position—she wouldn’t. And marriage was the last thing she wanted.
“Good thing, too. I suck at relationships,” she said lightly, her hand tight on the coffee cup. “I’ve tried too many times, but I just don’t have that particular gene. They’re messy, they’re painful and they always end in disaster. I don’t want to ruin our friendship.”
“You don’t suck. You didn’t force James to cheat. You didn’t hand the press those photos.” Marco’s brows took a dive, his expression dark. “And as for Ben...”
“Please do not remind me.” If there was a Disastrous Relationship Museum, hers would take front and center as prime exhibit number one: her first marriage to Jackson & Blair’s publicity manager, Ben Freeman, when she was twenty-two. He’d turned out to be a selfish, misogynistic bastard. Her second marriage five years later, a quickie Bali wedding to Marco’s teammate, annulled after just seventy-two hours when she’d caught James screwing a waitress in their bridal suite. And then her engagement to Aussie Rules’ wild child Ezio Cantoni barely a year ago. He’d taken nude shower shots of her then “accidentally” leaked them to the tabloids.
She was done with the scrutiny, the uncertainty, the angst. It was painful and humiliating and downright tiring. For her sanity and self-respect, it was just not worth the effort. And now she was bringing a child into that?
Kat sighed, shifting on the sofa. “And honestly, Marco, how are you going to be involved? Weren’t you planning to move back to France after the Football Federation of Australia’s awards in three weeks?”
“That was one option.”
Her brow ratcheted up. “That’s not how you talked about it a few months ago.”
He sighed and cast an eye to the shuttered window. “I’ve got a lot of things going on—the coaching clinics, the sponsorship stuff. Plus my network contract is up for renegotiation next month. I haven’t decided about France yet.”
She paused for long, drawn-out seconds. “Oh, no. Don’t you dare start to rethink anything. I won’t allow it.”
“You won’t allow it?”
“No.” She ignored his irritation with a wave of her hand. “We’re not married. Hell, we’re not even a couple. Just...best friends who may be having a baby.”
He said nothing, just looked toward the shuttered windows and then the wall clock that read quarter past one. “It sounds to be getting worse outside.” He stood. “We should go downstairs.”
She paused, glancing toward the windows, then nodded. “Okay.”
He offered his hand and she automatically took it, the sudden urgency of the moment pushing their discussion into the background. The innocent warmth of his fingers wrapped around hers created a frustratingly intimate sensation that she was loath to give up. He took her down the hall, to a door that led to the basement and his wine cellar, which he’d modified with this kind of situation in mind.
The wine was stacked neatly to the left of the small room, and to the right sat a couch, a fixed, fully stocked bar fridge and a small generator that powered the soft lamps that were now lit in preparation.
She hesitated at the door, scanning the room as reality flooded in.
“Don’t worry, chérie,” Marco said beside her, giving her fingers a reassuring squeeze. “We’re perfectly safe.”
Again, that word. The door was heavy but he closed it with ease, and when he turned to her, she swallowed the panic and offered a shaky smile.
They settled quickly in the room, Kat automatically going over to prepare coffee, Marco checking the small ventilation window high on the far wall and then the lights. After a few more minutes, they sat on the couch, Marco pulled out a pack of UNO cards and they settled in for the night.
“So how’s working for Grace going? Still a pain in the butt?” Marco asked casually as he shuffled the pack.
“Oh, she’s not that bad.”
“Hmm.” His expression was skeptical as he dealt them seven cards apiece.
She sighed. “Actually, I miss my old London job.”
“What, the one you took up between Ben and James?”
“Ugh.” She made a face. “My life’s most significant moments reduced to a ‘between exes’ reference.”
“Sorry.” Marco’s expression looked anything but. “Let me rephrase. The Oxfam job you took at the age of twenty-five when you spent a couple of years living and working in London in blissful anonymity.”
She gave him a look, not entirely convinced he wasn’t being sarcastic, before finally nodding. “It was only a year, but I felt better about that job than anything I’ve ever done. I felt like I should—” She cut herself off abruptly, her thumbnail going to her mouth, teeth worrying it.
“Like you should what?” He picked up his cards and fanned them expertly.
“Like I should do something more. Donate to charity or start up a foundation or something.”
She waited for him to voice doubt, to echo her father’s familiar refrain about giving up a perfectly good job for an uncertain dream when she’d casually mentioned the subject a few months ago. Instead he just looked at her and said, “You’ve never mentioned that before.”
She shrugged and overturned the first card on the top of the deck. “I stopped thinking about it after I told my dad.”
“Let me guess—he said you don’t know a thing about running a charity, it’s too expensive, why chuck in a perfectly stable job for a dubious flight of fancy in this economy when you’ll lose interest in the first year?”
“All of the above.”
He sighed and placed a yellow two on the pile. The sudden silence sat heavy in the air now, until Marco finally spoke. “Have you done the figures? Worked out how much it would take to do something like that?”
“No.”
“So work it out. Make a business plan. Talk to your old workmates. Call your accountant. Screw your father. I mean that in the nicest possible way,” he added with a thin smile and placed the first card down on the table. “You’re smart and clever and you have experience. You can work a crowd, raise funds and know how to handle the press. Whatever happens with those tests and the baby, you can still do this.”
She stared at her hand, rearranging the cards by color as her mind worked furiously. Oh, she wanted to. In between the many fluff pieces and gossip segments Morning Grace aired, the human-interest stories drew her the most. The burning compulsion to do something herself, to help ease someone’s burden, to bring a little joy into the lives of people who really needed it, got her every time. She always ended up donating to every cause she sourced. Every time.
“This’ll be bigger than a ten-minute segment,” Marco said now. “You’ll be able to give things more media coverage, follow it through, devote more time. Really make a difference.”
She put a Draw Two on the pile and murmured something noncommittal, signaling the end of the discussion.
Marco said no more and for the next half hour they played cards and pretended everything was fine, even though the faint sounds of the creaking house and the wind as it picked up forced their attention from the game a dozen times. Finally Marco turned on the small radio and the room was filled with a steady stream of weather updates.
When the lights suddenly went out, Kat jumped. Yet when the generator kicked in seconds later and the lights clicked back on, it did nothing to assuage her growing panic.
“What are we even doing here?” she muttered, flicking her thumb along the edge of her cards, eyeing the lights, then the generator. “We went out in a cyclone warning, for God’s sake! This is stupid, not to mention dangerous.”
“We’re