both her hands and pulled her up. The serious mood was obviously broken, Kelly thought, and they could talk another time. Right now she just figured on toasting the New Year with him and then packing it in. But for just that instant when he helped her up, her protruding tummy grazed against his flat abdomen. And her hands...for some reason he didn’t release her hands for another whole millisecond. His grip was warm and strong, his touch sparking an electric rush in her pulse.
She’d felt the same sizzle when he’d kissed her at the wedding. She was positive, then and now, that she was imagining it. He was being kind. He’d frankly brought up sex with her, several times now, with the same ease he’d mentioned having macaroni and cheese for dinner. He thought she was in love with his brother. There wasn’t a single rational reason in the universe to think he felt an ounce of attraction for her.
And she didn’t. She really didn’t.
But for that miniscule second, the muscle in his jaw tightened and some kind of emotion flashed in his eyes. Something bleak and stark. Loneliness. Aloneness. As if he realized—as she did—that a normal bride and groom would never be ending their wedding night this way.
It was just an impulse, while he was already standing as close as a heartbeat, to wrap her arms around him. She didn’t want to give her new groom a stroke, and hugs weren’t part of their deal. Maybe a hug was presumptuous, but she didn’t care. That look of stark loneliness got to her. Everyone needed a plain old affectionate hug sometimes, the warmth of a connection to someone else. If he had a heart attack, then he’d just have to have a heart attack.
He stiffened like a poker when her arms curled around him.
But then he unbent.
Holy cow, did he unbend...
Three
Mac poured another mug of coffee—his fourth that morning—and carried it to the window. The sun hadn’t even thought about waking up until past eight. The horizon still had the pink-pearl luster of dawn, making the snowy landscape look as pretty and innocent as a Christmas card—but there’d sure been nothing innocent about the blizzard winds last night. He estimated there were two fresh feet of snow on a level, which wouldn’t be that hard to plow out, except that nothing was on a level. Some of the swirling, eddying drifts were taller than him.
With Kel pregnant, he got antsy at the thought of her being cut off from doctors and civilization, even if the city was as shut down as they were. Still, he had a pickup with a blade. He could have their country driveway cleared in a few hours, but for damn sure no one was going anywhere this morning.
Hearing the thump of a distant footfall from upstairs, Mac immediately spun around. The kitchen was lit up brighter than a hospital surgery. Granted, the teal blue counters and Italian-tile floor were a tad littered, but he’d been working like a dog. Four pans jostled for space on the stove, one for eggs, one for bacon, one for muffins and the last for pancakes. The table was crowded with lined-up boxes of cereal and bowls heaped with apples and oranges and melons—he’d been challenged to find space for silverware, particularly after he’d added pitchers of both orange and cranberry juice.
Mac scratched his chin. Possibly he’d overdone it just a little. Hell, somehow he seemed to have enough food for a battalion of marines, but pregnant women were a completely alien species. He didn’t know what Kelly was supposed to eat or what appealed to her, either.
Mac hated being unprepared.
When he heard another footfall, his heart started banging in his chest. Swiftly he shoveled a hand through his hair, checked his jeans zipper, then glanced at his black sweatshirt to make sure there wasn’t as much pancake batter on him as there seemed to be on the floor. The sound of footfalls moved to the stairs. He braced as if he were imminently facing a firing squad of Uzi’s.
That’s exactly what went wrong the night before, Mac figured. He hadn’t been braced. He hadn’t been prepared. Technically there was nothing wrong with a hug, but he’d just never expected Kelly to suddenly wrap her arms around him. He still had no clue why she’d done it. Maybe every pregnant woman got a wild hair. Maybe she was tired and not thinking. Maybe she needed reassurance. Maybe she’d forgotten she was in love with his brother.
Mac hadn’t. Even if he’d tried, the family must have asked him forty times what would happen if Chad came home. They didn’t get it. Of course Chad was going to show up sometime—he always did after one of his playboy disappearing acts. Mac knew that perfectly well when he’d asked her to marry him, known she’d loved his brother, too. Those sticky complications didn’t erase the reasons for the marriage, but the opposite. Kelly had been in danger. Cut-and-dried. And Mac loved his brother, but he knew him. Painfully well. Whether Chad was snoozing on a beach in Jamaica or right here made no difference. Mac couldn’t trust his brother to protect Kelly or to do right by the child. Keeping her safe was up to him.
And that was precisely why his response to that damn hug was so inexcusable. Mac shoveled a hand through his hair. He remembered folding his arms around her, because he couldn’t just stand there like a lump, and hell, he didn’t want her feeling rejected or scared. Returning the hug seemed an okay thing to do, but after that it all got hazy. Sensations had bombarded him like bullets. Soft bullets... like her hair tickling his nose, and the feel of her tummy pressing against him, and the way her skin glowed so vulnerably in the firelight. She smelled like peach shampoo and soap and that teasing, illusive perfume she wore. It bugged him, those self-deprecating comments she made about being graceless and as big as an elephant. She wasn’t. She’d felt so small in his arms, so warm, so real. He remembered closing his eyes, remembered feeling gutpunched with a stupid, alien, childish wave of longing...he also remembered, too well, being aroused faster than a trigger-hot teenage boy.
He’d jerked back faster than a whiplash, hoping she hadn’t noticed. But all night long he’d seen the bathroom light go on and off. He’d worried about her pregnant kidneys, worried she was sick. But mostly he’d worried that she couldn’t sleep because she was in a strange house with her whole life turned upside down, and now he’d become a new kind of unknown worry in that picture for her, too.
He was just going to have to fix it, that was all. Hell, he’d handled multimillion dollar mergers, European stock crashes, hiring and firing staff in four countries. How much trouble could one pip-squeak-size pregnant woman be?
And then suddenly she was in the doorway. “Morning, Mac. You’re up so early. Whew, can you believe all this snow?”
“Good morning back and yeah, some of those drifts outside are really something.” Oh, God, one look and he could feel a sinking. Give him a stock crash anytime. He knew what to do about that kind of thing.
No matter how glaringly lit the kitchen was, she was still a brighter shock of color. She smiled at him through a sleepy yawn. Her hair was brushed—he was pretty sure—but it still fell around her shoulders in tumbled swirls. An oversize red sweatshirt burgeoned over her tummy, the color matching the two dots of color on her cheeks and her pants both. Unless he was mistaken, she was wearing fat fluffy hound dogs on her feet. It occurred to him that they must be slippers. And that five-hundred-watt sleepy smile suddenly disappeared—hell, had he already done something wrong?
She motioned around the kitchen. “Oh, Mac. You’ve gone to so much trouble—”
“No trouble at all,” he said swiftly. “I just figured you might be hungry for breakfast—”
“I’m always hungry, but I’m afraid I get a queasy stomach first thing in the morning. The most I can handle is a little juice and toast—”
“Toast.” The one thing, naturally, that he hadn’t thought of. “No problem, I know we’ve got bread around here somewhere—”
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