I frowned. “Is anything bothering you?”
She glanced up, but a solid wall of invisible ice separated her from me. All her warmth drained away. I might as well be looking at a marble statue. “What could possibly be bothering me?”
I glared at her. Thunderclouds roiled and boomed inside my head. Now I knew for certain something was bothering her. “Don’t tell me you’re letting all these pregnancy rumors get to you. Since when do you care what the papers say? They’ve said a lot worse about us.”
Just for a second, her old self flickered beneath the surface. She bent forward. “What would happen if it was true? What would happen if I really did get pregnant?”
I jerked his neck sideways. “How the hell should I know? What could be so wrong if you were?”
“What would Tanya do to me?” she asked.
“Tanya!” I snorted. “What’s Tanya got to do with this?”
She lowered her eyes again, and the glass window came down between us. “Forget it.”
“I will not forget it,” I ranted. “What, I might ask, does Tanya have to do with this? What does Tanya have to do with anything?”
She fixed her eyes on me, but those eyes chilled me to the bone. I barely recognized her. “Tanya said if I did anything to sully your reputation, she would nullify the contract. She would withdraw all the compensation you’re paying me to marry you. She would take away all my spending account money—everything—gone.”
“So, what?” I shot back. “You’re not pregnant, so what difference does it make?”
She threw up her hands. “Forget it. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
I flung myself back in my chair and scowled at her. She looked sideways at nothing. She didn’t even look at her menu.
I made a show of studying the entree section. “What are you going to have?”
She wadded up the napkin in her lap and threw it on her plate. “You know what? I don’t feel very good. I’ve got a stomachache. We’ve put in our appearance for this week. Can’t we please go home early? I want to go to bed.”
My mouth fell open. “You want to go home? But the night hasn’t even started yet.”
“I know.” She stood up. “Can’t we please just go? I don’t want to be here right now.”
She didn’t wait for me to get up and escort her. She just walked straight out the back door of the restaurant, leaving me no choice but to follow. She had to stand on the sidewalk in the fresh night air while we waited for the limo to come around and pick us up. She trained her face into the breeze and wouldn’t look at me.
I stared at the back of her head. What in the world was wrong with her? Everything went so great this last month, and she changed over
night. Now she gave me the cold shoulder. When I took her hand, her fingers hung cold and limp in my grasp. None of the warmth infused her touch and the inner light that used to shine out of her no longer radiated in my direction.
She didn’t linger when she got out of the limo. She usually hesitated to hold my hand so we could enter the penthouse together. Now she marched to the elevator cocooned in her frigid isolation. When the elevator opened in the penthouse foyer, she made a bee-line for the bedroom.
I hung back to see what she would do. When I got to the bedroom, I met her coming out of the bathroom in a large white terry cloth bathrobe. She clutched the lapels together under her chin. She wound up her hair in a loose knot on top of her head, crawled into bed still bundled in the robe, and pulled the feather comforter up around her chin.
I toppled onto the bed next to her. I bent close to murmur in her ear. “Hey, baby. Come over here and let me make you feel better. You know I can give you what you need.”
She closed her eyes. She turned over on her side, so she presented her back to me. “I can’t tonight. I’m too tired. I just want to go to sleep. Sorry, baby. Have a good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She didn’t move again. I reclined back on the pillows and scowled at her bunch of hair sticking out from under a mountain of down. I couldn’t see any other part of her. Why was she acting so weird all of a sudden?
I might think she came down with a cold or something, but the way she acted around that reporter made me wonder. She only got weird when he mentioned the pregnancy rumor. Something fishy was definitely going on, and I’d be blamed if I sat back on my hands without finding out what it was.
12
Gabriela
I sat at my dressing table and studied myself in the mirror. I made sure to hide the pregnancy test I took three days ago. Finding the spare time to sneak away from Gray to buy the thing and then take it back to the penthouse proved a much bigger challenge.
Now I couldn’t do anything but sit here and stare my problem straight in the face. The rumor was true. I was pregnant. I could only hope that the rumor about twins wasn’t true as well. Now how in God’s name could I break the news to Gray?