Covert Conception

Chapter Three

“Is this your idea of a bad joke?” Rick asked.

Natalie carefully studied his reaction—his iron jaw, his narrowed gunmetal-gray eyes and thunder-struck expression—and she quickly realized she didn’t care for any of it. It was too similar to what her own reaction had been when Kitt first told her about the test results.

She’d expected…what?

A confession?

Perhaps an explanation that would cause all of this to make sense?

Or maybe that’s what she hoped he would do, help her make sense of the situation. A miracle of sorts. However, it was obvious Rick didn’t have answers or a miracle. Or if he had them, he wasn’t ready to share them with her.

That didn’t mean he was innocent in all of this.

“Please tell me this is a joke,” he amended.

“Are you saying you didn’t orchestrate what happened?” Natalie countered.

He looked at her as if her ears were on backwards. “You’re damn right that’s what I’m saying.”

And he was adamant about it, too.

Natalie suddenly felt even more desperate, and it was desperation that made her toss the next question at him. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m telling you the truth, that’s why.” Rick opened his mouth. Closed it. Shook his head. Cursed. “Hell’s bells, Natalie, do you really believe I’d drug you so I could sleep with you?”

She’d already asked herself that. At least a dozen times. And during none of that personal questioning had she convinced herself that Rick would do something like this. He wasn’t the sort of man who required drugging or any coercion to get a woman into bed.

“I’m pregnant,” she restated. “I don’t know how it happened, and my only clue is that surveillance video. I need answers, and that’s why I’m here.”

He shook his head. “What you need is to have the pregnancy test repeated.”

“I’ve already done that.” She was up to a dozen times of watching for minus signs on little urine-soaked white plastic sticks. She’d try a dozen more if necessary, praying for one negative result. “They’ve all been positive.”

“Then, you need to see a doctor right away,” Rick quickly suggested.

“I did that a few hours ago. I had an ultrasound and a thorough examination. There’s definitely a baby.”

He cursed again, made his way to the chair, gripped the armrest and dropped down onto the seat. “This can’t be happening. The tests, the doctor, the ultrasound and the video are all wrong. They have to be.”

She’d had that reaction, too. Denial. It’d taken hours to get past just the tip of it. But she couldn’t afford Rick that same amount of time to work through his issues. She had an eerie feeling that time wasn’t on their side. “I need you to think back through—”

“Something happened that night,” he interrupted. But he didn’t say anything else.

Natalie froze. Waited. She forced herself to stay calm. “Obviously something happened,” she said when Rick just sat there.

He glanced at her stomach. “I didn’t mean that. I mean I blacked out.”

Her heart had been racing before that, but she could have sworn it stopped mid-beat. Natalie shook her head. “When? How?”

But before he could answer, the phone rang. He waved it off, but the ringing continued and when he perused his shop and apparently realized his employees were all busy, he reached across the desk and answered the phone.

Natalie actually welcomed the interlude. Yes, they needed to get to the bottom of this. Yes, she desperately needed to know what’d happened to her. To them. But she also needed a moment to compose herself. Right now, a thin thread of composure was the only thing that prevented her from screaming. And she didn’t want to lose it in front of Rick.

What was going on?

What?

Natalie had been asking herself that for a day and a half and was afraid she wasn’t any closer to the truth than she had been when Kitt had first dropped this bombshell.

She was pregnant.

Pregnant!

With a child she couldn’t even remember conceiving.

Unplanned motherhood alone would have been more than enough to deal with, but motherhood under these circumstances was terrifying.

“I’ll get that work order,” she heard Rick say at the end of a heavy, frustrated sigh.

He stood, brushed past her. He was so close that she had no trouble catching his scent. With the nonexistent A/C, the steamy claustrophobic office and the fact that he’d obviously just finished a long day of manual labor, his body odor should have been offensive.

It wasn’t.

Far from it.

Oh, there was sweat all right. His white cotton T-shirt was practically soaked, and the snug fabric strained across his toned pecs and arms. His hair was wet as well. His slightly too-long coffee-colored hair fell, permanently disheveled, almost to his shoulders. But he didn’t smell sweaty. He somehow managed to smell, well, manly.

He snatched one of the forms from the top of the filing cabinet and read off some figures. Because her energy seemed sapped and her pulse had turned thick and syrupy, Natalie simply sat on the edge of his desk, watching and listening. Waiting for him to finish—without a clue what they would say to each other once he was done. None of her life experiences had prepared her for this.

Rick’s movements were jerky. Stiff. Angry. And he kept casting glances her way. Natalie was casting some his way as well.

