Finish What We Started (16 page)

“Marry me, Candy.”

* * *

Regardless of how reassuring Lee was, she was still frightened. Her life had veered off schedule the minute he’d come back into her life. Most of it good, but this pregnancy thing scared the bejesus out of her. She felt out of control, like her whole world was on a runaway carnival ride.

She’d had a plan, a carefully constructed plan with a timetable and everything. Up until a couple of months ago she’d been checking things off in a nice orderly fashion. Get her veterinary degree.
Check.
Pass tests and obtain license.
Check.
Open and make a successful veterinary practice.
That one was mostly checked.
In the future, three to five years out, she was going to get married and two years after that, have a child.

Now she might as well scrap the whole damn plan.

If she was honest with herself, Lee was right. She didn’t have to give up anything and it
was
impossible to plan her life like she would a dinner party. But still, this was way too out of control. She loved Lee and she wanted to marry him, so she had said yes without reservation. It just wasn’t going to happen like she’d planned.

Her mother had damn near peed herself with excitement when they told her. She invited herself and Lee to the weekly family dinner and told her parents and brothers, about the marriage and the baby over roast beef and sweet peas.

Her father gave Lee a glare as he passed the potatoes, but he didn’t say anything. Lee clearly picked up on the tension, though. He visibly relaxed when she squeezed his leg under the table.

He grabbed her hand and held it is his. “It doesn’t matter to me if she’s pregnant, sir. I would have asked her to marry me eventually. I love her. Now is just sooner rather than later and I couldn’t be happier.”

Her father turned his gaze to hers. “Is this what you want, Candace? Do you want to marry this man?”

She squeezed Lee’s hand again and nodded. “Yes, Daddy. You know Lee. He’s a good man.”

Daddy’s glare intensified. “I knew him before, when he was building the new clinic. Not when he was knocking up my daughter.”

Calvin and Cary, her younger brothers, snickered. It didn’t matter that they were both in their twenties, apparently it was always funny when your sister and her boyfriend got a dressing down.

“Daddy!”

Her mother put down her fork with a clatter. “Oh Carl, stop making that face. You know your daughter well enough to know she wouldn’t do this if she didn’t want to.” She turned to Candace and Mark. “I, for one, am just thrilled. Such a handsome son-in-law.”

Her oldest brother extended his hand across the table. “Congratulations, Lee.”

Lee nodded. “Thanks, Clay.”

Her mother gushed nonstop for the rest of the meal about wedding plans. No one else got a word in edgewise that wasn’t about tulle or flowers or dress styles. She didn’t want to hear that they wanted a small wedding. At least, Candace assumed they wanted a small wedding. She did, anyway.

The rest of her brothers gave their congratulations in the forms of kisses on her cheeks and claps on Lee’s back. Her father eventually came around and shook Lee’s hand. He pulled him in tight and said something in his ear she couldn’t hear. On the ride home she asked about it.

Lee chuckled. “Oh nothing. He was just threatening to castrate me if I ever made you cry.”

“Oh, come on? Seriously?” She was going to have to talk to her father. She was a grown woman and that sort of nonsense was one thing when she’d brought home boys in high school but something else entirely when she brought home the man she intended to marry.

“Don’t be mad. You’re his little girl and you always will be. He wants to protect you.”

“It’s just silly.”

At the next stoplight he placed his hand behind her neck and pulled her in roughly for a kiss. Grabbing a handful of his hair, she held on tight and slid her tongue along his. The car behind them honked when the light turned green.

“You’re having my baby,” he said with a sexy grin.

Yes, she was. They were together. They were having a baby and everything was going to be okay. It was all going to work out fine.

God, he was handsome, especially when he smiled at her like that.

“Just so you know, if that’s my daughter in there—” he laid his hand on her stomach, “—I’ll kill any man who makes her cry.”

“Well, what if she makes the man she loves cry? What then?”

He turned the truck onto the long street that took them to his house. “I made you cry, too,” he reminded her. “Besides, you’re mine now.”

He showed her several times that night that she was his. She told him so repeatedly, every time he made her come.

* * *

Just as Lee had promised, he didn’t tell his family the surprise until they went to dinner at his mother’s house that weekend. Candy had sworn Holly to secrecy, but given the way Mark was looking at him when they pulled up on Mark’s bike, his brother already knew.

“Don’t say anything until I tell them.” He punched Mark on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Holly told Candace. “Mark doesn’t count in the secret keeping.”

