she’d kicked a puppy. “I know, and I’m sorry to be so witchy this morning. Dr. Barton says this is normal. Unpleasant, but still well within the range.”
It was Molly’s turn to sigh. “‘Unpleasant’ is an understatement.”
“You’re not wrong about that.” Six weeks to go? Between the sickness in the mornings and the unbelievable fatigue that set in around three o’clock, this first trimester wasn’t going well at all.
“Can I get you anything? Crackers? A soda?”
“Just help me find the Miller paperwork. I swear, this baby has stolen all my brain cells.”
Molly casually tapped a folder sitting just left of Ally’s elbow. “By the way, I talked to the landlord. He said we can have that storeroom for just a little more each month. I thought you could move your desk back there along with the baby’s stuff, and we’ll put a conference table out here to meet with clients.”
Tears gathered in Ally’s eyes. After the initial shock of Ally’s announcement had passed, Molly had gone into “prep mode,” never once questioning her decision to keep the baby, focusing instead on how they’d work out the logistics. Ally sniffed and reached for a tissue. Seemed she could check “overly emotional” on her list of symptoms, as well.
Thank goodness for Molly. She’d be a wreck without her. Her mom had flipped at the news, seemingly shocked that anyone accidentally ended up pregnant in this day and age. Ally had had to bite her tongue not to bring up her brother’s pregnant girlfriend, Diane—no one seemed overly surprised about that baby. Molly had been the voice of reason then, too. Her family was just too used to Ally being the sensible, smart, reliable one, she’d argued. In a rare moment of snark—showing how truly angry Molly was with the lot of them—she’d postulated that the real reason the family was upset over the news was that Ally’s attention would be focused somewhere else in the future. God forbid her family might actually have to take care of their own problems and not be able to run to her to sort them out.
Molly frowned. “You’re leaking again.”
Ally fanned her face. “No, I’m not. Just something in my eye.”
“Hey, I’d cry, too, if I went on my honeymoon alone and still managed to wind up pregnant.” Molly tossed the comment over her shoulder as she returned to her own desk.
“Yes, yes, I’m aware of the irony.” Right after she’d recovered from the shock of seeing a positive result on the pregnancy test and had realized she’d somehow ended up in the two-percent failure rate of the Pill, that irony had hit her right between the eyes.
It would almost be funny if it were someone else.
Molly’s keyboard clicked as she went back to work, and Ally tried to focus on the books from Miller’s Printing Company. She had to get their payroll data entered and their checks printed before the need for her afternoon nap hit, but she was having trouble concentrating.
From the moment her plane had taken off from San Juan, she’d tried to put Chris out of her mind. She knew she needed to forget him, to just let him and their hours together fade into a dim memory. But it hadn’t worked. She’d felt like a different version of herself, as though she’d been on the verge of something only to have been jerked back by her family responsibilities.
She’d caught a cab directly from the airport to the hospital, expecting to find her brother barely clinging to life. Instead, Steven was slightly battered from flipping his dirt bike, but awake, lucid and not near death at all—a situation she’d been tempted to remedy when he’d shown no remorse at all for ruining her vacation. After all, as her mother had added, Steven needed someone to deal with the hospital billing department and transfer money from his small trust to pay bills with.
The bitterness of missing out on more delightful days with Chris because of her family…well, she’d almost been over it by the time she’d missed her period, but any hope of forgetting about him had vanished at that point.
She was carrying his baby—a permanent reminder of those two wonderful days. How long would it take for her not to remember him every time she looked at their child? Her child, she corrected. This baby was hers alone.
Chris climbed the stairs to his office on OWD’s second floor two at a time. His mornings had taken on a pattern these days—an hour at the gym, a few hours on the Circe’s renovations, lunch, then into the office. Today, though, he came straight from the yard, bypassed his assistant’s desk without stopping for messages and went straight for his computer.
The damage to the Circe’s keel was greater than expected, and he’d contacted a friend for suggestions when he and Jack had clashed over the best course of action. He’d snapped a few quick photos with his phone, but couldn’t get them to send properly for some reason.
He dug the USB cable out of its drawer and waited for the files to download onto his computer. A few clicks later, and the photos and measurements were off to Pete. Aesthetically, Circe’s rehab was going well, but structurally they kept finding new issues to deal with. He’d barely gotten her home—the constant problems had stretched his trip to almost four weeks, much to Victor’s and Mickey’s amusement and Pops’s dismay.
Hopefully, this problem with the keel would be the last.
With the photos sent, Chris closed his e-mail account. The window open on his screen, though, showed another file had been in the download. That’s odd.
He clicked it open, and Ally filled his screen. Something heavy landed in his stomach at the sight of that cheeky smile. He’d forgotten he’d taken it. They’d been almost ready to sail back when his phone had fallen out of his kit bag. She’d caught it before it went overboard and handed it to him, saying something about…what was it? Boys and their toys, he remembered. In response, he’d snapped a quick photo of her. She’d protested, grabbed the phone away, and distracted him with a kiss.
It had been another hour before they’d set off.
Ally.
He didn’t need to look behind him at the bulletin board on the wall to know that Ally’s note with her name and phone number scribbled on the back was still there. A hundred bucks slipped to the desk clerk had gotten her contact info from the computer, but after the initial shock and anger at her abrupt departure had abated—and the struggle to get the Circe home in one piece had helped distract him nicely—he’d never followed up on his knee-jerk reaction to want to find her.
He’d put her from his mind, if not his dreams, and gone back to his life, even if the blithe way she’d dismissed him had left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Mickey had taken his life in his hands once to tease him about it—shortly after he’d returned to the Circe instead of sailing off with Ally on the Siren—telling him it was a fair turnaround considering his own love-’em-and-leave-’em past. That was the closest he’d ever come to hitting a crewmate.
He wasn’t sure why he’d even kept her note and number, much less pinned it on the board with the photos of him and his crew in various races over the years.
“Chris?” Marge, Pops’s secretary, stuck her head around his office door. “I brought you a sandwich.”
After thirty years with the company, Marge was more family than employee, and she’d mothered Chris shamelessly since day one. She was well past retirement age, but had said the place would fall apart without her and claimed they’d have to carry her out of there in a box. He and Pops certainly weren’t arguing with her or forcing her out of the door.
Crossing to Chris’s desk, she laid the sandwich on the blotter and ruffled his hair. “Jack said you two had a disagreement about the Circe.”
The sandwich smelled delicious, and his stomach growled at the reminder he’d skipped lunch when the keel had distracted him. “Jack always comes running to you, the tattletale. She’s not his boat.”
“And