Once Around (33 page)

He told himself that he didn
't cause the divorces any more than he'd caused the marriages that preceded them. Molly and Robert Chamberlain were a bad match, and no amount of counseling or good intentions would ever change that.

Maybe he and Jessy Wyatt were a bad match
, too. Maybe they didn't stand a chance in hell of making a go of marriage, but he was willing to take that chance. She made him feel things he'd never felt before, question things that had been absolutes before she came into his life.

And there was the small fact that she was carrying his child. He
'd never thought of himself as a traditionalist. He'd seen enough marriages fall apart to have little faith in the institution and even less in, the sanctity of the family. His own family had fallen apart with the death of Owen, Jr., and not even ties of blood and bone had been enough to help him claim a place in his father's heart.

He
'd never planned on having Eds. He'd seen it done well and seen it done badly, and he wasn't convinced which side he'd come down on. None of that mattered now. God, fate, destiny—whatever you want to call it, life had other plans for him.

And what about Jessy? You think: she had this in mind when she seduced you?

She'd been at the Med Center for two months. This was going to blow her position there all to holy hell. No wonder she was angry and defensive and pushing him away with both hands.

When she
'd first told him she was pregnant, he hadn't known what to say. A brief surge of primitive elation had been instantly replaced with wariness and dismay. She'd stared at ha' n, almost challenging him to say the wrong thing, and damned if he hadn't obliged.
What are you going to do?
he'd asked.
Are you going to have the baby?

It was an honest question. Not every woman these days was happy to be pregnant. Not every pregnancy resulted in a happy
, healthy baby. There were options available out there. Decisions a woman could make with the law, if not all of society, on her side.

Not Jessy. She was taking the hard way and she was willing to go it alone. There were few people on earth he respected
, and Jessy was now on the top of a very short list.

But he didn
't love her. He wasn't even sure he knew how.

#

"You'll come back and talk to me," Lorraine said to Jessy. "You promised, right?"

"
Right," said Jessy. "I'll stop in before I leave for the night."

"
And you'll call my mom and tell her'?"

"
I promised, didn't I?"

"
Yeah," said Lorraine, "but lots of people promise things. That doesn't mean much."

The girl was right. Promises were cheaper than canned peas on sale at Shoprite.
"I'll speak to your mama," Jessy said. "You don't have to worry about that anymore."

She stepped outside into the hallway and leaned against the wall.
"Damn," she whispered as the tears spilled down her cheeks. "Damn, damn, damn." This was all she needed, to be pulled into the problems of some pregnant teenager. She'd made a vow her first day in med school that she'd never get personally involved with any of her patients and, for the most part, she'd found it easy to keep that vow. But this was cutting too close to the bone.

A trio of orderlies walked by. They cast curious looks in her direction. The tallest of the th
ree whispered something to his two coworkers, and she knew they were talking about her by the way they suddenly tried hard not to look at her again.

Doctors weren
't supposed to cry. She knew the rules. Death, dismemberment—it didn't matter. You sublimated your emotions and got on with your work. She'd never found that particularly hard to do until now. That skinny little thing huddling under the blue hospital blanket was the girl she'd been not all that long ago. She felt as if she'd stepped back through a time portal and was confronting herself, all of her fears and longings and insecurities.
Let me keep my baby, Mama .. I can still go to medical school with a baby . . .

But Jo Ellen had had other ideas and the will to go with them.
You're just a girl,
she told Jessy,
you don't know how a baby changes everything. All those dreams of glory disappearing under a mountain of diapers and disappointment. I want better for you, Jessy,
her mama said.
I want you to be what I never could.

Of course Jo Ellen hadn
't said that last bit, but Jessy could hear her mama's voice saying it just the same as if she had.

The same thing was happening to Lorraine. She was being bombarded with expectations
, buried under the weight of guilt. She needed someone to talk to, preferably someone who had wanted to keep her baby but hadn't and would regret it every single day of her life.

A pair of doctors strolled b
y, and she ducked her head over her notebook and pretended she was scribbling something so they wouldn't notice her tear-streaked face. She had to get out of there. The head nurse was right. She had forgotte.to eat today. Maybe she'd go down to the cafeteria and grab a tuna on rye and some milk. She started down the hallway, rounded the corner, and walked straight into a faceful of roses.

"
Oh!" She stepped back, laughing apologetically. "I'm sorry. I wasn't looking where I was going."

The roses lowered
, and she found herself face-to-face with Spencer. "I was looking for you, Jess."

Oh
, God, exactly the one person on earth she didn't want to see. "You have thirty seconds," she said, ignoring the sweet perfume filling the air between them.

He pushed the flowers toward her.
"These are for you."

She glared at the roses and then at him.
"I don't like roses."

He looked vaguely de
flated, and she was glad. "Tell me what you do like, and trade them in."

"
I'm not the flowers type."

"
I think you are."

"
Don't," she whispered, feeling her control slip another notch. "I'm not in the mood."

"
I'm not going to ask you to marry me again," he said.

"
Good," she snapped, "because I've already told you my answer." .

