Twelve
The next week passed in a haze of happiness. A voice in Abby’s head told her to be careful, not to let herself enjoy it too much because it could be snatched away so quickly.
She’d never gone for long stretches without something going wrong. Like, spectacularly wrong. A bad boyfriend, a huge problem at work. Having to move. A huge expense she hadn’t prepared for. Running out of money. Until she’d found stability with her job at Jameson, the last two years had been a constant strain.
Just to be safe, the only thing she’d spent any money on since she started receiving the big paycheck was her condo. She figured she always could sell it if finances grew tight again. It was her rainy-day fund, in a way.
Looking around the dining room table now, she couldn’t call up any of those bad memories or nagging worries. Probably had something to do with how loud the Jameson family was. Man, they could talk about anything. Carter, specifically, was a pro at talking.
They’d all gathered to celebrate the news from Ellie’s doctor that she could move around a bit more. She came back from her appointment two days ago and declared a family dinner was in order. Verbally walked all over Derrick’s objections and made it happen. To make her happy, and everyone seemed determined to do that, they gathered.
Even now they passed a roast, vegetables and potatoes around the long rectangle table in Derrick and Ellie’s dining room. Dishes clanked as Carter and Jackson argued about the benefits of mashed potatoes over all other potato dishes. Jackson’s sister and Ellie’s best friend, Vanessa, couldn’t make it on short notice, and Ellie’s brother was away at some computer seminar, but everyone else was there.
“Are you okay?” Spence whispered the question in Abby’s ear as he leaned in closer.
She reached out and slid her hand over his thigh. Gave it a little squeeze. It was tempting to drive him a little mad under the table, but really, she wanted to keep the connection. After their week together, she’d been spoiled. She hated any distance between them outside of work.
This sensation of falling and being caught was new to her. So foreign but not unwelcome. Her young life centered on her and her mom. They had been an inseparable pair. Then she widened her circle to include a few friends. Now, with Spence, she opened it again for this makeshift family that joked with her while enveloping her in its incredible warmth.
He kissed her temple. “I know you’re not used to so many people.”
Carter snapped his fingers. He sat directly across from Abby and pointed at the dish next to Spence. “Stop licking your girlfriend and pass the peas.”
Spence made a groaning sound. “Are you sad because you don’t have a girlfriend?”
“We should find him one,” Derrick said as he forked the meat off the tray then kept passing.
From his seat at one end of the table, he looked like a king presiding over his lands. Abby thought that might have been a scarier idea and his dominance might have carried more weight if he didn’t spend half of the meal making lovey eyes at Ellie at the other end of the long table. He’d protested sitting so far apart but Ellie assured him he’d have the best view that way.
Honestly, Abby found the two of them adorable-bordering-on-annoying. Spence once talked about the bumpy road they had to engagement. She’d been in the office, but Derrick wasn’t really one to drag his home life in. He hadn’t before Ellie, anyway.
Not wanting to fall behind on the verbal poking going around the table, Abby leaned across Spence and looked at the one person at the table who seemed to keep eating no matter what happened around him. “Jackson, what’s your sister’s dating status?”
Jackson didn’t even look up from his plate. “Nope.”
“Come on.” Carter laughed. “But she already loves me.”
Jackson glared at Carter before glancing over at Abby. “I work with this crowd. Do you think I want to be related to them?” He froze for a second, then held up the hand that just happened to be holding his knife. “No offense.”
Derrick snorted. “How could we possibly be offended by that?”
“I like them.” Abby leaned in closer to Spence, soaking in his body heat. “You’ve all grown on me.”
Spence slipped his hand around her and gave her lower back a gentle massage. “Thanks, babe. And the feeling is mutual.”
Abby didn’t know how he planned to eat with one hand attached to her, but that was his problem. She savored the touching and the food. She was about to ask Ellie how she’d made the meal when she was still confined to bed or sitting down for most of the day, but then common sense kicked in. The two women in the kitchen when they all arrived at the house likely did all the work. Clearly there were some benefits of eating at a Jameson home.
The money—the stunning breadth of it—still didn’t sit right with Abby. She wasn’t used to all that wealth. The Virginia house looked like a school when she’d driven up for the party. Derrick’s town house was nothing short of spectacular but still managed to feel homey, which she credited to Ellie’s handiwork.
Abby had been raised with so little. She appreciated every last shoe in her closet and can in her pantry. She’d picked each item out and purchased them. The only thing that kept her from fidgeting when she thought about the reality of Jameson money was that Spence never showed any sign of being impressed with his bank account. If he had, she would have balked.
