Thirteen
“They’re okay.” Paula was peeking out of the kitchen window overlooking the deck.
“You mean Dad isn’t strangling Zach or freezing him out completely?”
“Nope.” Paula returned to the living room with two mugs of tea. “They’re measuring.”
“Measuring...do I want to ask what?”
“The deck, sweetheart.” Paula handed over a mug.
“Oh, that.”
Her mother sat on the dilapidated couch next to her, placing a comforting hand on Pen’s knee. “This seems very sudden.”
“Three months is one quarter of the year. It’s not that sudden.” Pen held her tea close to her lips. She hadn’t meant to sound so defensive.
“Three months is how long you’ve been pregnant. When did you meet him?”
“I told you. When I lived here. That’s been years ago.” Pen lifted her thumbnail and nibbled. Her mother’s serious expression remained. “Yes. Okay, it was sudden.”
“But you’re in love.”
Thank goodness her mother didn’t put a question mark at the end of that sentence. Pen didn’t like to lie. She smiled instead. No, she and Zach weren’t in love. What they had wasn’t ever supposed to be about love. She couldn’t deny she felt close to him—and that she liked him a whole lot.
When she thought of her baby, a worrisome thought niggled its way forward. Would her son or daughter grow up thinking love was a fairy tale?
No, she decided in an instant.
Pen would show her child love, and Zach would, too. Romantic love was avoidable. She thought back through her past boyfriends and wasn’t sure she’d ever been in love herself. There’d always been an obstacle, an excuse she’d found to keep from getting in too deep.
Maybe because she’d arranged many false marriages and engagements for publicity and had become the ultimate skeptic. Or maybe the idea of giving in and being someone’s all meant she’d be at risk to lose it all.
With a child on the way, she couldn’t afford to be selfish.
A pair of low male laughs carried on the Chicago wind and into the living room and Penelope and Paula exchanged glances.
“Are they...?” Pen started.
Paula blinked, then smiled. “I think they are.”
Zach and Pen’s baby would know love—so much of it, he or she would never want for more.
But as she made that empty assurance to herself Pen wondered if she could settle for the same.
* * *
Louis not only liked to talk about houses and building, he was also a Dallas Cowboys fan.
Go fucking figure.
Zach ended up at the picnic table drinking beers and yapping with Pen’s father until well after midnight.
“I should go up,” Louis said. He cast a glance at an upstairs window. “Paula waits for me.”
How...nice. Zach’s parents got along fine, but he didn’t remember his mother ever waiting on his dad, or his dad cutting anything short to go to her.
Louis stood and Zach stood with him. “Thanks for letting us stay.”
“Paula insisted on always having a guest room for Pen since she moved to Dallas. We lost her to Texas a year before we’re losing her to you.” Louis’s words held no venom, and actually sounded kind of sad. “You’ll see when that baby is born. Just how much you’ll do for it. Just how protective you’ll become.”
Zach could imagine. He’d already been that way with Penelope. He met Louis’s eyes and confessed just that.
“I’m like that about your daughter. She’ll never want for anything. Our child wasn’t the reason we became engaged.” His ex-wife was, but Zach sure as hell wasn’t sharing that. “But the baby definitely gave us a good reason to stay that way.”
Louis nodded slowly, obviously trying to accept the fact that his baby girl had gotten engaged and impregnated by some billionaire cowboy. Damn if Zach could understand Pen’s father’s position when he imagined having a daughter of his own.
With a slap to Zach’s shoulder, Louis echoed his fear. “God help you if you have a girl.”
* * *
Zach shut the door to the guest bedroom after brushing his teeth, stepping lightly across the real wood floors that were scarred and in need of a good wax. Paula had mentioned as much when she’d shown them to their room before looking to Zach to check if he’d be appalled by staying in such squalor. Her words, said on a tight laugh.
He’d assured her he could sleep anywhere, and though he’d kept it to himself, he’d also considered that he would sleep anywhere as long as Penelope was by his side.
He climbed into the double bed, a tight fit, the mattress sagging in the center. Pen let out a soft hum and wiggled under the blankets. Wrapping his arm around her middle, he tugged her close and buried his nose in her hair.
When he’d met her years ago in Chicago at a party, he’d been in full-on playboy mode. He’d set his Dallas drawl to full-tilt and laid on the charm, promising not to get into any trouble lest Pen’s PR firm would have to step in and straighten him out. He hadn’t seen her after that, so running into her at a swanky club in Texas had taken him by surprise.
He wasn’t a man who believed in fate, kismet or meant-to-be, but as he allowed his fingers to drape over his fiancée’s abdomen, he wondered if he wasn’t seeing this for what it was.
