Just A Little Bit Pregnant

Three

Pandemonium was the normal order of things at the Sentinel as deadline approached. Saturdays were especially crazy as the paper geared up for the Sunday edition, and this Saturday was no exception. Phones rang. People yelled or cussed. The smell of microwave popcorn competed with that of stale cigarette smoke, though the newsroom was supposedly smoke-free.

A row of glass-fronted cubicles faced the big room where people rushed, typed, argued or talked on the phone. In one of those cubbyholes, the Rolling Stones moaned about a lack of satisfaction from a radio perched high on a cluttered bookcase. Yellow sticky notes bloomed on printouts, clippings and miscellaneous piles of paper that threatened to bury the empty soda cans on the desk. A small ceramic planter held a dead plant surrounded by crumpled candy wrappers.

The nameplate on the desk read simply Outlaw.

No traditional family photos were on display, but two framed photographs from news stories and three press awards crowded the bit of wall that showed between file cabinets.

Someone down the hall dropped something large and metallic. The resounding clatter drowned out all the other noises, but Jacy didn’t notice. Like anyone accustomed to living with a large, noisy family, she was good at tuning the rest out. Surrounded by the clutter of her crowded cubbyhole, she was intent on her story.

The chaos and demands of Jacy’s job soothed her. After a miserable night she’d plunged into work that morning the way an Olympic swimmer dives into a pool—with the abandon and discipline of total commitment. She knew who she was here at the paper, what she wanted.

It wasn’t a major story. Yesterday a man died of stab wounds. In a city like Houston, death was as commonplace as births, weddings and brutality. But honor required Jacy to treat every article as if it were destined for the front page—no slacking, no skimping.

As soon as she finished the story she sent it, with a few swift keystrokes, to her editor’s desk for approval. Her chair creaked as she leaned back in it.

Damn, she was tired. She slipped her sandals off and pulled her legs up onto the chair under the gauzy cover of her loose sundress. Jacy had figured out a couple years ago that an unstructured dress was the coolest thing she could wear in the summer, and she seldom put anything else on from June to the end of September.

She laid her head on her upraised knees for a moment, and sighed. It was close to seven o’clock and she’d been on her feet nearly all day, after getting precious little sleep last night.

“Hey, what are you doing, sleeping on the job?” a cheerful voice asked.

Jacy raised her head. “One of these days,” she observed, “that cheeriness is going to get you killed.”

Nannette Tompkins grinned and held out a folder. “Records said you wanted this, and I offered to trot it up to you. You have any more of those chocolate-covered raisins?”

Jacy sighed as she took the folder from her friend. Nan was cute. There was no other word for it. She was short and curvy, with frizzy red hair, freckles and a smile to rival the young Sally Field’s. “I’m not up for chitchat now, okay?”

“That was obvious from the moment you showed up this morning, growling at everyone. Which is why I offered to bring this file up.” She came around to Jacy’s side of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

“Go away, Gidget.”

“Insults roll off me like water. Oh, here they are.” She retrieved what was left of Jacy’s stash of chocolate-covered raisins. “Now,” she said, sitting in the one extra chair the tiny office boasted, “tell Mama what’s wrong. It has something to do with that hunk of a cop you went out with a couple months ago, doesn’t it?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” Since Nan was as shrewd as she was cute, Jacy had little hope of being believed.

Both of Nan’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.” She tossed a few raisins into her mouth, tilted the chair back and propped her feet on Jacy’s desk. “Nothing’s wrong. You’ve just got the world’s worst case of PMS and felt like reading some obituaries and it’s pure coincidence that the one Records sent you belongs to Rasmussin’s wife.”

Jacy flushed. “Dammit, Nan, you had no business—”

“I care,” Nan interrupted, and for once there was no smile on her round face. “Whether that gives me a right to snoop or not we can argue about later. Now tell me what’s up.”

Jacy sighed, leaned back in her chair and opened the folder. “I’m pregnant.”

Nan’s feet came down with a thud. “You’re what!”

“You heard me,” Jacy muttered. The folder held two sheets of the slick, smeary paper used in the microfilm machine at the morgue, and a glossy photograph. One of the sheets was a copy of an article from a few years ago. The other was an obituary.

“It’s his? Rasmussin’s?”

“Yeah.” Jacy scanned the article. It read:

Three people were killed today when a westbound car crossed the center lane of the Central Expressway and crashed head-on into oncoming traffic.

“Have you told him?”

“Yeah.” The article added that the driver of the westbound car had been drinking and was ruled dead at the scene. His victims hadn’t been so lucky. One hemorrhaged to death before the ambulance arrived. The other died at the hospital during emergency surgery.

