Read Online The Pregnant Bride by Catherine Spencer - Free Book Online Page B

was that having him as an ally had helped her through the darkest hours of her life. He’d been her champion when she had no one else to turn to. Because of him, she’d emerged from her own misfortunes all the stronger. Given that, and the knowledge that his learning the truth would not, after all, destroy a marriage, was she being fair to keep her pregnancy a secret from him?
    Nervously, she smoothed her right hand over the fingers of her left. The answers were no longer as clear-cut as she’d once thought, and she wished he’d leave so that she could be alone and sort out her thoughts.
    “You do that a lot you know,” Edmund said.
    She looked up, puzzled. “Do what?”
    “Trace your thumb over the place where you used to wear Armstrong’s ring.”
    “Really?”
    “Really. Still crying yourself to sleep every night over him?”
    “Absolutely not! He’s out of my life.”
    “You almost sound as if you mean that.”
    “I do,” she said emphatically.
    She’d been making the same claim for weeks and couldn’t have said when it had shifted from proud denial to relieved truth. There hadn’t been a thunderclap to mark the day or moment. It was more that distance had not lent Mark enchantment. Instead, it had stripped him of his carefully cultivated mystique and revealed such inherent weaknesses that she had been able to let him go without regret.
    Now, other events—her baby, motherhood—filled the space in her heart which once he’d occupied. “He wasn’t as crucial to my happiness as I believed,” she said. “In fact, I’m enjoying being my own person again.”
    “That’s good,” Edmund said. “I’m glad.”
    “I wish more people shared your opinion! I’m forever being set up to meet someone new. My friends refuse to believe I’m happy being unattached, and as for my family…!” She shook her head disbelievingly. “They think the breakup is the tragedy of the decade and I should try to get back together with him, if you can imagine.”
    “And you’d never consider the possibility?”
    “Never. It’s out of the question.” For a reason you can’t begin to imagine!
    “Then I don’t need to worry about you anymore.” He smothered a yawn and got to his feet. “I should push off. You’re looking a bit peaked again, Jenna, and I’ve had a long day.”
    An hour before, she’d have said he never should have come to begin with. Now, surprisingly, she found herself reluctant to see him go. “It was nice of you to stop by.”
    “That’s me, all right…Mr. Nice Guy!” He closed in on her and for one wild, exhilarating moment, she thought he was going to try to kiss her. Instead, he smiled and cuffed her gently under the chin. “I’ll stay in touch.”
    From the third-floor balcony off her living room, she watched him leave the apartment building and cut across the lawn to the street where the Navigator was parked. He walked with a long, easy stride, a tall, dark and handsome man who exerted a powerful fascination for her above and beyond the fact that he’d fathered the child she carried.
    Mark had taught her the hard way that men weren’t always what they seemed, yet she found herself wanting to believe in Edmund and to trust him. Which brought her back to the question which had been hammering to be heard since he’d told her he was no longer married: dare she risk telling him he was the father of her unborn child? Or should she play it safe and sever all connection with him?
    More confused by the minute, she backed into the living room and closed the glass doors to the balcony. Her faith in her own judgment had been badly shaken by the fiasco with Mark. She needed to discuss her predicament with someone clear-sighted enough to see the big picture, and unbiased enough to offer an impartial opinion. She needed to talk to her best friend, Irene.
     
     
    “What I’d do,” Irene decided the next day, while the toddlers napped in the shade of the cherry tree in the day-care