Once Upon A Half-Time: A Sports Romance - Sosie Frost Page 0,111

the stringy flecks lodged in my throat, and tried to choke it down.

My stomach flipped.

This wasn’t good.

“What do we all think?” Mom clapped her hands. “Write it down. Come on, quickly now. We have two dozen more cake samples to go.”

Now my stomach flopped.

Twenty more pieces of cake? I couldn’t even watch Food Network this morning. Who the hell inflicted this type of torture on their family or local bakery?

Lindsey slapped my arm. “You aren’t writing anything down! I need your input! This is the most important decision for the reception!”

She’d said the same for the music, the venue, the dress…

I blinked, staring at the grid paper in front of me. The cake samples were labeled numerically, and a dozen columns stretched across the page. Each box held a specific set of criteria for judgment—decorations, flavor, color, texture, consistency, sweetness, frosting thickness, exclusivity, trendiness, melt-ability, memorability, champagne compliments, and how likely the flavor profile would match Lindsey’s chosen wedding theme, Fairytales in Heaven.

I wondered if I could add my own—how fun it’d be to smoosh in my sister’s face.

But Lindsey handed us tiny pencils without erasers, so I had to behave. Mom smacked my wrist as I tried to doodle in a score.

“Don’t hold your pencil like that, you’ll give yourself arthritis. Men don’t like gangly hands.”

This was why I typed everything, but Mom said I’d get a hunch back from the keyboard anyway. I gritted my teeth. The frustration swirled in my stomach. I stood up too fast.

“Where are you going?” Lindsey pointed her pencil at me. “Eat the damn cake, Mandy! I can’t do this without you!”

“I just…” Words nauseated me too. “Bathroom. Mark a big no for me on the coconut.”

Lindsey dropped her fork. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

I shimmied from the table, easing as far from the reeking cake as I could manage without drawing suspicion. “I didn’t like that one.”

“So you’re completely disregarding the other eleven sections of criteria because you don’t like the flavor? We can’t ignore how perfectly this cake would match the dress! It looked heavenly!”

Bryce shrugged. “We can order the other cakes to be white and coconut, babe.”

“For the last time!” Lindsey burst into tears. “It’s ivory!”

Nate couldn’t resist making my life harder. “Wait…you actually wanted us to score this, Linds?”

He pointed me to the bathroom while Lindsey raged. I slammed the door behind me as my sister’s wail turned into a threat to shove the rest of the cakes down Nate’s throat.

Coconut tasted as bad coming up as it did going down. I did the best I could and tried to keep quiet. At least the bar’s bathrooms were surprisingly clean. I remembered Nate’s disaster of a bedroom from when we were kids. At least he grew up and started taking care of his property.

It almost gave me…hope?

Sitting punked out on a bar’s bathroom floor gave a woman a lot to think about.

This wasn’t rock bottom yet, but it wasn’t far under my tush. If I wanted to hide the pregnancy, I’d have to stop getting sick so often or come up with a better excuse. I’d only get a couple days’ mileage out of the stomach flu. After that, I’d have to be more creative. Food poisoning. Dysentery? Once I used all the illnesses I could remember from playing The Oregon Trail, maybe I’d pretend I was shooting up. My family would probably accept drug use over an unexpected, unwed pregnancy.

Especially since Nate was…not like the Prescotts or Washingtons.

If our families weren’t pleased that Nate abandoned his calling to open a microbrewery and bar, they definitely wouldn’t like that we accidentally mixed pale ale with a dark stout.

Not that Nate would take the news well either, though I didn’t think it’d matter to him what color the baby was…just that it was his.

He hadn’t stopped chasing me, and I couldn’t get his scent out of my head—that rich, hoppy masculine tease that followed him from the pub. I barely survived walking in on him, bare-chested and trying on his tuxedo. For the past two days I suffered through hormone-induced nights of alternating weeping and unrelenting horniness.

I was a mess, and his green eyes and cocky smile were equal parts dangerous and tempting. Slipping into bed with him would probably soothe my nerves, and it wasn’t like I could get more pregnant.

Right?

But it would be a mistake, and I knew it. The warmth that once centered in my core had spread, and I was afraid it’d find its