“You have pet names for each other. Cute.” Carter sent Spence a bug-eyed look. “The peas, Spence.”
Spence didn’t move. “You have legs.”
“If I have to get up, I’m punching you.”
“You’re both annoying.” Jackson picked up the bowl and passed it across the table to Carter.
He dug right in. “About time.”
Through the controlled chaos, Derrick let out a loud exhale. Abby never knew her dad but she assumed this was the ultimate dad move. Make a noise and get everyone at the table listening. Smooth.
“This nonsense is going to stop when the baby comes,” he said.
“We’ll be too busy fighting over who gets to hold him to argue about anything else,” Spence said as he tried to steal the bowl of peas back.
Carter moved it out of reach.
Ellie eyed them all over the top of her water glass. “Or her.”
“Speaking of which—” Carter cut into his roast “—are you still trying to sell that faulty birth control story to explain your current state?”
“My pregnancy doesn’t need to be explained,” Ellie said, emphasizing each word.
“Carter.” Abby was pretty sure Spence kicked his brother as he said his name.
Ellie wasn’t quite as subtle. She fixed Carter with a you’re-right-on-the-edge glare even though she looked like she was fighting back a smile. “Don’t make me burn your clothes in the fireplace.”
He winced. “Hormones?”
She waved a knife at him. “Don’t test me.”
Abby felt a fog roll over her. The conversation picked at a memory she’d shoved to the back of her brain. A piece of information she didn’t want to deal with that now came screaming back to her.
The Pill. Sex. Antibiotics. She’d started taking the meds that were in her bathroom the second she started feeling sick. That happened before she had sex with Spence. Before, during and after.
Antibiotics and birth control pills were a bad combination. Still a long shot for getting pregnant, but it could happen. Some medications played with the effectiveness of the pill. When she climbed out of her sickbed and remembered that, she’d rechecked on the internet. The news was not as negative on the possibility of getting pregnant as she’d hoped.
Good grief. It wasn’t possible...was it?
Abby tried to remember Ellie’s list of pregnancy symptoms, all that she had to fight off and go through.
“Faulty birth control?” Abby didn’t mean to say the words out loud, but they were the only ones in her mind right now.
“Is this appropriate dinner conversation?” Derrick asked.
“It is in this house.” Spence shrugged as he made another grab for the peas and reached them this time.
His look of triumph over something so simple made Abby smile. Or it would have if she wasn’t busy counting days on the calendar in her head.
“The pregnancy is high-risk because my IUD failed,” Ellie explained. “It’s still in there.”
Carter whistled. “Damn, Derrick.”
“I didn’t do it.”
Spence glanced at Derrick. “Well, technically...”
“It kind of depends what the ‘it’ is in that sentence.” Jackson froze in the middle of moving the roast closer to him. “Is that the doorbell?”
The bell chimed a second time.
“Isn’t everyone here?” Derrick asked the question to the room in general. He clearly didn’t expect an answer because he was up and out of his chair, on the way to the door.
A terrible thought ran through Abby’s head. She leaned in to whisper it to Spence. “If your father is back in town—”
Carter nearly dropped his water glass. “Don’t even joke about that.”
Footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor as Derrick walked back in. He held an envelope. He dropped it on the sideboard that ran half of the length of the impossibly long room. Never looked at it again.
“What was it?” Spence asked even though he didn’t sound that interested in the answer.
“Delivery of work documents.” Derrick’s gaze flicked to Ellie as he sat back down. “Don’t glare. I didn’t tell anyone to send stuff here.”
“Yet, someone did. Gee, I wonder why they thought it was an okay thing to do.” She did not sound pleased.
Derrick winked at her. “You forget how important I am.”
“That ego.” Carter shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
Jackson scooped up more potatoes. “Try working with him.”
Carter glanced at her. She could feel the heat of his stare as the conversation bounced around her. She tried to keep up but the idea of a baby was stuck in her head now. She wanted to kick it out but it had grabbed hold.
“Abby? Do you have an opinion on that?” Carter asked.
She couldn’t stop looking at Spence, imagining what their children might look like. If a kid would have his stubbornness.
When she realized the table had gone unusually quiet and everyone stared at her, she struggled to mentally rewind the conversation and come up with an answer. “Uh, no. I’m taking the Fifth.”
The talking picked back up again. About food. About work. About anything Carter could think of, or so it seemed.
Spence leaned in closer, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “You sure everything is okay?”
“Just thinking.” And panicking and generally kicking her own butt for being so careless. She’d never done that before. With her luck, it would only take one time.
He smiled at her. “You can concentrate on anything with all this noise?”
