Ready, Set...Baby! by Christie Ridgway

Author:Christie Ridgway [Christie Ridgway]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459267176
Publisher: Harlequin

6

Standing before the worktable in the candy kitchen, Izzy rubbed the small of her back. “Five weeks to go! It seems forever.”

“Try five months,” Katie said, although she smiled sympathetically. “Are you too excited to wait?”

“And nervous. Dan, too.” Izzy put a second hand to her back. “Now that my due date is getting closer, he doesn’t want me to spend any time alone.”

Alone. The word echoed through Katie like a tolling bell, resonating unpleasantly against her heart. She knelt before a cardboard box and pulled out a stack of small, yellow, flattened cartons. If not for Seth, she would be pregnant alone, raising the babies alone. What did it matter that alone was how she spent her nights?

A memory from the week before, him carrying her to bed, his mouth soft on hers, created an ache between her legs. Her neck heated and she tried thinking of something else.

I never want to hurt you.

A week ago, his words had drifted through drowsiness into her consciousness. Since then, both had studiously avoided the bed-sharing issue. One thing she’d discovered they had in common was an ability to sidestep awkward subjects.

It’s what you get for marrying a stranger.

Apparently he thought it better to keep their relationship platonic. If that was what he wanted, if they could only have an nonphysical partnership—a parentship for the sake of the twins—then fine.

She remembered his green eyes burning down at her as he’d ended their kiss. But he did want her, she whispered inwardly; he did.

Not that it made her feel any better.

“What’s the matter? More trouble with Seth?” Izzy still rubbed at her back, a look of concern overlying the discomfort on her face.

Katie straightened and put the carton stack on the worktable beside the spools of violet ribbon. “Why don’t you go home, Iz? I can finish here.”

Izzy frowned. “You have the entire Junior League order to wrap. It’ll take hours.”

“Go home, Iz.” Katie needed to put Seth out of her head, and knowing Izzy, he would be a prime target of conversation over the candy wrapping.

Izzy’s red eyebrows snapped together. “Something’s wrong between you and your life-mate.”

“Roommate,” Katie corrected. “It’s more physically and emotionally accurate.”

“That man—”

Katie interrupted Izzy’s huff. “I’ll crank up the music, put my brain into neutral and my hands in high gear. I don’t want to think right now, about Seth or anything else.”

Izzy protested some more, but Katie insisted she leave. Losing herself and her doubts in music and the monotonous actions of individually wrapping the large candy order sounded perfect.

As Izzy let herself out, Katie crossed to the boom box in one corner of the room and upped the volume of the Mary Chapin Carpenter CD from background to semi-blasting.

Brrring. Through the boogie piano beat Katie caught the ring of her personal phone-line. She noted the time—three o’clock. The call was probably Seth, checking in.

Biting her lip, she let it ring again. Roommates could let the machine pick up when roommates called. Another ring. A roommate could

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