Covert Cowboy. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ just before the flu outbreak, Con. It looks as if the Ice Queen deliberately exposed her half sister to the Q-fever microbe during Holly’s pregnancy with Sky.”

      Chapter Three

      “Hold the elevator!”

      Marilyn hoped the note of panic in her voice wasn’t as obvious to Jim Osborne and Dan Curtis, her neighbors, as it was to herself. Hastening across the gleaming heartwood floor of the loft complex’s foyer—waddling, more like, she thought despairingly—she found herself calculating the number of seconds before she reached her apartment and made it to the bathroom.

      Living in a trendy converted warehouse had cachet, but there were definite drawbacks. For starters, the elevator had been originally built for freight, and it was slow. Jim and Dan would be getting off at the second floor, so their exit would tack on another ten or twenty seconds. Add thirty more for the mad dash up the industrial-style metal staircase that linked her open-concept lower floor to the upper one where the bathroom and bedrooms were, and there was a chance she wasn’t going to make it.

      Everything she’d ever read about the physical side effects of pregnancy had emphasized benefits like glowing skin and silkier hair. She’d never expected to be at the mercy of a bladder that felt roughly the size of a pea.

      Bad choice of word. As she scooted into the elevator she attempted to maintain a modicum of cool decorum by smiling her thanks at the two men.

      “Mama’s been shopping for maternity fashions,” Dan teased, casting an eye at her parcels and releasing the elevator door. Beside him, Jim raised an eyebrow.

      “I saw that look of desperation often enough on my sister’s face when she was expecting. Gotta go, sweetie?”

      The Marilyn Langworthy of three months ago would have frozen him with a look, she thought. Now she felt grateful for his perception.

      “Let’s just say I’ve decided to pack away my favorite CD of Handel’s Water Music until after next April,” she admitted. “There isn’t a warp speed button on that panel, is there?”

      “Sorry, no.” His pleasant features crinkled into a grin. “But we’ll go straight to your floor first. Will that help?”

      “You’re an angel,” she breathed fervently.

      As the oversize freight doors clanged shut and the elevator began its noisy and excruciatingly slow ascent, surreptitiously she eased her left foot out of its leather flat and felt instant relief. She looked up in time to see both Jim and Dan glance politely away.

      Her beloved collection of size seven Manolos were a dim memory, Marilyn thought wryly. Ditto for her wardrobe of designer suits and dresses, all of which she’d seemed to balloon out of within days of learning she was pregnant. Once upon a time she’d concentrated on the label of a garment, but now she’d acquired the habit of riffling through racks of clothes, extracting a likely looking top or skirt, and tugging ruthlessly at the waist-line to judge how much stretch it had.

      Of course, her shopping expedition today had been only a cover. She’d needed to get away from the office and come to some hard decisions.

      She was a thirty-one-year-old expectant single mother. She’d lost her figure, her reputation and after what she’d discovered this morning, quite possibly her job. And she had to go to the bathroom like nobody’s business.

      Joy soared through her, so pure and exhilarating she felt a prickling moisture behind her eyes. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a baby.

      “…bring a plate up to you later, if you’d like.”

      She’d missed the beginning of Dan’s comment, but it was obvious from his expression that he hadn’t been expecting tears in reply. She mustered a shaky smile.

      “Sorry, hormone overload. It’s gotten so bad lately I have to keep a box of tissues by the television in case a heartwarming advertisement comes on. What were you saying?”

      “I’m making my special moussaka tonight. I thought if you didn’t feel like cooking—” He stopped as Marilyn hastily tried to erase the moue of instant nausea that had shown on her face. “Vine leaves and ground lamb not on the menu these days?”

      “I’m finally over the morning sickness, thank goodness,” she said as the elevator lurched to a stop at her floor and the doors began to open. “But certain foods still seem to flick the queasiness switch with me. I’ll take a rain check on that moussaka for about six months from now, if that’s all right with you.”

      Jim and Dan were good neighbors, she thought as she sped through her open-concept living area and clattered up the metal stairs. That was important, especially in an unconventional building like this. The former warehouse was divided into only three spacious loft apartments, one of which was vacant at the moment, its owners being away in Europe.

      “And the best thing about them is that right from the first they were happy for me when I told them I was expecting,” she said out loud a few minutes later as she descended the staircase and bent with difficulty to pick up the shopping bags she’d dropped on her frantic way in. “Which is a whole lot more than I got from either the Langworthy or the Van Buren side of my family.”

      She felt suddenly too weary even to unpack her purchases. Tossing the bags onto the sofa and dropping into an oversize velvet-upholstered club chair, she closed her eyes.

      Immediately he was there, the way he always was when she let down her guard.

      Sometimes she could almost persuade herself that that whole night three months ago had been a dream—an erotic, sex-charged dream, in which she’d acted with an abandon that was totally unlike her waking self. And Connor Ducharme fit the profile of a dream lover perfectly, right down to his lazy sensuality, his tall, leanly muscled build, his New Orleans drawl. If that night really had been only a dream she would have been able to handle it, Marilyn thought bleakly. But it had happened. She’d slept with a stranger—not once, but three times that night. And she’d loved it.

      That was the part she found hardest to live with.

      She opened her eyes. From the soaring ceiling twenty-odd feet above her swooped a perfectly balanced wire and metal mobile, its impressive span in keeping with the spaciousness of the loft but its delicate construction a counterpoint to the exposed brick and heavy wooden beams that were an indication of the building’s original function as a turn-of-the-century warehouse. A current of air caught the mobile and it swirled lightly, like a swallow changing direction in midflight.

      She’d actually phoned the New Orleans police department a week later and asked for him. It had taken seven sleepless nights for her to come to that decision, and when she had she’d felt like the weakest of weak-willed females. She was well aware she’d sent him away, had told him she wanted to pretend the previous few hours had never happened, but illogically, that hadn’t mattered. She’d wanted to hear his voice. She’d found herself needing his touch. She’d craved him.

      So she’d set aside her pride and phoned, and at first she’d had the terrible suspicion that he’d duped her. The desk sergeant had asked her to repeat the name of the detective she was inquiring about, and had put her on hold for what seemed an eternity. At long last he’d come back on the line, only to inform her that Ducharme wasn’t in the precinct building at the moment.

      But by then she’d lost what little courage СКАЧАТЬ