Forgotten Honeymoon (5 page)

He frowned. “I don’t understand. Are you
telling me you never had sex with Nigel?” Surely he would have
known if she was a virgin.

She looked at him with her trusting green
eyes. “No. I was waiting for my wedding night. Some of us still do,
you know.” She smiled wryly.

Now he had two more reasons to feel
guilty.

Not only was she a virgin, he’d gotten her
pregnant.

She kept talking, calmly stating the facts.
“Nigel says he isn’t the father, so that means I had sex with
someone else.”

“Kelly, about the baby,” he interrupted. “I
need to tell you --”

“No, let me finish,” she insisted.

Under the circumstances, it seemed the least
he could do.

She said, “My thinking is, I must have been
raped--”

“No!” The word tore from him.

She continued, “because I know I wasn’t
sleeping with anyone else, and if I was attacked, then that could
explain my driving into a tree, couldn’t it? I’ve read the accident
report. The roads weren’t slippery, and my brakes were fine. Maybe
I was too upset to see clearly, or maybe I was trying to kill
my--”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

“I’m not joking. I’m just trying to make
sense of the facts. Because one of these days I’ll have to tell my
parents something. I have to cancel the wedding and return all the
presents. And with the baby coming,...”

Lars caught her by the shoulders. “Listen to
me, Kelly. Just shut up and listen. I’m the father of your
baby.”

She laughed bitterly. “Nice try. You must be
the one with a head injury.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Lars looked as if she’d shot him.

Kelly immediately regretted her laughter.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, but as the silence between them
lengthened, she said, “You are serious. Are you telling me we
actually made love?”

His pale blue eyes blazed. “Yes.”

She and Lars? Together? It was impossible,
but then this had been a day of impossibilities. And she’d never
known him to lie to her. She scrambled to her feet, to put distance
between them. She needed to think clearly. “But when? Where?”

The lines around his mouth lengthened. “That
depends on which time you’re talking about.”

Her voice squeaked, “More than once? Good
heavens.” She opened her mouth a few times, but couldn’t think of
anything to say except, “Good heavens” again. She paced for a
moment, then turned and asked the crucial question, “Why?”

He flinched. But when he spoke, his voice was
completely expressionless. “You’d had a fight with Nigel. You were
angry. I had the feeling you were proving something by sleeping
with me.”

That didn’t sound like her at all. Her eyes
narrowed. “Had we been drinking?” Neither of them were big
drinkers, but she was searching for a logical explanation.

“You’d had a few.”

That could mean anything. But even if she had
been drunk, it was impossible to imagine Lars touching her, kissing
her, performing the intimacies that had resulted in a baby.

Had she really slept with Lars? Naked and
everything? The thought made her skin tingle with embarrassment.
“So why did you do it?”

He hesitated before responding coolly, “I’ve
always found you attractive, Kelly.”

Attractive?
What kind of an answer was
that? She cried, “Do you sleep with every woman you find
attractive?” She knew that wasn’t fair. Lars didn’t have a playboy
reputation. In fact, for years Rawlins Lighting had been his only
love.

He watched her carefully. “It seemed a good
idea at the time.”

A good idea
. And now she was pregnant.
“I can’t believe --” she faltered.

This was Lars, the man she considered one of
her best friends. Surely there was something more he wasn’t telling
her. She wasn’t the kind of girl to get mad at Nigel and then
blithely hop in the sack with Lars.

Or was she?

Head pounding, she sat back down on the
cement floor. She hugged her legs and rested her head on her knees.
“What have I done?” she asked. “What am I going to do?”

Lars spoke quietly. “Well, you’re not going
to marry Nigel in three weeks.”

“No, that’s obvious.” She’d already broken up
with him that afternoon. There was a meanness about him she’d never
noticed before.

But maybe some of that was justified. After
all, she had cheated on him, with Lars, of all people. Lars, who’d
never made a pass at her, never flirted, never even looked at her
in a sexual way. They were friendly, yes, but she’d always thought
he found her immature. She thought he put up with her because he
didn’t want to risk upsetting her father. And now it seemed they’d
slept together. “I can’t believe ...”

