"If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?"
Mandy. And her baby. The realization didn’t surprise him at all. The knowledge had been creeping in for days. He cared about Mandy, he worried about her and the baby, he wanted to protect them. "A family. I would want a family." But he was broken, inside, and couldn’t expect any woman to take that on.
"Your mother asks my mother about you all the time, you know. She wants to know if I’ve seen you, how you’re doing, if you’re dating. I tell my mom I don’t know, because I don’t. I don’t know you. Maybe that’s a good place to start – talk to the people who actually still like you."
Damien snorted, feeling something deep inside of him that was almost like hope. It was such an alien feeling he wasn’t sure he understood it right. But Rob made sense. He didn’t know how to lay Jessica to rest, but he could reach out to the people he loved, let them know he did care, that he would try to dig inside and find the parts of him he’d thought were gone. Parts that Mandy had proven still existed.
"Are you going to charge me for this psychobabble?" But he slapped Rob on the back to show he was kidding.
Rob gave a grin, but his eyes were searching. "No, but you have to buy lunch."
"I can do that. And Rob, you pushed your luck with calling Jessica a bitch, but I’m still talking to you. And thanks for still talking to me after all these years."
That was as gushy as he was willing to get, but Rob seemed to get the message.
He picked up his chopsticks again. "That’s what friends are for."
Damien decided it felt good to have a friend again. And maybe, if he couldn’t offer Mandy a real relationship, he could be her friend.
Chapter 17
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 e-mails 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 phone messages 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 e-mails 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 that tacky? Was it too much, too little?
Ben had called several times, suggesting they go to dinner and talk, but she had been putting him off. It wasn’t something 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 e-mail. 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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 male 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.