Sweet heaven, if she thought for one minute that he’d had any voluntary part in this, she would have had him arrested. Except an arrest wouldn’t really have given her answers.

Nor would it change what had happened.

She slid her hand over her stomach. A baby. Even though she’d seen the ultrasound, it didn’t seem real. Maybe once she understood the circumstances, once she’d heard a plausible explanation—any explanation—maybe then she could come to terms with this. It wasn’t logical, but at the moment, she needed that hope.

Rick said an abrupt goodbye to the caller and slammed down the phone as if he’d declared war on it. In the same motion, he waved off one of his employees who was trying to get his attention through the small window.

“What exactly do you remember about that night?” Rick demanded.

The answer was readily available on the tip of her tongue—mainly because she’d already asked herself the same question again and again. “I was on prescription meds, and I was exhausted. So, most of the party is a little blurry.”

“How could we not remember that?” He pointed to the frozen image of them on the screen.

“I don’t know.”

He made a sound of agreement. It blended with his jagged huffs of breaths. “How do we know it really happened? Those people could be actors.”

“They aren’t. Kitt had the images enhanced, and if they’re actors, then they’re exact replicas of us, right down to my freckles and that little scar on the left side of your neck that you got fly-fishing when you were a kid.”

He threw his hands in the air before dropping them to his hips. “Then, maybe that’s what they are—actors with very authentic makeup.”

She gave a weary been-there-done-that sigh. “I would love it if that were true. But it wouldn’t explain the bruise on my arm. Or the bruise on your shoulder. And it certainly wouldn’t explain this pregnancy.”

“Maybe the pregnancy happened some other time,” he fired back.

For some reason, a reason Natalie didn’t want to explore, that stung. Yet, Rick certainly had a right to ask that. If their positions had been reversed, she would certainly want to know.

“I haven’t had sex in over a year,” Natalie explained. Not easily. Discussing her love life—or lack thereof—with Rick Gravari wasn’t tops on her list of favorite things to do. “At least, I haven’t had sex that I know about.”

He cocked his head to the side and gave her a flat look. “And you think you unknowingly had sex with me?”

Weary of the questions and the verbal battle between them, she tipped her head back to the screen. “It’s you in that video, Rick. But if you’re looking for definitive proof, I don’t have it. The video can’t be further enhanced. There’s no footage from a different angle that might give us a clearer image. And it’s too early to do a DNA test to prove paternity. I asked,” she added when his flat look was no longer so flat.

That caused a slight lift of his eyebrow. Natalie responded by lifting an eyebrow of her own. And by asking one very important question. “You said you blacked out at the party. What happened?”

He didn’t respond right away. Rick groaned softly and scrubbed his hands over his face. “Your caterer, I think.”

The fit of temper that Natalie had nourished and fed suddenly cooled. “What does the caterer have to do with any of this?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.” He paused, caught her gaze. “Someone put something in my drink.”

Natalie considered what he was saying. “You think that someone was the caterer?”

He nodded. “The only thing I had to eat or drink that night was at your party.”

“That proves nothing.”

Or did it? Because someone on the catering staff, a man, had given her a drink as well. Sparkling fruit juice. It’d had a somewhat bitter tang to it. At the time Natalie had attributed the taste to her prescription meds.

“No. But the lab test I had done proves something,” Rick corrected.

That captured Natalie’s complete attention. “What lab test?”

There was no sign of cockiness or victory in his stormy gray eyes. There was only frustration and yes, lots of anger and confusion. “When I woke up that morning after the party, I realized I didn’t have a clue how I’d gotten home. My motorcycle was there, parked outside the garage, a place I’d never leave it. Never. Since I felt like hell, I went to see my doctor right away. He ran some tests, and the lab found a substance in my blood.”

“What kind of substance?” Natalie asked.

Rick shook his head. “It was some kind of narcotic. My doctor had no idea what it was so he sent it out for further testing. The lab is still trying to identify it.”

Natalie was so glad she was sitting down. If she hadn’t been, that would have sent her in search of a chair. She felt a couple of steps past being light-headed. But she wasn’t so light-headed that she didn’t immediately spot an inconsistency in his account.

“Why didn’t you go to the police with this?” Natalie demanded.

“And tell them what, exactly? That maybe someone at your party slipped an unspecified narcotic into my drink? I decided I’d wait for the lab results before I started pointing any fingers. Of course, that was before I saw that surveillance video. I’m ready to do some finger-pointing now.”

