Surrogate and Wife. Emily McKay

sounds of him swallowing.

      The image of him drinking from a beer bottle crept into her head again. She could practically see him. The way he tipped his head back. The way his Adam’s apple slid up and down the column of his neck as he swallowed. The beads of condensation that formed on the bottle, moistening his fingers.

      She wasn’t a fanciful person. In fact, she’d been accused on more than one occasion of having no imagination at all. So why couldn’t she turn off the images of Jake in her mind?

      Was it merely the unnatural intimacy that came from talking to him on the phone while lying in bed?

      That must be it.

      “Look, I should go.” She glanced at the clock. “Now it really is late. At least for a pregnant woman.”

      “Yeah, I suppose so—wait, we don’t have a story yet.”

      “Can’t it wait till tomorrow? We could talk after work.”

      “By then it’ll be too late. You’re making our appointment with the justice of the peace tomorrow, right?”

      “Yes. I was going to do it over lunch.”

      “When you do, the women you work with will want details.”

      “The women I work with? What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “Oh, come on, don’t pretend to be offended.” That teasing warmth was back in his voice. “Women are the worst about this kind of thing.”

      She opened her mouth to disagree, then snapped it closed. He was right, of course. There would be at least a dozen women at the courthouse pumping her for information the second she scheduled an appointment with the J.P. Her court clerk, Meg. All the female court reporters. Not to mention the other judges. And Kevin would be just as bad as any of the women.

      Did she dare share the truth with even him? If she did, there would be the inevitable questions about why she hadn’t told him about the pregnancy in the first place. What a mess.

      “You’ve gotten pretty quiet over there. You fall asleep?”

      I wish.

      “Okay, so we need a story by tomorrow. Surely you have some idea already or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

      “What about Beth and Stew’s New Year’s Eve party?”

      “What about it?”

      “We could say we ‘fell in love’ that night. We were both there, right?”

      “Yes.” She went every year, even though she normally didn’t enjoy large parties. But on New Year’s Eve it just seemed wrong to stay home watching repeats of Law & Order. “But so were about fifty other people. All of whom would know we barely spoke to each other that evening.”

      “Come on, no one will remember that. It was a New Year’s Eve party. A lot of people were drinking.”

      “I wasn’t,” she pointed out.

      “Well, of course you weren’t.”

      “Hey—”

      “I’m sure you never drink in public. Wouldn’t suit the image of the judge, would it?”

      Actually, she didn’t drink out of fear of turning into her mother. But that certainly wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted him to know.

      “But even you,” he continued, “as sober as you were, do you remember what every other person at the party was doing?”

      Mostly she remembered the unending boredom of listening to Paul—Beth and Stew’s accountant—describe his two-week glacier cruise to Alaska. But other than Paul, she couldn’t remember how anyone else spent their evening. And despite how long it had felt, her conversation with Paul had lasted only twenty or so minutes.

      “Okay, then,” she conceded. “We ‘fell in love’ at the party. So we’re set with a story.”