Excerpt from Nine-Month Notice by Jennie Lucas
EMMALINESWENSONHAD always known her place in the world. With four rambunctious younger brothers, a struggling father and overwhelmed mother, Emmie’s job was to help her family, not herself.
She’d always known she wasn’t pretty, with limp dishwater-blond hair and a shape inclined to plumpness from her time baking in their tiny kitchen. As a teenager, she’d dreamed about falling in love with a strong, honorable man and sharing a passionate first kiss in the moonlight. But even then, she’d known romance was unlikely for a plain, dutiful girl like her.
Then, at twenty-seven, she’d fallen in love. She’d been seduced beyond her dreams. For one perfect night, she’d felt desirable, beautiful and valuable—cherished in the arms of the most dazzlingly gorgeous man in the world.
By the next morning, it was over.
Now, at twenty-eight, any romantic daydreams Emmie had ever had were well and truly gone.
“Are you ready, sweetheart?”
Turning away from the mirror, Emmie saw her father at the door, his craggy face beaming with pride and love.
“I wish your mother could see you now,” he whispered, wiping his eyes. “She’d be so proud.”
“Thanks, Dad.” A lump rose in Emmie’s throat. She wasn’t sure her mother would, in fact, be proud of her today. While she’d lived, Margie Swenson had always tried to convince Emmie to look beyond the grind of endless work and household tasks and find the quiet beauty of life.
Emmie hoped to follow her mother’s advice someday. Just not today.
Her wedding day.
Looking at her, the happiness in her father’s eyes faded. “Is something wrong?”
“Of course not.” Forcing a smile, Emmie rose from the vanity table and stepped into a pool of bright June sunlight from the changing room’s window, which shimmered gold against her white satin skirt. It had been her mother’s wedding dress decades before and was a little too tight for Emmie in her current condition. She should have had it tailored to fit her expanding waistline, but it had fit her fine just two weeks ago, when she’d agreed to marry Harold Eklund.
A man she didn’t love. A man she’d never even kissed.
Emmie’s knees shook as she picked up her small bouquet of beautiful red roses sent as a wedding gift from her best friend’s grandfather, who ran the flower shop in their vibrant Queens neighborhood. She risked another glance at the full-length mirror. The faded gown was lumpy and unflattering on her pregnant body, making her belly and breasts seem huge beneath the straining fabric.
Her face looked scared and pale in the mirror, in spite of the makeup she’d carefully applied following a video tutorial. The dark eyeliner, mascara and red lipstick made her look strange. Her dark blond hair was pulled back severely beneath her mother’s veil, the tulle headpiece perched awkwardly on her head, like a wad of tissues sticking in all directions.
She bitterly regretted not taking Honora up on that offer to hire a professional hair and makeup stylist. Too late for that now. Emmie’s best friend should have been her matron of honor today, but she’d rushed to the Caribbean last night with her family to check on Honora’s grandfather, who’d been injured on a cruise with his new wife in Aruba.
“Granddad’s doing better,” Honora had told her anxiously last night. “But I’m so sorry to miss your wedding.”
“Please tell him thanks for the flowers, and I hope he gets well soon.”
“I promise we’ll celebrate as soon as I’m back.” Her best friend had paused. “Are you sure about this? Seems awfully sudden.”
Emmie had lied and said she was sure, but the truth was she wasn’t sure at all.
So maybe it was good Honora wasn’t here. Emmie was having a hard enough time pretending she was a happy bride. She couldn’t even quite convince her father, though he wanted to believe it with his whole heart. There was no way she could have fooled Honora.
But she’d rather marry someone she didn’t love than shame her already grief-stricken family. For the last month, Emmie Swenson had been the scandal of her neighborhood, since the warming weather made her burgeoning belly impossible to hide. When her father and brothers demanded to know the name of the man who’d “seduced and abandoned” her, Emmie said she’d had a one-night stand in Rio while she was there working on a real-estate deal with her boss, Theo Katrakis. Which was true, as far as it went.
Theo.
She didn’t want to think about him.
Holding her rose bouquet with one hand, she gripped her father’s arm with the other so she had the strength to walk. Her breathing came in quick, shallow gasps as Karl Swenson led her out into the church foyer.
“Careful, sweetheart.” He flinched as her fingers dug into his arm. He added apologetically, “I’m not as bulletproof as I used to be, now I’m off the whiskey.”
“Sorry.” Loosening her grip, she forced herself to smile till her cheeks hurt. “You know I’m proud of you, Dad.”
