License to Thrill Page 13

  “You’re hurting me, Marc.”

  He winced and quickly released her wrists, watching as she rubbed them.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  She stepped quickly away from him and put on one of the hotel robes. She looked crazily small and delicate in all that thick, white terry cloth. “For what, Marc?” She knotted the belt and swiveled to face him. “Are you sorry about running out on me three months ago?”

  Running out on her? Who ran out on her?

  “Are you sorry for kidnapping me yesterday?”

  Kidnapping her? He thought they’d moved past that.

  “Oh, no, wait, I know what you’re sorry for. You’re sorry I’m pregnant.” Her voice cracked. “Aren’t you?”

  He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut again.

  Her gaze dropped to the floor. “Too late,” she whispered. “I’m well past the twelve-week mark, so abortion is out. Not that I’d have one, mind you. I found out I was pregnant when I was in the hospital. Alone. With no one but my mother and sister around to prove that someone did care about me.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Didn’t mean what, Marc?” She seemed to shrink into the depths of the robe. “Tell me.”

  Yes, Marc, spit it out, man. He silently cursed himself. “I meant I’m sorry for hurting you. Your wrists, I mean.”

  She looked at the ceiling and gave an exasperated groan that made him cringe. He’d said the wrong thing. Again.

  Why was it he could never say the right thing to her? No matter what his response, it never failed to send her straight over the edge.

  “What?” he asked, growing irritated. “What did you expect me to do when you sprung the news on me, Mel?” He grabbed his jeans, putting them on without his briefs and giving up on buttoning them after several failed attempts. He stalked toward her. “Or were you planning on telling me?”

  A SHOCK OF PANIC shot through Melanie. She had expected anger from Marc. Had even planned for his dumbfounded expression when she blurted the news. What she hadn’t predicted was the formidable, sober man facing her.

  She turned and tugged on her panties under the privacy of her robe. Her cheeks burned, her heart thudded, and even she knew her dressing was a way to buy more time. She gave Marc credit when he didn’t interrupt. He stood silently while she put on the jeans and the tank top she had bought.

  “Of course I planned to tell you,” she said softly, not daring to meet his gaze as she draped the robe over a chair back.

  “When, Mel? When were you planning to tell me?” His voice was low.

  She shivered, then bought a little more time by putting a sheer white blouse over the teal blue tank. She made a ceremony out of tying it at the waist. When? Good question. She really hadn’t known when she was going to tell him. That had always loomed somewhere out on the horizon. The only thing she had been sure about was that she would tell him.

  Then came yesterday, and the kidnapping, moving the time scale up so fast she got dizzy just thinking about it.

  What a difference a day makes.

  Marc took a step closer to her. Her gaze was riveted to his stony face. “When, Mel? After you got married?”

  She didn’t answer. She was too surprised by the myriad emotions plainly visible on his handsome, unshaven face.

  While he was obviously hungry for an answer, she also noted pain lurking in the depths of his eyes. Before yesterday she had never seen him so serious, so direct. Suffice it to say she would never have used those two words to describe Marc McCoy at any point in their relationship.

  He crossed his arms, emphasizing the clean lines of his forearms. “Well, seeing as your wedding is only a day away, I think it’s safe to say you were planning to tell me after the nuptials.” His eyes narrowed. “Although I’m not convinced you planned to tell me at all.”

  “Of course I was going to tell you. I told you now, didn’t I?”

  “Only under duress.”

  Duress? Yes, she would describe what she was feeling as duress.

  You deserve every harsh lash he can dole out, her subconscious taunted.

  God, how bad was it when her own subconscious berated her?

  Very bad. Awful.

  “Look, Marc, I…” Her heart contracted. “I did plan to tell you. You’ll have to trust me on that.” She anxiously brushed her hair from her face. “I do have to admit I don’t really know when I would have done it.”

  He stood, a tall and silent sentinel, waiting for her to finish. Problem was, she was done. That’s all she had to say. She had thought in vague terms. She envisioned Marc playing a role in their child’s life. Long weekends, some holidays, things of that nature. Even though merely imagining him standing on her doorstep on a weekly basis and not being able to touch him turned her inside out. But that all had depended on her telling him he was going to have a child.

  “Does…he know?” Marc shifted, appearing uncomfortable. “Craig?”

  It was the first time he had said her fiancé’s name in an uninsulting tone, which alerted Melanie to the seriousness of the question. And warned of the consequences should she tell him the truth. But if her current situation proved anything, it was that putting something off didn’t avoid the hurt. It only made things worse.

  She closed her eyes. “Yes,” she breathed.

  He didn’t curse. Didn’t yell at her. He didn’t even blink. He nodded once, as if understanding something she couldn’t quite decipher.

  Melanie hurried about the room, burning off the nervous energy filling her. After she had collected discarded towels, placed all the dishes on the service cart, wheeled it into the hall and stuffed her ruined dress into the shopping bag, she turned to find Marc hadn’t moved.

  Her heart surged into her throat, choking off her air supply, filling her eyes with tears.

  “Marc?”

