Lone Star Lovers Page 5

  “See, you think you’re being cute, but my parents’ house has twenty-two bathrooms.”

  “I know.” She sipped her wine and peered over the tiny rim at Zach. “I looked them up and their house was in Architectural Digest. It’s incredible.”

  “It’s ridiculous. But my mother likes to redecorate. With thirty-seven thousand square feet, she’s never at a loss for a room to have painted or altered to her ever-changing preferences.”

  Zach leaned back on the sofa, his arm draped around Pen. She snuggled closer and he adjusted the blanket to cover them both.

  “Do you get along with them? Or are you the classically overlooked middle child?”

  A low laugh that might have been confirmation bobbed his throat. “I get along with them. I joke about my mother’s frivolity, but she’s a great mother. My dad became sick and her world stopped on a dime.”

  “How is he now?”

  “Good. Misses his bacon and sausage.”

  “And strip steaks?” she teased.

  “It’s Dallas, sweetheart. Men eat steak.”

  “Right. Heaven forbid you do something as effeminate as not eat a cow.” She grinned, liking the way she could volley back at him. He was one of the easiest people she’d ever been around.

  He moved in on her again and the kiss lasted a little longer than either of them intended. “Glad you packed a bag, Penelope Brand.”

  Her heart kicked into overdrive when Zach set aside his wine and took her wineglass from her hand. His insistent kisses peppered down her throat and collarbone. When he reached her stomach, his hand flattened on the space between her breasts and he pushed her to her back.

  Then he lifted one of her legs onto his shoulder and made her dessert.

  Again.

  Seven

  “Tell me everything,” Miranda’s bubbly voice, on speakerphone, filled Pen’s office.

  Pen had called her friend to thank her for the generous basket she was now digging through. She pulled out a tube of lipstick and spun it to examine the lush red color.

  “I love this lipstick. ‘Red Rum,’” she read off the bottom of the tube with a laugh. Sassy. That was Miranda.

  “It’s long-wearing, not tested on animals and one hundred percent organic. Now, if you don’t tell me everything about the man you’ve been having sex with for the last month, I’m going to come to your office with torture implements.”

  She laughed at her friend’s colorful description. Pen had casually mentioned Zach and that she’d been seeing him.

  “It was supposed to be one night, and then we had a two-week gap.” She lifted the basket from her desk and put it on the couch. She was so giving herself a makeover later. “But when I saw him again at the mayor’s party, well... I couldn’t help starting up with him again.”

  “And you ended up engaged! It’s a fairy tale. It’s a fantasy!”

  It was a load of crap, but Pen had to keep up the facade with everyone.

  “Yes, I was very surprised.” That, at least, was the truth.

  “I’ll bet. Zachary Ferguson is one yummy prospect if you don’t mind my saying. And he must be a real catch for you to have leaped in with both feet so soon.”

  “Yes,” Pen said, unable to trot out any more false explanations.

  “Listen, doll, I have to go. We’re working on the spring line and I have an appointment.”

  “Thank you again for the gift.”

  “You bet. I expect a wedding invitation.”

  Pen opened her mouth to make an empty promise, but Miranda clicked off. With a sigh, she cleaned a few pieces of crinkled pink paper that had been used as packing in her gift basket from her planner pages.

  May’s schedule wasn’t as full as she’d like it to be, but she had a few phone calls to return. She turned to her weekly page and checked off the line item that read “call Miranda,” eyes skimming past the list of messages she’d written down to return on Monday but hadn’t gotten the chance. And here it was Friday already.

  Halfway to dialing a number for Maude Braxton, Pen’s eyes landed on a tiny red heart beneath Monday’s date, and she frowned.

  She’d been on birth control pills since she was a teenager because of erratic periods, and since she’d been on birth control pills, her cycle was correct down to the minute.

  She hastily flipped back to April, located the red heart, and counted the days to today.

  She was five days late.

  Five. Days.

  “Oh, my God.” Her stomach tightened, her mind racing. Could she be...? No. No way. She was on the pill. And even if her trusted form of birth control failed her, she was in her early thirties. At her age it was normal for things to go haywire. There could be a perfectly good explanation. Stress. It could totally be stress. But when she flipped back to April and saw the name of a jazz club scheduled for eight p.m., another perfectly good explanation came to mind.

  This one an even better explanation for a missed period.

  Numbly, she stood from her desk and pulled her purse out from behind the basket overflowing with tubes of lipsticks, moisturizers and eye shadow palettes. So much for giving herself a makeover.

  Pen was off to buy a pregnancy test.

  * * *

  Penelope’s wine sat untouched in front of her, but she couldn’t bring herself to say no and raise Zach’s suspicions. Even though telling him he was going to be the father of their unborn child was the very reason she was sitting here with him. She’d successfully avoided him all weekend, which wasn’t easy. It took a lot of circumventing on her part, but she had to wrap her head around the unfathomable truth.

  Despite being on the pill the entire time she and Zach were together, that night after the jazz club, one of his swimmers had reached its goal.

