“Good. Because you’re not allowed to go back, love,” he said. “I warned you before, remember. When you let me touch you again, we belonged exclusively to each other from then on. It was the plan before. It’s the plan now, especially now that you’ve made me feel all this! I think I’m going to die if I don’t get to feel your touch…if I don’t know you’re mine…only mine.”
My heart swelled at his words. “I’m yours, Travis,” I sighed. “I guess part of me has always been yours. And now…all of me is,” I whispered, and then I kissed him thoroughly.
When I met Sarah Saturday morning, I was pretty sure I was a picture of bliss.
“What have you not been telling me?” she asked. “You look wonderful! And you have a certain glow about you! Are you pregnant?”
I laughed. “Don’t be silly! This is not pregnancy glow. Let’s just say that I’m totally in love with my husband.”
She shrieked. “When did this happen?”
“I guess on our honeymoon, we were…doing a lot of kissing, and it took a lot for us not to sleep with each other. And then…on his birthday, I decided to stop thinking about the consequences and just go for the one man I’d always wanted. The marriage just turned real. And I’m happy, Sarah! I’ve never been this happy! I mean…we’ve only slept with each other for a week, but it has been wonderful. He is talking about kids and settling down in a different city. He’s everything I could ever, ever ask for and more.”
“I’m so jealous! How lucky can you be? I thought Travis Cross was a devil in angel’s skin. But it looks like he changed a lot for you. I guess this is love.”
I sighed. “We haven’t said ‘I love you’ to each other since we slept with each other.” I thought about it and I realized it was true. “It’s funny, because all these years, it was so easy to say ‘I love you,’ and we said it to each other all the time. Now…we haven’t said it in a week.”
Sarah smiled at me. “Probably because it means something different now. Before…those three words meant you loved each other as friends or as family. Now…that’s no longer the case.”
“I just wish he’d say it to me and I would have no doubt what he meant, you know,” I said wistfully. “Before we got married, he said he was sort of in love with another woman. But he chose to marry me nevertheless…and now, he keeps telling me that there is no one else for him. Only me. I guess that is more than enough. Maybe he didn’t love that woman strongly enough. And she’s out of the picture now.”
“So you did get what you were looking for after all. Your safety guy didn’t only save you from the ‘curse,’ but he also turned out to be the man you were looking for all your life.”
I nodded. “And I’m so happy! I’ve always loved Travis…as a dear friend. But he made me fall in love with him. He is a wonderful husband!”
While having coffee and dessert, Sarah told me about the performance schedules. I wanted to join, but somehow I knew this honeymoon phase with Travis wasn’t nearly over yet, and I didn’t want to spoil that by putting some distance between us. I wanted him to fall in love with me, too. The way I was so in love with him. And besides, my priorities had changed now. Our family came first.
“It took you that long to go to bed?” Sarah asked.
I laughed. “I was too careful! And Travis is too much of a gentleman! He is a master of keeping his emotions under control. We slipped sometimes, but we stopped just in time.”
“Wow! I can’t imagine how much self-control that took!” she laughed.
Suddenly, I felt queasy, as if something in the cake I ate had made me sick.
“Excuse me…” I said to her.
I immediately ran to the ladies’ room. I threw up everything I’d eaten since the morning. I washed my face with water while Sarah looked at me wearily.
“Sweetheart, are you…”
I laughed. “I can’t be, Sarah!” I said to her. “Unless pregnancy manifests itself this early. I mean…I only slept with Travis a week ago. It’s too early.”
Sarah shrugged. “When was the last time you had your period?”
Damn! I realized I hadn’t had my period in a long time. “I don’t know. A week or so before my bachelorette party. I might be delayed, but I can’t be pregnant.”
Then I realized pregnancy was not the only thing that could delay a woman’s period. There could be conditions worse than that. I knew because a couple of my aunts had suffered from female cancers over the years.
“Oh my God, Sarah. I think…I need to go see a doctor. What if I’m sick? What if I have a medical condition that actually prevents me from getting pregnant? A cousin of mine had her ovaries removed when she was just in her twenties. It runs in our family. I can’t take chances.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “I need to give Travis a child, Sarah.”
“Hey, calm down!” she said to me. “I know a good doctor. Let’s go there now.”
Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in the waiting room at the clinic Sarah went to. She was a blonde woman in her forties. She smiled at me.
“Married?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Good.” She narrowed her eyes. “Sexually active?”
If I hadn’t been under stress, I would have laughed at that question. “Yes,” I replied.
“Alrighty. When was your last period?”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, I cannot remember,” I said. “But I don’t remember having it last month or this month.”
“Feeling anything weird?”
“I threw up this morning.”
“First time you threw up?”
“Well, last week, too. Once. But that could be just because of something I ate.”
“Okay. Lie down on the table, and we’ll have a check.”