Natalie shifted her position slightly, trying to find some kind of equilibrium both mentally and physically. “Why would someone on the catering staff have drugged you?”

“I’ve asked myself that a dozen times, and the only thing I could come up with was maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe the beer was contaminated or something.”

“Then why wasn’t anyone else affected?” she immediately asked.

He stared at her and waited for her to draw her own conclusions. It didn’t take long. Rick was likely the only person at the party drinking beer. It was indeed a champagne crowd. But then, she was probably the only one who’d had sparkling fruit juice.

And that in turn meant it would have been fairly easy to drug them.

That explained the how, but it certainly didn’t explain the who and why.

“I don’t know the caterer,” she continued. “And I don’t know the man who handed me my drink.”

But she could find out, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

Natalie checked her watch. It was nearly 6:00 p.m. and she wished for more hours in the day, because her list of things to do was growing. “I want to talk to your doctor and the lab technician who ran the test on you. I’ll also want to talk to my mother, since she’s the one who hired the caterer. She’ll be home from her therapy session by now. I’ll call her.”

Rick caught onto her wrist when she reached into her purse for her phone. “Think this through. If you start asking questions about the caterer, your mother will want to know why. And she won’t quit until she gets the truth. The whole truth. So, if you plan to tell her about the baby tonight, you won’t want to do that over the phone.”

That was true. Natalie only wished she’d thought of it first.

“We’ll drive over there and talk to her,” Rick insisted, keeping hold of her wrist.

Natalie shook off his grip. “We?”

“We,” he confirmed. Without warning, he peeled off his damp T-shirt, grabbed a clean one from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and slipped it on. “I want to get to the bottom of this, too, and I want as much information as we can get about this caterer.”

Natalie almost argued with him. Mainly because it was natural to argue with Rick about any- and everything. But he had a point. The caterer or someone on his or her staff could have orchestrated all of this.

After all, someone had cleaned up the “crime scene.”

Someone had gotten both Rick and his motorcycle back to his house. Someone had dressed her for bed and discarded any evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. So that meant someone at her party had been involved on a very personal level. Her mother was the first step to figuring out whom.

And they could do that after they told Macy about the pregnancy.

Natalie was already dreading the conversation. It would be messy. Her mother just wasn’t very good at handling contingencies, and this pregnancy definitely fell into that category. There’d be tears and perhaps hours of melodrama. Unfortunately, her mother had to know.

Rick grabbed his keys from the desk and headed for the door. Natalie was right behind him.

“We’ll take my car,” she insisted.

Rick glanced over his shoulder and gave her that look. One she instantly recognized. And hated. She called it his blue-collar/chip-on-the-shoulder glare.

“This has nothing to do with the price of my vehicle,” she pointed out. “It’s just I’m conveniently parked right out front, and I’m not exactly dressed to climb onto the back of your Harley.”

He made a sound to indicate he didn’t believe her explanation.

She made a sound to indicate she didn’t care what he thought.

It was going to be a long drive to Macy’s.

“Besides,” she added, “riding a motorcycle in my condition wouldn’t be smart. And even you can’t argue with that.”

He didn’t.

With both of them still stewing and no doubt asking themselves a dozen unanswerable questions, Rick let one of his employees know that he needed to run an errand before they got into her car.

Natalie hadn’t thought the tension could get any worse, but she was obviously wrong. Without the noise and the distraction of the shop, the silence settled uncomfortably between them. And with each additional moment of silence, Natalie became more and more upset. More and more frightened.

More and more incensed.

Why was this happening?

Why had she become pregnant with Rick’s child?

Rick, of all people.

They had so much bad blood between them. Too much. But it hadn’t always been that way. Rick and she had known each other since childhood, and her mother had tried to get them together for years. Why, it was never clear to Natalie, but apparently Macy felt that Rick and she were the “perfect couple” destined to lead the “perfect life.”

Ironic.

Because her family was old money. To the proverbial manor born. Rick, on the other hand, was a self-made businessman with a keen sense of turning nothing into plenty of something. No Ivy League degree for him. No degree at all. He’d shunned his parents’ investment business and had become everything they hadn’t wanted him to be—the owner of a custom motorcycle shop. Yet, the normally socially conscious Macy had seemingly overlooked all of that so she could encourage a relationship that Natalie and Rick knew would never happen.

And it wouldn’t happen because of that one lapse in judgment three years earlier.

Neither Rick nor she had had much luck coping with that lapse. Hell on earth wasn’t just a meaningless expression for them. They were living it.

