Wishing and Hoping. SUSAN MEIER
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remembering, as he probably was, the night they had run into each other at a party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so far away from Calhoun Corners, Virginia, that he’d never expected to come across somebody from his hometown. He’d always known her as Isabella. So when their host introduced her as Tia—a nickname she’d picked up in college—without her last name, he hadn’t associated her with his formerly chubby, long-haired next-door neighbor, whom he hadn’t seen since she’d left for college six years before.
But she had assumed he’d recognized her because he didn’t ask her last name and flirted with her as if she were the love of his life—something she’d dreamt of through high school when she’d had a killer crush on him. She was thrilled when he’d accepted her invitation to come back to her house.
They hadn’t caught the misunderstanding until after they’d made love, but when he had discovered she was Isabella Capriotti, not just plain Tia-somebody-or-another-who-worked-at-an-ad-firm-in downtown-Pittsburgh, Drew had been furious. He’d felt she should have realized he hadn’t recognized her, if only because she should have known he wouldn’t have a one-night stand with the daughter of the man who had helped him build his horse-breeding business. And if that wasn’t enough, he didn’t sleep with women twelve years younger than he was.
After his outburst, Tia had stared at him mutely, thinking his understanding of romance was nonexistent. He had no qualms about jumping into bed with a total stranger, but he was upset about making love to her—mostly because he knew her.
Still, she had her pride. When they had made love, he’d believed she was somebody else. She couldn’t even remotely pretend the man of her high-school fantasies loved her. And the way he had scolded her had made her blood boil. She was an adult. She had a job and a house. A bank had considered her responsible enough to give her a mortgage. She hadn’t deserved to be treated like a little girl.
And that’s exactly what she had told him before she’d asked him to leave. When he’d walked out her door that night she had been convinced that she would never see him again.
She knew he wouldn’t be happy she was pregnant, but she was here to assure him he needn’t be concerned. She might be twelve years younger than he was, but she was a twenty-four-year-old woman who made enough money to support a child. She was ready to become a mom. He could have as much or as little involvement with this baby as he wanted.
“Don’t worry. I have everything under control.”
“What about me? Don’t I get any say in this?”
“I absolutely want you to be involved in our baby’s life, but there’s no pressure. You have the option to be as involved as you want to be.”
He gaped at her. “That’s your idea of having everything under control? To give me the ‘option’ of being involved in our baby’s life?”
“No!” Tia said, baffled by how he had twisted everything. “I have a job and my own house…”
“I’m not talking about finances. I’m talking about the personal end of things. A child should have its father’s name.”
He sounded exactly as her dad sounded any time he heard of a woman having a baby on her own, and Tia realized that this was probably why women didn’t date men too much older than they were.
“As far as I’m concerned the first thing we need to do is get married.”
Tia’s heart thumped at the possibility of being the wife of the man she’d fantasized about since she was fourteen. But she knew he didn’t want to marry her. And she didn’t think she wanted to marry him, either. Not after the way he’d reacted the night they’d made love. No thanks.
“I didn’t come here to extort marriage from you. The baby can just take your name. It doesn’t matter if we’re married when he’s born—”
“Maybe not to you, but it does to me and I’ll bet it does to your dad.” He paused and groaned. “Damn it! We have a bigger reason to get married than giving the baby my name.”
Not quite sure she trusted him, Tia peered at him. “And that reason is?”
“Your dad’s reelection campaign is in trouble.”
“Really?” she asked dubiously. Her dad had been mayor of Calhoun Corners since she was six. No one ever voted against him.
“For the first time in close to twenty years, your dad has an opponent. Auggie Malloy. His entire platform is based on the fact that your dad had a heart attack last year. Everybody knows he takes pills when he’s stressed and Auggie’s saying that makes him too sick to be mayor. And Mark Fegan agrees,” Drew said, referring to the editor of the Calhoun Corners Chronicle. “He’s been running editorials supporting Auggie.”
This time it was Tia who groaned. “Are you kidding me? By doing that he’s actually causing the stress that causes my dad’s chest pain.”
“And makes your dad look too weak to be mayor. But even so, the election isn’t our problem. Our problem is that your dad has enough stress already and God only knows how he’s going to react when we tell him I got you pregnant in a one-night stand and we’re not getting married because we don’t really know each other—but we had sex.”
Tia fell to the step just below the one on which Drew sat. She hadn’t intended to tell her dad the “circumstances” under which she got pregnant, but she understood what Drew was saying. With the stress her dad already had, there was a chance that any news that made him angry could be the stress that pushed him over the edge, and she didn’t even want to put into words what would happen then.
“What if we don’t tell him until after the election?”
“There are six months until the election. Do you think you’re not going to be showing any time in the next six months? Or that the stress of the election will lessen as we get closer to the day that everybody goes to the polls? If anything, the stress is going to increase. It’s better to tell him you’re pregnant now before the election stress is at its worst, when he really could have a heart attack.”
As Tia tried to think it through, Drew scooted off his stair to pace the foyer, his boots making a thumping sound on the hardwood with every step. But he suddenly turned and stood towering over her. Because it was a hot June day, he wore only jeans and a T-shirt that his chest and broad shoulders stretched to capacity. His penetrating brown eyes seemed to be able to see the whole way to her soul. He was so attractive it almost hurt to look at him. She swallowed.
“This doesn’t have to be complicated. If we tell your dad we’ve been secretly dating and you’re pregnant so we’re getting married, nobody will blink an eye. And it’s not like we have to be ‘really’ married. You work in Pittsburgh. I live in Virginia. We don’t even have to see each other except for a few weekends to make the situation look believable. We can divorce after the baby’s born and once again I’ll bet nobody will even blink an eye, if only because with you working in Pittsburgh and me living in Virginia everybody will say our marriage was doomed from the start.”
What he said made a lot of sense. They could pretend to be married without having to live together because of her job. Plus, not seeing much of each other was a built-in explanation for why the marriage would fail. Oddly enough, it was the perfect way to hide the bad part of their situation while revealing the good parts. Her parents didn’t have any grandchildren. A wedding and a baby right now might be a calming influence. At the very least, a baby and a wedding could make her parents happy.
“Okay. We’ll get married.”
“Okay.”
The foyer became incredibly quiet. They spent the next few seconds staring at each other and it sunk in for Tia that she was marrying the guy she’d dreamed about from the day she’d met him when she was fourteen. Unfortunately, the wedding wasn’t happening anywhere near the way she’d envisioned it. And, even more unfortunately, Drew Wallace wasn’t the Prince Charming she had imagined in her teenage fantasies. In fact, he was pretty much the