“Hopefully, it won’t be our last meeting. I want to see you again.”
He soon left, leaving the ball in her court. If he’d tried, she would have willingly gone to bed with him the same night, but he hadn’t. Instead, he’d handed her his card, and she and her girlfriends found out later he’d picked up the tab for the entire table.
She didn’t last one day before she called him.
****
Eva couldn’t blame Derrick for his attitude about their relationship because he’d been up front with her from the beginning. They had an understanding. Whenever he came into town, she would be available to him. It was her fault for developing feelings for him. He had every right to see other women, as she did to see other men. Except she’d fallen for him and didn’t exercise her rights, and it killed her to think he might be exercising his.
“He came down here all the time to see you. Maybe . . .”
“Kal, I know what you’re trying to do.” Eva turned grateful eyes on her friend. “But the truth is it was never serious between us. I was never his girlfriend.” Fresh pain seized up her vocal cords. She should be past this by now, but the longing for more still hurt. “He didn’t ask me to marry him because he’s madly in love with me. He asked me because I’m pregnant. No matter what I may think about him, he definitely wants to be a father to this baby.”
“Do you think you could buy more time?”
Eva shook her head in resignation. “You don’t know Derrick. He won’t budge, which means the noon deadline is final.”
Once, she’d heard him on the phone using a commanding tone of voice to express his displeasure at something or the other someone had done. The way he spoke, the inflection in his voice, had made her climb on top of him the minute he hung up the phone. That tone of voice wasn’t quite as sexy with the anger and the commands directed at her.
“Sounds like you know what you have to do.”
In a few months, she would be twenty-nine, and like many women her age, she had envisioned her wedding day a certain way, after meeting and falling in love with a modern-day Prince Charming. Only she had met a prince in the financial sense, minus the charming part.
“I’ll make my final decision in the morning. Maybe there’s some way out I haven’t thought about yet.”
Even though she said those words to her roommate, inside, Eva resigned herself to the inevitable. She would never forgive herself if she didn’t do everything possible to secure a safe birth and good future for her child—their child. Derrick could ensure that happened.
She shouldn’t have gotten pregnant, or so doctors had led her to believe. Scarring left over from an appendectomy she had as a teenager blocked her reproductive system. For years she thought she would never become a mother, but they had been wrong. She looked forward to all the changes her body would take on because it meant her child was growing safely just under her heart. Her baby was a miracle, and for that reason alone, she could never give her up.
She knew what she needed to do, but she didn’t look forward to it.
Chapter Four
The following morning, Derrick dined on a late breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes, and a side of cheese grits in the resort’s restaurant. The floor-to-ceiling windows offered a stunning view of the ocean. Outside, the waves rolled up and spattered into white foam against the rocks that created a natural boundary between the resort and the thin strip of sand at this end of the beach.