Allison Rasmussin was the one who died in surgery.

“Well? What did he say?”

Jacy took out the photo and tossed the folder on her desk. “He wanted to know why I thought it was his.”

Nan used some words that would have gotten Gidget’s mouth washed out with soap.

Jacy smiled for the first time. “Look,” she said, feeling the strain of the long day settle around her, “I know you mean well, but I need to sort some things out before I talk about it, okay?”

If one of the cubs from the city-hall beat hadn’t stuck his head in the door, looking for Nan, Jacy might not have prevailed. But between the rumor of a city councilman’s arrest for driving while intoxicated and Jacy’s smiling plea for time, Nan was persuaded to leave.

Jacy’s smile faded as soon as she was alone again. She looked at the picture in her hand. It was a duplicate of the one on Tom’s desk, she realized. Allison Rasmussin still smiled shyly out at the world from it, a delicate Dresden lady in a blue-and-white checked dress.

A pretty woman, Jacy thought—not beautiful, or especially striking. Just pretty. Had she been as delicate as she looked? Had she gone to college, drunk beer, crammed for exams, entered a profession? What had she dreamed, longed for, resented?

Had she loved her husband as much as he still loved her three years after her death?

When Jacy’s phone buzzed she dropped the picture on top of the folder, relieved to be dragged away from a subject she kept worrying like a sore tooth. But the interruption wasn’t quite the change of subject she’d hoped for.

Her boss was ready to see her now.

Jacy took a deep breath, trying to clear her weary mind. Tabor wasn’t going to take the news of her pregnancy well.

Theobold Tabor was over sixty but didn’t look it, though the deep grooves along his cheeks suggested his scowl was a frequent fixture. He had long, bony arms and legs, and skin the color of the polished teak cane that leaned against the desk where he sat. Back in the sixties some Klansmen hadn’t approved of the series of articles he’d done on civil rights. They’d taken a baseball bat to his knees.

Jacy respected Tabor more than any other journalist on the face of the planet, and she liked him almost as much as she respected him. At the moment, though, she was considering using his cane to hit him over his very hard head. “It’s none of your business,” she repeated.

“None of my business? You come prancing in here, tell me you need to take maternity leave in a few months and expect me to leave it at that?”

Well, no, she hadn’t expected him to “leave it at that.” That’s why she’d been dreading this discussion. In an office full of professional snoops, Tabor could have won an award, hands down, for being the nosiest. Especially with his friends. “My maternity leave is your business,” she said. “The name of my baby’s father isn’t.”

Indignation faded into sorrow on Tabor’s long face. “I thought we were friends.”

“We are, but—”

“You can’t trust me?” He put the question quietly. With resignation.

Oh, he was good, all right. Jacy rolled her eyes. “You already gave yourself away when you asked if the ‘sorry so-and-so’ was going to marry me.”

“A perfectly reasonable question.”

“I am not going to cater to your medieval ideas by telling you his name. You have no shame. You’d probably call him and tell him he had to marry me or something.” Jacy shuddered. That was all she needed—having Tabor and Tom both telling her she had to marry for her baby’s sake. She’d have to leave the state to get any peace.

“The man should be willing to give his baby a name,” he said firmly.

“I’ve got a name to give my baby. James. I may not know where it came from, but it’s a perfectly good name.”

He was silent for a moment before switching tacks. “Setting aside my ‘medieval’ notions, it’s not going to be easy raising a child alone. You’ll let me know if I can help, won’t you?”

“Well,” she said, weakly relieved that he’d dropped the cross-examination for now, “I might want to borrow Camille for a few words of advice sometimes.” Tabor’s wife had raised three children while working full-time as an architect before she and Tabor met and married a few years ago. Jacy figured she’d know plenty about how to balance parenting with a professional life.

“She’ll tell you the first thing you need is a supportive husband,” Tabor returned promptly. “And I...good God—”

“What is it?” she asked suspiciously.

Tabor grimaced. “Tell me that isn’t the baby’s father coming toward us across the newsroom. Please.”

Jacy’s whole body jolted. Tom? Here? She turned in her chair—and sighed. The stranger she’d seen in Tom’s office yesterday was winding between desks out in the main room. He was dressed slightly better today. His T-shirt was a truly virulent green, but it lacked yesterday’s slogan. He still sported the bandanna and a couple days’ growth of beard.

“Not the father,” she said. “The uncle.”

Jacy spoke the words, then stopped. Her baby was going to have an uncle? Her hand dropped to her stomach. She hadn’t realized, but...through Tom, her baby would have relatives. Like grandparents. An uncle. Maybe some cousins. Everything Jacy had lacked.

