In Shady Grove: About That Night Part 19

Gracie went cold all over. Which was so weird, considering the sweat forming between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the sun burning her forearms and shoulders. "Andrew and...Kennedy?" She shook her head. "No. No, he wouldn't do that."

"He would and he did." Luke shoved a hand through his hair, then put his hat back on. "I caught them. They were at her house last night. In her room."

"You...you caught them...having s.e.x?"

He shook his head. "They'd just finished. He didn't have a shirt on, and her hair was all messy, and she was in shorts and her bra." He gave another of those harsh laughs. "At first they tried to tell me nothing happened, but then Drew admitted they'd been hooking up behind my back for a while now. So I punched him. He got one in, too, but his nose was bleeding so badly and Kennedy was freaking out...so I left."

Poor Luke. Gracie gave his hand a rea.s.suring squeeze. "I'm so sorry."

Sorry his girlfriend was such a b.i.t.c.h. Sorry his best friend had betrayed him. Sorry he was hurting.

He turned his hand, linked his fingers with hers and squeezed back. "Thanks. I just... I feel like such an idiot, you know? For not seeing the signs sooner. For being so clueless. I had no idea. Pretty stupid, huh?"

He wasn't the only one who'd been fooled. If anyone had thought something was going on between Kennedy and Andrew, word would have gotten back to Luke. Even after Kennedy had treated Gracie so badly in front of Andrew, Gracie had never considered the other girl's meanness was due to her and Andrew hooking up behind Luke's back.

She should have, she realized now. She should have guessed that the reason Andrew had pretended they barely knew each other was that he didn't want Kennedy to find out they'd hooked up. That the reason Kennedy had been so rude to Gracie, had called her a freak, was that she was into Andrew.

"You're not stupid," she told him softly. "You trusted them."

Just as she'd trusted Andrew.

Luke's smile was small and incredibly sad. "That's why I feel so stupid." He rolled his head side to side. Sighed. "I'd better get back to work. Thanks for the lemonade. I'm sorry for acting like a jerk." He took a step away but stopped. Cleared his throat. "Do you want to hang out sometime? It's cool if you don't or if you're busy," he said, his words rushing together, color flooding his cheeks. "I just thought it'd be...you know...nice to...hang out."

She opened her mouth to say no. Why would they hang out? They barely knew each other, and she doubted they had anything in common.

Except they did. They'd both been betrayed and hurt by people they'd loved.

Besides, he needed someone to be there for him. To help him get through this. And she couldn't turn away anyone in pain.

"I'm actually not doing anything tonight."

"Yeah? Me, neither. We could watch a movie at my house. My parents will be home. I can pick you up around eight?"

Her inner voice screamed at her to take it back, tell him that she changed her mind. But he looked...well...not happy. Hard to look happy the day after discovering you were playing the part of King Arthur in the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle, but at least he didn't look so sad. So lonely.

"Sure," she said. "Eight works for me."

She went back inside, her words to him echoing in her head.

You're not stupid. You trusted them.

She wished she'd meant them. Wished she could believe them.

IVY HAD LUCKED out and gotten an after-hours appointment with Dr. Conrad late that afternoon. Now she and Clinton were in the small exam room. Clinton, she noted, was taking everything in.

"First time in one of these?" she asked as he frowned at the table complete with stirrups.

He nodded, his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. "It's...different from how I imagined it."

Ivy hopped onto the table. Might as well do it now. In a few months, any hopping would be impossible. "Yeah? How so?"

"I thought it would look more like some sort of torture chamber. But that's only because I accidentally overheard my mother talking to one of her friends about her annual pap exam when I was a teenager. Scarred me for life."

Ivy couldn't help it. She smiled. He looked so out of place, and he winced when he told the story, as if just remembering it was painful. "It's not all that bad. And there will be no torture involved this time. The doctor will come in, squirt some gel onto my stomach and use her magic wand to bring up a picture of the baby."

"You've already had an ultrasound done?"

