I look her over, a sly grin breaking free. “Zane is kind of hot.”
Hattie’s cheeks turn an adorable shade of deep red. “He’s also a billionaire. What in the world would we have in common?”
“You never know.” I sigh, thinking how little common ground it seemed Michael and I have on the surface, but once we scratched a bit deeper, we discovered a real connection.
“More to the point,” Hattie continues, unaware of my inner musings, “I wasn’t really feeling it, you know?”
“As in, it was nice but nothing more?” I raise an eyebrow, and Hattie laughs.
“Exactly.” She nods. “He’s hot, in a decade-older-than-me kind of way, but the blushing thing? It was more having a guy of his caliber notice me professionally.”
“Makes you wonder if maybe you gave up your dream too soon?” I ask, but my question hangs in the air all the way to the office.
“Let’s go eat.” Hattie opens the taxi door, and I follow her upstairs to the kitchenette, where the rest of the girls are unloading boxes and chopsticks onto the tables.
I fill the girls in on the meeting, and Hattie’s insistent blush every time I mention Zane tips them off to her little crush, which results in an abundance of affectionate teasing.
“Damn, Lore, where’d you stuff all that food?” Tia looks me over in appreciation while I help myself to another bite of beef rice noodles.
“What?” I ask mid-chew. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday evening.”
“And she threw up before the meeting,” Hattie adds, and all the girls offer sympathy.
“Okay, we need to get back to work.” Giselle sighs, and we go about collecting all the leftovers.
“I need to pee,” I inform Giselle, who is waiting for me to go back to the design floor together. “Go ahead.”
When I’m out of the stall, Rose is waiting at the sinks.
“Hey.” I smile at her, washing my hands, and she scrutinizes me as I do. “What’s up?”
“Have you peed on a stick yet?” Her question catches me off guard, and I blink a few times before finding my voice.
“What?”
“This is the fourth time I’ve heard about you randomly puking. You’re constantly running to pee, you’ve been eating triple your usual amounts, you’re always tired, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you were picking the egg out of the food. You never did that before. And when was the last time you had your period?”
“I’ve been under a lot of stress lately,” I whisper, grabbing onto the sink for support as I try to remember if I even had a visit from mother nature in the past two months. “Shit.”
“Come on.” Rose puts her arm around my waist and smiles in sympathy. “I’ll go with you to the pharmacy.”
“But, Joanna…” I try to excuse, then remember I’m quitting anyway. “Yeah, let’s go.”
An hour later, I’m sitting in the loft living area, staring at a plastic stick with a blue + on it, lifting my gaze to the table where five more sticks with the same result are piled.
“It’s Michael’s, right?” Rose asks as she places a hot cup of tea on the table in front of me, and I nod. “What are you going to do?”
“Tell him,” I answer without hesitation. “He deserves to know, even if I decide not to go through with it.”
“Yeah,” Rose agrees, blowing on her own tea.
“So, you and Rig, huh?” I change the subject, needing something else to think about for a few minutes. “You were pregnant?”
Rose’s expression never changes, even when she finally answers. “How’d you figure it out?”
“The way you react every time his name comes up and the fact that he writes all his songs about a fiery-haired girl.”
“Yeah,” Rose laughs, though it’s void of humor. “Kind of hard to miss, I guess.”