Forbidden Lust: 3 (Lust for Life) (10 page)

He blinked at her once. “Oz just suggested you and Munson be
the two artists who go with him to the new shop. This is news to you?”

A riot of emotions got tangled up inside her. She didn’t
know whether to be outraged that Oscar suggested dragging her two hundred and
fifty miles away from her family without mentioning it to her or elated that he
wanted her with him.

She swung her legs off Leo’s lap and stood, paced to the
other side of the room.

“He wants me to work at the Chicago shop?”

“That’s kind of what I just said.”

Did she love the idea or hate it? She couldn’t tell.

A chill rushed down her spine and she turned slowly to face
Leo. “Jamie knows.”

Leo nodded slowly. “Yes he does.”

“Is he pissed he didn’t hear it from me?”

His broad shoulders scrunched up near his ears. “No idea.”

“Is he here?” she asked, panic starting to rise.

The room spun, stars burst in her peripheral vision and she
had to brace herself on the tall filing cabinet next to her.

“
Whoa
.” Leo jumped out of his chair and caught her as
she swayed. “Hey, come on. Sit down and take a deep breath,” he coaxed, gently
leading her to his chair.

Nausea rose and she folded forward, forehead touching her
knees, and forced herself to take deep breaths in and out. Norma Jean touched
her nose to the side of Eva’s head and sniffed loudly in her ear before giving
the side of her face a good lick.

“That was a little scary, Eva.” Leo reassured Norma Jean
with a quick scratch to her head and brushed Eva’s hair off her neck as if he
knew it had suddenly become hot. “I’ve never seen you…swoon,” he said with a
chuckle. “Have you eaten today?”

She breathed in and out. “That’s all I’ve been doing all
day. I just need some sleep.” She turned her head and let it hang off the end
of her lap. “I’m so tired, Leo.”

There was a long pause and the hand he was running over her
back stilled.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

Eva sat up straight. Those little points of light looped and
swirled and then drifted away as she forced herself to focus on Leo, who looked
completely serious. When she didn’t answer for a minute—because her mind was
calculating so fast it was making her dizzy all over again—he grinned and knelt
in front of her.

“Are you?” He laid a hand on her stomach and his smile
stretched wide. “Are you making a little clone of the motherfucking asshole
Frenchman as we speak?” he asked, repeating a title she’d used frequently when
referring to Oscar over the past few years.

“Don’t be an ass,” she said, and swiped his hand away.
“We’ve been careful.”

Well, not completely careful, but it had only been one night
since they’d fucked without a condom in New York. There was no way…

“I’m probably just coming down with something.” She leaned
back in the chair, drew her knees up, covered her face with her hands and
groaned.

“Whatever you say,” Leo said, his tone dripping skepticism.

“I just want to crawl under the desk with Norma Jean and
take a nap.”

Norma Jean’s tail thumped on the floor a couple of times as
if she approved.

“How about we go back to my house and I make a pot of coffee
and we catch up instead?” He stood and held out his hand. “I’ve missed you too,
you know.”

“Christ, Leo. How am I supposed to say no to that?” she
asked, trying her best to look annoyed as she took his hands and let him pull
her to her feet. She wrapped her arms around him as he pulled her close and
took a deep breath of his familiar scent.

“You’re not,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.

Eva knelt on the floor of her bathroom, the three pregnancy
tests she’d just taken arranged like a fan in front of her, every one of them
clearly reading positive.

Leo’s flippant comment about her being pregnant had made her
stop and think. She’d been a lot more tired than usual over the past couple of
weeks. When she looked at the calendar and did the math she realized she was
not a couple of days away from starting her period like she’d thought in New
York. She was close to three weeks late.

She was as regular as Old Faithful, but since she’d started
seeing Oscar, days and weeks had flown by in a blur of long days of work and
even longer nights of the most amazing fucking she’d ever experienced. She’d
been looking forward to the next time they could be together and not much else
recently, so it didn’t surprise her the date her period should have started
came and went with little notice.

Of course it was too soon for her to have gotten pregnant in
New York, but she knew exactly when it had happened. There had been a night
weeks before when he’d made such passionate, gentle love to her that she’d
nearly cried.

At the time it had seemed as if they physically could not
stop kissing. He’d stayed inside her too long after they’d both come. The
condom had slipped most of the way off and made a mess of her and the bed both.
She’d laughed it off at the time, but Oscar had been worried. Turned out he’d
had good reason to worry.

A baby
, Eva thought, the tests going blurry as her
eyes filled with tears. She wasn’t ready for a baby. Fuck, she was barely ready
for the responsibility of having fallen in love—deep, earth-shattering, real
goddamn love—for the first time in her life.

There was a knock on her door and then she heard it open,
followed by Leni calling her name.
Shit
. She’d forgotten all about their
lunch date.

Eva scooped up the tests and shoved them into the cupboard
under the sink.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” she called, shut the bathroom
door quietly and stood. “Christ on crutches,” she muttered, getting a good look
at herself in the mirror.