She applied ultrasound gel on my tummy while I prayed so hard that I didn’t have cancer or any cysts that would prevent me from conceiving. Travis deserved to have a baby. He deserved to have a family. I didn’t want to rob him of the family he had dreamed of just because I was unable to give him children. The only way he could forgive his parents was…if he got a chance to be a better father to his children. That was my plan. And I also didn’t want to miss out on becoming a mother.
“I can’t see it properly. I’m going under,” she said. And she shifted to do a vaginal ultrasound instead.
“Well, congratulations,” the doctor said after a few minutes. “It looks like you’re pregnant.”
It took me a whole minute to process that. “What?” I wanted to be happy. Could they really detect it this early?
“Seven weeks.”
“Seven weeks?” I echoed. “Are you sure? It’s not just three or four weeks?”
She increased the volume of her ultrasound. I heard a walloping sound, and then it became rhythmic. I realized it was my baby’s heartbeat. Tears slipped from my eyes. I felt warmth envelop me, and I couldn’t define how happy I suddenly felt.
I’m going to be a mom!
“Heartbeat is strong,” she said. “You can’t hear that if you’re only a week pregnant. And the ultrasound says it was conceived around October 25th, plus or minus a week.”
Everything else that she said was a blur. She said something about seeing a doctor in Manhattan immediately. I thought there was alarm on her face when she checked me again, but she said the baby was fine, so I didn’t care about anything else.
I remember taking a note from her. I remember paying her assistant.
“Hello!” Sarah had to snap her fingers in front of me to bring me back to reality.
I stared back at her.
“Are you okay? What did she say?”
“Sarah…she said I’m pregnant.”
“Then Travis is going to be ecstatic!”
“Sarah…I’m seven weeks pregnant!”
It took Sarah a moment to recover, too. And then she breathed, “Oh my God!”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I lay on Sarah’s couch. I needed time to figure things out. I would
have been jumping for joy now if the doctor had said I was one week pregnant. But no—I was seven weeks pregnant, which meant I was already pregnant when Travis and I had consummated our marriage a week ago. If the time she gave me was right, I had already been pregnant before I even married Travis, and I was pretty sure nothing had happened between us on our honeymoon.
“Christian?” Sarah asked.
“How? I mean, I broke up with him months before I got married.”
“What were you doing around October twenty-fifth?”
“I was busy preparing for a wedding!” I replied.
Sarah took out her organizer and scanned through the dates. “Okay, October twenty-second, we all checked in to the hotel in preparation for your wedding. Are you sure you didn’t see Chris round about that time?”
I shook my head. “Of course! I haven’t seen him in months!”
“Eric?”
“Eric would never even be able to get it up!” I rolled my eyes.
“I was pretty sure I was the one who slept with the stripper.” Sarah giggled. “October twenty-fifth, we didn’t do anything,” she said. “That was the day before your family dinner.”
She stared at me blankly. I took a deep breath. She looked at me apologetically and reached out to give me a hug.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not!” I said. “I’m going to lose Travis because of this. I won’t let him answer for a kid that is not his. And, Sarah, do you realize what a shame it is if you do not know how you got pregnant in the first place?”
She handed me a glass of water. “We’ll figure it out, sweetie. For now, take a rest. Your baby needs you to.”
I must have slept all day. I felt so sad and so scared. When I woke up, Sarah had already prepared dinner for us.
“Come, you must be hungry.”
I ate in silence. I still kept picking my brain for what happened during that time. And everything came up blank. I couldn’t remember anything significant.
“I was just thinking,” Sarah said. “I think I remember where we were round about that time.”
I stared at her, scared of what she was about to say.
“We went on a drinking spree,” Sarah said. “You wanted to forget the fact that Travis might sleep with the stripper in his stag party. We drank our wits out.”
My heart pounded in my ribcage. That was the night I didn’t remember how I got back to my hotel room, and my clothes were scattered on my hotel room floor.
“Oh my God, Sarah!” I breathed. “I don’t know what happened to me that night. I can’t even remember how I got back to my room! And I was…I was naked when I woke up!”
Tears rolled down my cheeks. Sarah hugged me. I wished this were all a dream I would soon wake up from.
After a few hours, everything was still a haze to me. No matter how much I thought about that night, nothing changed. I was left with a dead end. I couldn’t remember what had happened after I drank about a bottle of tequila.
“How did you wake up?”
She blushed. “Well, Dante, the cute bartender I was flirting with all night? He got one of his friends to cover him for the remainder of his shift. He accompanied me to my room…one thing led to another. But sorry, sweetie. I don’t remember seeing you off to your room. I think I left you at the bar, actually, because I was in such a hurry to go back to my room with Dante.”
A memory came to my mind. There was a bartender, there was another guy.
“Which reminds me, I need to pay you back for all the liquor I had that night.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think I paid the bill,” I said to her.
She blinked back at me. “Well, nothing is free these days!”
“If you don’t remember paying, then who paid?”
“Maybe Dante?” Sarah asked.