He patted her hand, his blue eyes watery. “I’m proud of you, too. He’s a good man. You can build a good life together.”
Emmie hoped so. Her mother’s death seven months ago had caused enough grief and pain for her family. Since Emmie had revealed her pregnancy last month, her brothers had gotten into multiple bar fights defending her honor, while their shamed father had nearly started drinking again.
She was grateful to Harold Eklund for giving her a way out. The elderly widower, a friend of their family, had been living on his own for years. His apartment was filthy, his clothes rarely clean, and he survived on cola and cheap sandwiches from the bodega across the street. He’d offered Emmie a home, in exchange for her tending house and cooking his dinners. There was no question of love, and certainly not of sex.
But Harold was a kind man. Missing his own faraway grandchildren, he’d offered to help out a bit with her baby. They could help each other. She’d be able to work from home, doing her father’s bookkeeping, for at least her baby’s first months, long enough for her to figure out what to do. She wouldn’t stay married to Harold forever—or would she?
Since their engagement was announced two weeks ago, her brothers no longer came home at night bloodied and scowling. Her father could again hold his head up high.
Surely that was something she could be proud of. As long as her family was happy, Emmie could live without love.
And good riddance. Love had only broken her heart.
“You sure about this, sweetheart?” Her father looked at her as they stood in front of the chapel doors. “Harold is a good man.” He hesitated. “But marriage lasts a long time...”
Taking a deep breath, she nodded. “I’m sure.”
Biting his lip, Karl Swenson nodded with an uncertain smile. Turning in his rumpled suit, he opened the chapel doors.
The triumphant organ music crashed around them like a wave. As Emmie entered on her father’s arm, the people packed into the crowded pews rose noisily to their feet. Swensons and Eklunds had lived in their little Queens neighborhood for a hundred years, and everyone had come to see the disgraced, pregnant Swenson girl marry the long-widowed, much-pitied retiree.
It was funny. When Emmie was a little girl, she’d sometimes longed to be seen. But now, as everyone openly gawked at her from baby bump to badly fitting wedding dress, she wished she could hide under a rock. Some people whispered slyly behind their hands, others smiled encouragement. Being the center of attention was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Theo made you feel like that, a small voice whispered inside her. The night he...
Emmie pushed the memory away. She couldn’t think of Theo, not now, not when she was about to marry another man.
She looked up at Harold Eklund, waiting for her at the end of the aisle beside the minister. He was beaming at her, shifting his feet, his thin gray hair combed back carefully, his suit dated and tight.
As she moved slowly down the aisle, Emmie glanced down at the engagement ring on her left hand, with its tiny diamond. “Betty would want you to have it,” he’d told her two weeks ago, rheumy eyes wet with tears. “No good gathering dust, she’d say. She’d be grateful to you, taking me on, just until I can see her again.”
With a deep breath, Emmie forced her leaden feet onward. As they reached the front of the church, the organ music abruptly stopped, and suddenly it was deathly quiet.
The minister blinked down at her, then intoned, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today...”
Emmie barely heard the words. She was dimly aware of her father passing her hand to Harold’s care. He held her hand awkwardly, gingerly.
Marriage lasts a long time.
Emmie’s heart was pounding. She tried to remember why she was doing this, binding her life forever to a man she barely knew—
Because as she looked up at her groom, she didn’t see Harold’s pale blue gaze but someone else’s, dangerous and black. She trembled, remembering the darkness. The heat—
“If anyone can show just cause why this couple may not be lawfully joined,” the minister intoned, “speak now or forever—”
“Stop. Now.”
The low growl of a man’s deep voice caused the stone floor to shake beneath her feet. Sucking in her breath, Emmie turned.
A powerful man stood at the back of the church, clothed in darkness, those same fierce black eyes she’d remembered now piercing her soul.
Theo.
He’d come for her!
Theo Katrakis knew the morning he woke up in bed with Emmie Swenson in Rio that he’d made a big mistake.
But so what? His life was strewn with mistakes. He shrugged them off and moved on. Mistakes hadn’t prevented him from becoming successful. Indeed, Theo often thought they made him more so.
Everyone talked about the necessity of a balanced life, filled with some work, yes, but also friends and family, small pleasures and hobbies, taking care of one’s neighbors, and love—love to last a lifetime, love most of all.
But that was no way to build a billion-dollar fortune. The way to do that was exactly the opposite: to ignore everything else and focus obsessively on one thing every single day for sixteen or eighteen or twenty hours, then snatch up some sleep. Then wake up and do it again. And again and again.
