Light Her Fire (Private Pleasures 2)

She lifted her eyes to his, and the anguish there almost tore him apart. “So am I.”

He didn’t know how to respond to the impasse, other than to reiterate all the sound, logical reasons why she should be the one to compromise in this instance, but she didn’t give him a chance.

“Josh, you have to let me go.”

His options sucked. He let her go and watched her race down his porch and drive off until her taillights disappeared. Then he sat on the couch, staring at the ring still sitting in its box, wondering how the hell his carefully planned romantic evening had gone so completely off the rails.

…

Melody dragged herself across Main Street and trudged down the sidewalk toward the office. She pushed her sunglasses higher on her nose and tilted her head down to avoid the harsh light. The humid morning already promised a sweltering day. A headache brewed behind her eyes, and her stomach threatened to revolt with every step, despite downing half her large Jiffy Java to-go cup of decaf peppermint tea. Last week’s walk-to-work companions, hope and optimism, were nowhere to be found this morning. Her white-cottage dreams of a happily ever after with Josh and their baby would remain just that—dreams. Her life, on the other hand, was officially a nightmare. Unmarried, pregnant, terrified, and stuck between two options she didn’t want to consider. On the plus side, things couldn’t really get much worse.

Something hard clipped her shoulder, knocking her several steps back and spilling her tea all over her blouse in the process. “Hey!” She looked up in time to see Justin Buchanan whizzing by on a skateboard. He turned and wagged his tongue at her.

Lovely. She tossed her cup into a nearby trash barrel and pulled her favorite silk blouse away from her skin, recognizing a ruined garment when she saw one. Just one more ruined thing in her life, and a comparatively small one considering everything else, but her emotions were so fragile she found herself blinking back tears. Unwilling to stand in the middle of the sidewalk bawling, she put her sorry butt in gear and started walking again.

Her cell phone chimed. While she’d like to think Josh was calling to tell her he’d slept on it and decided to turn down the job, she knew better. Ginny and Roger had been calling all morning. She’d have to talk to them at some point, she knew, but…later. Much later.

She mined the phone out of her purse and changed her setting to “do not disturb,” then dropped it back into her bag and looked up. Her miserable heart sank into her unwelcoming stomach. Did God hate her? Roger and Ginny loitered by the front steps of the office.

One look at her face apparently told the story. Ginny said, “Oh, honey.” Roger wrapped his arm around her, and that was all it took. The tears started in earnest. He more or less lugged her up the steps and into the building. Ginny held the office door open, and in the back of her mind she registered the fact that it was unlocked, which meant Ellie was already in.

Roger sat her on the sofa and hovered beside her, brushing her hair away from her face and murmuring, “Mel, don’t cry. Tell me what happened. Let’s figure this out.” Ginny scurried through the waiting room and into the office. She returned seconds later with a box of tissues, a bottle of water, and Ellie.

Nicely done, Melody. Now, for the second morning in a row, three sets of worried eyes focused on her. She needed to pull herself together. She took several tissues from the box Ginny offered, wiped her tears, and blew her nose. “I’m okay.”

“You’re far from okay,” Ellie replied. “Those were not tears of happiness.”

“I saw Josh in town yesterday afternoon,” Roger said. “Things seemed very on-track. I know he was planning a big evening. What happened?”

She nodded and swallowed the lump that kept trying to form in her throat. “He proposed. Got down on bended knee, with ring in hand. The works.”

“Wow, Mel, before you said a word about the baby?” Ginny asked.

“He didn’t have a clue about the baby. He had other reasons for popping the question.”

Ellie frowned. “And those changed once he learned you were pregnant?”

“No. No. He took the baby news in stride—I think.” She shook her head and tried to get her thoughts in order. “Everything got so muddled. In the same breath he proposed, he told me he’d accepted the job of fire chief in Cincinnati. He wanted me to pack up and move there with him.”

“Sounds like a good opportunity for him,” Roger observed in his neutral lawyer voice.

She looked up at him, then Ginny and Ellie. Their expressions all reflected varying degrees of what is the problem?

“I-I told him I was pregnant, and, obviously, under the circumstances, we couldn’t move to Cincinnati. Bluelick is where we belong. We have friends and family here. You guys are here.” She raised her eyes and looked at them. “I can’t picture raising this child anywhere else. But he didn’t agree. He insisted the baby represented all the more reason to go…higher-paying job and better for his career and…he just…he didn’t understand my feelings at all. He wants to go. And I don’t.”

“So you left things in a deadlock?” Ginny’s voice carried a note of censure. “Somebody blinks first or off he goes and here you stay?”

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t have the solution. All I know is for us to stay together, one of us has to make a huge sacrifice and be miserable.”

“You don’t know you’d be miserable in Cincinnati,” Roger pointed out gently. “As for friends and family, it’s only a few hours away.”

She thought about the women in the restroom at Stratton’s and squared her shoulders. “There is nothing I want in Cincinnati.”

“Yes there is,” Ginny said softly. “Josh.”

Chapter Twenty

Josh walked into Rawley’s after the end of his shift Monday evening knowing full well he was at the bar stalling. He could hide in Rawley’s for days, but he couldn’t hide from reality. Ready or not, he was going to be a daddy. The prospect terrified him to the bone—what the fuck did he know about being a dad?—but excitement mixed with the terror. An angel-haired toddler with a laugh like Melody’s kept invading his brain and making him smile. It was only a matter of time before he ended up on her doorstep. She obviously wasn’t coming anywhere near his, while his resolved diminished by the minute.