  “I have a charity dinner on Friday. Come with me.” He sat on one corner of the wrap couch rather than in the middle next to her, and for once she was grateful for the space. “Chase and several of the Dallas brass who attended his party will be there. Good networking opportunity. Plus, now that we’ve wrapped up everything with Yvonne, it’s best that we’re seen together.”

  “Right.” Pen somehow managed the one-word response despite her heart being lodged in her esophagus. He was right. It made sense to continue seeing him. If they mysteriously ended their engagement right when Yvonne had agreed to keep her trap shut, no one would believe it was real. Which might not matter except that Chase had announced to one and all that his brother was going to be married. She didn’t want to be responsible for making Dallas’s trustworthy mayor into a liar. If that wasn’t enough public attention, there was the business world wagging their tongues about Ferguson Oil’s youngest CEO taking a wife. Soon they’d have to amend their announcement to add that Zach had impregnated his bride-to-be...who the public would later learn wasn’t going to be his wife at all.

  God. This was a nightmare.

  Maybe she didn’t have to tell him today. Hope sparked fresh in her chest. She had a good four weeks before her baby bump made itself known. Why not avoid him until then? And the paparazzi and public functions... She could become a hermit.

  If she folded up the shingle on her PR business.

  Sigh. That wasn’t a realistic plan at all.

  The only certainty was that she was keeping the baby. Her pregnancy was unexpected, yes, but Penelope believed deep in her soul that life unfolded in the order it did for a reason. If fate decided she was to be a mother, then she’d accept. It was as simple, and terrifying, as that.

  Zach drank from his beer glass and eyed Pen’s untouched wine. There was no way to avoid him for an extended period of time. He was a force—he was in her life. She had to do the mature thing and tell him the damn truth.

  She filtered through her muddy mind until she located the speech she’d practiced in her office’s bathroom mirror fi
ve times before she came here tonight. It was short, sweet and to the point.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  Zach’s limbs were stiff and unmoving, the blood sloshing against his eardrums making Pen’s voice sound a mile away.

  “I found out Friday night and I couldn’t tell you over the weekend until I decided what to do. So here I am.” Pen fastened her gaze on the wineglass. The wine she couldn’t drink because she was pregnant with his child.

  He focused on the beer glass in his hand for an exaggerated beat before managing, “What do you mean?”

  His tone was as flat as the firm line of his pretend fiancée’s unsmiling mouth. Pale blue eyes rested on his as if she was as shell-shocked as him. Only she couldn’t be, because she’d been processing for three days and he’d had three seconds.

  “I mean I’m having the baby—your baby. Keeping this a secret from you was never an option.”

  Hell, no, it’s not, came the immediate thought.

  He hadn’t sat around and contemplated fatherhood, but now that he knew it was a reality, the surety of being involved rang tuning-fork true in the pit of his gut.

  “The due date is December, right before Christmas.” She shared it like she was talking about some other couple who was suddenly expecting a bundle of joy. For as distant as he felt from this announcement, she might as well be talking about someone else.

  He set his beer aside and stood, unable to sit any longer. His measured steps were more of a stalk, but he reined in his energy to face the woman on his couch. Penelope had radically changed his future—his entire family’s future—in a few short weeks.

  Wait. Weeks? He did some quick math.

  “It’s been a little over two weeks since my brother’s party. How the hell could you know you’re pregnant already?”

  Her porcelain skin went pink. “It’s been four weeks, Zach, since you and I had sex the first time.”

  The first time?

  Ah, hell.

  He nodded to himself as reality reared its head. That was the clincher about math—the answer wasn’t up for debate.

  The jazz club. The night he’d explored her up and down and up again. The night he thought would be the last he saw of her.

  He pulled a hand down his face, pausing with it over his mouth for a moment. His shock was a palpable entity swirling the room, his thoughts ranging from excitement to horror to wanting to accuse her of attempting to take his money like his ex-wife.

  But this was Penelope he was talking about. Even if he didn’t trust her—and he did—there was the significant matter of her not knowing he had that many zeroes in his bank account the night he took her back to her place.

  “I have a plan,” she said.

  “A plan.” Mind racing, his vision blurred as his thoughts circled the track again.

  “I’m a public relations superhero, Zach. I have a plan.” She patted the cushion next to her. He sat, but not next to her, and lifted his beer to take a hearty gulp. Hell, he might drink Pen’s wine, too.

  “It’s simple. Over the next two weeks, you and I will be seen together less and less until we aren’t seen together at all. We’ll share a press release that you and I will not be raising the child together. We could even go with a story that we were friends and I wanted a child and you didn’t and—”

  “No.” Zach’s voice was thunderous, bouncing off the high ceilings and echoing around the room.

  Pen’s mouth was frozen midspeech for a second before she said, “I don’t expect you to take on a baby. You’re a CEO with a budding career. What we had—”

  “Have.”

  Her slim eyebrows rose. “Pardon?”

  “What we have. Present tense.”

  “What we have is a month-long, on-and-off sexual relationship.”

  “Until five minutes ago, that was true.” She might have alarmed him with unexpected news, but his brain was now sliding into operation mode.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I came here to reassure you that I’m not coming after your money.” She stood suddenly. He stood with her. She thrust her chin out, pride gleaming in her slitted eyes. “Plenty of working mothers manage to raise a child alone. I certainly don’t need your wealth to do it.”

