A Baby Between Them. C.J. Carmichael

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СКАЧАТЬ his gaze raked over Rae, and she could almost hear him listing all the flaws he must be seeing. Messy hair that hadn’t been washed in days, no makeup, terrible clothes.

      Whereas Aidan looked…absolutely delicious. More handsome than ever, not to mention calm and collected, even though—as Rae now understood—he hadn’t expected to see her here, either.

      Well, that explained one mystery. She should have known he wouldn’t have been looking for her.

      “Funny,” she said. “That’s exactly what Justine told me.”

      Aidan blinked, surprise registering in his enigmatic, dark eyes. Finally, he broke the visual connection and crossed the room to the windows. The Pacific Ocean, deceptively calm on this late-summer day, dominated the view through all three picture windows that ran the length of the combined kitchen and dining area.

      Rae stayed where she was, watching him push his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and trying not to admire the way the dark denim outlined slim hips, long legs, tight ass.

      Ah, hell, it wasn’t fair. Aidan had never looked better. Shouldn’t men like him come marked in some way to warn innocent women of the potential danger? He hadn’t asked her how she was feeling, hadn’t even acknowledged the fact that she was pregnant. He really was a cad.

      Now she glanced at the spot where he’d been standing earlier and saw a very large duffel bag. And suddenly the ramifications of the problem before them increased significantly.

      “You came here for a vacation?”

      “Yes.” He swung round to face her again. “How long are you planning to stay?”

      Rae looked at him, incredulous. He had to be the most self-centered man on the planet. “Why, until the baby’s born, of course.”

      Aidan’s hands dropped to his side. His face went blank. “Baby?”

      Stepping out from behind the island, Rae rounded her hands over her large belly. Good grief, his face. It was almost as if…

      “Oh, my God. Rae, why didn’t you tell me?”

      CHAPTER TWO

      “YOU DIDN’T KNOW?” Rae’s voice, usually so strong and confident, gave out in a squeak at the end of her question.

      Aidan couldn’t find the words to answer her. He was in shock. Her belly was huge. Enormous. She looked as though she was ready to pop at any second. He tore his gaze from her middle and gave the rest of her a closer look. In contrast with her belly, her arms and legs seemed abnormally skinny. Once, she’d had curves in all the right places. Now, her curves were definitely in all the wrong places.

      “Rae, when did this happen?”

      She placed her hands, covered in quilted oven mitts, on her hips. “You know damn well when it happened. Eight months ago, in that stupid hotel room in Philadelphia where we were supposed to be preparing our presentation for the Triumph merger.”

      He covered his face with one hand. Groaned. Eight months… Yes, that took them right back to the night he’d spent with her. He’d known then that he was making a mistake. But he’d had no idea just what a whopper it would turn out to be.

      “Why haven’t I heard about this? You never called.”

      Her gaze focused in on him like a laser beam. “You made it perfectly clear my calls weren’t welcome when you banished me to Pittsburgh.”

      “Banished? That was a promotion, Rae.” Holding out his hand, he ticked off the reasons on his fingers. “You got more money, more responsibility, a step up the corporate ladder.”

      Rae shook her head, releasing more strands of wild, dark hair from her loose ponytail. “Sure, Aidan. And you didn’t have to go to work every day and face the woman you’d made the mistake of sleeping with. Be honest and admit the truth. You sent me to Pittsburgh to get rid of me.”

      Her words infuriated him and he had to struggle to reply calmly. “Not true.”

      “If you weren’t trying to avoid me, then why did you stop making monthly visits to Pittsburgh once I was made divisional VP?”

      “I trusted you to handle the job.”

      “Oh, really? And the switch from the conference phone calls you used to make to divisional VPs to group e-mails—that must have been another example of your great trust? It wasn’t because you didn’t want to hear the sound of my voice?”

      “You’re reading too much into all that. And forgetting how busy I’ve been, with Harrison out of the office so much….”

      Since he’d married Justine, Harrison had started working eleven months of the year from here on Summer Island. It had fallen on Aidan, who’d been promoted and given a huge raise, to fill in the gaps.

      “Right.” She looked at him scornfully. “You’ve been busy. You haven’t been avoiding face time with the employee you screwed. And when I say ‘screwed,’ of course I’m speaking literally and figuratively.”

      Aidan paced to the far corner of the room. He needed space to think. He needed to be calm and rational. But every time he looked at Rae’s enormous belly he felt as if he was about to have a panic attack.

      Focus on something else for a minute. In front of him, the Kincaid china cabinet was filled with French Provincial serving dishes, teapots, ornaments. He felt like smashing the lot of them.

      So much for calm and rational.

      He turned to face Rae again. “What were you expecting me to do? We shouldn’t have slept together. It was a mistake and we both should have known better.” He let out a huge sigh of exasperation. “Because of my position of authority, I recognize that I shoulder the majority of the blame.”

      She blinked and her head jerked back a little, as if he’d slapped her.

      What had he said wrong this time? Surely she couldn’t deny that what they’d done had been ill-advised, to say the very least.

      “Look, we’re two ambitious people, who in a moment of weakness…” He paused, remembering that moment of weakness, and how truly incredible it had seemed at the time. That night he’d wanted her so badly that he hadn’t cared about consequences. About any consequences. For the first time in his life he’d been so carried away that he hadn’t used a condom.

      He hadn’t even asked if she was protected. Which, clearly, she hadn’t been.

      “Rae, even if you think I’m the biggest jerk in the world…”

      “Sounds about right.”

      He decided to ignore that. “I still deserved to be told you were pregnant.”

      “Really? Why?”

      Her answer stunned him. “Because I’m the father.”

      “So what? You contributed the sperm. Big deal.” With her hands still covered in protective mitts, she picked up the pan and tipped the loaf of bread on it into the trash. “This smell СКАЧАТЬ