persistent about their coming tonight. He didn’t want to think about George and his failing health. “You went to the doctor’s today, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Everything is fine. Normal. Nothing to report.”
She smiled for him and patted Emma’s knee beside her. Everything changed the day Marti left Cameron’s penthouse. He paid attention to her and talked to her more about his job and life. He included her in his business dinners and invited her to George’s with him. If he sometimes got a strange, almost sad look in his eyes, she ignored it and tried to make him smile. Emma broke through those solemn moments better than she did, and that was okay too. Things between them were good, settled, and the wedding plans were moving forward. Even Marti’s presence at George’s didn’t deter Cameron, or make him any less interested in her. She didn’t know what happened between the two of them. She didn’t care, so long as she had the ring on her finger and Cameron’s last name on her bank accounts.
Only one problem. She needed to figure out how to explain not being pregnant when, no matter what she did, Cameron refused to sleep with her before the wedding. Options limited, she’d have to fake a miscarriage. She’d make a show of how upset it made her that he’d only married her for the baby and now that it was gone he didn’t want her. A good guy, that truth would shame him into staying with her. She hated knowing the baby kept him with her, but she wanted the life she’d have with him and one day, given time to get to know her better, he’d want to stay with her.
“You never said: did they give you the baby’s due date? I’ll want to mark it on the calendar at work. I can take some vacation time at the end of the pregnancy and after the baby is born.”
“He said the baby will be here near the end of December. Won’t that be a lovely Christmas gift for us all? Right, Emma?”
“Sure,” she said absently.
No matter how hard she tried, the little bugger remained polite but distant. She played along, which suited Shelly fine. Marti might have found the key to gaining Emma’s devotion, but Shelly accepted she didn’t have the instinct or inclination to be anything more in Emma’s life than her father’s wife.
“I thought you said your doctor was a woman?”
“She is.”
“Why did you say, ‘he’, before?”
“Hormones. They shut off my brain. All the preparations for the wedding and the dinner engagements you have for business plus with George. It’s just so much.” She tried to sound exhausted as all pregnant women were in their first trimester. She wasn’t exhausted. She loved all the attention and dinner parties. She’d met people she’d never hoped to associate with, rich people.
“What is the due date? I want to know.”
“December twenty-seventh.” Actually, the date was her old boyfriend’s birthday and the first date to pop into her head. It would do.
Cameron turned skeptical. He knew a little bit about babies having had one already and gone through the process with Caroline. He’d read books and gone to her appointments both in the beginning of the pregnancy and in the end. He thought about the night he’d met and slept with Shelly and mentally went through the calendar he kept in his head. He calculated forty weeks’ gestation for the pregnancy. She was close, but something was off.
They arrived at George’s and the matter of the due date nagged at the back of his mind.
George waited for them in the dining room, looking wan and pale. Cameron took his seat after seating Shelly and Emma, immediately noticing the absence of a place setting for Marti. She hadn’t joined them or come to say hello.
She had to be there, somewhere. The Jag George told him he’d bought for her sat outside in the driveway. His heart raced at the thought of seeing her. Then again, maybe she left the car with George and sailed away on her ship. He wondered if he should ask about her. Thankfully, Emma saved him the trouble.
“Where’s Marti?”
“She’s upstairs. I asked her to allow us dinner together alone tonight. I want to talk to all of you in private.”
“Why? She wouldn’t tell anyone. She’s good at keeping secrets. She taught me how. The trick is not to tell.”
Everyone laughed at Emma’s serious tone.
Cameron wondered just what secrets Marti was keeping.