  “This isn’t a challenge,” Zach said, his voice firm. “I don’t doubt you’re capable of doing whatever you damn well set your mind to, but know this.” With his thumb and forefinger, he tipped her chin up. “My child growing in your belly isn’t insignificant to me. I’m not walking away.”

  From you or our baby.

  None of the determination slipped from her gaze but tenderness joined it. “I’d never deny you the right to see or support your child, Zach. I was suggesting that I get out of the way.”

  “Whose way are you in, Penelope?”

  She didn’t say it but he could feel the word yours in the tense air between them.

  He dipped his face and captured her lips, sliding his tongue into her mouth and claiming her as his yet again. She wouldn’t be eschewing herself from his presence anytime soon.

  In fact...

  He bent and scooped her into his arms never breaking their lip-lock as he made a path for the bedroom. He was going to see to it that she didn’t get any farther away than his apartment.

  Baby or no, he’d staked a claim on the blonde in his arms long before her surprise announcement.

  And now she’d given him another reason to convince her to stay.

  Eight

  Penelope wasn’t aware the charity dinner Zach invited her to would be at his parents’ home. Until they pulled into the long driveway, fountains flanking either side, the grass mowed into an artistic crisscross pattern.

  The house was gargantuan. She hadn’t been joking about seeing it online, but one couldn’t fathom thirty-seven thousand square feet until looking right at it. The place was like its own city.

  “Wow,” she murmured, gripping her wrap and clutch. “This is impressive.”

  From beside her in the back of the limo, Zach emitted a noncommittal grunt.

  “Did you grow up in this house?”

  “No. They bought this place about seven or eight years ago. We grew up in a big house, but not this big.”

  The driver pulled to a stop and an attendant in a fine tuxedo opened the limo door for her. She accepted his offered hand, stepped out and transferred that hand to Zach.

  “You’ve done this before,” he commented. His tux was like the one he’d worn to Chase’s birthday party, but he’d chosen an all-black ensemble: shirt and bowtie included. The darkness made his golden skin, bright green eyes and hair in need of a trim stand out in tantalizing contrast.

  “Keep looking at me like that,” he murmured into her hair, “and I’ll have to show you to one of the many private bedrooms.”

  She should scold him but couldn’t. Finding a bedroom sounded, well...lovely.

  The charity function was being held in the house’s ballroom on the far east side—or as Pen liked to think of it, “left.” They joined the well-dressed throngs clicking through the marble hallways and stopping to admire what had to be million-dollar-plus paintings and sculptures dotting the long corridor.

  “Pretentious, right?” Zach muttered, earning a gasp from an older woman whose gray curls were piled on top of her head.

  Pen swallowed the laugh pushing against her throat. If that older woman knew who Zach was would she be more or less offended?

  It wasn’t until they entered the ballroom where the silent auction was underway that the butterflies in Pen’s tummy took flight. Right at the same moment her date said...

  “There’s my mom.”

  His mom. As in a mom. As in what Penelope would soon be—or was now, depending on when
one started counting. She might start hyperventilating.

  “Before I forget...” Zach stepped in her line of vision, taking it up with his fine attire and gorgeous self. “This is for you.”

  He reached into his pocket and light winked off a small metal object—okay, now she was going to hyperventilate.

  He slid the band onto the third finger of Pen’s left hand, a massive square-cut diamond in the center of an army of smaller diamonds. She...gaped. The ring was stunningly beautiful, and would likely require stronger biceps in order to hold her arm up while wearing it.

  “Zach.” Her gasp was muted, and then vanished altogether, when he lifted her knuckles and placed a kiss on them and the ring.

  “Can’t look engaged without the ring, now, can you?” His dimple made a brief appearance.

  “I suppose not.”

  “Let’s say hello.” He offered his right arm and Pen looped her left hand around his elbow, trying hard not to stare at the blinding facets winking up at her.

  “Eleanor Ferguson,” he said when he reached his mother. “I have someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Eleanor turned, her martini balanced between manicured pink nails and a few stunning rings of her own, all diamond-encrusted and throwing off nearly as much light as Penelope’s. Her blond hair was coiffed and stylish with warm honey highlights.

  “Penelope, I presume.”

  Pen nodded.

  “Please, call me Elle. It’s wonderful to meet the woman who stole Zach’s heart.” There was nothing disingenuous about her smile, but Pen still felt as if the woman’s reaction was a touch insincere.

  “Heavens, Zach. Renaldo did well.” Elle lifted Pen’s left hand and examined the engagement ring. “Renaldo is our family jeweler. He’s the best.” She slid the pad of her thumb over the diamonds. “Perfect fit, too. A little wiggle room is always nice in case you eat too much salt.”

  Or if I’m pregnant with your grandchild.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Hors d’oeuvres.” Elle rolled eyes that were a muted shade of Zach’s envious greens. “Since his heart attack, I make him eat healthy, but the very moment he’s out of my sight, he’s elbow deep in sausage canapés.”