“Would you please stop saying that?” Lars
said tightly. “It happened.”

She’d offended him. She reached out to touch
his arm. “I’m sorry, I never --”

“So am I,” he said tersely. “But that doesn’t
change the fact that we’ve made a baby.”

Yes, the baby. The baby was the important
factor in this confusion. “I want to do the right thing,” she said
slowly, watching his face for his reaction. “We’ll work out some
sort of custody.”

“No.”

No?
“Does that mean you want me to get
an abortion?”

He paled. “No. Absolutely not. But I don’t
want to shuttle the baby back and forth like an unwanted
parcel.”

She knew his parents had divorced when he was
a child. Had he grown up feeling unloved and unwanted? “Are you
suggesting we get married?”

He shook his head. “Too late. We already
are.”

“Good heavens.” Had the entire world gone
mad, or just her? “Next you’re going to tell me you’re secretly an
assassin for the CIA.”

He was confused by her jump in logic. “What
are you talking about?”

She laughed shrilly. “Why not? And maybe I’m
not really Kelly Rawlins. I’m a Martian in disguise.”

He put his arm around her. “Kelly, shh,” he
said. “It’s not that bad.”

She pushed him away angrily. “Don’t tell me
what to feel. First I find out I’m going to have a baby. Then I
find out I’ve been cheating on my fiancé. And now I have a
ready-made husband. And I don’t remember any of it. How could so
much happen in five days?”

Lars dropped his hands to his sides. “I’ve
wondered that myself.”

Lars didn’t sound happy, but then he’d just
learned he was going to have a baby, too.

For a minute, they said nothing, each lost in
thought. Kelly stood. She held out her hand for Lars. “Come on,
husband,” she said wryly, putting emphasis on the last word.
“You’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Where are we going?” he asked, as she walked
towards the front door.

“For a walk,” she said. “I could use the
fresh air, and I think it would be better to hash this out on
neutral territory.”

#

Lars held the door open for her as she
stepped outside. Maybe she was right, and the fresh air would clear
their thoughts.

Kelly’s studio was located on the outskirts
of an older residential area in Dallas. They walked along the
sidewalk; passing a neighbor’s open garage door. Two teenagers,
with radio playing, worked on a truck engine. Other than that, the
night air was quiet and still.

He held out his hand, and after hesitating
just a second, she took it.

Her hand was soft and warm in his. This was a
good sign. In his mind, their situation wasn’t completely
unsalvageable if she was willing to hold his hand. “I need to
understand those missing days,” she said quietly.

He knew she was struggling to accept what
he’d already told her, and he appreciated her willingness to
listen. “How much do you remember?”

Kelly was quiet as she thought back. “The end
of February. Maybe the twenty fifth or sixth? I was working late at
my studio. That’s the last thing I remember before I woke up in the
hospital.”

Lars knew Kelly slept odd hours, often
working through the night and then sleeping all day. That was one
of the things she and Nigel had in common.

He watched her face, wondering how much he
should tell her. He’d stick to the truth, he decided, but avoid the
unnecessarily painful details. “Well, I didn’t see you until Friday
night at the club. You were with Brenda and two other of your
friends. You told me you had broken your engagement with
Nigel.”

Kelly looked at him from the corner of her
eyes. “Well that’s one thing in my favor.” she said dryly. “At
least I didn’t sleep with you when I was engaged to another man.
Did I tell you why we’d split up?”

“Not then, but later you told me he’d been
unfaithful.”

Kelly nodded. “I see,” she said finally. “So
you gave me a shoulder to cry on.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Her eyes narrowed and she dropped his hand.
“Are you saying we did it then?”

“No. We made out at my condo, but that was
it.” With hindsight, he knew that was when he should have taken her
home. He knew she’d been drinking, and he shouldn’t have taken
advantage of the situation. But ultimately, he did.

She frowned. “But how did we jump from making
out to getting married?”

She’d been the one to bring it up, but he
didn’t think she’d believe him. Looking back, he had a difficult
time believing it himself. He’d told her that he loved her, and
she’d said,
“Prove it.”

