A Bride, A Barn, And A Baby. Nancy Thompson Robards

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      She was pregnant.

      What was she going to do?

      She and Zane had spent one night together. One night. Six weeks ago. While she was well aware that it took only one time to get pregnant, they had used a condom.

      How could this happen?

      What was she going to say to him?

      Lucy turned off the tap and dried her hands on the fluffy pink towel hanging on the rack behind her. The color looked astonishingly bright in contrast to the bathroom’s white tile walls. Then again, all of her senses seemed to be amplified right now. She’d finally bitten the bullet and taken a pregnancy test after living in denial, chalking up what she now knew was morning sickness to food poisoning and the flu—a very, very long bout of the flu. Never mind she was usually as regular as the Fourth of July falling on July 4 every year.

      She was certain the only reason she was late was because she’d been under a lot of stress lately. The Campbell Wedding Barn had been booked solid since Southern Living had featured the venue as one of “The Most Beautiful Wedding Barns in the South.” She couldn’t have purchased better advertising. So she had to admit her work stress was good stress. Too bad she couldn’t say the same about her relationship with Zane.

      While the air between them since that night wasn’t exactly bad—in fact, they were sickeningly polite to each other—they had agreed that it would never happen again. Zane had been racked with guilt. “It’s not you, Luce, it’s me,” he’d said. “It was wonderful, but I care about you too much for it to happen again. I don’t want sex to ruin our friendship.”

      Umm...okay.

      Not quite the morning-after talk she’d been dreaming of writing in her diary all these years. It was confusing and hurtful. At first, Lucy wasn’t sure if it was his polite way of giving her the brush-off, but then he’d told her he was seriously pursuing job opportunities outside of Celebration. Rumor had it that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at a ranch in Ocala, Florida, was about to become available soon—literally, people stayed in those positions for life. So they were rare. He’d already sent in his résumé. There and to several other ranches that weren’t in Florida. Because of that, he’d decided it was in their best interests if they just remained friends.

      After she had gotten past the first few stinging moments of him dropping the it’s-not-you-it’s-me bombshell, he had reverted to acting like his old self again. Lucy had too much pride to let him know that their one night together had been simultaneously the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. Although, for one insane moment, she had seriously considered countering with a friends-with-benefits offer—because even though her sexual experience wasn’t vast—OMG—she knew a good thing when she, umm...experienced it. And that night with Zane had been that good. Out-of-this-world good. Ruin-you-for-others good. Total justification for a friends-with-bennies relationship, because now that she’d had a taste of Zane, she was starving for more.

      But then hard, cold reality set in. Lucy knew herself well enough to realize she’d never be content with something so casual when she was in love with him.

      Yep. She loved him.

      But he didn’t love her.

      It was hard to wrap her mind around his saying that he cared about her too much for it to happen again. He promised he had enjoyed it. He’d even gone so far as to say it was his best ever and that was why they needed to keep things platonic.

      Umm... It sounded like an oxymoron if she’d ever heard one. It was so good; I never want to sleep with you again.

      That did not make one bit of sense.

      Of course, she’d been upset and that was when he’d told her that he was one-hundred-percent certain that he was leaving Celebration and he would never ask her to give up her business to follow him and there was something about long-distance relationships not making sense. So they needed to be friends.

      Now it had gone from friends-with-benefits to friends-with-a-baby.

      How in the world was she going to tell him she was pregnant?

      She’d been in love with Zane Phillips for as long as she could remember. And, yes, she might have had a daydream or two about having his babies, but she never would’ve gotten pregnant on purpose.

      She covered her face with her hands and hoped that he wouldn’t think she’d tried to trap him. When her hands fell, she stared at her pale face in the mirror.

      He was going to think it was history repeating itself. And not in a good way.

      It was no secret that there was no love lost between Zane and his father. Everyone in the community knew that Nathaniel Phillips was a bad husband and an even worse father—that was, when he’d bothered to come home. Before he’d served Dorothy with divorce papers, he’d been gone more than he’d been at home, leaving Dorothy to basically single-parent their two boys. When Nathaniel Phillips got remarried, it came to light that he had children with another woman who lived in Dallas. The one he claimed was the love of his life. Once Zane had confided in her that his dad resented Dorothy and him because Nathaniel thought Dorothy got pregnant on purpose, to trap him. He never loved her, and that was why he divorced her and married the woman he did love.

      As far as Lucy knew, he was still married to her.

      Lucy swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat. She would give Zane credit for being more evolved than that. She knew without even a second’s hesitation that he wouldn’t blame her or accuse her of trying to manipulate him. Of course, she had to prepare herself for the fact that this news was going to blindside him. She also had to accept the very real fact that he loved her about as much as Nathaniel Phillips had loved Dorothy. Although she wouldn’t insult him by comparing him to his father.

      “Zane does not love me,” she said to her reflection, thinking if she said it out loud her heart would hear it and wake up to reality.

      She said it again and listened hard.

      The words echoed off the bathroom tile as she said them again. Reinforcement. She needed to make sure the words sank in, that she fully understood the reality of the situation. He might care for her as a friend, and they might be darn good together in bed, but he did not love her.

      But of course, he was an equal partner in this, too.

      Even if she had started it, because she had been the one who had gotten the love train rolling, because she knew Zane well enough to be certain that if she hadn’t spelled it out, if she hadn’t made it clear that not only was it okay for him to cross that line but she’d wanted him to make love to her, he never would have touched her.

      Once the train was out of the station, so to speak, they had both been equally willing participants. She put her hand on her flat belly.

      This baby was nobody’s fault. The pregnancy was unplanned and not ideal, and Lucy was still reeling from the shock of it, but none of that changed the fact that next March, she was going to have Zane Phillips’s baby.

      In the meantime, she needed to figure out how to tell him.

       Chapter Three

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