She was anxious, suddenly, to know more about Tom’s family. What were they like? Would they accept the baby?

“An uncle, eh?” Tabor said thoughtfully.

Jacy grimaced. She’d slipped. Given that much, Tabor would have Tom’s identity in a day or two. The man was uncanny that way. “All right,” she said, standing. “I’ll tell you now if you promise you aren’t going to call him and tell him to ‘do right’ by me.”

“You don’t really believe I’d interfere in your life that way, calling some man I’ve never met and—have I ever met him?”

“No hints,” she said firmly, heading for his door. If she hurried she could intercept Tom’s brother before he got here and Tabor interrogated him. “Do you promise?”

“All right, all right. I won’t call him.”

Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t go harass Tom in person, but she was out of bargaining time. “Tom Rasmussin,” she told him, and turned the door handle.

“The cop?” He sat up straight, astounded. “You’re involved with a cop?”

“Not anymore,” she said, and escaped.

Raz saw Jacy emerge from a glass-enclosed office. As she headed toward him he added details to his impression of her yesterday. Physically she was a knockout, of course—not beautiful, but she fairly shimmered with energy. And her body—down, boy, Raz told his own body. He was going to have to learn to think of this woman as a sister.

She asked him to join her in her office. He followed, aware of the half-dozen people staring at them curiously—aware of the sway of her hips beneath her loose, gauzy dress.

He smiled. Maybe seeing her as a sister was asking too much of himself. He could still appreciate the view, couldn’t he?

He followed her to a tiny cubicle where the Supremes were singing about being a “love child.” She grimaced and switched off the radio. Raz settled in the only chair without waiting for an invitation.

She didn’t look happy to see him when she sat behind her desk. She looked wary and tired...and sinfully hot, like a week’s worth of mind-blowing sex wrapped up in wrinkled cotton. Hot enough, maybe, to break down the milehigh walls of a certain stubborn fool.

Best of all, she looked nothing at all like Allison. The only other woman who had stirred his brother’s interest in the past three years had looked entirely too much like his dead wife. Fortunately, she’d ended up marrying their cousin Seth. “We haven’t exactly been introduced,” he said with one of his best grins. “I’m Tom’s brother Raz, and I am very pleased to meet you.”

“Raz?” Her eyebrows rose. “I could have sworn it was Ferdinand,” she murmured.

He winced. “Apparently my brother’s been giving away family secrets.”

“Nope. But I’m a reporter. I’ve got my sources.”

He glanced at the folder on her desk, where Allison’s photo smiled back at him. “So I see.”

She snatched the picture and stuck it back in the folder. “So what can I do for you?”

“First, you can accept my apology. I didn’t realize when I insisted on staying in Tom’s office yesterday quite how personal your business with him was. I’m sorry I intruded.” He hesitated. “Well, I’m sorry if my presence was awkward for you, anyway. I’m not really sorry I was there. This way I got to hear the good news right away.”

She hesitated, then smiled tentatively. “I’m glad you consider it good news. Apology accepted.”

She was sharp, sexy, successful...and, he realized when he looked at that uncertain smile, vulnerable. Raz recognized that and responded instinctively. He couldn’t lust after a woman with wounds hiding in her eyes, wounds he suspected his brother had a lot to do with. “You shook Tom up pretty thoroughly.”

“Good.”

“He’s not really as much of an idiot as he seems, you know. He’s...not good with surprises.” Raz knew both too much and too little to say more—too much about his brother’s side of what had happened between him and this woman, too little about her.

“I don’t—” A yawn interrupted whatever else she was going to say.

“Long day?”

“Saturdays always are.” She eyed him curiously. “That’s the ugliest shirt I’ve ever seen. You’re undercover with Vice, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “If you’re trying to excuse my taste—”

Her phone rang. She picked it up, shrugging an apology for the interruption. She listened, asked a couple questions, then hung up and stood. “That was my boss,” she said, her eyes shiny with excitement in spite of the shadows beneath them. “I’ve got to go. The old Rutger Hotel is burning, the reporter who normally covers that beat is on another story and Tabor’s holding the front page.”

Big fires are noisy. The sounds of this one reached Jacy while she was still in her car a couple blocks away—water roaring and hissing, men shouting and a deep, bass rumbling, as if some huge monster were under assault. Adrenaline ate at her lingering exhaustion as she hunted for a parking place—adrenaline and dread.

Her years as a reporter had never taught her how to approach human disaster with detachment. Even as she parked her car illegally in an alley, she wondered if anyone burned in the belly of that beast or crouched in one of the yet untouched rooms, waiting for rescue or death.

