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“Not this time, no, Miss Brooke.”
Nicole leaned back against the bed and took a deep breath, and, sure enough, there really weretwolittle blobs, side by side, floating around in her abdomen.
“Okay. This is fine. Not right now, this second, but it will be fine.”
“I think that’s the perfect attitude to have, Miss Brooke,” said Dr. Hilton in her calm voice. “It’s okay to be unsteady right now, just as long as you know that it will all be okay in the end.”
Thankfully, that did make Nicole feel better.
* * *
Nicole finally came out of the examination room, her belly cleaned of ultrasound goo, and once again in that strange state that she’d been in so many times before where the world halted a little before her life took a completely new direction. Scott stood from the plastic chair he’d been waiting on. He took one look at Nicole, the shock written all over her body, and his face crumpled. Given their family history, he’d assumed the worst straight away.
“I’m not sick,” she said quickly. “It’s not bad, it’s… I’m not sick.”
“Then why do you look like that?” he asked, voice still worried.
“I’ll tell you in the truck,” she said, walking out of the hospital as fast as possible, just wanting to be at home. The only thing she could think about right now was that she was going to have to tell Brendan at some point; shehadto. But how was she going to do that when he just ignored her calls? It wasn’t something she really wanted to send via a text.
All she could do was follow Dr. Hilton’s advice. It might all be a mess now, but she would figure it out. She just needed a little time.
CHAPTER17
BRENDAN
The firm had been in a state of celebration for weeks after Brendan had returned and signed off in person on the once-failed deal. The seller was happy, free from the corrupt representative; Tina was happy to have her brother back; all of the companies and their employees were happy that building was now going to proceed on state-of-the-art apartment buildings; and investors were happy, with offers to buy apartments and offices before they were even built already rolling in. Brendan had been wealthy long enough that he was no longer all that impressed looking over general figures, but this had blown even his expectations out of the water.
He’d gone to celebration dinners with everyone, attended meetings to get all the plates spinning again, and through it all he had hoped that the rush that he had used to get from this would come back to him. But it never did. Not even a fraction of it.
Brendan didn’t think he’d ever been so miserable. Even before the whole farm debacle, just after his heart attack, he hadn’t felt this downtrodden. He’d been lost, sure, but he hadn’t felt destroyed. He’d just been oblivious. Isn’t that what Nicole had called him once? Oblivious?
And that was mostly what was making him miserable. All he could think about was Nicole, and no matter how hard he tried to drown himself in work, in socializing, in anything at all that could distract him, his thoughts almost always returned to Nicole, still out there on Green Acres farm and, as far as he knew, once again doing it all by herself. He’d just picked up and abandoned her because he’d gotten his feelings hurt. Every day that he entered the office, he ached to be out in the fields instead, already done with the morning milking and herding the cattle to their pasture for the day.
He’d kept those thoughts to himself, though, and while he was sure that none of his staff had picked up that anything was wrong, Tina was a different matter. She knew him too well; there was no way she hadn’t noticed his utter lack of enthusiasm for what had once brought him so much pleasure. She hadn’t asked him outright what had happened, mostly because when he’d returned to Houston he very bluntly said he didn’t want to talk about it. But Brendan had a feeling that if this darkness around him continued, she was going to be broaching the topic sometime soon whether he liked it or not.
What he should do was call Nicole. It was all he wanted, to hear her voice, for them to talk things through, to see if this couldsomehowbe fixed. But the more time that passed, the harder it got. Maybe after a day or two he could have explained it away as just needing some space, needing to collect himself. But more than six weeks had passed and now it just made him look like a petulant child who was giving her the cold shoulder instead of talking about it.
Because the more he thought about it, the more he could see her side of things. He’d hadno ideawhat he was doing when he had shown up on her doorstep — because it had never stopped being her doorstep no matter whose name the papers were in. He was a stranger there, bumbling around with his head in the clouds. And Nicole was reactive; she was instinctive, and that was something he’d come to love about her — so to be surprised that she had let her impulsiveness get the better of her was a bit rich on his part.
This was how his days went at the moment, moving through the motions at work in a daze, all the while thinking about how he could somehow reach out to Nicole without her slamming a figurative door in his face for not giving her a chance to explain herself in the first place.
Even though individual apartments were selling quickly, the firm was set to have a board meeting about advertising the ones that remained and how to go about it. Brendan was dreading it as he walked down the hall to the door at the end. It was just going to be a bunch of back-and-forth about tiny details that no one would notice anyway.
Just as he was about to slip inside the room and settle down for a painful few hours, his phone buzzed. Brendan didn’t recognize the number, but with the deal going through and now a few others in the works, plenty of people were reaching out to him. Delaying his entry into the boardroom, he stayed in the hall and answered the call. The meeting could wait an extra minute or two. Or five.
“Hello?”
There was a slight crackle from the other end of the phone as if the caller’s reception was bad.
“Uh, hi,” came a deep voice with a southern accent. “This is Brendan Greenwood, right?”
“Yes, it is.” Why did the guy sound so worried? “How can I help?”
“Uh, so this is kind of weird,” said the caller, tripping over his words, still slightly hard to hear through the static. “My name’s Scott Brooke. I’m Nicole’s brother.”
Brendan’s breath caught in his throat, and before he could think anything else, the worst-case scenario had flashed to the front of his mind. She’d been hurt or, worse, trapped beneath a piece of machinery or run off the road in a car accident. She was sick or broken or both and this was how he would find out…
“What happened?” Brendan said, already striding from the hallway, the meeting forgotten, heading for his office where he could hear better.