“Or maybe it’s whoever took me back to my room! Whoever did…took advantage of me and left me a souvenir.”
Sarah looked at me apologetically. “Do you want to go back to the hotel? We can check.”
“We need to go now.”
“What? Why now?”
“Because we need to talk to your bartender, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t take day shifts. And tomorrow, I should be ready to face Travis.”
Travis called me that night. I hated it, but I had to lie to him.
“I’m sleeping over Sarah’s. I feel tired, actually,” I said. “I miss you.”
He sighed. “I would give everything to have you beside me right now.”
I giggled. But he didn’t know there was a trace of bitterness to that. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”
“That’s too long,” he sighed. “Next time, you’re coming with me on my trips.”
“Travis, you can handle a few days without me.”
“I discovered I can’t. Not anymore,” he said. “Take care of yourself while you’re there. And be miserable without me.”
I giggled. “I am.” That was true. I was miserable. Not only because Travis was not with me, but because I knew there was an eighty percent chance our marriage would end abruptly. I couldn’t let Travis save me this time.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Travis?”
“Love?” he replied.
“I need to go. It’s been a long day,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
“Brianne…” he said softly.
“Yes?”
I heard him take a deep breath. Then he said, “I love you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t,” he said.
“Of course I do. You always said I was the only thing left for you to love, remember?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But this ‘I love you’ isn’t like before.”
My heart stopped at that very moment. I even forgot to breathe.
“Wh-what do you mean?”
He sighed. “I mean I love you. Do you understand?”
I think my heart broke at that very moment, and immediately tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yes.” I took a deep breath. And because I knew I meant it, too, and because I knew tomorrow might change forever, I said, “I love you, too, Travis. The same way you love me.”
He sighed. “God, I wish we’d said that to each other before we parted.”
I took a deep breath. “Me too.” I wished I’d said that to him earlier. I wished I wasn’t pregnant and didn’t know who the father of my baby was. More than that, I wished I were pregnant with Travis’s child. That I was only a week or two along, because then I would definitely be sure that Travis was the father. I realized I didn’t want to get pregnant with anyone else. Just with Travis. But things were different. And I was a freaking mess because I knew that as much as I loved Travis, I couldn’t let him take care of someone else’s child. And that moment I heard my baby’s heartbeat, love had grown in my heart already. I loved this baby, even though I didn’t know who’d fathered him. Because no matter who the father was, I knew that he was mine.
“Well, that will be the very first thing I will say to you when I see you tomorrow,” Travis said.
“Can’t wait,” I whispered.
He chuckled. “Go to sleep now. There are no flights available to Connecticut at this hour. Otherwise, I would be taking them to get to you.”
“You have a meeting tomorrow,” I reminded him.
“That’s a bummer, huh!” he said, his voice full of frustration. “All right, goodnight, love.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you in my dreams.”
When we hung up, I couldn’t stop crying. The moment would have been perfect! But it was all ruined. Because I knew tomorrow did not bring anything that I should be excited about. Tomorrow, I might lose Travis forever. Actually, he was lost to me the moment I found out I was pregnant with somebody else’s child.
Travis had been there for me all my life. He’d saved me
over and over in the past. But he couldn’t save me from this mess. I would not allow it. It wasn’t fair. Even if he insisted, and I have a feeling he would come up with another solution to my problem, I would not let him. He’d done so much already. I could free him of his promises to my brother. He had already fulfilled those promises a long time ago. And I loved him too much to ruin his life.
We checked in to the same hotel where we’d had my wedding. It was ten in the evening when we arrived. After getting our room, we headed to the bar where Sarah and I had gone drinking before my wedding.
A familiar face was there. I guessed he was the guy named Dante. Then another bartender was there, too. He was a blond guy with hazel eyes.
“Two faces I was not expecting to see tonight,” Dante said. He gave a dazzling smile for Sarah, and Sarah winked at him.
“Oh, please!” I rolled my eyes. I was starting to have nausea already.
“Sorry,” Sarah said. She turned to Dante. “Actually, we’re here to ask you for a favor.”
“Anything,” Dante smiled.
“Remember we were here before?”
“I remember everything, sugar,” he said to Sarah, which irritated me even more. But I kept my mouth shut.
“I left with you. And somebody covered for you, right?”
“That would be me,” the blonde bartender answered.
I stared at him for a moment. He was familiar. Like I had seen him before, and it could have been that night. I thought, in horror, that this guy could have been the one who took me back to my room.
“What happened after I left with you?” Sarah asked.
Dante was taken aback. He stared at Sarah for a moment and then he said, “Well, you couldn’t get your hands off me. Not that I minded. I took you to your room…”
“Not that!” I said in an irritated tone. “She meant, what happened here, in this bar, after you left with her.”
Dante shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, sugar.”
I turned to the blond guy. He narrowed his eyes as he stared at me, as if he was trying to place me or remember what happened.
“Don’t tell me you took me back to my room?”
“Of course not! I’m married. And faithful.”