Troubles in Paradise (Paradise #3)(28)

“But we have no way to prove Todd did that,” Natalie says. “Yet.”





Ayers


Baker must have had a sixth sense that something was going on because he’d called Ayers while she was in the bathroom holding the pregnancy test with a shaky hand.

Positive.

Ayers had stared at the screen of her ringing phone. Baker was listed in her contacts as “the Tourist” with a photo of a leatherback sea turtle.

She’d declined the call.

She was pregnant? Well, yeah. Obviously. Of course.

Ayers wasn’t a complete idiot; pregnancy had been her first thought, but she’d dismissed it immediately because it was too awful and Ayers had had so much awful piled on her recently that there wasn’t room for any more. Rosie dying, a broken engagement, and now…

When Ayers got back together with Mick, she’d insisted he use a condom because of Brigid. He’d been good about this. Not happy, but conscientious. Even the night of their engagement, he’d used a condom.

The only time Ayers had had unprotected sex was with Baker on their single night together. It was just that one night. A couple of times, but still.

Still, that was all it took. One egg and one sperm—baby.

Well, she couldn’t have a baby. She could barely take care of herself. She lived in a studio—cute, but unsuitable. Her houseplants were dying. Where would she put a crib? A high chair? A Pack ’n Play or a bouncy chair or a swing or any of the other large, noisy paraphernalia that babies required?

She could, maybe, have had Mick’s baby, because Mick was a known quantity to Ayers. But to have a baby with Baker, a person she had been on exactly one date with and slept with twice?

She wasn’t prepared for any kind of conversation with Baker. She sent him a text: I’ve come down with something. It’s bad and I wouldn’t want you or Floyd to catch it. I’ll call you when I’m better.

Rosie had been in this exact same predicament. No, Rosie had had it worse. Rosie found herself pregnant by a man she thought she’d never see again. She’d kept the baby—and who was that baby now? It was Maia, the most wonderful human Ayers knew. Didn’t Ayers want a Maia of her own? A child who was wise and sweet and smart and funny? A child who would love her the way that Maia loved Rosie?

Theoretically, yes; Ayers wanted children. She had always pictured herself with children, and she even knew what kind of mother she wanted to be—the kind of mother who dressed up with her kids for Halloween, the kind of mother who let the kids have hot fudge sundaes for dinner on their last day of summer vacation. She wanted to be a Scout leader. She wanted to be fun and involved and reliable, a buoy during the unpredictable currents and undertow of growing up.

Just like everyone else, she wanted to be exactly like and completely different from her own parents.

Oh, jeez, Ayers thought. She had to tell her parents the news. But first, she would need to find them.



Treasure Island was fixed, but Ayers couldn’t handle an all-day boat charter either physically or mentally. She called Whitney in the office and told her that she needed some time off—a couple of weeks, she thought, but maybe longer.

“But you’re not quitting on us, right?” Whitney said. “No pressure, girlfriend, but you’re the heart and soul of this operation. Cash is good but he’s brand-new.”

“I’m coming back?” Ayers said. “I mean, I’m coming back. Of course I’m coming back.”

At La Tapa, Ayers was shaky and sweaty and distracted. Tilda covered for Ayers’s lethargy and her mistakes. Tilda thought the problem was Mick, both the broken engagement and his weeklong sit-in at Cruz Bay Landing. It had become a thing. Mick had been going to work, but directly afterward, he sat at the bar at CBL with the ring in front of him and Gordon tied to his bar stool, and he drank. He was there on his days off as well, from open to close. Tourists had started posting pictures of #heartsickmick with the beer and the ring box in front of him and Gordon snoozing dutifully at his feet.

Mick had managed to make the breakup all about himself; he’d cast himself as the victim, and he’d gotten his own hashtag in the process. Meanwhile, Brigid was still working at the Beach Bar and not at Island Abodes like Mick had promised, so frankly Ayers didn’t care if 60 Minutes came to do a segment about his broken heart—Ayers wasn’t going back.

“I feel bad for the guy,” Skip, the La Tapa bartender, said at the end of service. “I’m going over to have a drink with him.”

“Birds of a feather,” Tilda murmured.



Ayers needed to confide in someone—and that someone should have been Baker. However, on Wednesday afternoon, Ayers got a text from Cash, and the next thing she knew, she had offered to adopt Winnie for a while because Tilda’s fancy, type A parents didn’t “do dogs.”

This, at least, felt right. It was the least she could do after abandoning Cash on Treasure Island. It would also be nice to have a warm body around, one who wasn’t going to ask her any questions.

Ayers had picked Cash up from the boat and driven to Peter Bay to collect Winnie. Ayers had never been to Tilda’s fancy, type A parents’ villa before—she had never been to any of the homes in Peter Bay; it was exclusive, private, gajillionaire territory—and when she drove down the steep chute of Tilda’s driveway, she got vertigo. It felt like they were driving off a cliff into the sea.