Candy rolled her eyes but hugged her friend anyway.

His sister, Sarah, seemed surprised when he walked in with Candy. Surely Ma had told her he was seeing her again. His mother had been intrigued that he was taking another chance with Candy.

He was mildly concerned how Sarah would receive the news of their marriage. She hated being tip-toed around, and he wouldn’t leave her out of the biggest change in his life, but he worried how his new happiness could potentially cause her pain. He was way more nervous about telling his family than he’d been about Candy’s father.

The smell of spaghetti and meatballs lured them into the house through the kitchen door. Sidney was already at the table with an array of army men laid out in battle formation. Sarah was chopping veggies for the salad. Holly joined his sister and took charge of the carrots.

“You guys know Candy,” he said after he’d greeted his nephew with a high five and kissed his mother on the cheek.

“Hello again.” His mom gave his fiancée a kiss on the cheek.

Sarah waved from the counter. “Hey, Candace. Good to see you again.”

Okay. So far, so good.

His mom cried at the news. Sarah squealed and hugged Candy. His brother slugged him on the arm again. Sidney whooped when he was told he could be a groomsman.

Things were going well.

He exhaled a heavy sigh of relief. The beautiful woman who was going to belong to him in a few short months stood with his mother, sister and sister-in-law in the front room while he and Mark and Sidney did the dishes. He watched them through the door, heard their laughter, and tried as hard as he could to ignore the fact that Candy still hadn’t told him she loved him.

Chapter Seventeen

A month and a half later and wedding plans were coming together like heaven was on their side. Candace rubbed her belly while going over menu suggestions from Mark. He’d offered to open the restaurant for a private party and she and Lee had jumped at the suggestion. That segued nicely into choosing blue and silver for the wedding colors. She’d asked Marisol to be her maid of honor and Holly and Sarah to be attendants. The three of them looked absolutely stunning in the deep blue dresses they’d selected the same day they’d found her wedding dress.

She found some simple but elegant invitations and ordered only one hundred of them. Their mothers worked together to make a reasonable guest list.

Honestly, things pieced together like building blocks.

The Ob/Gyn told her she was healthy and the pregnancy was progressing like it should. She was at the end of her first trimester. She was hardly showing and the goal was to get past the wedding before she was as big as a house.

She was having fun. In fact, once or twice she found herself veering into the land of giddy. In less than a month she would be a married woman. She’d steadfastly refused to move in with Lee until after they were married—it was semantics she knew since they spent every night together anyway, but she wanted to do at least one thing that fit into her original plan.

Lee couldn’t be swayed from starting in on the nursery. He selected the second floor bedroom closest to the stairs and the master suite and had already painted a selection of soft pastel colors on the wall for her to choose from.

Every night they laid in bed talking—well, they did other things first, but eventually they talked—and he had convinced her through sheer repetition that her career wouldn’t suffer. He was there to pull his weight and they had so much family to back them up. She could still achieve everything she wanted. Little by little, she became excited about the tiny human growing inside her. She had even started writing down names she liked.

Two nights in a row she dreamed about a precious little girl with Lee’s jet black hair and her blue eyes.

She had a busy Saturday at the clinic. Besides the regular scheduled appointments, there was an emergency drop in. A frantic woman brought her dog, a black retriever mix, into the clinic late that afternoon. The dog had been hit by a car and required surgery to stop the internal bleeding. She reset a hind leg and cleaned up all the abrasions. All in all, the dog required forty-eight stitches. By the time she was done, her scrubs were covered with blood. She didn’t feel well and her back was killing her, so her tech, Ray, offered to stay with the animal to monitor his vitals.

By the time she got home to the house she was still sharing with Marisol, her back was aching and she couldn’t get comfortable. Romeo Darling circled her legs and meowed, but he wasn’t interested in dinner. She decided to lie down and brought the cat with her to the bedroom. She left him on the bed and went to the bathroom to take a shower that she hoped would relax her enough to take a nap.

She turned on the shower, setting the knob to hot. The room was already filling with steam when she took off her scrub top and dropped it on the floor. Then the drawstring pants fell to the bath mat with her underwear. She stared at the white cotton bikini panties. There was no reason they should have blood on them, but they did, a lot of bright red blood that didn’t match the dried color of the dog’s blood on her pants and shirt.

Her stomach lurched and she tried to stem the panic that was bubbling up into her throat. She peed and the toilet tissue came back bright red, as well.

“Oh no oh no oh no.”