The makeup she’d put on earlier to run to the drugstore was
smudged all over her face and her eyes were so red she looked high as a fucking
kite. She made quick work of washing her face, but there was nothing she could
do about her red eyes, which apparently were not going to stop leaking. She
grabbed the roll of toilet paper off the edge of the sink and went to face her
sister-in-law.

Leni’s eyes went wide when Eva came out of the bathroom, and
the expression on her face caused new tears to rise. Eva made it no farther
than the foot of her bed. She sat down hard, dropped the toilet paper roll onto
the comforter and bawled like a baby into her hands. After a second the
mattress dipped and Leni put her arm around Eva’s shoulders, cradled her head
and drew it to her shoulder.

“Is it anything you want to talk about?” Leni asked once Eva
started to calm down.

She did and she didn’t. She had no idea what to think or
feel. The only thought running through her head with any consistency was
this
can
not
be happening to me
.

Eva sat up and swiped at her face with her hands. She drew
in a deep breath and looked at Leni. “I’m pregnant,” she said, and the shocked
expression on Leni’s face made her want to cry again. Jamie hadn’t told her.

“Sorry.” Leni took Eva’s hand between hers and squeezed it.
“You caught me off guard. I didn’t realize you were even seeing anyone.”

That made Eva laugh, and even though it sounded strained and
ridiculous, it felt good. She drew in a deep breath and confessed, “I’ve been
seeing Oscar.”

Leni bounced a foot away from Eva, her mouth hanging open
and her blue eyes huge with surprise.

“Oscar Gaudin?” she asked, incredulous. “The same Oscar you
call ‘that goddamn motherfucking asshole’ on a fairly regular basis?”

“It started the day after your wedding. Right after you and
I were talking in the backyard.”

She told Leni everything—well, mostly everything—starting
with that amazing first kiss in her parents’ bathroom and ending with Leo’s
uncanny prediction the day before. When she was finished, Leni closed her mouth
and blinked a couple of times.

“You’re in love with him,” she said, smiling her sweet,
pretty smile.

Eva looked down, picked at a thumbnail. “Yeah.”

Leni covered Eva’s hands to still her. “What about the
baby?”

Eva’s nose burned as if she was going to start crying again.
“I don’t know, Len.”

“What’s your first instinct, honey?” she asked, giving Eva’s
hands a squeeze.

“That this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to
me,” she whispered—and realized the epic fuck-up the instant the words were out
of her mouth. “Fuck,” she muttered, catching Leni’s hand in hers before she
could pull away. “I’m so sorry.”

Leni waved her free hand dismissively, but the damage was
done.

Leni Rodriguez, brand new wife to the only one of Eva’s
siblings who’d talked all his life about how much he wanted a family as big as
the one they grew up in, had been born with a birth defect that made her
physically unable to conceive a child.

For one wild, panicked moment—in a thought that passed
through her mind in no more than a quick a flash—Eva considered suggesting
giving the baby to her brother and sister-in-law to raise. Which of course was
the most horrific idea she’d ever had.

She jumped to her feet to pace the room, arms crossed tight
over her chest.

“I don’t deserve this,” she said on a choked sob, tears
running down her face freely again. “I’m an awful, horrible, ugly person. I
don’t deserve a baby.”

Leni got up and caught her by the shoulders.

“You’re not any of those things, Eva. Just shocked.”

Eva could hardly believe the look of pure empathy on Leni’s
face.

“How have you not punched me out? All you want in the world
is to be able to have a baby and you can’t. I’m nowhere near ready for a kid
and I’m knocked up. Accidentally. And all I can think is…” She couldn’t say it
out loud again.

Leni sighed. “Honey, this has nothing to do with me.” She
smoothed Eva’s hair back and held her face, looked directly into her eyes.
“This is happening to
you
, and you have every right to feel however you
feel about it. There is no right or wrong way to react to this kind of news.”

“I don’t deserve to call you my friend,” Eva said,
embarrassed her voice cracked.

“Now I am going to punch you in the mouth,” Leni said with a
tender laugh and pulled Eva into her arms. “I love you, you know.”

Which only made Eva sob so hard she couldn’t speak for a long
time.

“You just need to take a deep breath and give yourself a
little time to decide what you want.” Leni wiped at Eva’s wet cheeks when she
pulled back again. “You’ll do what’s right for you, no matter what choice you
make.”

Her body, her choice had been something she’d believed in
her whole life, something precious passed down from the previous generations of
her family. While both sides of her family were the “worship every Sunday, no
exceptions” variety of Catholics, they did not see eye to eye with the church’s
stance on abortion. But did that mean not having the baby was a choice Eva was
going to be able to make?

She closed her eyes at the memory of that night, that moment
when the condom slipped and changed her life forever. Her pulse sped up and her
body tingled as she recalled the way she had still been trembling long after
her orgasm subsided and how Oscar had been kissing her, so deep but so
incredibly tender. The way he’d opened up to her completely for maybe the first
time, looking deeply into her eyes and letting her see exactly what he felt for
her.

His name came out on her next exhalation and she paced to
the island that separated her kitchen from the living room, pulled out a tall
chair and sat.

