Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale)(80)
“Doesn’t pay much,” he said, standing outside complex F (Is For “Friendship”), where he caught Verity and Ryan as they were walking back to Colton’s car one evening. “But the older lady who used to work there? Simone? She fell down some stairs and broke her hip. Would be nice to have someone there who we already knew we could trust.”
“You’re offering me a job?” she asked, her mouth dropping open in surprise.
“No,” he said, grinning at her. “It’s not mine to offer. But I think you should apply.”
She did. And on the spot, the director of Bonnie’s Place told her she could have the job: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from noon to six p.m. She accepted the position gratefully and signed up Ryan for the Bonnie’s Place day program, where he learned life and job skills and enjoyed the amenities at the recreation center five days a week. She enjoyed the part-time work, and she loved watching Ryan build a new life for himself, making friends within the nurturing gates of Bonnie’s Place.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, while her brother was at the day program, she cared for Colton’s house: gardening, of course, but also making new curtains for the kitchen and living room windows, freshening up the paint on the outside shutters, and planting climbing ivy that was already growing up and around the mailbox. It was the only way for her to show him that she loved him, and besides, she would have gone crazy if she didn’t stay busy.
But she should have known that the status quo wouldn’t last.
Almost forty days into Colton’s rehabilitation, Verity came down with a stomach bug, a wicked one that made her throw up for a few hours one Tuesday morning, then fall back into bed at the brink of exhaustion and sleep for an additional four hours before waking up and hurling again.
The funny thing was, she didn’t have a fever or the sweats, she hadn’t eaten anything funny, and even after sleeping, she still felt bone tired. Nursing a cup of tea in the kitchen, where she checked off the days of Colton’s commitment on a wall calendar, she finally put two and two together, widening her eyes with shock and awe. Leaping up from the table, she stared at the calendar, her heart beating faster and faster, her hands shaking as she turned back the page.
She and Colton had made love on the picnic table forty-two days ago . . . and she hadn’t gotten a period since. She’d been so overwhelmed and depressed and anxious to stay busy, it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d skipped a cycle, but now it did.
Racing to the bathroom, she whipped her T-shirt over her head and looked at her breasts spilling out of her simple white cotton bra.
“Oh my God,” she murmured, staring at her still-flat stomach in the mirror with wide eyes. Unprotected sex. Nausea. Exhaustion. Huge boobs. No period. It all added up to one unmistakable sum. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I’m . . .”
Placing her hands tenderly on her belly, she looked at herself in the mirror as her eyes pooled with tears. I’m pregnant with his baby. She was carrying Colton’s child inside her, a child that she wanted so much and so completely, she thought she might faint from the wave of pure love that swept over her. I’m having his baby. Her heart raced with happiness, even as rivulets of tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I’m waiting for you,” she vowed, thinking of Colton, of her knight, her sweet place, her love. She sniffled softly as she wiped her tears away and smiled at her tummy. “And now I’m waiting for you too.”
***
For a week Colton had been trying to find the right words to tell Verity how sorry he was—that he didn’t mean what he’d said to her in the courthouse, that he loved her as much as it was possible for a man to love a woman, and that the weeks she’d lived with him were the happiest of his whole life.
When the sunshine woke him up, she was the first thing on his mind.
While he worked out at the hospital gym, he composed letters to her.
While he mopped the hallways, he arranged words of apology in his head.
When the bolt sounded on his hospital room door at night, he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying desperately to figure out what to say.
And suddenly fifty days had passed and he had about twenty letters started, piled in the top drawer of his desk, unsent because none of them sounded just right. None of them expressed the profound depths of his regret and remorse. None of them did justice to her love for him and his for her. None of them felt fair if she’d already moved on and started building a new life for herself and Ryan. And none of them felt like they would make any difference anyway, because in his heart he believed she was already gone . . .
. . . that is, until day fifty-three, when he received a letter from Melody.
Written in her cheerful, childlike scrawl, it read:
Dear Colton,
Come and see me.
Let’s eat eggs at the table.
I miss you.
Ryan misses you too.
I love you.
Love,
Melody
xoxox
He blinked at the note, reading it and rereading it ten times before setting it down and rereading it ten more times. Not that it made any more sense on the twenty-first reading, but there was one line that he stared at, his heart and head warring passionately over its truth:
Ryan misses you too.
Was Mel thinking wishfully about the day at the zoo, wishing she could see Ryan again? Or had she transposed the words and actually meant “I miss Ryan too”?