baby. The father …”

“Blake?” Anna guessed.

“It’s the only possibility,” Kelly whispered, so she wasn’t sure her friend would here, but she did.

“You’re not alone,” Anna promised her gently. “I’ll go get you a test from the drug store right now and stay here while you take it. How about that?

Kelly knew it was the best offer she was going to get, and she sat up just enough to tidy her hair a bit. “Yes. Okay.”

The fifteen minutes that she had to wait for Anna to get back seemed like an eternity, but eventually there was a paper bag hung over the door of the stall and Kelly reached up to take it.

With trembling hands, she undid the packaging, then used the test and set it aside to wait the requisite three minutes for the result to show.

It seemed to take hours before the positive result glared up at her from the screen, and Kelly felt sick all over again. There was a strange combination of terror and joy that settled low in her stomach, and for a long moment she simply didn’t know what to say.

“Well?” Anna demanded, after a full minute had passed. “Anything?”

Kelly stood up, smoothed down her skirt, and opened the door. Wordlessly, she handed her coworker the test, meeting Anna’s eyes when she looked up from it.

“Well,” Kelly said, clearing her throat. “I guess I’m having a baby.”

“Damn it, Blake.” Stomach thoroughly emptied Kelly sagged onto the floor, reaching for a nearby tissue box and a glass of water to rinse the awful taste from her mouth. Hands slightly shaky, she wiped at her lips and whispered, “Answer my messages.”