Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
If Damien sent her one more link on the benefits of breastfeeding, Mandy was going to shove a breast pump up his nose.
This was not how she had envisioned the first two weeks back to work after Punta Cana. Frankly, she had been concerned that Damien would be overtly sexual to her, shooting her hot glances and brushing body parts along hers so that she was in a constant state of arousal.
She had worried that if he was suggestive in any way to her, she would crumble like a cookie and leap into bed with him, forgetting all her concerns.
She needn’t have worried.
Damien was being as sexual as a bath mat.
No, he wasn’t interested in her at all. But he was fascinated by her pregnancy.
He had purchased his own copy of The Everything Guide to Pregnancy, along with a half a dozen other books, which she had seen on his desk, and he quoted from them quite frequently in the deluge of emails and texts he sent her every day.
She had seen him in person only once, and that had been a mistake on her part. She’d been sneaking in some files to put on his desk, and he’d caught her on the way out. But what could have been awkward, or sensual, had seemed to her just rather friendly. He had been big smiles and all kind concern.
It was infuriating.
And now she was in her cubicle, trying to banish all thoughts of him from her head, when she saw in her inbox she had three emails from Damien.
With a sigh, she tucked her feet under her rolling chair and clicked the first one. She was wearing a tight stretchy maternity top, and it kept riding up and exposing her stomach. Tugging it down for the twelfth time, she glanced through Damien’s message.
This looks cool. And there was a link for a cot that turned into a toddler bed, then an adult full bed.
“Oh, my God.” She brushed her hair back. He was checking out baby furniture for her. It wasn’t at all obvious to her how they had reached this point in their relationship.
But it was a rather pretty cot. Damien had good taste. It was a sleigh bed. Glossy, rich wood, dressed up with a pink lace ruffled comforter. Then Mandy saw the price and gasped. It was two thousand dollars. She didn’t have two thousand dollars.
By the time she had paid off her debts from the shop, paid closing costs, and had invested five hundred dollars in maternity clothes, she had only enough left over for a nest egg.
Money for emergencies. Rent money for when she was on her six weeks without pay maternity leave.
Not money for buying two-thousand-dollar baby beds.
If she had to, she’d ask her parents for the money, of course, but the thought made her wince.
Then there was Ben. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with him, or how to maneuver her way through their new relationship as parents-to-be who weren’t dating.
Could she ask him to split the cost of the furnishings?
Was it too much, too little? Was that inviting him in to offer opinions she had no interest in hearing?
Ben had called several times, suggesting they go to dinner and talk, but she had been putting him off.
It wasn’t some thing she could do indefinitely, but she found she couldn’t think about Ben without getting angry over his initial offer of money to relinquish his responsibilities.
It wouldn’t serve either of them if they met and she was angry, so she felt as though she needed to work through that before she saw him.
Not to mention, she had the sneaking suspicion he wanted to leap right back into bed with her, which was not going to happen.
Sighing, she clicked on Damien’s next email. It was a link to childbirth classes at the hospital.
Have you signed up yet? Most seem to last six to eight weeks and suggest starting at twenty-eight to thirty weeks gestation.
She almost wanted to laugh. If she didn’t know how to categorize Ben, she sure in the hell didn’t know what to do with Damien.
And while she knew they couldn’t renew their physical relationship, and that it wasn’t practical that they could be friends when he was her boss and she was pregnant with another man’s child, they had slept together.
She thought about Damien nonstop. She cared about him a great deal, which she could admit when she was feeling honest. And she worried that he needed something more than she had been able to give him.
He needed to relax, not work so hard. He needed a distraction, and not one that was her baby. Because that was driving her batty.
His final email was actually work related, of all things, and Mandy was typing a response to his inquiry when her instant message window popped up. She knew it was Damien before she even read it because of the ring tone she had set up exclusively for him.
Have you thought of any names?
Names for what?
She lost the thread of what she’d been typing in the email and sighed with frustration. Maybe she needed more sleep. Her ability to do two things at once seemed to have disappeared lately.
The baby.
Of course. Why didn’t she think of that?
It made perfect sense for her to discuss naming her child with her boss.
She debated telling him she hadn’t thought of any, but she did want to put out feelers about a couple of names.
Somehow it seemed more natural to do that with Damien than it did with Ben, which was completely wrong, but it was too late to fix that.
I was thinking about Cecilia for a girl and Simon for a boy.
Her heart swelled a little at the thought of giving a name to her child. Giving him or her an identity.
I don’t know...those sound very British.
All the good feelings she’d been having fled.
I am British!
“Bloody idiot.”
Mandy’s groan of frustration was so loud that the woman in the cubicle next to her peered around at her. “You okay?”
“Yes, I’m just thinking that my boss is insane.” What on earth made Damien wonder at eleven A.M. on a Tuesday more than four months from her due date what she was going to name her baby? And then criticize her choice.