“You’re totally certain about this pregnancy?” Rick asked.

Natalie almost preferred the silence to the question. There was none of that chip-on-the-shoulder animosity in his voice, which meant all of this was likely sinking in, and he wasn’t taking it too well.

“Dead certain,” she assured him.

Rick shook his head, leaned forward. “I don’t remember even speaking to you that night.”

“Same here,” she agreed.

“Yet according to that video, we ended up in the hall outside your bedroom. Kissing. Touching…”

Oh, yes. Definitely kissing. Definitely touching. They’d been all over each other—literally.

Though she knew it wasn’t possible, especially since she hadn’t remembered anything else, Natalie could have sworn she recalled that kiss.

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and it was as if that one glance opened the hormonal floodgates. There were still no specific memories for the night of the party. But there were other memories, ones that were best forgotten.

As was Rick.

And she’d spent the last three years trying not to remember that he was the most unforgettable man she’d ever known.

It was hard to believe all of his mismatched features could add up to something extraordinary. But heaven help the female population, they did. The olive, bronzy skin: a DNA contribution from his Greek father. Those sizzling gray eyes framed with indecently long lashes. The cheekbones of a Celtic warrior. She’d yet to meet a woman of any age or any background who hadn’t found Rick Gravari hot.

Including her.

Much to her disgust.

That one kiss they’d shared three years ago, that one short lapse in judgment had caused someone to die. Not just someone though. Someone they both loved.

“David,” she said under her breath.

A little over three years ago David had asked her to marry him. She’d said yes, even though David knew she didn’t love him. He also knew she was looking for an out, a way to stop her mother’s relentless matchmaking. That’s why Natalie had agreed to be his fiancée. But not his wife. She’d told him upfront that there would be no marriage.

David obviously had thought he could change her mind.

Natalie had thought an engagement ring would stop her from wanting Rick. It hadn’t. One night, Rick and she had run into each other at a party. They’d talked. Had too much to drink. Had gotten way too close. One thing led to another, and they kissed.

Just as David walked in on them.

Obviously feeling betrayed by his two best friends, David had swallowed what turned out to be a lethal dose of sleeping pills. He’d died in the ER only a few hours later.

David’s death would always be with Rick and her. It would always connect them.

And it would always keep them apart.

At least Natalie had been sure of that until now. Until this pregnancy.

She was carrying Rick’s baby. That was the one element that neither of them could dismiss. And it was the element that had brought them together.

“Take the next turn to get to Commerce Street,” Rick instructed. “And don’t put on your blinker.”

“Why?” she immediately asked, forcing herself out of her troubling thoughts.

“Just do it.”

And for some reason unknown to her, she obeyed him. Maybe it was because she had no fight or argument left in her, but it also had something to do with that suddenly intense expression on Rick’s face.

“Do you recognize that SUV behind us?” Rick asked.

Natalie’s attention flew to the rearview mirror. There was indeed a black SUV following closely behind them. “No. Why?”

“Because it’s been behind us since we left the shop.”

“It’s probably a coincidence.” This particular street wasn’t the busiest in the city, but it did lead to several main intersections.

“Maybe.” But he didn’t sound as if he believed that.

Natalie, on the other hand, decided to hope for the best. She’d already had enough thrown at her for one day without borrowing more trouble.

“Take the next left,” Rick told her.

Without turning on her signal, she waited until the last possible second to make the turn. She was going a little too fast, and the tires squealed in protest.

She checked the mirror again.

The SUV made the same slightly out-of-control turn.

Her heart went into overdrive. That turn didn’t seem to be a coincidence. It seemed deliberate. But why would someone be following them?

“Speed up,” Rick insisted.

Natalie did, and the SUV followed suit. In fact, it continued to mimic her actions when Natalie slowed down and switched lanes.

What the devil was going on?

With that scary question pounding in her head, Natalie slammed her foot on the accelerator and pushed her car well over the speed limit.

The driver of the SUV followed them.

Chapter Four

Rick hadn’t thought this day could get any worse.

But he’d obviously thought wrong.

He didn’t have a clue why that SUV was following them, but it was. He had no doubts about that. Coupled with the drugged sex/baby news, Rick was ready to concede that he was in the middle of one crazy dream.

Except this was too real to be a dream.

“Turn right,” Rick instructed Natalie.

She didn’t argue, but he could see the concern all over her face. She was chewing on her bottom lip, and she had a white knuckle death grip on the steering wheel. Still, she made that right turn and sped up. Once again, the SUV stayed right on their bumper.