  He didn’t respond, just stared at the spot where she’d been standing earlier.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  She stood with her hands fisted at her sides, willing herself not to turn away. In all the scenarios she’d envisioned when she told him she was pregnant, she never thought she’d be the one apologizing. Until this very moment, she’d adamantly believed she was the one who deserved the apology.

  Now she realized she’d punished him for crimes he hadn’t committed.

  I was alone and pregnant.

  He didn’t know she was pregnant.

  He won’t make a good father.

  She’d never thought she’d make a very good mother until the choice was taken away from her.

  He’s going to run in the other direction when he hears this one.

  He hadn’t.

  He finally moved. She jumped without knowing why. The suddenness, maybe. The fact that he had moved at all.

  “Tell me, Mel, how does this, my knowing, impact your plans?”

  Everything that had happened in the past three months slipped through her mind. The hospital. The doctor’s shocking news. Marc’s unexplained absence. Craig’s proposal of marriage.

  “I honestly don’t know.” And she didn’t. After all that had passed between Marc and her, she couldn’t see herself marrying anyone else. Not even Craig.

  He blinked once, slowly. Then he moved again. He finished dressing and came to stand in front of her.

  “I know what you’re going to do. You’re getting married tomorrow,” he said, his gaze lazily traveling the length of her body and lingering on her stomach. “But it’s going to be me you’re marrying.”

  9

  MELANIE STARED at the passing countryside with no concept of where they were or where they were going.

  After Marc’s staggering pronouncement, he’d hustled her out of the hotel via the back entrance and deposited her in the Jeep. She was aware of little more than taking the pet carrier he’d given her before leaving the room.

  What had he meant by saying she was going to be getting married tomorrow to him? The mere thought was e
nough to start her heart racing. Swallowing, she vaguely registered that they were still in the city. Was he taking her to the town house? She looked in his direction to find him almost relaxed. As if their recent conversation hadn’t taken place.

  She watched a woman, stranded at the side of the highway, fixing a flat tire. It struck her that she once thought that would be one of the worst things to have happen, to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Now she knew better. But she also knew enough to know that no matter what the situation, things could always get worse. Her heart gave a triple beat. Or better.

  She shifted in her seat to face Marc, her knee brushing his thigh. “What did you mean back there?”

  “Back where?” he asked a little too innocently.

  She kept her gaze steady.

  He shrugged. “I meant exactly what I said.”

  She gestured nervously. “Which is?”

  “Are you losing your hearing along with the good sense God gave you?” He grinned from ear to handsome ear.

  Melanie barked with laughter, surprising herself.

  She tried to school her expression into one more befitting the situation.

  He’d told her once about his father’s fatherisms. “With the good sense God gave you” was a popular one. That he’d used it to lighten the mood gave her hope. Hope that this was nowhere as serious as she’d feared.

  She bit her bottom lip, unable to completely wipe the lingering smile from her mouth. “So let me get this straight. Tomorrow,” she said, drawing the word out and indicating a point on her jeans with her finger, “I’m getting married.”

  “Uh-huh.” He flicked on the blinker and exited the highway. Moving away from the city, she noticed distantly, as he continued west on a two-lane state route.

  “But I won’t be marrying Craig.”

  He nodded as if indulging a particularly slow child. “Uh-huh.”

  Her smile widened. “And the reason I’m not going to be marrying Craig is because I’m going to be marrying you.”

  “Right.”

  Melanie’s smile vanished. “Wrong,” she said hoarsely.

  She turned to face the dashboard, her stomach tightening to the point of pain. She suppressed a groan.

  “Oh, no, Mel, I’m right as rain.” He reached over to take her hand and ran a callused thumb over her sensitive palm. “You see, I have every intention of becoming your husband tomorrow.”

  Husband. Marc.

  She tugged her hand away. “Please…don’t touch me.”

  He laughed, the robust sound making her stare at him as if he had gone insane. “No, that may be what you’ve been saying to Craig the last three months. Me? Admit it, Mel.” He moved his hand to her leg and brushed it up the inside of her thigh. “Me, you can’t get enough of.”

  Incredibly, she felt like opening herself to his touch.

  Panic swelled sure and strong in her chest, chasing the air from her lungs. His repeating the words didn’t make her understand his announcement any better. Marriage to Marc would be— A peculiar melting sensation flowed throughout her body. Marriage to Marc would be wonderfully exciting, unpredictable, impossible.

  The emotional roller coaster she’d been on for the past two days provided all the proof she needed that marriage to Marc would be a disaster. He was by turns irresistibly handsome, foolishly inexplicable and ultimately irresponsible.

  “Where are we going?” she whispered.

  That made him move his hand away. “Someplace safe.”

  She tightly closed her eyes. “We’re not going back to that, are we, Marc? We agreed we were partners in this.” She forced herself to stop worrying her hands in her lap. She’d tried to get the ring off at the hotel, but it wouldn’t budge past her first knuckle. Her fingers must have swollen more than she realized. “That means sharing information. That means I get just as much say in where we go as you do. Someplace safe just…well, it doesn’t cut it right now.”

  “It’s going to have to cut it because that’s all I’m giving you.”