“He’s going to want this.” She knew it with a certainty that
was so complete there was no arguing, not even with herself.

Leni went to the stove and checked the water level in the
tea kettle.

“For as quiet and standoffish as he can be, he loves kids.”
Eva rested her elbows on the counter and her head in her hands. “When Tammy’s
boys were born he sat with the rest of us in the waiting room while she had her
C-section. Leni, I’d never seen him smile the way he did when Mark offered to
let him hold Louis for the first time, and I’d known him twenty years by then.
It was pure joy.”

Leni listened without comment as she put the full kettle
back on the stove, turned the fire on beneath it and went about the business of
scooping loose-leaf tea into the infuser on Eva’s ceramic teapot.

“You know the story about his mom and dad, right?” Eva
asked.

“Jamie has only told me that they both died when he was
little and he was raised by his grandmother,” she answered as she got mugs out
of the cupboard.

“From what I’ve heard, his mom was something of a free
spirit,” Eva started.

“Not a surprise there,” Leni said with a knowing smile.

That made Eva smile as well. “She moved to California after
high school and was living in this hippy surfing community when she met Oscar’s
father. His family owned and ran a vineyard in France, I don’t remember where
exactly, but he was in the States visiting some of the wineries in California.

“Anyway, he decided he wanted to learn to surf while he was
there. Oscar’s mother was his instructor. They had this crazy-passionate affair
and by the time he finally went home to divorce his wife however many weeks
later, she was pregnant with Oscar.”

Leni’s expression was half amused, half shocked. “Very
scandalous.”

“It gets better, and then it gets a lot worse,” Eva assured
her. “Apparently his dad’s wife is from an even bigger winemaking family than
Oscar’s dad’s, and both families made it extremely difficult for him to get a
divorce. It got dragged out in court for two years. His dad traveled back and
forth so he could spend as much time with Oscar and his mom as possible, but he
was still married when Oscar’s mom drowned.”

Leni stopped what she was doing and looked at Eva, her eyes
wide.

“She fell and was hit in the head by her surfboard, knocked
unconscious and dragged into an undercurrent,” Eva explained. “When his father
found out he was so despondent he committed suicide.”

“And left Oscar without either of his parents?” Leni asked,
horrified.

“I didn’t understand it for a long time either but, until
recently, I’d never loved anyone I didn’t want to live without.”

Leni let the kettle whistle as she gave Eva a long look,
another sweet smile replacing her shocked expression. She removed the kettle
from the stove, turned off the burner and poured boiling water into the pot.
The air instantly filled with the scent of the fragrant sweet orange tea she’d
picked. Eva’s favorite.

“What about his family?” she asked, setting the teapot on a
trivet on the counter.

“I believe they offered to raise him,” she said, drawing on
the memory of eavesdropping on a long-ago conversation. Her mom had been
friends with Oscar’s grandmother until she’d died a few years earlier. “But he
was all his grandma had left of her daughter and she wanted him with her. I
think they helped support him, sent her money and paid for his schooling.”

“So he’s technically the heir to a French vineyard?” Leni
asked, sitting next to Eva at the counter before she poured them both a cup of
tea.

“His father had several older brothers, so not really.” Eva
turned on her chair so she was facing Leni, thanked her as she passed her a
steaming mug. “He’s been there and met his grandparents. I guess he looks just
like the rest of the men in the family.”

“So there was no denying him from the beginning?”

“Not at all.” She picked up her mug and held it close to her
nose, let the smell brighten her mood. “They loved him. His parents,” she
explained. “He has a picture of the three of them in his living room, his mom
smiling like the luckiest woman in the world, his dad kissing his fat baby
cheek. Oscar looking serious as usual,” she said, smiling even though emotion
was making her eyes and nose prickle with the threat of fresh tears. “He’s
going to want this baby.”

Leni’s lips tightened into a thin line and she nodded. “I
have a feeling you’re right.”

Eva drew one leg up and hooked her heel on the edge of the
seat. She rested her elbow on the counter and tipped her head into her hand. “I
love it when he smiles.”

Leni arched an eyebrow as she took a tentative sip of her
tea. “You know, now that I think about it, he has been smiling a lot more
lately.”

The idea pleased Eva more than she would have expected. “You
think?”

“Even Jamie mentioned it not that long ago,” she said with a
nod. “He came back from a meeting with Oz and Leo and said Oz seemed really
happy. I thought it was odd because, for one, Jamie doesn’t usually offer
random commentary on people’s state of being, and Oz is usually so…not unhappy.
Just neutral.”

Eva nodded. She knew exactly what Leni was talking about on
both counts.

Leni gave her a knowing look. “You’ve been a lot happier
these days as well.”

“Yeah, I’m having a lot of really fucking amazing sex these
days,” she said nonchalantly. “Sorry. That’s not fair. I won’t talk about my
sex life since I don’t want to hear about yours. With my brother,” she added,
then shuddered for emphasis.

But the small, secretive smile on Leni’s face said it
all—Jamie was definitely taking very good care of her behind closed doors.
Eva’s heart broke all over again that a child would never come from the deep
love they obviously had for each other.