"My first appointment. But it was hard to tell what was what. The doctor explained where the head was and everything, but it all looked like a blob to me."

She'd felt like a failure, as if she'd gotten a big fat F on her first test as a mother, but the doctor had rea.s.sured her that she wasn't the only mother not to be able to make out her baby's head from its bottom at this early stage.

Dr. Conrad, a tiny, compact woman with silver-streaked blond hair, came in and introduced herself to Clinton. "Ready for this?" she asked Ivy.

"You bet." Ivy undid the b.u.t.ton of her shorts, unzipped them and wiggled them down just past her hips. Clinton, she noticed, averted his eyes.

"Here we go," Dr. Conrad said as she squirted the thick gel onto Ivy's stomach.

Ivy watched the screen on the monitor. She wasn't sure why she'd brought Clinton here, except there had been something in the way he'd admitted this was all new to him that had made him seem not quite as dangerous. More human. Approachable.

As approachable as someone that wealthy could be.

But now she watched his expression as the picture formed on the screen and Dr. Conrad pointed out what was actually baby.

Awe. Pure, unfiltered awe.

And terror.

Welcome to her world, buddy.

"Everything looks great," Dr. Conrad said, still moving that wand over Ivy's stomach. "Would you like to know the s.e.x of the baby?"

"No," Ivy said at the same time Clinton said, "Yes."

Dr. Conrad smiled and put the wand away. "Why don't I step out for a moment, give you time to decide?"

Ivy wiped the gel off her stomach, slid to her feet and pulled her shorts back up.

"You don't want to know if you're having a boy or girl?" Clinton asked.

"Nope."

"If you find out, you can be better prepared. Clothes. Nursery colors. Names." He paced, looking too big, too masculine for the room, with its posters of pregnant women and babies. "You'll have time to adjust to having either a son or a daughter."

"I don't plan on buying many clothes beforehand, just the necessities like onesies and pajamas. They don't have to be gender specific. As far as the nursery, I live in a one-bedroom apartment. The baby will be bunking with me for the foreseeable future, and if he or she doesn't like the color, he or she will just have to live with it. And I'll come up with a name for each. As far as adjusting, I'm not sure what sort of adjustment I'll need to make. Seems to me, you have a son or daughter, and you love them just the same."

"You really don't want to know?" he asked again, looking as if she'd told him she wanted to go in for elective surgery without knowing what it was for.

"There are too few surprises in life. Why would I want to ruin one of the biggest ones I'm ever going to have?"

"Seems to me this whole pregnancy is a surprise. Should be a big enough surprise."

"Believe me, it was. But while it wasn't all that happy of one, this one will be."

He frowned. "I want to know."

"Too bad. We're not finding out. If you find out, you'll slip up and tell me. And you don't want to ruin it for me, do you?"

"Fine," he said. "We won't find out."

She blinked. Shook her head. "I'm sorry, but did you just give in to me without trying to charm me, intimidate me or buy me off?" She narrowed her eyes. "You're being nice. I don't like it."

He grinned, slow and easy and s.e.xy enough to make her knees weak. "Darlin', I'm very nice."

"No. You're not. You're charming, yeah, but that's not being nice. I know the difference. You're only giving in to me now so you can use this against me later."

"I'm not going to use anything against you later. If it's that important to you not to find out the baby's s.e.x, then we won't find out. I'm not a complete a.s.s, Ivy," he said softly.

She needed him to be. It was easier to keep her distance, to not count on him when he acted all bossy and arrogant. "Thank you."

The door opened then, and Dr. Conrad came back in as if she'd known how long their conversation would take. "Have we decided?"

"We're going to wait to find out the s.e.x," Ivy said, in case Clinton was tricking her.

"All right." Dr. Conrad sat on the stool, gestured for them to take seats on the chairs. "Ivy, you said you had some questions."

"We need a paternity test," Ivy said, refusing to feel embarra.s.sed by it. Certainly she wasn't the first woman to ask for one in this office. "I'm not sure what our options are."

