Read Online The Best Man's Baby by Victoria James - Free Book Online

him.
    “Fine. Since I have no other alternative, and I feel like crap, you can help me load up the first flower van in the parking lot. One of our guys is running late and this is the earliest wedding, so we don’t have time to waste. All the silver vases with the hydrangeas and roses go in first.” She was walking around and talking at the same time. He wasn’t about to admit he didn’t know what a hydrangea looked like, so he let her lead the way. She still had a clipboard in her hand and was counting under her breath. He decided he liked the way Claire looked in her everyday jeans, especially since she filled them out so well.
    “Stop checking out my butt, Manning, and start loading up the truck,” she said in a whisper and looked around. Everyone was too busy to pay attention to them.
    “You know it’s a real turn-on for a guy to be talked to like that,” he said, picking up a vase and hiding his smile.
    “I’ll make sure I don’t do it again.”
    He picked up a second vase with his other hand. “Claire, you shouldn’t be lifting these. These must weigh like twenty pounds.”
    “Oh please, I lift those all the time.” She came to stand beside him and to prove her point raised her eyebrows and lifted up a vase, walking right out the propped-open back door. He cursed under his breath and followed her out the back.
    “So when are we going to talk to your mother?”
    He caught the vase she almost dropped.
    “We? No, I don’t think so. We are not going anywhere.” Her hands were frantically waving back and forth between their bodies.
    “You’re not telling her anything on your own. When does your father get back?”
    “Right now I’m thinking of not telling her at all. My father won’t be home for another few weeks. Maybe I can leave town or something. Like some pregnant teen in the fifties—”
    “This isn’t the fifties.”
    “You don’t know my parents.”
    He almost disagreed. He knew her father very well, but if he told her that she’d have a thousand questions for him. “Fine. We’ll talk about it at dinner tonight.”
    “I’d really like to tell my mother on my own, and I need to tell her soon before news of the, um…” She gave him a sheepish smile as her voice trailed off.
    He grinned. “News of the burger-stabbing reaches her?”
    She took a deep breath and nodded. “Can you just get the rest of the vases and we’ll talk after?”
    “Sure.”
    For the next half hour, Jake went back and forth getting the vases from the back room while Claire arranged everything on the truck. She was interrupted at least ten times by different employees and by phone calls on her BlackBerry. Not once did she lose her cool or look the least bit annoyed at all the questions. After the last van was loaded and all the employees gone, she turned to him. They were standing in the back room, which now looked as though a tornado had swept through and ripped up a rose garden.
    “Okay, I need ten minutes to change and then I’m out of here.”
    “You need to change?”
    “Yeah,” she said, grabbing a suit wrapped in dry-cleaner’s plastic out of a closet and walking toward what looked like a washroom. “Because now I’m going to make sure everything at all the churches is being set up properly, give my best to the brides, and then I’m done! I usually try to look professional.”
    He nodded. She did this every week? How did she plan on keeping this up as her pregnancy progressed? He felt a tightness in his stomach at the impending arguments he knew were inevitable when he told her she was going to have to slow down. One problem at a time.
    She was about to close the door to the washroom when she turned to look at him. “You really don’t have to wait.”
    “I want to.”
    She sighed and turned around, closing the door behind her.
    He looked around the room while she changed. He wasn’t much for flowers, but he had to say the smell in the room was pretty amazing, like a hundred spring gardens