Holding Her Breath (Indigo) (16 page)

“So it’ll be at least another two months before we’ll know.”

“Will you start showing before that?”

“There’s a good chance, I guess. But it’ll probably just look like I need to lay off the cookies or something. I dunno. I haven’t known many pregnant women. But, well, there is this other procedure they can do. It makes me kinda squeamish to think about, but they can do it at ten weeks. So in a month from now. But I really don’t want to do that one.”

Chace groaned. This had to be the worst conversation of his life.

“Chace?”

Chace cleared his mind of the memory of his father and focused on the crisis at hand. “Well, what do you want to do if it
is
mine?”

“I don’t want anything to mess up things with Hank,” she said. Of course her mind went to herself first. That was just the way Kelly operated.

“And I don’t want to mess up things with—never mind.” Chace hesitated to tell her about Whitney.

“What? Chace, are you seeing somebody?”

“That’s none of your business, and I don’t even see why you would care.” He tapped his fingers against his knee.

“Chace, I still care about you and I don’t want to see you jumping into anything. You know you’re kind of impulsive and you don’t think things through all the time. Are you sure you should be getting into a new relationship already?”

“If I am in a relationship, I’m grown, Kelly. Even though you rarely treated me that way. I can make my own decisions and I know what’s best for me. And were you thinking of how much you care about me while you were screwing around with that old man who’s abandoning his family for you? Were you thinking of his family when you did it, huh? What about them? Who’s going to care about them?”

“That’s not fair.”

“What is? You drop this bomb on me that you’re pregnant and it might be mine, and then you want to talk about fair?”

“It’s pretty obvious you don’t want anything to do with me and I want to start a family with Hank. Maybe we should just pretend it’s Hank’s either way. I just wanted you to know. I wanted you to have the option. But if you want to just—we could just—pretend.”

If the baby was his, he wouldn’t let the three of them live that lie—the child not even aware of living it. “I couldn’t do that to my kid. If it’s mine, I would want to be in its life. I understand you’re with Hank, and more power to you guys. I don’t want to be in your life. Just the baby’s.”

“So what’s the next step?”

“I guess we have to wait until you can get this paternity test,” Chace said, wishing he could just disappear into the couch cushions and never come back out.

“I guess.”

“You gonna tell Hank about any of this?”

Kelly was silent for a moment before saying, “If the test comes out—wrong. I mean. Well. There might not even be anything to tell him.”

“Well, I gotta go. I have a lot to do today,” he said, not wanting to be on the phone with her any longer.

“Okay. Um, Chace?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I call you sometime? Will you answer the phone?”

“If it’s about the baby, yes. If you keep calling for things other than that, no. I know you want to be friends or whatever, but I don’t. Please respect that I’m moving on with my life.”

“Being friends doesn’t mean we can’t move on.”

“It does to me.”

She sighed heavily on the other end. “Bye, Chace.”

“Bye.” He tossed his phone on the coffee table, curled up into a ball on the couch, and pulled a nearby throw pillow over his head.

Whitney walked down the sidewalk, headed to her building. The cold wind actually felt good cutting against her face. She was still warm from the overcrowded rush hour train she’d taken to Farragut West and from the brisk pace of her walk after getting off the metro two stops too early. She’d needed the exercise since she’d skipped the gym for a few days, and the train had gotten oppressively full. Besides, she needed at least some distraction from emailing Chace back every two seconds. She didn’t want him to think she was constantly waiting for the next email from him. Whether or not it was true, she didn’t want him to think that.

She pressed her fingers lightly to her lips, almost unaware she was doing it. The kiss had felt so good. Too good. His had been more than a hurried, lustful, just-wanting-to-get-to-other-more-interesting-things kind of kiss. Tongue moving slowly, lips thoughtful. Mouth promising what she’d never have believed from words.

It was going to be hard not to get attached. Very hard. Chace could probably make a rock fall in love with him. Even if he hadn’t been turning on the charm—which maybe he didn’t even know how not to—she doubted she would have been able to get him out of her mind.

Not only was he gorgeous, he was sweet, funny, kind. Nothing like the jerks it’d always been easy for her to turn down before. She’d never come across someone real before. Not that she’d been looking. But, looking or not, Chace had literally come out of nowhere, and she had the feeling he wasn’t going anywhere.

Suddenly, she had a strong desire for it to be just them again. The way it had been in the club. Her arms wrapped around him. Just kissing the way they had on New Year’s. Always. Feeling his skin—his warmth beneath her fingers. Pulling back only to look into the endless depths of those ice blue eyes. Fire and ice in a very non-Frost way. Or maybe that was exactly what Frost had meant.

Whitney brought herself back to the present as she opened the ornate glass door with the gold handle and walked into her office building. After saying hello to the security guards, she walked over to the elevator bank and pushed the number for her floor. Her firm had the top ten floors of the building. No longer able to resist, she pulled out her phone and responded to Chace’s most recent email.

It wasn’t anything important. And neither was her reply. Mostly, she thought it was just that they liked the idea of being able to communicate even though they were unable to see each other for the first time since a couple days after Christmas. She tried not to keep track of such things, but she couldn’t help it.

She wanted to kiss him again. Catch his bottom lip gently with her teeth and hold it there. Just hold it gently. Feel connected to him in a very intimate way. See, she shouldn’t have even been thinking that way. He just did something to her. Something unnatural. That same thing also made her think about laying on a blanket in a park with him that spring, her head on his chest, their fingers intertwined, just tangled up in each other with no desire to go anywhere outside of that moment—that sphere of intensity. It was odd. She’d never had thoughts about a guy like that. Not even any of her crazy crushes in high school. Yeah, she’d had dreams of lust. But never intimacy.

