need a change—I’ve been putting it off for too long.”
“And you don’t want to work for Karen.” Sam’s lips twitched. “Don’t blame you. I’ve met her.”
“Can’t you talk to Mr. Carew and tell him not to sell to her—to anyone?”
“Sure I can. But it’s big money. Who am I to tell him he can’t accept? He’s getting older, like me. He and his wife deserve to retire and live half the year in Hawaii if they want. A big sale will help him do that.”
Christina deflated. “Yeah.”
There were always more than two sides to everything, she’d learned. Life was more complicated than black and white, good and evil.
She was still not happy with Sam for not telling her, but she understood. Choices were hard.
Sam’s choices, on the other hand, had given Christina options. She talked to Lucy, who sounded excited that Christina was finally coming out to Houston. Lucy could introduce Christina around, and get her started in a job. A real job, with real hours. No more tending bar and babysitting drunks.
Once she’d settled things with Lucy, Christina told Bailey what she planned, in a long, tearful phone call. Bailey and Adam had finished their honeymoon trip and were heading back to California to work on the movie Adam was stunt coordinator for. Bailey’s life was moving on.
So was Christina’s. She was finally free to decide her fate—without obligations to Riverbend, without obligations to Grant. Amid the pain of deciding to let Grant go for good, Christina was eager to find out what road her life would take.
She packed up her things at Bailey’s house—she and Bailey decided they’d keep the place as a refuge, renting it out when they could. No selling to developers.
Christina was so engrossed in getting ready to go that she lost track of the rest of her life. Two days before she was to drive to Houston, she realized what the exact date was.
Christina’s monthly cycle was so regular that she and Bailey joked they could set their calendars by it. Christina had figured she’d be done before she drove to Houston so she wouldn’t have to worry about it on the road, never fun.
And then she’d forgotten all about it. Christina woke up in the bedroom of Bailey’s shotgun house early in the morning, blinking while it hit her that she was more than a week late.
Well, shit.
Chapter Twelve
If Christina went to the corner drugstore and bought a pregnancy test, everyone in River County would be discussing it over their next meal.
She asked a couple friends if they needed her to pick up anything for them in Austin and drove there, using the excuse that she was buying more supplies for her move to Houston.
At a large chain grocery store in a road off Mopac, she bought what she needed. Christina ran the errands for her friends at Central Market, put a packed gallon of Amy’s Ice Cream in the cooler she’d brought with her, and headed back to Riverbend.
That night Christina went into her bathroom, opened the test box, fingers shaking, and went through with it. The test showed positive for pregnancy.
The emotions that battered Christina made her end up flat on her back in bed. First—euphoria. She’d thought for so long she couldn’t conceive. The colored stick in her bathroom told her otherwise.
She was going to have a baby. Christina hugged that knowledge to herself, tears of joy leaking from her eyes.
Then, vast confusion. From the timing, the child could be Grant’s … or it could be Ray’s. She’d been with Ray right before he’d gone to Lubbock for his bull riding. Two weeks later, she and Grant …
Christina and Grant had tried to have a baby for the last couple years they’d been together. They’d stopped using condoms, pills, or other means; it had been bare body-to-body, nothing in the way.
Nothing had happened. And they’d seriously tried. Day and night. When no baby came, it had created a hell of a lot of tension between them. They’d tried not to talk about it, but then keeping it bottled up had made it come out in nasty explosions. Finally it had been too much to take, and they’d splintered.
Now this. Christina laid her hands on her abdomen, sure she felt the spark of life there. It was incredible.
But if she and Grant hadn’t succeeded before, what was to say they suddenly could now? That meant, odds were, that the baby was Ray’s. Not good.
These days, a pregnant woman could find out