Romantic Acquisition (26 page)

Kate held back from thinking along those lines.  She had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about so she shouldn’t jump to conclusions.  S
h
e promised herself that she’d wait until he got back and then she’d find out.

She tried to eat a sandwich for lunch but couldn’t swallow.  She didn’t feel well for some reason. 
Her throat was tight and she had a slight headache. 
She suspected that she was coming down with something but didn’t feel hot so she tried to push the icky feeling away.
  She pushed the sandwich away and drank her soda instead which seemed to help her stomach slightly. 

The afternoon was incredibly busy.  Her staff found out that she was available again and bombarded her with questions, complaints and issues that only she could resolve. 
She worked steadily through the afternoon and into the early evening. 

By the time she got home that night, she was exhausted and could barely keep her eyes open.  She fell into bed, barely able to change into a tee-shirt and warm socks before pulling the covers over herself. 

Kate woke the next morning feeling just as bad as she had the day before.  She laid in her bed and wondered where she had gotten a virus from.  No one in the office seemed to be sick. 

She rolled over and decided to call in sick. 
She’d just called in for a headache last week, but she didn’t feel guilty about this time.  She hadn’t had a sick day in over five years.  Kate considered that she was definitely due for some sick time. 

It was
three o’clock
in the afternoon before she woke up again.  She felt much better.  Sitting up in her bed, she looked around, surprised by the afternoon sunshine spilling into her bedroom. 

Kate yawned and padded to the kitchen, famished.  She made herself a
sandwich and ate it quickly.  Sh
e then showered and changed clothes, deciding to head into the office for a few hours of work.  She knew her staff would be confused that they had their team leader back for one day, then she was gone again.

The office was in chaos when she arrived.  There were orders misplaced, or shipped to the wrong store, several vendors were calling and demanding payment and one of her buyers was trying to quit.  She had her hands full trying to deal with all the small issues and it was almost
ten o’clock
when she could breath
e
again. 

She was sitting at her desk wondering if there was any other crisis she needed to resolve before she left for the evening when she heard voices outside her office. 

David was talking to someone but she didn’t recognize who the other voice was.  It sounded like the person who
had been
in his office the other day when she’d overheard the mysterious conversation. 

“No, we’ll sell long and make over ten million dollars on the deal.  Then we back out of it at the last minute and no one is the wiser,” David was saying.

Kate didn’t understand what he was talking about but she knew it wasn’t good.  He’d been gone all day yesterday and she’d been so busy today she hadn’t had time to talk to him about the conversation from the coffee shop.  No
w she wasn’t sure she should tal
k to him about it.  What was he up to?

Kate quietly left her office and went home.  There was a message from Carlo on her answering machine.  He sounded upbeat but he didn’t leave a phone number so she couldn’t call him back. 

She hit the play button again, just to hear his voice.  Kate bit her fingernail, wondering if she should talk to Carlo
immediately about the conversations she’d overheard
.  Whatever David was doing was way over her head.  She knew it was bad and she suspected that he was manipulating stocks during this sale.  She knew next to nothing about stocks except what her 401k reports showed so she wasn’t experienced enough to connect the dots and figure out what David was doing.  But she was sure Carlo would. 

Accepting that she’d have to wait until tomorrow, no matter what she did, she walked into her kitchen and tried to find something to eat for dinner.  But her stomach didn’t seem to want to accept any kind of food.  She decided on a glass of milk but could only drink half before she started feeling awful again. 

After rinsing out her cup, she realized that she was bone weary, just as she had been the night before
.  She crawled into bed after washing her face, brushing her teeth and changing into a night shirt.  S
h
e was asleep moments after her head hit the pillow.

Waking up the next morning, Kate was miserable.  She felt awful again and didn’t understand
why
.  She thought back to everything that had happened in the last few weeks and gasped. 

Could it be possible?  Kate shook her head, then stopped the action when it made her stomach more upset. 

Sh
e la
y
in bed and tried to relax but her body just wouldn’t allow it.  She counted backwards and sure enough, she was more than five weeks late. She had been so busy, she hadn’t even realized that so much time had passed.  It had been five weeks since she’d gone on the ship with Carlo.  Five weeks since she’d first made love with him.  They had used protection
every time they’d made love
but condoms weren’t one hundred percent
effective
. 
Nothing was. 

Kate groaned as the reality of her situation sank into her befuddled mind.  She counted the weeks again, wondering how she could have missed something so significant. 

But there was no way around it.  She pulled herself out of bed, then sat on the edge while her stomach calmed down. 
She needed to get to the drug store and get a pregnancy test.  That was the only way to be sure, she told herself.
  Before she started to panic and make rash decisions, she needed to have proof of a pregnancy. It could just be that she had come down with some sort of bug or her body was starting to get an allergy to something, she told herself. 

