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Except the longer he stood there, the more it began to feel as if it was totally her problem. And when the elevators started dinging, marking the return of most of the staff, she knew she had to get him somewhere more private. Standing in the middle of a room of reporters was not where they needed to hash this out—especially if she wanted to keep hidden the fact that he was the father of her unborn child.
“Come on,” she said, making an executive decision to get them both out of there before things got even messier than they already were.
She grabbed his arm and propelled him toward the staircase situated in the left corner of the building. She’d get him outside to the back parking lot. Since the Times’ staff had been cut down to a fraction of its former size, no one needed to park back there anymore.
He seemed to be somewhat recovered by the time they made it down the stairs and out of the building. Or at least recovered enough to ask, “It’s mine?”
“Of course it’s yours. Otherwise I wouldn’t have felt the need to call you and leave you that voice mail.”
“I swear, I didn’t get the voice mail. If I had, I would have called you. I would have—” He broke off, shook his head. “So you’re eighteen weeks along, then?”
“You came up with that number pretty quick,” she told him, surprised that he remembered exactly when they’d met.
“I’m not the one who walked away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, I wanted to see you again. I texted you numerous times trying to get you to respond. You’re the one who chose not to.”
He was right. She knew he was right, but still, she couldn’t let it go. “If you were so interested in me, why didn’t you call me back when I called you? Even if you didn’t get the voice mail, you had to have seen that I called.”
For the first time since he’d shown up in her office like some kind of avenging angel, he wouldn’t look her in the eye. Which told her everything she needed to know even before he said, “I erased your number. If you called—”
“When I called,” she corrected him.
“When you called,” he conceded, “you would have come up as an unknown number.”
Well, if that didn’t tell her exactly where she stood with the man who was the father of her child, nothing else would. She’d spent weeks, months, obsessively rereading his texts while he’d simply erased her from his life.
Then again, that was about par for the course with her, wasn’t it? Growing attached when she knew she shouldn’t and then being shown, again and again, that she didn’t matter at all.
“Right. Of course.” She tried to sound flippant, but from the look on his face she wasn’t carrying it off nearly as well as she’d hoped to. “That’s fine. Perfect, really, just go back to that.”
“Go back to what?”
“You living your life, me living mine and never the twain shall meet.”
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “I hate to break it to you, Desi, but the twain has already met. And it made a baby when it did.”
“You say that like I’m supposed to be surprised by the consequences of our one night together. I’m the one who’s been carrying this kid for the last eighteen weeks. And I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with it after it’s born. So you can take all your ‘we made a baby’ crap and go back where you came from.”
“You don’t really think it’s going to be that easy, do you?”
“I don’t see why it has to be complicated. You go about living your life exactly as you always have and I’ll figure out what to do about the baby.”
“As we’ve already established, you’re eighteen weeks along. Which means you’ve already decided what to do about the baby. And if you’re not having an abortion—”
“I’m not! So you’re out of luck on that front.”
Nic made a low, angry sound deep in his throat, shoved a frustrated hand through his hair. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? I said it was obvious that you’ve made up your mind to have the baby and you read that as I want you to get an abortion? What’s wrong with you?”
She nearly laughed. If she had a dollar for every time someone had asked her that question in her life…well, she wouldn’t be working a crappy entry-level journalism job, that’s for sure. “Look, I don’t even know why we’re having this discussion. It’s not your problem—”
“Not my problem?” he squawked.
“Exactly. Not your problem. My job isn’t great but it’s got good benefits and my dad’s life insurance left me pretty well off when he died. So you don’t have to worry that I want something from you, because I don’t. I know this is my baby and—”
“Your baby?”