"
We got it all wrong," he said, ignoring her words. "We have to go back to square one and start over."

"
We're not starting anything," she said as her heartbeat accelerated. "We were a mistake. We shouldn't have happened in the first place."

"
Can't undo it," he said. "We happened."

"
I'm busy," she said, pushing past him. "Why don't you go home and count your trust funds?"

"
What time do you get off tonight?" he asked, falling into step with her as she headed for the cafeteria.

"
Midnight."

"I'll
be waiting for you in the lobby."

"
No!" She, stopped in her tracks and spun around to face hint. "Get out of my life, Spencer. I don't need or want you in it." Seeing him hurt too much. She'd rather cut him from her life entirely. Her game playing had come with a terrible price tag attached to it.

"
I'm not going anywhere."

Her eyes filled again with tears.
"Don't do this to me. Not today."

"
Why not today?" He didn't sound like himself. That edge of sophistication that always unnerved her was gone. "I didn't want to make you cry, Jess. That's not why I'm here."

"
Don't flatter yourself. I'm not crying over you."
Ah'm not cryin' . .
The more upset she got, the more Southern she sounded. Any second now he'd be calling for an interpreter. "Why are you here?" She batted the flowers away with her hand. "Why are you doing this?" Nobody ever brought her flowers. Didn't he know that?

"
Why do you think?" he countered. He sounded even less like himself--ruffled and exasperated. "We started all wrong, Jess. I'm trying to. get us back on track."

"
Back on track? We were never on track, Spencer. We weren't anything at all." She'd thrown herself at him because she'd actually believed she could be happy with nothing more than the memory of one night in his arms.

"
You're right," he said. "We were a one-night stand and we got caught, but that doesn't mean that's all we can
be."

Her resistance was beginning to ebb. You could live just so long without hope. Sometimes she felt as if she
'd lived her whole life without it. "Why are you doing this?" she said softly. "Is it for the baby or for me?"

He didn
't answer right away. He was looking at her as if he'd never seen her before, and the intensity of his gaze made her wish she'd never asked the question in the first place.

"
I don't know," he said after a moment. "Maybe I'm doing it for us."

"
Good answer," she whispered. "Very good answer."

She buried her face in the cream and crimson blooms and began to cry.

#

Molly
got home from Spencer's office around three-thirty and changed into a pair of loose black pants and a white T-shirt. She took an emerald green sweater from her closet and pulled it on over her head. Two weeks ago it still had that oversized look she was striving for. Not anymore. Her breasts and belly stretched the nubby fabric almost to the limit of decency. She didn't care. This wasn't a fashion statement. She needed bright colors to lift her dark mood.

Jessy was still at the hospital. Molly couldn
't remember what time Rafe had said he'd pick her up. Four o'clock? Eight-thirty? She also couldn't remember why she'd ever agreed to such a ridiculous idea. She wasn't an invalid. She was pregnant. She didn't need someone to drive her around. She had all of her faculties. She could drive herself anywhere she wanted to go.

The thing was
, she didn't want to go anywhere.

Not even the Caribbean for a quickie divorce?

Now there was a swell idea. Where did Robert get the nerve to suggest such a thing?

Same place he got the nerve to walk out on you and take every stick of furniture in the house.

Good point. It made her wonder how well she'd known her husband in the first place. They'd shared a home and a bed and a life, and the truth was she didn't know the first. thing about him. She knew he liked his eggs sunny side up, his shirts starched, his bath towels warm from the dryer, but she didn't know what made him happy or why he'd never loved her the way she'd wanted to be loved.

Did you love him
, Molly? Be honest now. Did you love him the way he wanted to he loved?

She hated questions like that. She hated being honest with herself.

She'd loved him the only way she knew how—as a partner, as the man who would father her children. Robert had represented the security she'd never known as a child, and when he proposed to her, she said yes immediately. "We're good team," he'd said. She'd support him during law school, then the moment he was settled in with a good law firm, she'd quit and start a family. That was their dream, wasn't it? That was what the hard work was all about.

He
'd said he was happy. He said his parents would be crazy about her. He said all the right things but he never once said
I love you.

The saddest part of all was that it took ten years for her to realize it.

She wondered how different her life would have been if she'd demanded more of Robert and the relationship, if she'd understood that being a good team meant more than a career and a house in Princeton Manor. Of course, if she'd understood that she would have seen that their marriage was doomed from the start.

She hated Robert for taking the coward
's way out, but she couldn't hate him for wanting more from a marriage than they'd found together. She hated him for walking out on his unborn child, but she couldn't hate him for falling in love. Not now that she knew what they had both been missing.

The baby shifted position
, a flurry of soft kicks and punches that usually preceded a nap.
It's your loss, Robert
she thought as she gently massaged her belly.
You turned your back on a miracle.

He made his de
cision the day he walked out the door on them. Now he'd have to find a way to live with it.

Chapter Twenty

Something was wrong.

Molly hadn't said a word since she got in the car. Every time Rafe tried to engage her in conversation, he found himself slamming face first into a wall of monosyllables.