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“Unlike you, who never said anything and who had been married.”
She didn’t like to talk about Jason.
“So I learned young that marriage isn’t for me. But most women seem to want to be married.”
“And some prefer a career.”
“I hadn’t heard the two were mutually exclusive,” he said dryly. “Most of the women at Signals, Inc. are married, aren’t they? And each has a career.”
“I was engaged once,” she said slowly.
She rarely talked about Jason. What was the point? But Trace had shared his past, she could do no less.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were making plans for where we would live after we married and Jason said something about wanting a big house and yard for the children. We had never discussed that before—he’d never said anything about wanting children. I had to tell him I couldn’t have a baby. He went really still, then got up and left. The next day he came to see me to tell me he wanted children—his children. If I couldn’t provide them, it was better we called it quits at that point rather than later.”
“Bastard.”
“A lot of men want their own children.”
“A woman isn’t solely a baby machine,” Trace said. He rose and paced to the window. “So did he go on to marry and have a bunch of kids?”
“I don’t know what happened to him after we split.”
She never tried to find out. Her sister had urged her to do so at one time—just to bring some kind of closure, but Cath felt she had all the closure she needed. Bottom line—she’d not been good enough for Jason Donalds.
Only—it turned out she might have been. If they’d gotten married, would she eventually have become pregnant?
For a moment she daydreamed of finding Jason and casually walking by him at a store or the mall, pushing her baby in a carriage.
But of course, he’d certainly fallen out of love with her as she had with him, so there would be no emotional elation on showing him she could have a baby.
And there were no guarantees she was going to deliver a healthy infant.
The daydream vanished. The niggling worry returned. She was able to push it away for long periods of time, but it slipped in when she was not expecting it.
“How far do you want to take this seeing each other bit,” she asked.
He turned and leaned against the wall, his hands in his pants pockets.
“As in?”
“I have a doctor’s appointment every Tuesday afternoon. I was able to make them at five, so I only have to leave work a little early. I don’t want to cause any gossip until I have a better feel for whether this little one is going to be okay. I’m scheduled for a sonogram next week, and then I’ll have another later in the pregnancy.”
If there was a later. But she didn’t reveal that fear to Trace. She tried to keep those thoughts at bay. She wanted this baby so much. She didn’t know what she’d do if she lost it.
“I’ll make arrangements to go with you next week. And whenever I can thereafter,” Trace said.
“Are you serious about being there at the delivery?”
She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Some of it was superstition. If she didn’t count on anything, maybe she wouldn’t be disappointed.
“Why not? I was there at the conception. I like to see a project through.”
She almost smiled at his attempt at humor. But the magnitude of the situation wasn’t funny.
“You’ll have to meet my parents. You met my mom, but not under the best circumstances.”