“
How?”

“
Marry me.”

“I suggested that we fly to Reno and get
married.”

She squeaked, “And I agreed?”

Lars knew he shouldn’t be offended by her
reaction. He knew what she felt for him. She never would have
agreed to marry him if she hadn’t been distraught.

She shook her head. “Sorry. Obviously I
agreed or we wouldn’t be in this mess. Then what happened?”

“We got into Reno early Saturday morning. We
got married at a little roadside chapel and went back to the
hotel.”

She held up her hand. “Spare me the details.
I can guess the rest.”

He’d thought that she was as eager as he, as
they’d undressed each other, scattering clothes on the floor. But
now, he didn’t know what she had been feeling.

She asked, “Why didn’t we call our parents
and let them know?”

“We planned to surprise them when we came
back. Remember I still had to go to work on Monday.”

She folded her arms in front of herself
defensively. “I’m a little offended that you wouldn’t even take a
day off.”

He didn’t rise to the bait.

She persisted, “So if everything was so
wonderful, why didn’t we fly back and tell everyone?”

Good question, and he dreaded giving her the
answer. He took a deep breath. “Sunday morning, you slept in.” He
frowned at the understatement. She’d slept seventeen hours, hardly
moving, refusing to wake. Alarmed, he was preparing to call the
hotel doctor, when she suddenly awoke and took a shower. She spent
more than an hour in the shower, which had surprised him, but he
didn’t know if that was normal for her. Later, he’d wondered if
she’d been trying to scrub away his touch.

He continued. “When you woke, you came to
your senses. You said you still loved Nigel and that sleeping with
me was your way to pay him back.”

Her eyes widened. “I did all that out of
revenge?”

He remembered her leaning over the bed,
methodically slamming her clothes into her suitcase.
I’m sorry,
Lars. It’s been fun, but we both know this was a mistake
. There
had been no tears, no excuses, just his beloved Kelly tearing his
world apart. He said quietly, “I don’t know what your motives were.
I’m just telling you what happened.”

Kelly stood still for a moment, her eyes
glistening with unshed tears. “Oh, Lars, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t want her apologies. “We agreed that
you’d file for an uncontested divorce and no one would be the
wiser.”

“But then I came home, wrecked my car, and
forgot to file.”

“Yes.” And he’d run off to Boston, not
knowing she was hurt. He couldn’t help but wonder what would have
happened if he’d stayed in Dallas. What if he’d been the one to
greet her in the hospital, instead of Nigel? If he’d told her the
truth then, could he have convinced her that they were happily
married after a whirlwind courtship? And as long as she didn’t
remember, she need never have known that she’d changed her
mind.

But he would have known. And he couldn’t trap
her into staying married to him with a lie.

Kelly’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “You
must have been surprised to get my wedding invitation.”

Her smile wrenched his heart, reminding him
of what they had shared and what he’d lost. No matter how bad
things got, she kept her sense of humor. “That’s putting it
mildly.”

#

“Kelly Henderson. Mrs. Lars Henderson.” Kelly
addressed her reflection as she brushed her teeth that night, but
saying the words didn’t make it seem any more real.

How could she have married Lars? She’d loved
Nigel, hadn’t she? After today’s unpleasantness, she wondered if
she’d ever really known Nigel, or if she’d merely seen what she
wanted to see.

She’d found his accent intriguing. The most
commonplace statements seem more clever or romantic when said with
a British accent. Nigel also had a fun, creative career as a
musician. She’d been enchanted, and hadn’t looked beyond the
surface.

That still didn’t explain her sleeping with
Lars. She’d always liked him and admired him, but she’d never
thought of him as a lover.

Or had she subconsciously? Today she’d been
very aware of him physically, reaching out to take his hand,
wanting him near her.

But what did he want? How did he feel?
Tonight, when he’d told her what had happened that weekend in
March, he sounded as if he were making a factual presentation to
the Board of Directors. She had no idea how he felt about it, other
than his saying he found her attractive. Did he love her or had he
offered to marry her because he felt sorry for her? That sounded
like the Lars she knew. He probably thought he was being
chivalrous.