Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (50 page)

“I’ve got to make sure Landon isn’t
driving his aunt crazy,” I said. “I could walk you to your car though.”

When we got to her car, I managed to
scrounge up enough courage to kiss her; Mackenzie melted against me, and the
urge to call and tell my sister that I’d be late to pick Landon up was almost
unbearable. But a little voice inside my head told me that I was just delaying
the inevitable. I kissed her one last, quick time. “I’ll get in touch after the
holiday,” I said. “I’d love to see you again, and soon.”

“That would be really nice,” Mackenzie
said. I turned away to find my car, and tried not to wonder how I could spend
almost two hours with a woman and not know for sure whether she loved me or
not.

Chapter Five - Mackenzie

I had expected that the date with Patrick
would finally make everything clear to me; I’d know for sure whether or not he
was interested in me, or if he’d moved on. Instead when I went home I had been
more confused than ever. To make matters worse, the day after the date was my
day off from work; I was going to be spending the whole day by myself, dwelling
on the strangeness of the date and trying to figure out what to think.

Patrick had said that he wanted to see me
again—sometime during the holiday week. But he hadn’t made any specific
timeframe, and he hadn’t texted me after we’d parted for the night. He hadn’t
even mentioned wanting to come home with me; though that might be as much
because he had to think about Landon as anything else. We’d made out—and it had
been as hot as ever—but before that the whole date had been awkward. And then,
of course, there was the fact that he’d been avoiding me, and he hadn’t given
me any kind of reason for it. Something about his excuse about being busy just
didn’t add up to me, though I couldn’t say what.

Instead of torturing myself all day, after
I got up and had some breakfast, I called Amie. Even if I wasn’t sure whether
or not I could fully trust her with information about my relationship with
Patrick, I wanted her company, and she was one of the only other people in the
office who had the day off so close to Christmas. “Hey, Amie,” I said when she
picked up the phone.

“What’s up? I would’ve thought you’d be
hanging out with Patrick.” I rolled my eyes, even though I knew she couldn’t
see.

“He’s at work,” I pointed out. “I was
wondering if you’d want to come over and help me wrap presents.”

“Sure! As long as you’ve got some wine for
me to drink when I get there.”

“Are you even supposed to be drinking with
the medications you’re on?”

“I’ll skip a dose; I’ll need to do that anyway,
with having to take the bus to get there.”

“I can pick you up,” I pointed out.

“Nope. I’m going to hop the bus in ten
minutes—it’s going right by my place to your place. Don’t even think about
getting in your car. The roads are icy.” Before I could argue the point—to try
and tell Amie that if the roads were bad enough that she didn’t want me to
drive, they were bad enough that walking to the bus stop, especially with her
injuries, would be miserable—she hung up on me. I shook my head and chuckled to
myself, and got up to get ready for her to arrive.

I grabbed a cheap bottle of red wine that
one of my patients’ parents had given me as a Christmas gift and poured it into
a pot with some spices, sliced an orange and a lemon and added them too. I set
it on the stove to heat up a little bit—Amie would definitely be even happier
to have not only wine, but hot wine to enjoy when she got to my place. I pulled
out all of the things I needed to wrap, including the presents I’d gotten for
the clinic’s holiday party the next day. We had two big gift-giving things for
the party: one was a Secret Santa with a limit of $15, and the other was a $5
“stuff the stockings” gift.

In twenty minutes, there was a knock at my
door, and I hurried to let Amie into my apartment. “I can smell wine,” she
said, giving me a quick, awkward hug with her injured arm dangling, a big bag
full of gifts to be wrapped hung on her other shoulder.

“Not just wine,” I said, leading her into
my kitchen. “Mulled wine.” I turned off the heat and added a little bit of
sugar and big splash of brandy from a bottle I kept around mostly for cooking,
and in a minute we were sitting at my kitchen table together, drinking our
wine, talking about the office gossip.

