furrows got deeper. “Oh.”
“Ally? Is everything okay?”
The frown lines disappeared as she brightened and plastered a smile across her face that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’m just trying to reconcile this Chris with the one I met on Tortola.”
“Same guy.” He grinned at her.
“Not exactly.”
“But close enough.”
“Maybe.”
She fell silent, tracing the pattern on the seat cushions with a finger, and he wondered what she was thinking about. In the silence, Ally’s stomach growled. Loudly.
She blushed, placing a hand over her stomach. “Excuse me. I haven’t eaten much today—between the morning sickness and, well, everything else that happened.”
He stood. “Then I get the chance to feed you, after all. Let’s go.”
Ally hesitated. “Um, I should probably head home….”
He’d almost forgotten Ally’s overly cautious nature, but even coupled with what she euphemistically called “everything else,” he didn’t realize he’d have to coerce her just to get her to have a meal with him. Of course, she was probably still a bit distrustful of his motives, but they had to get past that if they were going to work anything out. And if he’d learned anything as the captain of Team Wells, it was how to build a crew. Food helped.
“I never did get to take you out for a meal before, so I think I’m due. You need to eat, the baby needs to eat, and I haven’t had lunch, either.”
Her brow started to furrow again, but she seemed to catch it in time and shrugged instead. “You’re right. Food would be good. Just not Mexican.”
He jumped to the ground as Ally carefully descended the ladder propped against the Circe’s hull. Reaching up, he grasped her waist to guide her down the rungs and felt a tremor run through her. Like an electrical current, it vibrated through his fingers and shot through his veins, and he was loath to let her go when her feet finally touched ground.
Ally didn’t turn around, and his fingers tightened on her as the heat of her skin seeped through the thin cotton of her dress. He remembered the feeling. Obviously so did she.
With her back to him, those wild curls tickled his face, the fresh citrus smell of her filling his nose and warming his blood. Experimentally, he moved his thumbs in small circles and another shiver shook her. Only inches separated them. If she’d just lean back a little…
Voices filled the room, chasing the silence away as the men returned from lunch, and Ally stepped away.
As she faced him, he noted the flags of color on her cheeks and the way her teeth worried her lower lip. Ally might be angry with him or wary of him or any other number of things, but she wasn’t immune to him.
Satisfied with that knowledge for the moment, he allowed her the space she seemed to need to get herself back under control.
“I think—I mean we…Um, I, uh, guess…” She blew out a deep breath and brushed her hair away from her face. “Let’s just go, okay?”
She turned on her heel and took two steps in the direction of the door before she stopped. The Dagny was right in front of her, and she looked at it carefully, her eyes tracing over the rigging before returning to the three hulls of the trimaran. Her mouth twisted briefly and she nodded, almost imperceptibly, before she set her shoulders and turned back to him.
Her smile—a real one, this time—snared him. “Are you coming? I’m hungry.”
“AND AFTER THAT, everything went fine. We had a nice lunch, and I came home.” She’d been too tired to do much more than send a quick text to Molly last night, so Ally brought her up to speed on the revelations of yesterday while they tackled the much overdue and mindless chore of filing.
“You certainly seem in better spirits this morning.”
“My breakfast stayed down, so that was a nice way to start the day.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.” Ally grinned. “But it’s still good news, right?”
“You just seem to be in a really good mood for someone who still has the threat of a massive, ugly legal battle looming over her.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Obviously not.”
“Dagny.”
“It’s a boat. It’s what the man does for a living. I don’t see the connection.”
“Okay, pay attention. Chris got all upset over the news of the baby, then I escalate that by handling the situation badly, too. Like any man, he had to fight back.”
“And he used the big guns.”
“The biggest. But right now, this is still fresh news for Chris. That will fade. At this very moment, even with impending fatherhood on the horizon, he’s still planning on going off on this around-the-world race thing. We talked about it a lot yesterday, and he’s bordering on obsessed with it. That, and rehabbing the Circe. After that, there’ll be another race and another boat vying for his attention. He’ll lose interest in me and the baby soon enough—between the distance and everything he has to do for this race, we’re not going to be high on his radar—and by the time the baby gets here, Chris will have figured out that he doesn’t want to be tied down with a child.” Ally closed the file drawer with a satisfying bang. “He’ll have moved on. Maybe we’ll work out some kind of settlement to salve his conscience or some visitation plans or something, but I guarantee he’ll tire of this baby stuff soon enough.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.”
“Molls, racing is everything to him. He only works in the shipyard to make his grandfather happy. Wandering feet and an adventurous soul don’t exactly equal Father of the Year. Look at my brother. Diane’s been slow coming around to this simple fact, but even she’s starting to realize that Steven will never marry her and settle down.” Hungry again, she dug in her desk drawer and found an apple. Biting into it, she savored the taste and the lack of roiling nausea. “Nope, all I have to do is just bide my time and ride this out and Kiddo and I will be fine.”
Molly’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m glad to hear that. Oh, and by the way, the Kriss brothers are coming by Monday to work up an estimate on your new office.”
“Excellent.” And she meant it. After the upheaval of this week, she was finally feeling as if she had things back under control. TGIF indeed. She had about a thousand things she needed to do today. She’d been next to worthless most of the week, and poor Molls hadn’t been able to pick up all of the slack, but her to-do list was manageable, if long, and without continual distractions she’d be able to get caught up and still enjoy the weekend.
But she found it hard to concentrate. The radio played softly, Molly’s keyboard clicked away in the background, and the phones were silent, yet she couldn’t seem to make the columns of numbers on her screen add up properly. After two hours of working on the same account, she’d made little headway, and she closed the file in disgust. She did mundane things instead—balanced her brother’s checkbook, renewed her father’s fishing license—but those simple chores didn’t require much of her attention.
Her e-mail inbox was empty—since Erin had kicked her out of the wedding, she was no longer forced to referee the ongoing battles between her mom and her sister over caterers and flowers—and the lack of family drama felt odd. Maybe that was why she was unable to focus; she wasn’t used to working without