Blame It on Chocolate

He caught up with her midflight, with what he hoped was an unobtrusive hand plucking her shirt-tail. “We’ll be in Lucy’s office for a few minutes, everyone. You okay, Gretchen?”

“Sure,” she said, which was what Gretchen always said, but in this case, Reiko was already inviting her to try the new chocolate. The kid’d be okay.

Lucy would probably be okay, too.

Whether he was going to be okay was the real question. Because one look at her face and he knew this was going to go bad. Very bad. Maybe very, very bad.

As soon as they were out of sight, she said, “I know, I know, we didn’t finish our Bliss project discussion the other day—”

“No, we didn’t. And we need to get that done damn quick. But that’s not all we have to discuss right now.”

“What?” At the door to her office, she moved in first, quickly, as if allergic to being that close to him. He’d felt the startled tremor streak her spine when he’d touched the back of her shirt. And now she didn’t hide behind the desk, but she moved as far as the windowsill, where she could lean, arms under her chest, chin up…as if she were braced for a blow.

He latched the door and leaned there, giving her some space, but for damn sure blocking the exit. “So,” he said gently, “you’re pregnant.”

“Huh?” She shook her head as if disbelieving such an incomprehensible ridiculous statement.

Aw, hell. Politicians lied better than she did. Nick felt as if a lead ball—with spikes—had just dropped in his stomach. Yeah, he’d guessed the truth from her voice last night. From everything. Until that instant, though, he thought there was still a chance of some other answer. Fear of disaster didn’t always mean a disaster was going to happen. Only he saw those hazel eyes shifting from his like a thief in a bank.

He wiped a hand over his face, wishing he could wash himself into a state of invisibility. “You’re pregnant,” he said again. “By me.” For a second there, he wasn’t dead positive if he was saying it aloud for her sake or his.

“For Pete’s sake. I’m going to sue that doctor. I realize it was your doc, but all the same, he can’t just tell someone else a patient’s confidential medical infor—”

“Luce—” He had to interrupt her. “No one told me. I just added it up. Your sudden throwing up, the timing, your swearing there was absolutely nothing wrong. Only you’ve never even taken a sick day, much less mentioned ever having an upset stomach to anyone. So…I looked at a calendar. The night you called me about the successful experiment—”

“That night doesn’t have to mean anything. For all you know, I sleep with zillions of guys. Regularly.”

He didn’t say, when cows fly. But straight arrows like Lucy just didn’t tumble for strangers. Or on a whim. Hell, her greenhouse floor was clean enough to eat from; she was that persnickety. “Look. You don’t have to make up stories. We’re in this fix together—”

“You’re not in any fix, Nick. I am. This was totally my fault. You never came on to me. Never invited anything. Nothing would ever have happened if I hadn’t…” She swirled her hands.

“Is that supposed to mean you didn’t intend to tell me?” When she didn’t give him the correct answer for that question, he said, very very quietly, “You just agreed to take on a mountain of extra work—to become an integral part of a chocolate project that could throw the cacao market on its ear and shake up the whole chocolate industry. Yet you didn’t figure you needed to mention that you had a major health issue like a pregnancy on your plate?”

“Well. No.”

Okay. He didn’t have a temper, he’d told himself a hundred times. And if he did, there were very few people who could push it. But Lucy headed the list. Ramifications of this pregnancy—her pregnancy, their pregnancy—kept popping in his brain like mini-explosions. What to do. How. Where. When. But first, he obviously had to deal with that sick, panicked expression on Lucy’s face.

“Luce…listen to me. We can work out whatever you want to work out. We can make happen whatever you want to happen.” He heaved out a wary sigh. “Although you know my grandfather will only have one solution.”

“No one has to know it’s yours. And that includes Orson,” she promised him.

“That’s no solution.”

“I’ll get a mountain of pressure from family, too. Everyone will have an opinion about what I should do and try to railroad me into doing it.”

“Caving into pressure from any side is no solution, either.”

“So,” she said, as if that single word were a finished thought.

“So,” he echoed, and took a step forward, meaning to touch her. Why exactly, he didn’t know, when he had never initiated a personal contact of any kind with Luce before. But the instinct to touch seemed to bubble up from a well of frustration and helplessness—feelings he had no tolerance for. This was all going crazy wrong. So far their whole conversation had been awkward and weird and unnatural. For darn sure, he’d wanted to face her, wanted to have this out. Wanted it down in black ink, what they were both going to do—if there really was a pregnancy.

