Covert Conception. Delores Fossen
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the catering staff have drugged you?”
“I’ve asked myself that a dozen times, and the only thing I could come up with was maybe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe the beer was contaminated or something.”
“Then why wasn’t anyone else affected?” she immediately asked.
He stared at her and waited for her to draw her own conclusions. It didn’t take long. Rick was likely the only person at the party drinking beer. It was indeed a champagne crowd. But then, she was probably the only one who’d had sparkling fruit juice.
And that in turn meant it would have been fairly easy to drug them.
That explained the how, but it certainly didn’t explain the who and why.
“I don’t know the caterer,” she continued. “And I don’t know the man who handed me my drink.”
But she could find out, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.
Natalie checked her watch. It was nearly 6:00 p.m. and she wished for more hours in the day, because her list of things to do was growing. “I want to talk to your doctor and the lab technician who ran the test on you. I’ll also want to talk to my mother, since she’s the one who hired the caterer. She’ll be home from her therapy session by now. I’ll call her.”
Rick caught onto her wrist when she reached into her purse for her phone. “Think this through. If you start asking questions about the caterer, your mother will want to know why. And she won’t quit until she gets the truth. The whole truth. So, if you plan to tell her about the baby tonight, you won’t want to do that over the phone.”
That was true. Natalie only wished she’d thought of it first.
“We’ll drive over there and talk to her,” Rick insisted, keeping hold of her wrist.
Natalie shook off his grip. “We?”
“We,” he confirmed. Without warning, he peeled off his damp T-shirt, grabbed a clean one from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and slipped it on. “I want to get to the bottom of this, too, and I want as much information as we can get about this caterer.”
Natalie almost argued with him. Mainly because it was natural to argue with Rick about any- and everything. But he had a point. The caterer or someone on his or her staff could have orchestrated all of this.
After all, someone had cleaned up the “crime scene.”
Someone had gotten both Rick and his motorcycle back to his house. Someone had dressed her for bed and discarded any evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. So that meant someone at her party had been involved on a very personal level. Her mother was the first step to figuring out whom.
And they could do that after they told Macy about the pregnancy.
Natalie was already dreading the conversation. It would be messy. Her mother just wasn’t very good at handling contingencies, and this pregnancy definitely fell into that category. There’d be tears and perhaps hours of melodrama. Unfortunately, her mother had to know.
Rick grabbed his keys from the desk and headed for the door. Natalie was right behind him.
“We’ll take my car,” she insisted.
Rick glanced over his shoulder and gave her that look. One she instantly recognized. And hated. She called it his blue-collar/chip-on-the-shoulder glare.
“This has nothing to do with the price of my vehicle,” she pointed out. “It’s just I’m conveniently parked right out front, and I’m not exactly dressed to climb onto the back of your Harley.”
He made a sound to indicate he didn’t believe her explanation.
She made a sound to indicate she didn’t care what he thought.
It was going to be a long drive to Macy’s.
“Besides,” she added, “riding a motorcycle in my condition wouldn’t be smart. And even you can’t argue with that.”
He didn’t.
With both of them still stewing and no doubt asking themselves a dozen unanswerable questions, Rick let one of his employees know that he needed to run an errand before they got into her car.
Natalie hadn’t thought the tension could get any worse, but she was obviously wrong. Without the noise and the distraction of the shop, the silence settled uncomfortably between them. And with each additional moment of silence, Natalie became more and more upset. More and more frightened.
More and more incensed.
Why was this happening?
Why had she become pregnant with Rick’s child?
Rick, of all people.
They had so much bad blood between them. Too much. But it hadn’t always been that way. Rick and she had known each other since childhood, and her mother had tried to get them together for years. Why, it was never clear to Natalie, but apparently Macy felt that Rick and she were the “perfect couple” destined to lead the “perfect life.”
Ironic.
Because her family was old money. To the proverbial manor born. Rick, on the other hand, was a self-made businessman with a keen sense of turning nothing into plenty of something. No Ivy League degree for him. No degree at all. He’d shunned his parents’ investment business and had become everything they hadn’t wanted him to be—the owner of a custom motorcycle shop. Yet, the normally socially conscious Macy had seemingly overlooked all of that so she could encourage a relationship that Natalie and Rick knew would never happen.
And it wouldn’t happen because of that one lapse in judgment three years earlier.
Neither Rick nor she had had much luck coping with that lapse. Hell on earth wasn’t just a meaningless expression for them. They were living it.
“You’re totally certain about this pregnancy?” Rick asked.
Natalie almost preferred the silence to the question. There was none of that chip-on-the-shoulder animosity in his voice, which meant all of this was likely sinking in, and he wasn’t taking it too well.
“Dead certain,” she assured him.
Rick shook his head, leaned forward. “I don’t remember even speaking to you that night.”
“Same here,” she agreed.
“Yet according to that video, we ended up in the hall outside your bedroom. Kissing. Touching…”
Oh, yes. Definitely kissing. Definitely touching. They’d been all over each other—literally.
Though she knew it wasn’t possible, especially since she hadn’t remembered anything else, Natalie could have sworn she recalled that kiss.
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and it was as if that one glance opened the hormonal floodgates. There were still no specific memories for the night of the party. But there were other memories, ones that were best forgotten.
As was Rick.
And she’d spent the last three years trying not to remember that he was the most unforgettable man she’d ever known.
It was hard to believe all of his mismatched features could add up to something extraordinary. But heaven help the female population, they did. The olive, bronzy skin: a DNA contribution from his Greek father. Those sizzling gray eyes framed with indecently long lashes. The cheekbones of a Celtic warrior. She’d yet to meet a woman of any age or any background who hadn’t found Rick Gravari hot.
Including her.
Much to her disgust.
That one kiss they’d shared three years ago, that one short lapse in judgment had caused someone to die. Not just someone though. Someone they both loved.
“David,” she said under her breath.