Kate managed to pull on a simple black dress with a pair of boots.  S
h
e wasn’t up to coordinating her outfit today.  She just pulled her long hair back into a pony tail with a white bow, not caring how it looked. 

A
t
the drug store, she purchased
a
pregnancy test along with a whole bunch of makeup in an effort to hide the test in some way.  She was sure the cashier would be wondering why a woman without a wedding ring was purchasing a pregnancy test.

Fortunately, the teenage cashier didn’t even hesitate or blink as she rang up the pregnancy test among all the makeup.  She simply put the test into the bag, rang up Kate’s credit card and smiled to the next customer. 

Kate
brought the test home and immediately took it into her bathroom, not caring that she was going to be late for work again today.  Ten minutes later, she was still sitting on the edge of her bed staring at the line on the end of the stick.  It was blue.  She went from staring at the stick, to reading the directions again.  If there was a line, it was positive.  No line, negative.  Pretty simple. 

Kate’s hand shook as she lifted the stick again.  Sure enough, the blue line didn’t disappear. 

“What have I done?” she asked
out loud, the tears streaming down her face. 

She’d gotten pregnant and didn’t have a
husband
.
  How could history repeat itself so harshly like this?  Couldn’t this have happened to someone else?  Someone who didn’t know the pain she would be inflicting on an innocent child?
  Carlo would probably be furious, just like her father had been and just like her old boyfriend had been.  Why was she destined to fall into the same miserable trap her mother had endured?  Why had she been so stupid as to put another child what she went through
?

Kate sat up and dried her tears.  She wouldn’t let that happen.  S
h
e would love this child so much he or she wouldn’t know that there was a missing parent. 

Sh
e could do
it.  She was intelligent, she had the financial resources and the health insurance.  That was a whole lot more than what a lot of other women started off with
.  And they’d all
done well, raising wonderful, caring children into society.  If they could do it, so could she!

Within a half hour, she was
still
feeling awful
physically
, but excited
emotionally despite her previous despair over her situation. 
She was going to have a baby! 
Carlo’s baby!  If she didn’t feel so awful, she’d jump around her house in joy. 

She remembered Carlo’s ominous statement about talking to her about something when he came back.  He
was probably going to break up with her anyway
, she thought sadly
, so this would be her one reme
mbrance of him. She could keep
a small part of him with her always. 

The thought of never seeing Carlo again broke her heart but she knew she could endure that.
Kate knew that she’d have to endure a lot now.  She’d have to be strong. 
She was going to have a baby.
  Her hand instinctively covered her stomach where she thought the baby was resting.  This child was going to have everything it could possibly want to make up for the fact that his or her mother had fallen in love with a man who didn’t want children. 

By the afternoon, she was at work and the worry took over.  She wasn’t going to worry about Carlo.  She was going to see him one last time, tell him she understood his need to break things off between the two of them.  He needed to know he’d have a child in the world, but she’d assure him that she could handle the responsibility on her own.

Kate
vacillated
between euphoria and depression.  She was too excited about the idea of having a baby.  But then she’d realize that Carlo wouldn’t be with her to share her joy and she’d plummet into a depression. 

Her co-workers probably thought she was losing her mind, she thought as she walked back from the bathroom late in the afternoon.  She would be smiling one minute, then fighting back tears and grabbing for tissues the next.  She caught several odd looks from Sarah and Matt but they didn’t approach her about her odd behavior. 

On the way home from work that night, she stopped at a book store and bought a book on pregnancy.  She cried as she read the first few pages that explained why she was feeling such highs and lows.  It made her feel better to know that her crazy feelings were not irrational but were expected because
of the hormones created by
her pregnancy. 

Kate fell asleep at
eight o’clock
that night, the pregnancy book open on top of her bed.  The phone rang around
ten o’clock
and she answered it but wasn’t able to wake up enough, even for Carlo.  She mumbled something to him but told him that she had to go back to sleep and hung up the phone.

The next morning, the nausea was bad.  She barely made it to the toilet before throwing up for ten minutes.  She didn’t have anything left in her stomach afterwards.  She showered and got dressed, still
feeling awful.  At
the office, the smell of any kind of food just made her want to run for the bathroom so she took the long way around to her office so she didn’t have to pass by the kitchen. 

Carlo called her several times during the day but he still didn
’t
leave a phone number and Kate was becoming anxious.  Why wouldn’t he leave a number where she could call him back? 
She was now desperate to talk to him about the conversations she’d overheard in the coffee shop and in the hallway
and also to get the awful breakup conversation over with.  There was her happy news, but even that would be a difficult conversation to have with Carlo since he didn’t want to be ‘roped into that daddy’ thing again as he’d put it a few days ago.

He would be back the next day so she forced herself to stop thinking about it.  She’d just worry which wasn’t good for her or the baby
, according to
her new
pregnancy book
.