A Promise for the Baby. Jennifer Lohmann

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      CHAPTER TWO

      KARL RETURNED TO the apartment later than he’d planned. Her little convertible had been easy enough to find. It’d been parked exactly where she’d said it would be and the Nevada plates gave away that it was hers. So had the pile of fast food containers on the floor of the passenger side. The blankets and pillows in the backseat had been a surprise. As had the empty gas tank. He’d thrown the trash away when he’d filled up her tank. The blankets and pillows he’d left in the backseat, though he’d left them folded rather than in a heap.

      Riding up the elevator with bags of Chinese food and a growing sense of unease, he prepared to face his wife.

      Vivian had set the table he never used with the place mats, white cotton napkins and flatware he also never used. Jessica, his ex-wife, had bought them. She hadn’t taken them with her when they’d divorced. Neither had she taken the apartment nor the BMW. All were status symbols he was certain she’d considered more important than their marriage, but not important enough to possess after the divorce was final. An indication, he’d felt when he’d signed the divorce papers, of the low regard in which she had held their marriage.

      Time allowed him to be more generous with his reflections. Marriage to him hadn’t given Jessica anything she’d really wanted, so why keep the trappings? Leaving the flatware, china and linens in the apartment with her ex-husband, she was free to start fresh.

      He wondered if Vivian had been married before. Did she have an apartment, friends or a book club? Why had she estranged herself from her life to drive halfway across the country in search of an unknown husband? After setting the bags of food on the counter, he looked around the room for her. He could learn the answers to his questions later. Eventually, people always told him the information he wanted.

      Just as he determined that the living room was empty, he noticed Vivian leaning against the rail on his terrace, looking north over the skyline of Chicago. With the room lit up against the dark night sky, Karl could only make out contours of her slim body. When he turned off the lights in the living room, her form gained substance. She reached up with her arm, pulling her hair off her neck and over her shoulder, exposing skin to the cold.

      The night they’d spent together existed in a dream world, but his memories of the morning after were clear and sharp. He remembered waking up to find her sleeping, her black hair spread across the pillow and her neck exposed. He remembered looking at the knobs of her spine as they trailed from her nape down her back and under the covers. How kissable those knobs had looked. But then he’d gotten out of the bed to make coffee, found the marriage certificate and any thought of kissing her neck was gone.

      Stepping outside into the cold pushed away those memories. They were married, she was in Chicago, and kissing the slim line of her neck had never been further away from possible. “Do you have a winter coat?”

      She was standing outside in jeans, her sweater and pink argyle socks. “I’m not cold.”

      Even in the hazy moonlight he could see goose bumps dotting her neck, but she didn’t shiver or tuck her hands around her body for warmth.

      “I bought the apartment for this view,” he said, folding his arms on the railing of the terrace and leaning forward to look out over the city with her.

      “What are the names of some of the buildings?”

      He pointed out the Aon Center and Smurfit-Stone Building. “If you’re still here in the summer, maybe you can go on an architecture boat tour. Or they have walking tours year-round.”

      “You don’t have curtains.”

      “No.” Removing the curtains was one of the few changes he’d made when Jessica had moved out.

      “Not even in your bedroom?”

      “I value openness.”

      “You should come west.”

      “I’ve been to Vegas.” He slid closer to her on the terrace. Not so close that their arms touched, but close enough to feel her presence. She still smelled like jasmine.

      “Not Vegas. Vegas is the flashy west. I mean southern Idaho, where you can see for miles in every direction and there’s nothing but sky and canyons.”

      “Is that where you’re from?”

      “I graduated high school in Jackpot, Nevada. It’s right across the border.”

      He’d married a blackjack dealer from a town called Jackpot. The world had an unfortunate sense of humor. “It would’ve been a shorter drive from Vegas to Jackpot.”

      She turned her head to the side to look at him, the corners of her mouth turned up in a mysterious smile. “Shorter, yes, but there’s nothing for me in Jackpot. Plus, it would be wrong not to let you know you’re going to be a father.”

      “A phone call would’ve sufficed.”

      “Would you want to learn that you’re going to be a father with a phone call from a stranger?” She didn’t slip again and admit to not being able to go home, as she had when they’d been talking in the living room.

      He didn’t have an answer to that question. If asked this morning, he would’ve said yes. Now, standing next to Vivian on his terrace, looking at the lights sparkle across Grant Park and smelling her jasmine perfume, he wasn’t so sure. Her neck was even more kissable up close.

      “Dinner’s getting cold.” He pushed off the railing and walked back into the apartment, not looking to see if she followed.

      * * *

      KARL WASN’T MUCH for words, Vivian thought, as she picked up the plates after dinner. They were strangers, sure, but they were married strangers who were having a child together. Even after they finalized the divorce, they would still have a child to raise together. The least they could do during the next eight months was to get to know each other.

      But based on his terse responses over dinner, he didn’t agree. She heaped the utensils on the stacked plates and took them into the kitchen. When she turned, he had followed with the cups and trash.

      “I’ll get those.” She took the glasses from his hand and loaded them into the dishwasher. “Don’t СКАЧАТЬ