“Who’d you get for secret Santa?” I rolled
my eyes; no one was supposed to know, but since Amie was going to be helping me
wrap presents, there was no point in even trying to keep it a secret.

“I got Mary-Ann,” I said. “I got one of
those gift sets from Bath and Body Works for her, since she wears all that
lotion and stuff.”

“I got Jim,” Amie said, making a face. “I
got him a couple of mini-bottles of bourbon on special and a gift card to the
hardware store.” I laughed; Jim was another one of the physical therapists, and
one of the manliest men I’d ever met in my life—he’d be delighted with the
present Amie had gotten him. “If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s got a wife
already, and a kid on the way—only you didn’t hear it from me—I’d ask him out.”
Amie sighed.

“Please! As if you need another man in
your life. You’re juggling what—three guys right now?”

“Two,” Amie said, shaking her head. “Me
getting injured freaked Dave out and he split on me.”

“Men are shameful creatures,” I told her,
doing my best Southern Belle impression.

“You say that when you got one of the good
ones?”

I shrugged it off.

“What’s going on with you and Patrick, by
the way?”

“Let’s get this wrapping started,” I
suggested. I took another sip of the hot, strong wine and stood carefully; it
was already starting to hit me.

“Well if you don’t want to talk about it…”
Amie followed me into the living room with her wine and we got down to work on
wrapping our different presents. She had gotten a bunch of nice pens for
everyone for her “stuff the stocking,” in different colors so that everyone
would know which was whose; one of the most common rights in the office was the
chronic shortage of pens—with everyone accusing everyone else of stealing
“their” pen.

I put on some Christmas music and we got
down to work, chatting about what we wanted to do over the holidays, comparing
New Year’s Eve plans. I figured that I would be spending my night with my
family, and told Amie as much. “Are you bringing Patrick to meet everyone? It
seems a bit soon for that.”

“Probably not,” I said with a shrug,
concentrating for a moment on a tricky corner on one of the presents for my
Dad. “I’m sure he’s probably got plans already.”

“Probably?” I glanced at Amie’s face to
see the look of surprise on her features. “Probably? Amie—if you’re dating him,
you should
know
whether he’s got
plans for New Year’s or not. Did you even invite him to your parents’ party?”

“No.” I finished taping down a tail of
wrapping paper and turned the box around to make sure it didn’t look weird. “I
don’t know if I want him to come with me to the party.”

“Why not? He’s cute, and it’d get your
parents off your back for at least a few weeks.”

“Yeah, and they’ll spend half the night
asking him about how many dates we’ve been on, about what he does for a living,
whether he’s planning on having kids…” I felt my cheeks burning as the real
reason for not inviting him nagged at me: I didn’t know whether or not I was,
strictly speaking, even still in a relationship with Patrick.

“You’re hiding something from me about the
guy,” Amie said, frowning and crossing her arms over her chest. “Come on, Mack.
If he’s done something to hurt you…”

“It’s not really his fault,” I said. “At
least—I don’t think it is. I mean, it’s just gotten weird between us. That
isn’t anyone’s fault, right?”

“That depends,” Amie told me. “How has it
gotten weird?”

“Just…” I sighed. “Let me get us both some
more of the wine. I’m going to need it to explain.”

I stood up and gestured for Amie to stay
where she was, seated on my living room floor. I went into the kitchen and
refilled our glasses, taking as much time as I dared. When I came back into the
living room, Amie had finished off another one of her pen packages and was
waiting for me to start talking.

“Okay, so…”

“So the other day, he had to cancel one of
our dates,” I explained. “I didn’t really think anything about it; he said he
had a business dinner he had to go to, which I guess makes sense.”

“You had to cancel on him the night I got
hurt,” Amie said. “So what’s the deal?”

“In the back of my head I was…” I frowned
and took a sip of my wine. “I guess I was suspicious but I didn’t really say
anything. He promised to make it up to me with a date that was twice as good,
and that he’d bring me flowers, the whole deal—you know?”