“It’s called conversation, Spence,” Jackson mumbled under his breath.
Ellie groaned. “Enough talking. Eat.”
“The pregnant woman has spoken.” Derrick picked up his glass in a toast.
“You know, for that power to keep working, you’re going to have to be pregnant all the time.” Jackson flinched, which must have meant Ellie kicked him. She was right there, after all. “Hey!”
“I’m up to the challenge,” Derrick said.
Some of the color drained from Ellie’s face. “Let’s start with one first.”
Abby looked down at her plate. She really hoped she wasn’t the one saying that a month from now.
* * *
It took another half hour to finish up and move the conversation into the living room. On Ellie’s orders, the men cleared the table and argued during every second of their work as if they’d been sent into the mines to dig for coal.
Spence didn’t mind helping out. He’d do dishes, but he refused to do them alone. In Derrick’s house, that usually wasn’t necessary because family dinners meant he hired people to handle most of the work. With Ellie being less mobile, Derrick was interviewing for a full-time cook, but he had to do it behind her back because she was not comfortable with the idea.
Spence glanced into the great room next to where they’d eaten dinner and saw them all gathered around, lounging on sofas. Arguing, like they always did. He was pretty sure that was part of the Jameson gene pool. Jackson probably picked up the habit by association.
The only person not having coffee and debating dessert options was Abby. She stood in the doorway between the dining room and the great room, watching. He’d picked up on her mood change earlier. His family could be overwhelming. He got that. But he sensed something else was bothering her.
They’d been growing closer, spending more time together. Talking about things other than work. He didn’t want her to shut down now.
“You sure you’re okay?” He slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her body back against his. “You got quiet.”
She sighed. “That was a lot of activity.”
“Yelling. A meal with this group is a lot of yelling.”
When she leaned against him, he put his chin on her shoulder. Breathed, letting this moment settle inside him. The comfort of it made him think he misread her earlier. The slight tension running through her had vanished. Now she relaxed.
She rubbed her hand over his arm. “You love it.”
He couldn’t deny it. Today was the kind of event that drew him back to DC. Being able to unwind with them. Joke and have fun without fear of someone losing their temper or their dad storming in. “I kind of do.”
“Was it like that growing up?”
“Hell, no.” He thought about the right way to explain it. He wasn’t asking for pity or suggesting he had it bad, not compared to other people. But it hadn’t been good, either. “We weren’t allowed to talk at the table.”
She turned around in his arms to face him, never breaking contact. “Are you kidding?”
The concern was evident in her eyes. Healthy concern. He could handle that.
He brushed his fingers through her hair, loving the feel of it. “Does Eldrick strike you as a guy who wanted to hear what his kids had to say?”
She rolled her eyes. “My mom would come home exhausted and still listen to me babble.”
She shared so little about her past and her life before. From the few bits she’d dropped, Spence had an image in his mind. She liked solitude and trusted very few. That probably was a smart way to live. At least it seemed safer.
But he did miss having someone who knew more about her and might be able to offer some advice to him now and then. Ellie only offered up so much. “I’m sorry I never got a chance to meet your mom.”
“Me, too.”
He hugged her then. Pulled her in close and wondered how he’d ever let go of her in the past. That had been a terrible mistake, maybe his worst. And that was saying something.
He spied the envelope that was delivered earlier. He’d forgotten about it. Since it lay there untouched, he guessed Derrick had, too. Spence almost reached for it now. He had no idea what could be so important for a home delivery. Then he saw the return address. “Jeff Berger.”
Abby froze in his arms. “What?”
Not wanting to let go of her, Spence nodded in the direction of the envelope. “The delivery was from him. The guy has this weird competition thing with Derrick.”
Her expression stayed unreadable. “Why?”
“When Derrick saved the company, he did it by grabbing a bunch of small jobs, then expanding the business into new areas, both geographic and different types of projects.” Everything had been a struggle back then. Spence was relieved they’d moved past those days. “He cut right into Berger’s business and Jeff took it personally and has been looking for revenge ever since.”
Abby’s hands slid down Spence’s arms. Her fingers slipped through his. “Wow.”
“It’s a stupid guy thing. Jeff gets spun up even higher because Derrick won’t engage.”
She frowned. “Then why was Jeff at the party?”
“Keep your enemies close.” At least that’s what Spence assumed. He hadn’t bothered to ask because he didn’t care that much about Jeff.
“I hate that saying.” An edge moved back into her voice.
He decided to let it go. She’d tell him when she was ready. “But it’s smart.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
She was frowning again but Spence had the perfect temporary solution. “We need cake.”
“My hero.”