Only in both his head and heart, he just couldn’t seem to totally believe it. That single occasion, hell, it hadn’t even been a whole night. One single crazy, crazy hour had led to this. In fact, when he’d wakened the next morning—in his own bed, alone—he thought he’d dreamed the whole thing. It just seemed incomprehensible that anything intimate could have happened between them.

And now Lucy was shrinking from him.

Nick couldn’t remember feeling lost. The feeling was alien to everything he knew about himself. When his parents died, grief had overwhelmed him, but he’d had to take on responsibility and grow up so fast that he’d never had time to wallow. God knew, he’d made mistakes. And he’d played around plenty. But from the time he was a kid, he’d had the power to make all the major decisions about his own life with nominal outside interference. Now, though, there was Luce. Who didn’t seem willing to even talk to him, much less include him in giant decision-making that affected both of them.

This wasn’t just…upsetting and unsettling. He couldn’t feel more lost if he’d been dropped in the South Pole without a compass.

“Look, Luce,” he tried again. “Let’s work from stuff we know we can agree on. I’ll pay all your doctor bills. And for anything else you need or wanted related to this—”

“Actually, I don’t think I’ll need help. You know what great insurance I have from Bernard’s. But don’t worry. I’ll ask if something gets beyond what I can manage.”

Shit and double shit. Strangers could be having this conversation. Not people who were supposed to have been lovers. “Okay, skip any talk of money for now. What about…the pregnancy itself. I mean, I don’t know whether you’re scared or happy or angry or what. Have you thought about what you want to do?”

Her shoulders drooped just a little as she shook her head. “I just found out yesterday. To be honest, Nick, I’m still reeling.”

It was the first honest, natural thing she said. “Me, too,” he admitted. “I don’t know what to say, what to do. But it seems like the place to start is with the sure things. If you’re absolutely sure you want to keep the baby, that’s one thing. But if you’re considering—”

“An abortion? Or adoption?” She swallowed hard, as if trying to talk through a stone-size lump in her throat. “I’ll consider everything. All the options. But the only thing I’m positive of right now, Nick, is that you and I don’t even like each other. Not really. We had a moment. That’s all. There’s no basis for a marriage or anything crazy like that.”

“I wasn’t thinking marriage.”

“I’m sure you weren’t,” she said swiftly. “I just wanted to clear the air, make sure you know that I’d never pull that chain in a hundred years.”

She’d stiffened up all over again, as if braced for him to say something hurtful. He started to answer her, but then the doorknob rattled, followed by strange scratchy noises. “Not now,” Nick called out, but the knob just rattled again.

“Uncle Nick, it’s not me!” He heard Gretchen’s voice pipe up, and glanced at Lucy, who was obviously as distracted by the child’s voice as he was. Her lips twitched at Gretchen’s obvious fib.

“If it isn’t you, how come I can hear your voice?” Nick said wryly.

“Because it’s Baby and Boo Boo. Somehow they got in the front door. And they ran all over the place. They’re trying to find Lucy. And I can’t hold them. But don’t interrupt your meeting! I’m right here! I won’t let them in! Don’t you worry, Uncle Nick!”

Any other time, he’d have laughed—and Lucy undoubtedly would have, too. This time she just said quickly, “We can’t discuss this now, Nick. Not at work. And besides that…”

Yeah, he knew. Besides that, outside the door was clearly bedlam.

Of course, pregnancy was a kind of bedlam, too, but for now, hell, both his personal life and Project Bliss seemed like trying to handle balloons in a high wind. He’d not only lost control. He couldn’t imagine right then how the hell he was ever going to get control again.

CHAPTER FIVE

SATURDAY MORNING, just after ten, Lucy opened the bathroom door in a rush and ran smack into Russell—or, more specifically, her forehead rammed into his. Both winced.

Lucy recovered quicker, but her sense of humor was starting to slip on the subject of her cousin. God knew she loved him. Totally. The way you can only love good family—through their bad habits and the good stuff both. But damn. Ever since he’d shared his revelation with her, he seemed to think talking about it with her every spare second was going to make the subject easier to deal with. It wasn’t that far a drive for him to commute from school in Mankato, but he was starting to become a dust catcher at her place. Last night he hadn’t gone home at all.

When she’d first moved into her own place, she’d imagined—she’d actually totally believed—that she could go to the bathroom by herself. Indulge in her wickedness, by herself. Run around naked if she wanted to, by herself.

