My phone vibrated in the chest pocket of my suit. With a view of nothing more than the back of my wife’s head, I felt safe to pull it out and look. When she looked at me, I wanted her to know I was here with her rather than buried in my phone.
As if I’d conjured it with my mind, the name of the fertility clinic we’d visited just before leaving flashed on the screen. I’d planned to check the caller and then send them to voice mail without shame, but sometimes, plans needed to change. With one more glance at my work-engrossed wife, I stepped out of the auditorium, waited for the door to thud closed softly, pushed the screen to answer, and put the phone to my ear.
“Kline Brooks.”
“Mr. Brooks, this is Dr. Taunton. I’ve got some things to go over with you. Is now a good time to chat with you and your wife?”
Things to go over. I glanced over my shoulder at the door to the auditorium and quieted my voice slightly. “She’s actually working, but I can relay the message.”
And cushion the blow.
Heartsick, I rubbed at the tightness in the center of my chest with the palm of my hand and looked to the swirling pattern on the carpeted floor. Each fiber of fabric followed the lead of the one next to it, like an intricate course of dominoes, but focusing on its mundaneness did nothing to quell the approaching nausea.
God, this feeling was familiar. Disappointment and helplessness all wrapped together and stuffed tightly inside the confines of my chest. All the money in the fucking world, and all I’d been able to deliver for months was heartbreak. Our friends’ antics had provided quite a number of fun distractions, but I didn’t know how much more I could take.
“Well,” Dr. Taunton started and then stopped with a chuckle. “We got the results back from all the tests, including the blood test…”
I closed my eyes tight and braced myself, jaw clenched and back taut. My muscles were so tight, a simple touch would have shattered them. At least, that’s what it felt like.
“And your wife is already expecting.”
God, how was I going to tell her? Disappoint her again?
Wait…what?
Replaying Dr. Taunton’s words, I went over each one as carefully as I could manage while experiencing what felt like an aneurysm. I felt like I was in a desperation desert, and the hopeful words were a mental mirage of clean, flowing water.
“I’m sorry. Did you just say—”
He laughed again, interrupting and confirming, “You’re going to be parents. Your wife is pregnant. Eleven weeks or so.”
I sank immediately to my knees, a completely involuntary movement, and tears threatened at the corners of my eyes. Denim fabric at my knees destroyed the careful conformation of the carpet, creating its own little smooshed craters. It didn’t take me long to give up the notion that I should climb back to my feet, and I sank back until my heels met my ass.
The feeling of unexpected happiness crashing over disappointment and its proponents in a wave was indescribable. I had never, in my entire thirty-five—fuck, almost thirty-six—years, felt anything like it.
Today, I wouldn’t have to look into the eyes of my wife and wonder whether I’d be able to be enough for her. I knew she was enough for me, and she did a good job of pretending I was for her, but the course of our journey toward starting a family of our own had changed her. Molded her in ways she hadn’t been expecting.
“Thank you,” I said finally, wrangling my thoughts long enough to put two simple but entirely too meaningful words together, and Dr. Taunton laughed again.
“For the first time in a while, I honestly had nothing to do with it. This was all you, her, and some extremely coincidental timing.”
“Thank you,” I mouthed again, but this time, I was talking to God—I had a feeling this had a whole lot to do with him.
Well…
Rehearsal for the pageant was going as planned.
That is, if you considered a half-goatfuck of marketing proportions part of the plan.
Luckily, I did.
The stage lights were bright and strong and pretty much unrelenting on the contestants, and their graceless dance partners and my responsibility—popularly known as the New York Mavericks—were sweating bullets from the ambient heat. The sequined-covered girls handled the spotlights with ease, but the tough, burly men missed dance steps and squinted every goddamn time they faced the audience.
Hell, some of them even covered their eyes with their thick, veiny forearms.
But I had already known this would be the kind of display our guys would produce. I had also known it would be the main draw of intrigue to fill every single seat in the auditorium, and I was certain it would lead toward future marketing and promotional opportunities for nearly every guy on the team.