“Sounds like he’s better than even I thought!”
Amie worked away at another package. “Where does it get weird?”

“Well after he canceled, I figured he’d
text me or call me that night to reschedule, you know? At least to set a date.
But he didn’t. And when I texted him the next morning to ask how the dinner
was, he said it was just about how he’d expected…but normally he kind of gets
flirty when he replies.”

“That can’t be it.”

“It isn’t. You haven’t been working, so
you haven’t seen Landon coming into the clinic alone.”

“Alone?”

“His dad’s out in the car. Supposedly
working. You know—busy since it’s about to be a week away from the office, and
he has to make sure everything is as it should be before everything shuts
down.”

“He could work in the waiting room. Or at
your desk.”

“Exactly,” I said. I shook my head. “So I
started to feel like he was avoiding me, but I didn’t really know what to do
about it. Finally, last night I called him to just basically ask if we were
okay.”

“And what was his reaction?” Amie took a
long drink of her wine.

“He said he’s just been really busy, and
he asked if I had any plans last night. I didn’t, so he suggested that we do
some Christmas shopping together.”

“That sounds promising.”

“It kind of was,” I agreed. “But then I
got to the mall and everything was weird between us the whole time. He hugged
me and kissed me but there was—it was like there was some weird thing between
us. Like we weren’t talking at the same speed, even though we were.”

“Ah.” Amie nodded. “So how did the date
end? Did you just throw yourselves at each other and go up in a blaze of
awkward passion?”

“Nope.” I sighed. “We made out a little
bit and then he had to go pick up his son. We couldn’t have gone home together
even if it hadn’t been so weird.”

“You’re right; men are all shameful
creatures,” Amie said. She raised her glass and I clinked mine against it, and
for a while we went back to wrapping presents without even addressing the topic
of Patrick.

We finally finished up both of our
wrapping chores, and managed to finish off the wine, too. Instead of taking the
bus, Amie decided that she was going to spend the money to catch a cab, and I
offered to give her some leftovers out of my freezer so she wouldn’t have to
cook.

“I know you didn’t want advice from me, or
you would have asked me for it,” she said as she was putting on her coat to go
downstairs. “But here’s what I think, for what it’s worth. You and Patrick like
each other—even before you were dating I could see it on both of your faces.
Don’t worry about waiting for him to make the move again. Invite him over.”

“But what if he’s lost interest?”

“Then he won’t come over,” Amie said with
a shrug. “But at least you’ll know where you stand.” She gave me another quick,
awkward hug and settled her bag of presents on her shoulder again, heading for
my door. “You’re going to the party tomorrow, right?”

“Obviously,” I said, smiling in spite of
myself. I wasn’t sure how practical Amie’s advice was, but it definitely gave
me something to think about as I went through the rest of my day, getting ready
for the party and cleaning up my apartment. I felt a little bit better—but I
couldn’t end the nagging voice in the back of my head wondering what I would do
if it turned out that Patrick had lost interest.

Chapter Six - Patrick

“Hey buddy, make sure you pack your
toothbrush this time,” I told Landon even as I tried to find my own travel
toothbrush to shove it into my suitcase. “I’m not going to stop at the pharmacy
in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve to get you one to use.”

I had gotten off of work at noon, picked
Landon up from the babysitter’s house, and spent the rest of the afternoon
fighting against the clock. My parents expected me at the house by dinner time,
and while it was flexible—with so many relatives coming into town, it had to
be—I didn’t want to be more than thirty minutes late at most. Just like I’d
told Mackenzie, I’d had to buy a few last-minute gifts for in-laws; I’d stuck
to gift cards since they at least couldn’t be offended that I had no idea what
they liked, but it had taken forever to get through the lines, even at two in
the afternoon. Then Landon and I had come back to the house and I’d set him to
work right away packing his things.