  She fervently battled hysteria. “We’re partners—”

  “That was before I found out you’re carrying my child.”

  She stared at him, puzzled. “Your child?” she whispered. “A little over an hour ago, you didn’t even know I was pregnant.”

  He gazed at her from under his eyebrows. “Okay, our child.”

  “Which brings us back to the partners thing.”

  He slowly shook his head again. “Oh, no, Mel. The way I see it, our roles now are completely bipolar. You—” he gently jabbed a finger against her collarbone “—are officially in charge of eating right, exercising, taking your vitamins and creating a healthy internal environment for our child.”

  Her anger flared. “Who in the hell died and named you ob-gyn?”

  “The way I see it, your being pregnant gives me license to do a lot you might not be happy with, Mel.” He grinned. “Anyway, those are your duties. Now my duties…” He flexed his hands against the steering wheel. “My most important duty is to maintain a healthy external environment. Namely, keeping you safe.” He glanced at her. “Nine months of hard labor is the way things look right now.”

  “Five months,” she corrected absently. “And I’m the one who’s facing labor.”

  Marc wants to take care of me. She rubbed her forehead with a shaking hand. The thought was appealing in a sort of medieval sense. Me man, you woman. Wasn’t that the way things used to be? And while women had come a long way, baby, they still had a long way to go. Sure, small concessions had been made. In wedding ceremonies, it was no longer, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” and men were known to wash the occasional dish or two. She flicked a glance at Marc, admitting that he not only washed dishes, he could whip up a pretty good meal with the help of the microwave, frozen vegetables and a broiler.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. What was she doing? While her view of the future had been knocked askew, it was dangerous to make room for Marc in it. She felt as if she was wandering through a dangerous daydream where being handcuffed—literally and otherwise—to Marc didn’t seem like such a bad proposition.

  She shifted on the seat as they put the D.C. suburbs behind them.

  “We can’t even agree on anything, Marc. What makes you think we could make a family work?”

  His expression never faltered. “We’ll make it work.”

  Then it occurred to her that Marc wasn’t doing all this because he loved her. He was doing it because it was the right thing to do. Marrying her was a duty. A job. And one he thought he was up for.

  Her heart expanded painfully.

  No, for the good of her baby, she couldn’t marry either Craig or Marc.

  While Marc’s heart might be in the right place, the signal got scrambled somewhere between his chest and his head.

  I’M GOING TO BE a father. Marc waited for panic, for anger, to set in, but all he felt was this strange kind of weightlessness. I’m going to be a father.

  He glanced over to Mel, twisting that rock around her finger. He wanted to tell her to take it off, wished he could replace it with the one in his pocket. But now didn’t seem like the right time.

  Okay, he admitted he hadn’t been overly enthusiastic when they’d initially discussed how they felt about children a year or so ago. He grimaced. Who was he kidding? He’d adamantly said he wouldn’t even consider having kids. And he hadn’t.

  Boy, in light of the day’s events, did that seem a lifetime ago.

  His reasons had been solid enough. Raised in a family of four other males, with a male who barely got passing grades as a father and was far in the hole when it came to mothering, he wasn’t the only one of the McCoy bunch to decide children weren’t in the cards. His decision had come as a result of a long, middle-of-the-night conversation with Connor after his youngest brother, David, had run away. It had taken them some eight hours to find him.

  Marc acknowledged that it hadn’t been David’s running away that had upset him s
o much. It had been where the four-year-old had run to.

  His brothers and father had been about to report his disappearance to the local authorities when they got a call from their closest neighbor, three miles up the road. They would have called sooner, they said, but they hadn’t known David’s real name because he was calling himself Grover, after his favorite Sesame Street character, and said he didn’t have a home.

  Pops had driven Connor and him over to pick David up. Only when they tried to pry him away from the family, who were having dinner, their little brother had kicked and screamed, insisting that this was his home. No one could blame him. The neat little family, complete with mother and father and other children, would be anyone’s ideal.

  The entire humbling experience had made Marc realize he’d had a heart. More importantly, he’d learned that same heart could be broken.

  “Mel, what I said…you know, before you told me you were pregnant…”

  She looked at him in that way that made him squirm. It was worse than facing a crowd of protesters while guarding the president.

  “Well, you have to know I had no idea….”

  “I was pregnant?”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  “No problem.”

  He glanced toward her, but she had turned to stare through the window.

  He tried again. “I know I once said I never wanted to have children.”

  He watched as her chin quivered slightly.

  “Well, I don’t feel that way anymore.”

  She made a sniffing sound, then finally looked at him. “And how exactly do you feel, Marc?”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d asked the question. He couldn’t count the times he’d been caught on the wrong side of what he called her “put your feelings into words” game. Still, he knew he had to try or risk a whole lot more than a whack in the arm.

  “Happy?” he said cautiously.

  Her short burst of laughter dismayed him.

  “What?” he asked, frowning.

  She appeared as caught off guard as he did, and she quickly looked away. “The way you said ‘happy’ in the form of a question.” She cleared her throat. “So, are you happy or not?”