The woman next door laughed. “All bosses are insane, but I’ve heard yours is the worst.”
That brought Mandy up short. “Oh, he’s not so bad as all that.”
He wasn’t bad at all, in fact. Damien was at least asking—that was more than she could say for Ben. He seemed more concerned with investigating her new breasts than wondering about their child. Maybe she wasn’t being fair to him, but then again, maybe she wasn’t being fair to Damien.
I was thinking that Rebecca is a nice name.
Did he now? And who the hell had asked him? Pursing her lips together, Mandy clicked the “close” button to get rid of the offensive window.
She was done with that conversation.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t get rid of her thoughts about Damien as easily as that window. Especially when the tickets she’d ordered for the Saturday Yankees game showed up in her mail at the office.
She had bought them in a moment of weakness, thinking that Damien really needed to pursue outside interests. At the time, she had been secretly hoping those outside interests would involve her and how many sexual positions they could try, but she realized now that was exactly the wrong thing to do.
She’d told herself all along that she couldn’t get involved with Damien, long term or short term. She had a child and Ben to contend with. But that didn’t stop her from repeatedly entertaining sex with Damien again.
So she had ordered the tickets as a reminder to him of their time together. But Damien seemed completely over his attraction to her, given all the energy he’d put into pursuing her since their return.
Which was none. He hadn’t once even tried to see her in person, yet he’d obviously spent hours surfing online looking up baby furniture and birthing classes.
The tickets shouldn’t go to waste, but she didn’t think she could spend an afternoon listening to Damien extol the virtues of breastfeeding.
As far as she knew, Rob Turner was Damien’s only friend in the office. She’d take the tickets to him and suggest he invite Damien. If she gave the tickets directly to Damien, she had no doubt he would stick them in his fastidious drawer and never use them.
Rob was hanging up his phone when she knocked on his open door. He looked at her curiously. “Mandy, isn’t it? Come on in.”
“Thanks.” Feeling a bit ridiculous, she slapped the envelope with the tickets in her hand. “I was wondering if you’re busy Saturday. I’ve got tickets for the Yankees game and I thought you might like to go.”
His eyebrows shot straight up. “Does Damien know? Because I kind of thought you and he…”
Mandy stared at him for a second, not sure what he meant. Then she felt her face flush. “Oh, God! I didn’t mean you and me. I meant you and Damien.”
Rob laughed, but she wasn’t feeling very funny at the moment.
“Oh, okay. But what a disappointment for me.” He grinned at her.
Embarrassed, she rambled on. “If I give the tickets to Damien, he won’t go. He’ll just come up with some excuse and work the whole day. So I thought if you dragged him there, at least he’d get out a bit.”
That little speech had been way too revealing, given the fact that Rob’s grin fell right off his handsome face. “It sounds like you know Damien pretty well.”
She shrugged.
“Why don’t you go with him? Given the way he talks about you, he’d rather be with you than me.”
She would not ask, she would not ask...
“He talks about me?”
Rob nodded. “He’s mentioned you quite a bit. And though he hasn’t said anything specific, I get the feeling something happened between the two of you in Punta Cana. And if that’s the case, I’m happy for both of you. Damien needs someone in his life.”
Rob leaned back, tipping his whole chair off the ground. He had a stress ball in his hand, and he tossed it up in the air.
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, because sooner or later people were going to figure it out, and given the whispers she’d heard from some of the other staff, they were already wise to her situation.
It was getting hard to hide. And she wanted Rob to stop his thoughts there, because she didn’t want any rumors swirling about her and Damien.
Nor did she want Rob suggesting to Damien that they could have a future together.
Rob’s stress ball plummeted to his desk. His feet hit the floor hard. “Are you serious?” He glanced at her stomach. “Well, hell, that’s the best damn thing that could have happened to Damien.”
Mandy clenched her teeth. Damn it, she was making a complete muck of this. “It’s not his.”
His eyes narrowed. “Come again?”
“Damien isn’t the father.” And for the first time, she was willing to admit that she almost wished he were.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!” She knew how to do math, for fuck’s sake.
Rob sighed. “Oh. All right. I’ll take the tickets then.” He held out his hand. “It’s a damn shame though. I thought you might be the woman who could finally get through to Damien.”
“He doesn’t see me that way.” She was still hurt and seething over that. “He thinks I’m a good assistant, and he’s curious about the baby. That’s all there is between us.”
His hand closed around one end of the envelope she held out to him. “You’re wrong. He’s attracted to you and trying to pretend he isn’t. You’re the first woman I’ve seen him have any interest in since Jess.”
Mandy dropped the envelope with the tickets. “You care about him.”
Rob nodded. “I’ve known Damien all my life. You should have seen him before. He was a great guy. ”
“He still is,” she whispered.
And she meant it.