She stared at the ruined panties in horror. Now that she knew something was terribly wrong, it seemed like the pain in her back intensified. A new ache in her lower abdomen materialized out of nowhere. Maybe it had been there the whole time and she’d just ignored it.

What was she supposed to do now? Shouldn’t she know? She was a doctor, after all. Medically she understood what was happening to her body, to the baby, but she felt helpless, floundering with no clue as to how to proceed.

She called for Marisol. Her roommate’s car had been in the driveway, but she hadn’t seen her when she’d walked in.

“Marisol,” she hollered louder. “Are you there?”

“What do you need?” her friend asked from the other side of the door.

Like a zombie, Candy staggered naked through the steamy air toward the door and unlocked it.

Marisol paled when she saw the bloody clothes. “
Cara
, what happened? Are you hurt?”

“That’s mostly not my blood. Except some of it is. I don’t know what to do. I should know. Anatomy is anatomy. I’ve seen this before. There was a cow once, during labs. There’d been a lot of blood that time. This time not as much, but still. It’s there.” Candy redirected her stricken gaze from Marisol’s shocked face down to the pile of clothes and the guilty underpants lying on top. “Do you know what to do?”

Marisol looked totally freaked out, maybe from her babbling or maybe just from all the blood, which like she said, wasn’t all hers. “I don’t know what’s going on here. Tell me what happened.”

“There was a dog hit by a car. I did emergency surgery and came home to take a shower and lay down.” When the other woman nodded, she continued, doing her best to make sense. “But that blood, right there—” she pointed to the underwear, “—that’s mine.”

Marisol lowered her brows. “Are you...?”

“I think so.”

They both stood there like idiots with the shower running and the steam clouding the mirror. “How many weeks are you?”

“Eleven and a half.”

“Did you call the doctor?” When Candace shook her head, Marisol pulled her phone from her shorts pocket. “Lee?”

Again, she shook her head.

“I’m calling them both. Why don’t you get in the shower and clean up from earlier.”

She nodded her head stupidly but didn’t move. “I’m letting him down again. He’s never going to forgive me this time.” That’s when the tears started. Candace was afraid they were never going to stop.

* * *

Lee drove like the devil was after him. He parked the car all wonky in the driveway and burst through the front door without knocking.

Marisol was waiting for him in the living room. “I put her in the shower but she’s been crying the whole time. Her doctor isn’t available but the nurse said to take her to the emergency room.” She trailed behind him to Candy’s room. The water was running, but he could still hear her crying and it was breaking his heart.

Marisol’s hand landed on his arm as he reached for the bathroom door. “Wait. She’s afraid you’re going to be angry at her.”

He blinked. “Why?”

“She thinks you’re going to be mad that she failed you.”

“Goddamn it.” He pulled his arm free and went through the door. It was so steamy in there he could barely see the shower. He yanked a fuzzy brown towel off the rack, then pulled the shower curtain away. She was sitting under the spray, her arms hugging her knees, and she was sobbing.

“Oh, baby, come here.” He pulled at her hand until she stood up. Reaching behind her, he shut off the water and wrapped the towel around her, then circled her waist with one arm, slipped the other under her knees, and lifted her from the bathtub. He walked back to the bedroom, mostly because he couldn’t breathe with all that steam, then sat on the bed, cradling her in his lap.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed. It was agony.

“It’s okay. Shhh.” He repeated the same nonsense words over and over, not knowing what else to say. He tried to soothe her by stroking her back, kissing her hair, saying soft words. Marisol hovered at the edge of the room, concerned and wanting to help.

“I’m so sorry,” Candy said as soon as she wound down enough to talk. “I’m so, so sorry.”

He kissed her temple. “What for? Honey, this isn’t your fault.”

She breathed in a shuddery breath and spoke in a whisper. “You’re never going to trust me if I keep letting you down.”

He squeezed her to him wishing he could take this all away. “You didn’t let me down. I love you.”

That started the tears again. It was forty-five minutes before he got her calmed down.

Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed but she cooperated as he and Marisol got her dressed. She sat still while he combed her hair. She insisted that she could walk to the truck and then into the hospital, although Marisol carried her purse.

After an ultrasound and a blood draw, the emergency room doctor told them she’d had a complete miscarriage. She was given antibiotics and sent home. Lee asked a million questions, but Candy remained silent on the bed, looking at her hands. Would she need to see the Ob/Gyn again? Yes, make an appointment right away. Was there risk of infection? Probably no, the ultrasound showed that all the tissue had been expelled. Candy flinched at that, and he squeezed her hand in a lousy attempt to comfort her. The doctor reminded them to fill the prescription for the antibiotics to prevent infection. No sex for several weeks, until the bleeding stopped.