“I know you want to talk some more, Russ, but honestly, I just can’t right now. I told you. I’m having lunch with my mom—and it’s a solid hour and a half drive from here—”

She flew past him toward her bedroom, still zipping her favorite black jeans and toweling her hair dry at the same time. Russell, who seemed to think his announcement about being gay meant she wouldn’t mind dressing around him, followed as far as her doorway. “I just don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you to talk to.”

“That’s crazy, Russ. You spent all last night talking to my dad, you get on with him like a house afire. You know you could tell him—”

“No. He’s great, but I couldn’t tell him this. Or anyone else.”

“I’m just not sure why you picked me. I love you. You know that, but honestly, I know nothing about this kind of thing.”

“That’s not the point. The point is that you’re the one person on the planet I completely trust. Not just trust that you wouldn’t tell, if I asked you not to. But also trust that you wouldn’t condemn me.” He watched her pull on the white sweater with black stripes, a gift from her mother, and then attack her hair with a dryer.

“Are you sure you’re gay?” Lucy asked over the dryer’s whine.

“I admit I’m not dead sure. But I think I am.”

“Did you actually sleep with another guy?”

“No.”

“Kiss another guy, make out?” Cripes, she couldn’t hear over the dryer so she switched it off, opened some pots, did the cheek and lip thing, then the earring thing, then grabbed her hairbrush. Somewhere she had some pull-on black boots. Dress boots. Soft kid leather. Heels.

“Well, no. But the feelings are there.”

“Well, everybody gets feelings. When I see a beautiful woman in the movies, I notice her, and believe me, I’m not gay.” The boots were in the very back of her closet. She rubbed off the dust, then backed out and hopped on one foot to pull the right one on. “For Pete’s sake. I think everybody notices their same gender and can respond to their attractiveness and looks—without automatically thinking you’re gay. Or that there’s anything weird at all.” She pushed hard—they were those kinds of boots that fit great once you had them on, but it took ages to get them on right.

“You think?” Russell asked. He still stood slouched in her doorway when she pushed past him toward the kitchen. He was wearing what he’d worn last night, when he’d claimed he wasn’t sleeping over—the oversized shirt, the canvas pants, the no socks.

“Come on, Russell, you know that. It’s just common sense. Only the homophobic types get hysterical if they have a feeling now and then. But I think you should ask someone with some life experience in this—”

“No,” he said in a panicked groan.

“Okay, okay. But I knew one homosexual person pretty well. She’s a woman. I met her in college. She was a good friend then, we just kind of lost touch after graduation. But I could try to track her down if you want me to ask her for some information or advice.” She almost choked when they walked in the kitchen. Her pristine white counter and gleaming sink had disappeared. All she saw were beer cans. Coffee mugs. Leftover pizza. Crumbs. Mysterious and scary stains on the floor.

She had a fond memory from a few weeks ago—before the Night of the Chocolate—when the kitchen was still hers, all hers, and even the corners in the cupboards had been spotless. Even the corners of the top cupboards. Even under the refrigerator. Even behind the trash bin.

“Did you actually do anything with that friend? You know, experiment or anything?” Russell was now leaning in the doorway to the kitchen.

“No.”

“But did you want to experiment? Did you think about it?”

“No. Cripes, Russell. It never occurred to me. I don’t think it occurred to her, either. She was just a regular kind of friend.” She grabbed her fringe bag, passed by the fresh round of messes in her living room, and shot a passing, desperate look at her picture over the fireplace. The only thing still normal in the whole place seemed to be her picture of the lone eagle flying over the lake. Her life was starting to feel like it had moved ten points off center and was never going to come back in focus again. Except for the eagle. The eagle was still all hers. She grabbed her coat. “I have to go. I’ll be late for lunch with Mom as it is.”

“But you’re not getting…impatient…about talking with me about this, are you?”

“Of course not. We’ll talk whenever you want.”

“I know your dad’s at the store. But I may stick around with him today. If he wants to go to a movie or something.”

“Sure, sounds great. Only if I come home to find this place even more of a sty, I’m going to kill you both.”

“Sure, Luce. Sure.” He stood motionless and woebegone as she smooched his cheek.

She ran outside, only to feel a startling gush of wind. The ground was a muddy, soggy mess from all the melting snow, but even though the day was ugly, the sky polka-dotted with clouds, the breeze had a cocky scent to it. A springlike whisper of sweetness. She wanted to savor it, only damnation, guilt kept biting her conscience, so she ran back in the house. “Russell,” she said irritably, “I love you. And you’re going to be okay. All right?”

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