Sweet Sinful Nights(48)

Another pair of pink lines punished her with their clarity.

You’re knocked up, bitch, the twin lines seemed to say with a cruel sneer.

She sank to the floor of the cramped bathroom, parking her rear on the cold teal tiles. Options flickered before her eyes. But really, the choices were very few. Terminating a pregnancy wasn’t on the table. That wasn’t anything she’d ever do.

So it came down to this—keep the baby or give up the baby.

Keep. Give up. Keep. Give up.

Over the next month, Shannon swung back and forth by the day, by the hour. Depending on what she ate, or what she didn’t eat. What she wore. How hunched over the toilet she was at West Side Story rehearsals. How well she hid her morning sickness from her boss.

If there was one thing Shannon Paige-Prince knew how to do it was keep her own damn secrets.

She hid it so well that no one knew why she kept popping into the ladies room to yack up her morning toast. Mercifully, the morning sickness didn’t last long.

As she packed up her bags for London, ready to move with the cast and crew to open the show on the West End, she picked up her cell phone. She flipped it open, ran her thumb across the screen, and started to dial the most familiar string of numbers in the world to her. The ones she’d called during college, every night, every day. Her man’s number.

She didn’t know what to say. Or what to do. Maybe it was better that way. A call for help. Let him listen. Let him talk. Let her not have to make this decision alone.

She ran a hand over her belly, still terribly flat. She threw caution out the window and dialed his number. She didn’t wait long to hear a voice.

“This cell service has been disconnected,” a recording said, tinny in her ear.

She tossed the dumb thing on the floor, and it clunked dully on her rug as she cursed her own stubbornness—she should have taken his calls those first few days. He was truly gone now. Off in Los Angeles, living his new life, with his new Los Angeles phone number that she didn’t know.

Or perhaps this was the sign that she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, so she flew to London, no one the wiser that she was stowing away an extra passenger in her belly. She saw a doctor twice. An ultrasound told her the baby was growing perfectly.

That made her sway closer to the keep side.

So damn close.

But then there was work, and her future, and those things seemed to tug her back to the give up side.

Work consumed her in London as the production began. Indecision swamped her nights and gripped her dreams. She and Brent had both wanted kids. They’d talked about having a family, but as a someday-down-the-road possibility. Knowing he’d wanted to though, eventually, was a heavy weight on her. Telling him would kill two birds with one stone—she’d have him back, and she’d have a decision. She could track down his number, call him, and tell him she was pregnant. If she did that she knew that they’d be together again.

He was too good, too upstanding, and too family-centric to ignore his duties.

He’d leave Late Night Antics in the blink of an eye, fly to London, and be by her side. As she rehearsed the cast through Officer Krupke on the new stage, her fingers itched to track him down again. She could drop this bomb on him, and he’d come running back to her. She desperately wanted him in her life again.

But as the dancers finished, she rewound to the day he’d shattered her heart. She clutched that memory in her hands, like a lifeline to her brain. Somehow, she had to connect her heart to her head. To find the wires, and reattach them properly, so her brain would receive the right message.

Keep the baby. Give up the baby.

One or the other.

She crossed the weeks off on her calendar, but she was no closer to a decision. Week sixteen. Week seventeen. Week eighteen. Week nineteen.

They came and they went. No one knew. She was barely showing. Even so, she snapped a photo of herself in the mirror, as if the reflection could confirm the small curve in her belly.

Michael had an assignment in Europe for a few weeks, and she vowed to decide when he arrived in London to visit her for a couple days. She’d lay it all out for him. Ask for his help. He’d always been her rock. Her guidepost.

They went to dinner at a pub after the theater, and she told him everything, then asked him what to do.

His answer was swift and immediate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and locked eyes with Shannon. “Call the motherf*cking bastard. Tell him he knocked you up. And tell him to get his f*cking head out of his ass and take care of the mother of his baby and his child. Done,” Michael said crisply.

“Oh, that’s all?”

“Do it, Shan. Do it,” he urged.

“I don’t have his number. His cell service is disconnected.”

“He works on that late-night show, right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and a few phone calls later Michael was writing Brent’s new phone number on a cocktail napkin. “Here you go.”

She put the napkin in her purse. A weight eased off her. It slid to the dirty, hardwood floor of the pub as Michael knocked back a beer, and she nursed a soda. The decision had been made.

“Tomorrow,” she said with a nod, resolute. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since those two pink lines had the audacity to f*ck with her life. All she’d wanted was a path. A roadmap. A decision. She had it now.