There would be several GIFs, memes, and social media statuses that would go viral because of the comedic genius that was big, muscular, professional football players trying their damnedest to gracefully sway and lilt across the stage. I was certain.
Sure, it might have been a bit evil for me to put the guys in this situation, but I knew it would eventually be worth it in the end. Well, as long as no one got injured or put themselves in a precarious situation with a teenage beauty pageant queen.
Every appendage and phalange on my body was crossed in ritualistic hope that neither of those tragic scenarios occurred. Something of that magnitude would probably have Wes thinking he could spank anyone he wanted too.
God, Thatch is ridiculous.
“Looking good, boys!” An ear-piercing wolf whistle startled me out of my thoughts, and irritation, carefully contained up until this point, boiled over. I knew that familiar, melodic voice.
Speaking of fucking ridiculous, Dean stood beside me, cheering and clapping his hands in a rhythmic, classy way that only a gorgeous gay man decked out in a pristine Prada suit could pull off.
“Holy hell,” I muttered. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry, honey,” he apologized, but his smirk was anything but apologetic.
I raised a pointed brow. “Liar.”
“Ohhhhh, someone is a bit catty today,” he teased. “Is it that time of the month, sweet cheeks? Can I get you a pad? Some Midol?”
I rolled my eyes. It always came back to the period. We as women not only had to sweat and cramp and bleed over the rebuilding of our uterus every month, we also had to listen to everyone reference it. I was half tempted to smear my menstrual blood on the skin of whoever’s arm as proof the next time they asked me and I was actually on it. “I think it’s amazing that you can keep a straight face while mentioning pads and Midol when I know you are silently gagging on the inside.”
He grinned but only after settling down following a shiver. “I know, right? A little more practice and I might be able to act like I’m straight and enjoy eating pussy.”
I laughed at that. “The only pussy you eat is from that awful little mom-and-pop deli in Chelsea you still frequent.”
“Are you saying they’re serving the good people of New York cat for lunch?”
I raised both hands. “All I’m saying is that their chicken salad sure as hell isn’t being made from actual chickens.”
“Gross.” He grimaced. “Stop ruining my favorite restaurants for me.”
“I’m merely trying to save you from food poisoning. You should be thanking me.”
“Actually, you should be the one thanking me. I saved you from getting some serious wrinkles around your pretty blue eyes with my sexy whistle. You were all frowny and far too serious. And I’m a little bit offended, to be honest. You still haven’t said how fucking sexy I’m looking in this suit.”
I rolled my eyes in exasperation, but still, I couldn’t stop a smile from cresting my lips.
He nudged me with his shoulder. “Aw, there’s my favorite smile from my best girl.”
“Where have you been, by the way? I haven’t seen you since we got off the plane.”
I’d tried to convince Kline to let Dean come along to the Bahamas under the pretense of it being an actual business trip for Brooks Media, but he’d done a hell of a job ruining that argument: Leslie. So, I’d rethought my strategy and come at it from a different angle. A very sexual angle with my ass in the air and Kline behind me with his hands all over it.
Dean was the very lucky recipient of an all-expenses-paid vacation from my sexually coerced billionaire husband, and I didn’t even feel bad about it. He was a hoot, a stylist, and the best gay friend a girl could have all in one. But since the second his ungrateful ass had stepped off the runway, he’d been missing in action.
“Oh, honey, have I got some stories to tell you,” he said with a waggle of his brow. I pulled him toward the row of seats behind us and sank down in the one on the end while he sat beside me. With the way he’d looked when he said the word “stories,” I knew it’d be best to hear them sitting down. “I spent two nights on an all-gay cruise ship, and I never even saw the water.”
I shook my head as several visuals popped into my mind, and I focused on the facts. “Hold on…you mean to tell me you haven’t even been at the resort for the past two days?”
He nodded without shame and did a little shimmy. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. And I don’t regret one second of it. Two days on a big-ass boat and the only moisture I saw got swallowed.”