But when she shut her car door behind her, she did her best to shut away both her dread of what she might discover at the fire, and the last remnants of her fatigue. She had a job to do.

It was summer, so it was still light outside when she approached the barricades. And hot. She felt the heat of the fire sharply through the thin gauze of her dress as she hunted up witnesses, and she breathed in air that stank of burning. Smoke billowed out of the windows of the historic old hotel, chased upward by a lurid underskirt of orange flame.

Four fluorescent yellow fire engines hemmed in the blaze. From eighty-five feet off the ground, two men in the basket of the snorkel truck directed a thousand gallons of water a minute on the roof of the nearest building. Below, firefighters in protective gear aimed the powerful umbilical lines of their fire hoses at the monster devouring the building.

It took Jacy fifteen minutes to confirm that all of the hotel guests were believed to have gotten out. Within another half hour she had some names, a possible cause of the blaze and interviews with the battalion chief and one of the evacuees. The fire wasn’t out, but it was under control—and back at the newsroom, Tabor was holding a spot on the front page. Time to leave.

Darkness was slipping over the city when Jacy headed back to her car, where her cellular phone waited. She ran possible lead lines through her head as she walked.

Halfway there, she started to feel dizzy.

Jacy was used to good health. She’d never felt anything like the light-headed, fading sensation that swept over her. She stopped, uncertain. A little scared.

Had she forgotten to eat? Yes, she decided. That was it. That’s all that was wrong with her—low blood sugar. She’d skipped supper. Obviously delaying meals was a mistake in her condition. After a brief pause she felt slightly better and started walking again.

Then the first cramp hit.

Wounded animals make for their lairs. When the walls of Tom’s apartment started closing in on him that afternoon, he headed for headquarters. The window of Tom’s office faced west. He stared out at the dying day as the thickening gray of twilight gave way to the darkness that spread itself over the city, watching as lights winked on in windows. Tom had spent half his lifetime defending the people in the houses behind those winking lights from those who preyed on their fellows.

Protect and Defend.

Twenty years ago, when he’d graduated from the police academy and pinned on his badge for the first time, he’d known so much. A man did, at that age. He’d been certain of what he wanted from life and how to get it. He’d wanted to be a cop like his father, and he’d wanted to settle down with a good woman and raise children.

It hadn’t occurred to him, at twenty, to wonder whether he deserved either of those sweetest of life’s gifts.

By the time he met the good woman twelve years later, Houston’s streets had knocked most of his certainties out of him. He’d still wanted to marry, but he’d no longer dared to want children.

Allison had, though.

Tom turned away from the window and walked to his desk. Slowly he picked up the photo that had sat on the same corner of that desk for six years—three years before Allison died, and three years, now, after.

It wasn’t Allison he’d dreamed about last night.

Tom knew what love was. He’d loved his wife, so he knew it wasn’t love he felt for Jacinta James. This hot, urgent craving was too selfish, too physical and too nearly desperate to be that tender emotion. But it wasn’t anything as simple and clean as lust, either. Lust by itself wouldn’t burden him with guilt this way. Lust would have been eased by taking her to bed, not doubled.

Obsession, maybe.

The name didn’t matter. Whatever he felt, he was going to have to deal with it, and he hoped, he prayed, he could get a handle on how to do that quickly. She was carrying his baby. His baby. He’d treated her badly and she wanted nothing to do with him, and he couldn’t blame her for that. But he couldn’t let her continue to hold him at arm’s distance, either.

He had to change her mind. Somehow, some way, he had to change her mind about marrying him.

Tom stared at the photo in his hand. He couldn’t ask Jacy again to marry him while Allison’s picture sat on his desk, could he?

The phone rang. Tom set the photo on his desk, facedown, as he picked the receiver up. “Rasmussin here,” he said.

“Tom?” The voice at the other end was so shaky and uncertain that for one jarring second he didn’t recognize it. “Tom, there’s something wrong. Really wrong. I—I’m cramping and I—”

“Jacy? Where are you?”

“I’m in my car near the Rutger. The hotel. There’s a fire and I—I’m bleeding.” Her voice broke, and she was crying. Jacy, whom he would have sworn could take a beating without crying, choked her words out between sobs. “I’m afraid I’m losing the baby. I’m scared, Tom. I’m so scared!”

“Stay there. Stay right there in your car and I’ll get someone to you.” He could do this, he told himself. Hadn’t he done this hundreds of times, talked to a victim or a witness, kept his voice steady, detached, so they would stay calm while he did his job? “Stay there,” he repeated, and his voice broke. “I’ll get you some help, Jacy, I swear it.”

Four