Again, Whitney had to bring herself back to the here and now as she walked out of the elevators and onto her floor.

She said hello to people she passed and asked them how their Christmases had been, while heading to her office. When she got to her office area, she greeted her assistant, Bettina, who handed her a stack of folders.

“Hi, Whitney. There’s more on your desk. And Kim is on the war path. She wants to see you right away,” Bettina said, pushing her black hair away from her face. Bettina was just over five feet tall. Other than the height thing, she could have probably been a model. She had slight, fine bone structure, thin eyebrows, high cheekbones, and bright green eyes.

Whitney took the stack of folders from her. She thought for just a moment about trying to fix Bettina up with Chace to take away the temptation, but quickly realized that she’d never be able to do something like that. Regardless of what she said or wanted to think, she didn’t want to imagine Chace being with anybody but her.

“You have a ton of messages, there are some inter-office memos you should probably read, there are a couple of articles highlighted in the most recent copy of that one IP journal we subscribe to that you always read, there’s a meeting at two about the case. You know the one. Bevyx. Everybody’s talking about it. Oh, and you have a lunch meeting with the team. Apparently, it’s a strategy planning session for the case.”

“Okay, let me sort through some of this stuff and then I’m going to see Kim.”

“So hold your calls?”

“Please.”

Bettina smiled. “Welcome back, Whitney.”

“Thanks,” Whitney muttered.

Bettina laughed and closed the door after her.

Whitney rifled through the folders on her desk and scanned her work email. At least she didn’t have anything urgent waiting for her. Not wanting to put Kim off any longer, she took a deep breath and walked to the woman’s office.

Kim’s assistant let her right in, telling her Kim had been expecting her. Kim was a junior partner and supposedly Whitney’s mentor on the partnership track. She thought that mentors were supposed to help. Kim seemed like an adversary most of the time. Maybe as the only black female junior partner in the D.C. office, Kim had a chip on her shoulder. Well, that didn’t mean she should expect Whitney to help bear it.

Kim looked up at her briefly with beady black eyes set in a dark brown face. Her black hair was pulled tightly away from her face in the bun she always wore. She was writing something on a legal pad, and she gestured with her free hand for Whitney to take a seat.

When she was done writing, Kim capped her pen and set it on the desk. She sat up straighter in her chair and folded her hands beneath her chin. “Whitney, I’ve never known you to have trouble following directions before. Is there a problem?”

She was jolted by the abruptness. Kim was being even more…Kim than usual. No small talk, how was your Christmas, anything.

“I’m sorry?” She had no idea what the woman was talking about.

“When I ask for a task to be completed, I expect it to be done. The associates who wrote the memo I asked you to review sent it to you on New Year’s Day. That was two days ago. I haven’t heard one word from you about it.”

All of the blood drained out of Whitney’s face. She’d forgotten all about that memo. She hadn’t looked through her many emails thoroughly yet. She’d been too busy playing cutesy with Chace.

“I—I’m sorry. I’ll take care of it right now. I’ll go back to my office and—”

Kim held up her hand. “No need. I’ve already given it to Cynthia. She has drive. She really wants to make partner. I’m beginning to question whether you do or not.”

“Of course I do. It’s the most important thing—”

“Do you even know the facts of the case, Whitney? Do you even know the parties’ names? How about just the name of our client, Whitney? Do you know that?”

Even though she knew, she didn’t answer. She was trying to keep her temper from flaring. Plus, Kim probably wouldn’t have let her finish her sentence anyway.

“Vacations are no time to play around unless you’re happy where you are. Now, if you’re happy being a senior associate, fine. Enjoy your cookie making and caroling or whatever it is you do down there in Virginia. But this is a huge case.” Kim’s nostrils flared, and she tapped her pen against her legal pad. “Andersen says this is the sort of thing that could be in casebooks, law students reading it for decades to come. This could bring the firm back from the slump we’ve been fighting since that little embezzling scandal last year. New York is watching us on this one.” Kim sat back in her chair, tapping her pen on her desk.

The firm was headquartered in New York. The big guys were there. The sons of Gibson and Grey themselves, even.

Whitney knew that she’d really screwed up this time. She’d never given Kim a real reason to berate and belittle her before so she’d always been able to brush off Kim’s words in the past. But this time was different. Whitney was dependable. More than that, she’d always gone beyond the extra mile. So, she’d messed up once. It was demeaning. Kim was acting like she hadn’t always given every part of her heart, mind, and soul to that job. She worked at least sixty hours a week. She rarely took any vacation time except at the holidays, leaving well over half her vacation time untouched every year. Kim didn’t have the right to treat her like this. Tears pricked the backs of her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Kim. It won’t happen again.” She bit back her emotion.

“It better not,” Kim said. The hard set of her jaw matched the tone of her voice. She straightened a stack of paper on her desk with a slow deliberateness that was meant to be a sign that she was dismissing Whitney.

“I’m going to go get caught up on everything right now. Is there anything else I should be doing for the case before our lunch meeting?”

“Making sure you know what it is. That’s all. You’re capable of reading a file, aren’t you? I mean, I never had any doubts before, but now…”

“I’m on top of it. Don’t worry,” Whitney said, managing to keep her voice from cracking.

She didn’t talk to Chace for the rest of the day. She was too worried about work to think about sending him any more emails or even to notice that he’d stopped sending emails to her.

Whitney decided to take the firm’s car service home. She was tired, cranky, and didn’t feel like putting up with the metro that day. When the car pulled up in front of her building, she was startled to find Chace sitting on the steps outside of it.