Friends were not necessary, nor small pleasures, nor hobbies. He’d never met any neighbors in his Manhattan high-rise. His other grand properties around the world were all comfortingly isolated by thick walls and security guards. As an orphan, he luckily had no family to worry about. And love, love to last a lifetime?
That was the least desirable thing of all.
There was a reason Theo had reached the age of thirty-nine without a wife or child. He had better things to do. He’d been an orphan living rough on the streets of Athens when, at sixteen, his father’s brother brought him to live in Upstate New York. After his uncle died, Theo had thrown himself into building his small property-development company, taking it national by the time Theo was twenty-five and global by thirty.
Work was what mattered. Work brought power and money, and those made a man bulletproof.
So when Emmie had quit without notice, calling from New York after her mother’s funeral, just days after their night together, Theo told himself he’d survive. It was a damned inconvenience to be sure, but he’d find another new secretary and move on.
And he had. He’d moved so fast and so far he hadn’t been back to New York City in the last seven months. It wasn’t that he was avoiding her. That would be ridiculous. It had just happened that for the last seven months, he’d been unusually busy making deals overseas.
Then his friend Nico had called him yesterday.
And Theo suddenly realized that the mistake he’d made sleeping with his secretary seven months before was even bigger than he’d ever imagined. One that would permanently change his life.
He’d been on his yacht when he’d gotten the call, en route to the pleasurable endeavor of destroying his new property on the small island of Lyra. Then, as the red sun set over the dark sapphire Aegean, he’d learned his former secretary was getting married. Because she was pregnant.
His friend Nico had snorted. “You didn’t know? You really have been out of touch. She told Honora she had a one-night stand in Rio. I guess she hooked up with a stranger at a bar and never learned his name.”
Emmie, pregnant from a one-night stand in Rio. Theo felt his body flash hot, then cold. “Impossible.”
“I can barely believe it myself. Emmie’s always seemed so quiet and sensible.” He paused. “It must have happened right before her mother died. Her last days working for you. I don’t suppose you ever saw a man hanging around her?”
“No.” Theo remembered the tremble of her lips when he’d embraced her, the awkwardness of her movements, her uncertainty. She hadn’t known what to do. She’d been a virgin, at her age. She hadn’t even known how to kiss.
Then the morning after their night together, she’d gotten the awful call about her mother’s death. There was no way Theo could believe, after she rushed back to New York for the funeral, surrounded by her grieving family, she’d suddenly flung herself into the arms of some other man. No.
The baby had to be Theo’s.
And she’d never told him.
“She’s marrying some old man in Queens,” Nico said. “Some friend of her father’s. Even Honora can’t understand why. We offered to help, but she won’t take charity. I thought maybe you could offer Emmie her old job back, just in case she’s marrying under financial duress.”
Marrying under duress.
“I have to marry him, baby. We won’t survive if I don’t.”
Theo heard the echo of his mother’s trembling voice. He leaned against the railing of his yacht, gripping his phone in his hand. Pushing the memory away, he said, “It’s a free country.”
“What happened between you two?” Nico said suddenly. “I thought Emmie quit to take care of her family. But it seems strange she didn’t invite you to the wedding.”
“We were never good friends,” he said evasively. “You know that.”
“But still, it seems like... Oh, no.” Nico sucked in his breath. “You seduced her, didn’t you? Tell me you didn’t seduce her.”
Damn him for seeing too much. He gritted his teeth.
“Theo?”
“No,” he said heavily. “I didn’t seduce her.”
And he hadn’t—not exactly. But what had happened that night was still entirely his fault. His alone.
Theo had long since come to terms with who he was. Three years ago, his last real girlfriend had thrown a plate at his head when he’d dumped her at Le Bernardin on their six-month anniversary.
“You’re a selfish, heartless bastard, Theo Katrakis!” she’d screamed in her French accent.
The plate had missed, smashing against the wall, but the words hit their target.
How could he deny words that were so obviously true?
Being a selfish, heartless bastard had made him who he was today. If women chose to love him after he specifically warned them not to, well, that was their mistake.
Then his previous secretary had stormed off the job in the middle of a critical deal in Tokyo, all because she claimed to have fallen in love with him. He’d lost millions in his most expensive love affair ever, which was ironic since he’d never even slept with the woman.