Marisol delayed her plans with Jason, offering to stay with Candace until Lee could get the prescription filled. He left her on the sofa, Romeo Darling rubbing against her side.

The drug store took forever and no amount of glaring at the pharmacy clerks moved them any faster. Finally, medicine in hand, he stopped at the fast food drive-through and picked up a large mocha milkshake, her favorite. When he got back, Marisol wordlessly pointed to the bedroom. She was curled up on the bed, her face tearstained. Her cat had tucked himself into the curve of her stomach. He could hear him purring from across the room. Lee placed the milkshake on the bedside table, the pack of antibiotics next to it, and climbed into the bed behind her. He molded himself around her back and tucked her into his arms.

While she slept, he finally let the worry for her subside slightly and allowed the grief over the loss of their child to sink in. A few tears mingled with her hair, but no one ever had to know.

* * *

He woke to her looking at him. At some point in the night she had turned and snuggled up to him. Her eyes were open, gazing at him, and she gave a weak smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Please stop saying that.” He kissed her forehead, her nose, her lips. “You didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault.”

“I keep thinking you’re never going to be able to forgive.”

“I love you.” He hoped that would ease her doubts. He didn’t know what else to do. “I’ve loved you for so long.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered and clutched his T-shirt with both hands.

He stroked her hair and her back, kissed her with all the tenderness he had in him. It meant everything that she’d finally said the words.

After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and looked at him like she wanted to say something important. “We can call off the wedding now.”

He pulled back and looked at her, fear making his chest tight. “Oh, no. You said you’d marry me. There’s no way I’m letting you back out of it. There’s no take-backs.”

She lowered her gaze and sighed. “Thank God.”

* * *

She’d lost the baby a week ago. She wasn’t sorry the nausea was gone, or even the bigger breasts, but she grieved for her child. She walked around feeling stunned and vaguely lonely.

Marisol was almost more of a wreck than she was.

“Thank you for being so kind,” Candace told Marisol and Holly when they took her to lunch. “I’m fine. Well, I’m going to be fine.” She pointed a very serious finger at her roommate. “You are not to cry again.”

The woman who had no problem staring down a bare-ass football player in a stinky locker room kept crumbling every time the subject of Candace’s lack of pregnancy was hinted at. “I’m sorry.” She swiped at her eyes. “I’m just worried about you.”

“I appreciate it.” Candace said,

“You were just so...stricken. I didn’t know what to do for you.”

Candace remembered staring at the pile of clothes and feeling like she’d stepped outside of herself. And then the panic. Lee insisted she was crazy for thinking that, but she couldn’t help thinking there was something she could have done to prevent it all. Intellectually, she knew it wasn’t true, but there was still nagging guilt.

Holly hugged her and offered to take her shopping as some retail therapy. Candace promised to take her up on it soon. Lee’s mother and Sarah brought over flowers and a casserole. Her own mother forced her to take naps and plumped pillows behind her head. Her daddy didn’t say anything, just hugged her tight.

Lee had wanted to take a week off work to take care of her, but she’d refused. She had absolutely no intention of taking a week away from her own clinic. Work gave her something else to think about.

Lee had quietly closed the door to the designated baby room and painted over the pastel swatches.

Instead he took up the banner of wedding planner and things amped up to another level entirely. With only a little over a month until the wedding, there was plenty to be done. It was actually kind of weird how much he knew about weddings. What kind of favors should there be on the tables for guests? Did she want a stretch limo or would she prefer a Rolls-Royce? Did she think they should book Infinity Blue’s house jazz band or did she want to audition others?

One night he steered her out on the balcony with a bottle of chardonnay and his three-ring wedding binder. “How about the honeymoon, love? Would you rather go to Hawaii or Europe? Did you ever make it to Italy? Rome would be romantic.”

She agreed that Rome would be fabulous. She watched him bury himself in plans and figured it was better than him building a new wing on his house.

The minute they were past the ban, Lee wooed her with dinner, a moonlight stroll and magnificent sex.

The clinic clientele list was steadily growing and her schedule got fuller every day. She started to feel guilty when she realized she was feeling happy again. That started a whole new rapture of guilt. Eventually, the guilt and sadness that kept sneaking up on her would fade. That’s what all the online forums promised, anyway.