"There are several," Dr. Conrad said with absolutely no judgment in her tone or expression. "You can wait until after the baby is born and we can take a sample from the umbilical cord, swab the baby's cheek or take a blood sample from the baby's heel."

Clinton frowned. "Does that hurt the baby?"

"It's a little p.r.i.c.k," the doctor said, "and we won't need much." She smiled rea.s.suringly. "Trust me. The baby won't remember the pain and will be over it in a matter of seconds."

"What if we don't want to wait until after the baby is born?" Clinton asked, and Ivy tried not to get upset. She'd known he didn't want to wait until after she gave birth, but if he didn't believe he was the father, why was he in Shady Grove? Why had he come to this appointment with her?

"I don't want to do anything that jeopardizes the baby," Ivy said. "If there's no medical reason to do an amniocentesis, then I won't have one."

"What's an amniocentesis?" Clinton asked.

"A thin needle is inserted into the uterus through the stomach and a small amount of amniotic fluid is taken," Dr. Conrad explained.

He went so pale, Ivy worried he was going to pa.s.s out. "Are you all right?" she couldn't help but ask.

"Fine." He sounded and looked anything but. "Just...the thought of it..." He shook his head. "No. We don't want to do that." He looked at her. "I would never ask you to do that. I would never ask you to do anything that would endanger the baby or cause you pain in any way."

He sounded so sincere, she had no choice but to believe him.

"There are other options," Dr. Conrad said. "The most accurate, noninvasive way to establish paternity before birth is to take a blood sample from both of you. The lab can a.n.a.lyze the baby's DNA found naturally in Ivy's bloodstream."

"It's safe?" Clinton asked. "For both of them?"

"Perfectly safe," the doctor a.s.sured him. "As I said, we'll just need blood samples from both of you. And it's 99.9 percent accurate. It can be done now, since Ivy's past her first trimester."

"When can we have our blood drawn?" Ivy asked, not wanting to delay the inevitable.

"I can get the lab orders printed out within five minutes," Dr. Conrad said.

Ivy stood, not looking at Clinton. "Sounds good. The sooner this is done, the better."

The sooner she could prove to Clinton he was her baby's father, the sooner they could both move on with their own lives.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

CLINTON UNROLLED HIS sleeve as he and Ivy stepped out of the hospital's front entrance. It had gotten cloudy, the sky ominous and gray, reminding him a bit of how the storms rolled in over Houston.

They crossed the street to the parking lot. He glanced around. Hills, hills and more hills, all lush and green. He hadn't seen much of Shady Grove, but what he had seen, he had to admit, was pretty.

Ivy stopped next to an old car with rust above the wheels and dents on the b.u.mper.

"That's not your car," he said.

"If it's not, then someone out there is driving an exact replica of my vehicle."

"It's a piece of c.r.a.p." And couldn't possibly be safe.

"Yep. But it's all mine. Bought and paid for with my hard-earned money." She studied him. "Wonder if you can say that about anything you own."

He resented the accusation, though he wouldn't let her see it. He worked d.a.m.n hard for what he had, and he wasn't going to apologize for being born into wealth and privilege. Not when he busted his a.s.s every day to keep his father's company running, to keep it growing. "You can't drive that."

"I can and I do," she said, unlocking the door. She turned back to face him, the wind picking up the ends of her hair. "Since the doctor is going to let each of us know the results, I guess we're done until we hear from her."

He raised his eyebrows. "You do realize we're heading to the same place?"

She smiled. "Sorry, cowboy, but I'm not following you back to your room this time. I've got things to do, places to be and all that."

He edged closer, couldn't seem to help himself. Pregnant women shouldn't look so s.e.xy, should they? But Ivy did, with her blowing hair and that knowing, s.e.xy smirk. "Have a drink with me," he heard himself say before he thought better of it.

Now she laughed. "Been there. Done that. Besides, I don't think Junior here should be drinking. Not until he's a few years older at least."