SIX
With his afternoon cleared, there was nothing Jeff would have rather done than call Connor. Tell his best friend he wasn’t the only one to pick up a souvenir in Vegas. Talk out the changes ahead of him and have the guy—the only guy on the planet who knew him as well as he knew himself—tell him he had his back.
But Connor had just reconciled with his wife—a woman he’d married within hours of meeting that same night Jeff met Darcy—and even if Jeff thought he could live with himself for interrupting them...he was fairly certain the two lovebirds were still off the grid.
Just as well.
There was someone else who deserved to know what was happening first.
Olivia. The woman he’d started a relationship with five weeks ago. The something Jeff had found to fill the empty spot in his life he’d only become aware of after Vegas.
Jogging across the marble-and-glass atrium, Jeff caught the elevator to Olivia’s top floor office.
How the hell was he going to explain this? And how would she take it?
Things had been going well with them. They’d been a smart fit from the start. Comfortable together, compatible.
She was open and pleasant. Harvard educated. Business savvy. Connected.
Two hours ago, he would have given it six months at the outside before he popped the question. And only because it seemed like an appropriate time to wait. In Olivia he’d found a woman who was all the things he’d known he wanted for a partner in life from as far back as he could remember—from the first time he looked across the table at his parents and thought to himself, someday, I want that.
The business journal over morning coffee. The dinners at the club. The shared interests for their shared lifestyle. The sparkling hostess championing the charities and foundations they supported.
It sounded shallow as he itemized it in his head, but it wasn’t.
He wanted the kind of good match that meant a lifetime of companionable, easy happiness. What his parents had up until the day five years ago when a heart attack took his father. The best man he’d ever know. The example Jeff had always hoped to live up to. Hell, he wished he was around to talk to about this.
Riding up to Olivia’s, he couldn’t help question what she would think when she looked at the woman he’d been with before her. The one who’d been his wake-up call about putting an end to the screwing around with women who weren’t right for him and thinking about getting serious with one who was. Settling down. Starting a family.
Olivia would see everything she wasn’t when she looked at Darcy.
And it would make her wonder.
Darcy had been a good time he hadn’t seen coming. And the only reason she’d gotten under his skin the way she had was because of the way she’d left.
So the chemistry between them had been hot enough that even months later, he could feel the lingering burn of it, so what? That was sex. Not exactly a foundation to build a solid forever on. But neither was it something he could, in good conscience, ignore when it came to a relationship with another woman.
“Hey, Mel. She in?” he asked, when he got to her office.
“She’s on a call. Should I interrupt?”
“No. I’ll wait.”
This was news he needed to tell her today and in person.
Sometime later, Jeff was searching stages of pregnancy on his phone, checking them against his calendar and travel commitments when Olivia’s office door swung open and she walked out to greet him with a welcoming smile.
“Jeffrey, what a wonderful surprise!”
“Got a few minutes for me?” he asked, unfolding from the deep sofa to lead her back into the office. And once there, he closed the door behind them. “Is it private in here?”
Olivia’s brow crumpled a bit at the question as she looked at the closed door behind him and then her neatly organized desk loaded with her current projects. “I was thinking you might be here to take me to lunch.” Her nose crinkled before reluctantly meeting his eyes again. “But are you here for something...else?”
A bark of laughter escaped him as he realized the direction of her thoughts. She’d thought he was here for some kind of afternoon desktop quickie. Yeah, now he got her confusion. It wasn’t exactly like that between them.
Shaking his head, he crossed to the cluster of club chairs across her office and held a hand out asking her to join him. “No, Olivia, I’m sorry. Something...unexpected has come up. We need to talk.”
A little furrow had cut between her delicate brows as she lowered herself into the chair across from him. “You’re worrying me, Jeffrey. What’s happened?”
Looking at her guileless face and earnest eyes, he wished there was some way to sugarcoat the bitter news he was about to give her. But it wouldn’t help either of them. “A couple of months before we met, I spent the night with a woman who came to my office today. She’s pregnant.”
Olivia sat stone still, her eyes gone wide. “Was there something between you?”
He opened his mouth to say no, but said instead, “It was one night.”
“Who is she? Would I know her? Is she the type to keep quiet? What does she want from you?”
“I doubt very much you know her, unless you’ve spent more time in Vegas than you let on.”
“She’s a stripper. Oh, God, Jeffrey, please tell me she isn’t a prostitute.”
“No!” He raked a hand back through his hair. “No, she was the waitress at a bar I was stuck at waiting for Connor the night he met Megan. I was killing time and one thing led to another.”
He didn’t like the sound of his explanation, but the deeper, expanded version of the truth wasn’t something Olivia needed to hear.
“You just found out? So, there hasn’t been any time for conclusive paternity testing, then. This baby might not even be yours. I mean, Jeffrey, one night with some Vegas cocktail girl three months ago. We don’t know anything yet.”
A part of him wanted to agree. Tell her she was probably right and to give him a few weeks to sort it out. Only she deserved the whole truth. “We’ll have the DNA testing done, but I already know this baby is mine.”
She didn’t ask for details but he could see the understanding in her eyes. The way the hope shifted toward disappointment.
She swallowed, withdrawing her hands from his to tuck them around her waist. “Are you going to marry her?”
Darcy’s emphatic pre-proposal rejection came to mind, pushing a wry smile to his mouth. “No.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding slowly before meeting his eyes with a steel he hadn’t encountered in hers before. “Then cut her a check.”
He stared hard at the woman seated across from him, the one he’d thought might be able to share his life. “To what, go away? Disappear?” He couldn’t even voice the next alternative he hoped to hell she wasn’t suggesting.
Something roared inside him, as a protective instinct churned hot in his gut. “It’s my child.”
“And we’ll raise it as ours,” she said quickly, taking his hands. “We’ll get married. Have a private adoption. We’ll craft an explanation to suit us both.”
Adoption. Of course, that’s where Olivia’s head would have gone first. Adoption and marriage. A neat package, except for the part where she’d completely discounted Darcy as a part of the equation beyond a dollar amount on a check.
“Jeffrey, we have something here. Something I’ve been waiting to find for a very long time. We could make this work.”
Offering Olivia’s hand a quick squeeze, he pushed up from his chair.
He needed to cut Olivia some slack. She’d jumped to the wrong conclusion, probably because the few details he’d parceled out pointed that way. She was trying to come up with a solution to a problem he’d dropped in front of them. It just wasn’t the right one.
Walking over to the bank of windows, he rubbed his hand over his jaw. Darcy was right. They all needed a little time to get their heads around this new development.
“Darcy doesn’t want to give the baby up. She was offering me an opportunity to be a part of its life. Not to...option it off. You don’t know her.”
Olivia sat back, watching him the way he watched guys from across the conference table. Reading their tells and all the things their faces and bodies said without their mouths having to. “And you do?”
“Only enough to say, she wasn’t here to give her child up.”
“Okay. Then we’ll take it from there.” She followed him across the office, laying her hand gently over his arm.
“Olivia, I don’t know what this next year is going to bring. I think it might be better for everyone if we—”
“No. I’m not going to give up on us because things aren’t exactly the way I thought they would be.” She met his eyes. “We’re so well suited. So right. All I’m asking is you give us a chance before making any decisions. Please.”
Jeff wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She felt stiff against him. Like an off fit in a way he’d never noticed before.
Which he supposed made sense, considering he’d just put something between them neither of them knew exactly how to deal with. Now the least he could do was grant her request and give them a chance.