Searching for a replacement, he’d been dutifully attending Nico’s summer party in the Hamptons when he’d suddenly looked at Emmie Swenson, the plain, prickly friend of Nico’s wife, and realized she had three excellent qualifications: she was utterly trustworthy, she was a whiz with numbers, and she despised him to the core.
It had made him laugh how annoyed Emmie had been to accept his job offer. But she’d needed money to pay medical bills for her mother, who’d been sick with cancer, and her father’s plumbing business was in trouble. He’d offered to quadruple her salary, so she had no choice.
“Just promise me you’ll never fall in love with me,” he’d said.
Her violet eyes had turned merry, making her almost pretty.
“That’s a promise that’s easy to make. Pigs would fly before I’d ever love you, Theo Katrakis.”
And they’d shaken hands on the deal.
He’d turned out to be right. Theo’s risky bet on her paid off, as his riskiest bets usually did. After a rough beginning, Emmie had learned the intricacies of the new job and became the best secretary he’d ever had: precise, accurate, a champion at protecting him from things he didn’t want to deal with. For over a year, she’d organized his schedule perfectly, taken excellent notes and correspondence, and excelled at fierce gatekeeping.
Until that night he’d discovered that beneath the unattractive oversize suits she wore like armor, Emmie Swenson was a soft and sensual woman, unutterably beautiful, with a kiss like fire.
Until that night in Rio—
No. He couldn’t think about it.
Gripping his phone, Theo had stood at the lonely railing of his yacht and stared at the red sunset.
Maybe Emmie getting married was for the best, he’d tried to convince himself. Even if her groom was some old man who was just a friend of the family. Maybe the guy could make her happy. Maybe he could share his feelings. Maybe he actually had feelings.
Unlike Theo. And at his age, facing down forty, he would never change. At least not for the better.
He opened his mouth to tell Nico he was out of it, that he’d have his new secretary send some bland gift, that he didn’t care.
Then—
His baby.
“So you’ll call Emmie?” Nico persisted. “Offer her job back?”
“I’ll do more than that,” he’d replied grimly. “I’ll go to her wedding. And talk to her myself.”
After finishing the call, Theo told his crew to return to Athens as quickly as possible. Gloating over the ruin on Lyra Island would have to wait. He told his secretary to make sure his private jet was fueled and ready when he arrived.
Flying across the Atlantic last night, he’d barely slept. He took a shower, changed his clothes, paced. The flight took longer than it ever had. He tried to stay calm, but his heart was pounding so hard he could barely catch his breath. From rage.
Emmie had kept her baby a secret.
She’d lied to him with her silence.
She hadn’t even given him a chance.
His plane landed outside New York where his motorcycle waited, a mode of travel quicker than any car. He stomped on the gas and sped to Queens, twisting dangerously through traffic, engine roaring in his determination to reach the church in time.
Cold. Cold. He had to be cold. To lose his temper would show weakness; it would show he cared. He would be ice.
He finally reached the old stone church in Queens, crammed between colorful shops and walk-up apartments. He’d been to this neighborhood. Nico’s wife had grown up here, alongside Emmie. The neighborhood was blue-collar, working-class, and a happier, livelier place than Midtown Manhattan. As Theo parked his motorcycle, a dog rushed down the sidewalk, barking happily in pursuit of two children on toy scooters.
Grimly, he set down his helmet over his Ducati. Crossing the street, he strode up the church steps and silently pushed open the door.
The minister was already speaking as he entered the crowded church. His motorcycle boots echoed softly against the flagstones, faltering when he got his first look at the elderly bridegroom. What the...? That was the man Emmie had chosen? Over him?
The bride turned her face, and he saw his secretary’s snub nose and heart-shaped face beneath an appallingly unfashionable knot of tulle sticking out in every direction. She looked uncomfortable, even miserable, and no wonder. Conventional wisdom said that every bride was beautiful, but the white gown seemed lumpy in all the wrong places. It emphasized her huge breasts. Her huge belly.
She was giving herself away, along with her baby. Some other man would be the child’s stepfather. She’d hidden the baby from Theo in an attempt to cut him out of the equation, to make him powerless—
“Stop,” he ground out, stepping into the aisle. “Now.”
Everyone in the pews gasped, turning toward him. The minister stared slack-jawed, and beneath her crown of white tulle Emmie turned, eyes wide with horror.
“Theo,” she breathed. “What—what are you doing here?”
“Emmie.” His eyes dropped to her belly, then lifted dangerously. “Are you pregnant with my baby?”