Wicked Game. Lisa Jackson

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      A frisson slid down Becca Sutcliff’s spine. She inhaled sharply and glanced behind her. The girl at the counter of Mutts & Stuff slid her a look from the corner of her eyes. “You okay?”

      “Someone’s walking on my grave, I guess,” Becca murmured.

      The girl’s brows lifted and Becca could practically read her mind: Yeah. Right. Whatever. She rang up Becca’s purchases and stuffed them in a bag. Thanking her, Becca shifted the packages she was already carrying to accommodate them. Yes, she was filling a need, shopping like it was an Olympic sport, a result of the messy, lingering aftermath of unsettled feelings that still followed from her split with Ben. And now Ben was dead. Gone. Never to come back. And it all felt…well…weird.

      She headed back into the mall, slightly depressed by the cheery red and pink hearts in every store window. Valentine’s Day. The most miserable day of the year for the suddenly single.

      Okay. She wasn’t completely unhappy. She’d known for a long time that she and Ben weren’t going to make it. They’d never been in love. Not in the way she’d wanted, hoped, planned to be. When she’d learned he was seeing someone else, she was angry. At herself, mostly. She couldn’t really even recall what had triggered their marriage in the first place. What had she wanted? What had Ben wanted? Had it just been timing? A sense that, if not Ben, then who?

      Then she learned he’d died in the arms of his new love. Heart attack.

      Gone, gone…gone.

      She was still processing. Still getting used to the fact that he’d left her for another woman. Left her…when she’d still believed that maybe, just maybe, there would be that chance for them. That chance to start a family. Have a child. A child of their own. A child of her own…

      The window of Pink, Blue, and You, a combined baby and maternity store, materialized in front of her. She’d stopped into it earlier and picked out a gift for a pregnant coworker. It was a fine torture to be inside. She wanted a baby. She’d always wanted a baby. Her insides twisted with the memory that she’d lost an unborn baby a long, long time ago.

      Yet, at times like this, the pain returned, as fresh and raw as when she’d miscarried.

      Tears hovered behind her eyes. But she wasn’t going to break down, for God’s sake. Not now. She’d grieved far too long as it was. She held the stupid tears at bay, turning her face away from the display of pastel pinks and blues and lemony yellows. Was that why she’d married Ben? To have a baby? To replace the one who’d been taken from her?

      Becca told herself to get over it. She’d asked herself the same question countless times, had toiled and fretted over the answer. But it was all moot now. Ben was gone. And he’d left his twenty-two-year-old new lover pregnant, something he’d never wanted with Becca.

      “I don’t want children,” he’d said. “You knew it when you married me.”

      Had she? She didn’t remember that.

      “It’s just you and me, Beck. You and me.”

      Maybe she had married him to have a child. Correction. To replace a child. Maybe she’d made up the “I love you” parts. Maybe she’d just wanted the whole thing to be so much prettier than it was.

      “Damn it all.” She had no time to walk down this lane of self-pity. It was over. O-V-E-R! She turned away from the window. No need to torture herself further. No need at all.

      A food court was on her left and she glanced over as she headed the other way. But as she tried to hurry on, her vision grew blurry, forcing her to slow down and finally stop short. Her pulse was suddenly rocketing. Damn. She was going to faint. She’d been down this route before, more times than she’d like to admit. But it wasn’t really fainting. No. More like…falling into a spell. A wide-awake dream. But it hadn’t happened in years. Not for years!

      Why now? she asked herself a half-second before a sizzle of pain shot through her brain. She staggered and fell to her knees, packages tumbling from her arms. Becca bent her head, instinctively hiding her face from curious onlookers, one last moment of clarity before the vision overcame her.

      In a transformation that was both familiar and feared, Becca was no longer at the mall, no longer feeling the wrench of loss of her baby. No longer in the real world but in a watery, in-substantial one, a world that had plagued her youth yet had been curiously missing and distant for most of her adult life…until now.

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