Chapter One
Two minutes and thirty-three seconds to go.
Lizzie Baron stared at her watch with dismay. It had only been twenty-seven seconds since she started the timer on her watch. She refused to look until the full three minutes was up. Instead she checked her reflection in the mirror of the executive bathroom of the Baron Energies offices. She brushed a flake of mascara off the crest of her cheek and tucked a strand of rebellious hair behind her ear. She smoothed her skirt—a straight, businesslike skirt in boring charcoal-gray that ended just a shade above her knee, and checked the buttons of her matching fitted jacket for stray threads.
Perfect.
One minute, seventeen seconds.
Three minutes had never, ever in the history of the world, been this long. She was sure of it.
Her stomach churned uneasily but she told herself it was just nerves. Stress. She worked long hours at her job and didn’t get much downtime. Everyone at Baron was on edge since they had recently lost a major contract in the Gulf. The tension level in the downtown Dallas office could be cut with a knife most days. Stress could definitely have caused her period to be late, right?
Except, a little voice inside her head reminded her, your period was due before that particular piece of bad news, remember?
Twenty-six seconds.
She breathed in and out. She was not pregnant. It wasn’t possible. Well, it was. Technically. But highly improbable. She didn’t have time for this. And a one-night stand with a rodeo bum...well, how often did people get pregnant from one night?
She smiled grimly at the reflection of her face, her skin oddly pale under the unflattering fluorescent lighting. The answer to that was simple. It always only took one time for someone to get pregnant. Granted, the chances went up with frequency of... She swallowed. They hadn’t exactly slept a lot
that night.
Zero seconds.
Lizzie took a deep breath. Putting off looking wouldn’t change the result. She reached for the stick and stared at the little window.
A plus sign.
She was pregnant.
Just flipping wonderful.
* * *
LIZZIE GOT OUT of her car, blinking in the brightness of the San Antonio sun. She’d used the almost four-hour drive to prepare, to work out what she was going to say. The first thing she’d done after taking the home test was visit the doctor, where her pregnancy had been confirmed. Lizzie hadn’t wanted to say anything to anyone until she was 100 percent sure the first test hadn’t been a false positive. Her mind was still reeling with the news, and she was trying to sort out how she was going to tell her family....
They were going to seriously freak. And be disappointed. Who, in this day and age, went around having sex with strangers? She bit down on her lip. She was a joke. A statistic. A casualty of the 1 percent of condoms that failed at a crucial moment.
She’d always felt like the responsible one. When Delia Baron left her kids, Brock had been on his own, and Lizzie had stepped in and mothered her younger siblings. Then her dad had married Peggy and adopted her boys, Jacob and Daniel. Those years had been pretty good. They’d all lived together out at Roughneck Ranch—the name a deliberate hat-tip to the oil industry that had put the Baron name on the map. Lizzie had cared for Peggy a lot, which meant Peggy’s death had been especially hard to take.
Now her father was married again, this time to a much younger wife. Lizzie might have resented Julieta, who was only ten years older than herself, except Lizzie had found an unexpected friend and support in her stepmother.
Telling her would probably be the easiest of the family. Julieta never judged. She was always after Lizzie to get out and enjoy life more. Lizzie was fairly sure, though, that this wasn’t what Julieta meant.
For one night only she’d allowed herself to cut loose. What a fool she’d been for thinking she could work out her frustrations by being so self-indulgent, that she could be irresponsible without repercussions and consequences. It was totally out of character.
But sometimes she felt as though she was the one who took on all the heavy lifting in the family, was the rock for all her brothers and sisters when they went through stuff. She was tired of being Lizzie who never made mistakes, Lizzie who did everything right. Lizzie, Brock Baron’s firstborn.
Yeah, Jacob was pretty much the same age as she was, but he was her stepbrother. Lizzie was the oldest and her brother Jet was the baby. Sometimes she wished they were reversed in the birth order, because Brock wouldn’t give up the idea that Jet would take over Baron Energies one day. Problem was Jet wasn’t remotely interested.
Lizzie, on the other hand, had missed out on her fun years because she had been too busy getting her education and stepping into a role at the family company. She was supposed to set an example.
It was a lot of pressure.
Lizzie sighed and shut the car door, feeling the heat of the sun soak through her tailored jacket. What she really needed was a coffee. A nice, big, strong coffee with two sugars and real cream. Sadly, since the moment the test was positive, she’d given up the caffeine and cut back on the sugar. The result had been three days of caffeine withdrawal headache and irritability.
And through it all one thought had stuck in her brain. Lizzie needed to talk to him. The baby’s father.