A second chance.
But as the thought hit him, so did the palpable fear of screwing it up. Of being in a position to lose not only the woman beside him but also access to their child.
Zach hadn’t thought about fatherhood. Hadn’t thought about it even when he’d asked Lonna to marry him. But the moment Pen announced her pregnancy an overwhelming feeling of right swept over him.
It wasn’t just the baby. It wasn’t just that he was in his thirties and it was past time for him to consider starting a family. It wasn’t that he’d crafted a fake engagement to distract from the real issue at hand.
The game-changer was Penelope Brand.
She murmured in her sleep—or her half sleep, as it were—and he kissed her shoulder. He’d promised to claim her in this very bed, parents’ house or no, believing their sexual chemistry would rival the need for sleep and trump the need to be quiet with her parents down the hall.
Now, though...
She rolled in his direction, her eyes opening briefly then shutting again. The moonlight streamed through the window, highlighting her fair hair and kissing her curved cheekbone.
He’d claim her in a different way tonight.
He scooted in the springy bed to give her room. Her body was going through the rigorous toils of crafting a baby—their baby—and she needed all the sleep she could get.
He couldn’t give her everything, but that, he could.
* * *
The flight home from Chicago was quick, and soon enough Zach and Pen were changing from their comfy flight clothes into slightly more formalwear for visiting the Ferguson house.
One set of parents down, one to go.
She’d let Zach choose the nature of the venue, which he’d scheduled for cocktail hour. She’d argued about building their visit around alcohol since she wouldn’t be having any but he’d assured her she didn’t have to worry.
At a little after seven Saturday evening, Pen settled onto the settee across from the chaise longue in the sitting room at the Ferguson mansion.
Elle was perched formally on the edge of a high-backed chair, Rider settled into the one next to it. A female member of the house staff walked in with a tray holding four martinis with speared olives in each elegant glass.
Zach accepted his glass, but held up a hand when the younger woman bent to give Penelope her drink. “My fiancée is expecting, so she’ll need something nonalcoholic. Club soda with a lime, okay?” He pegged Pen with a playful look while she struggled not to swallow her tongue.
Evidently, breaking the news to his parents wasn’t going to be a slow build.
Rider accepted his drink, Elle hers, and Pen offered a shaky smile in response. Elle’s right eyebrow was curved so high on her forehead, it’d been lost in her hair.
No one said a word until Pen had a club soda in hand. Elle went first.
“And here we thought you’d come to tell us that your engagement was a sham to distract from your ex-wife.”
“Eleanor, for the love of—” Rider let out an exasperated huff and swallowed a mouthful of his martini.
“You’re only allowed one of those, don’t forget. Savor it.”
Pen stiffened, but the comforting weight of Zach’s arm was around her back in an instant.
“We’re due in December. We wanted to tell you in person before you found out from someone else.”
Elle pursed her already pursed lips, her cool green stare assessing and, from Pen’s vantage point, not all that approving.
“I think it’s great,” Rider said with a huge smile. Pen latched on to the man’s sentiment like a lifeline. “We already wrote you a check.” He reached into the pocket of his slacks and came out with a folded paper. “It’s for the wedding, but now I suppose you can include it with preparing for our first grandchild.”
He let out a hearty laugh and embraced Elle’s hand. “Better than croaking of a heart attack before I get to meet my grandkids, eh, Elle?”
“I suppose that’s true.” She narrowed her eyes again and Pen shifted in her seat. “What interested you most in my son, Ms. Brand? His money or his DNA?”
Next to her, Zach went on alert, but Pen stayed his retort by touching his arm.
“I can understand how this information comes as a shock to you, but there’s no need to be rude, Mrs. Ferguson. I’m neither a gold digger nor a woman who expected to get pregnant. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to know the part of your son that most interests me. I simply saw someone I liked.” She paused to take in Zach, whose mouth flinched like he might be fighting a proud smile. “And had to have him.”
She snapped her attention back to Elle, who’d dropped her jaw. Likely no one dared speak to the Oil Queen of Dallas the way Pen had, but the older woman had started it.
“Mom.”
Elle turned her stunned reaction to Zach.
“We’re not asking your permission, or for your approval. But I expect you to be much more gracious when the baby is here. He or she will be the first-born grandchild in the family.”
Elle drank down her martini in hearty gulps, then retrieved the spare martini left behind when Pen refused it and gulped that one, too.
Rider, his good humor intact, let out a crack of laughter. “Guess she’ll be having my second one, then.”