A Bride, A Barn, And A Baby. Nancy Robards Thompson

sense. So they needed to be friends.

      Now it had gone from friends-with-benefits to friends-with-a-baby.

      How in the world was she going to tell him she was pregnant?

      She’d been in love with Zane Phillips for as long as she could remember. And, yes, she might have had a daydream or two about having his babies, but she never would’ve gotten pregnant on purpose.

      She covered her face with her hands and hoped that he wouldn’t think she’d tried to trap him. When her hands fell, she stared at her pale face in the mirror.

      He was going to think it was history repeating itself. And not in a good way.

      It was no secret that there was no love lost between Zane and his father. Everyone in the community knew that Nathaniel Phillips was a bad husband and an even worse father—that was, when he’d bothered to come home. Before he’d served Dorothy with divorce papers, he’d been gone more than he’d been at home, leaving Dorothy to basically single-parent their two boys. When Nathaniel Phillips got remarried, it came to light that he had children with another woman who lived in Dallas. The one he claimed was the love of his life. Once Zane had confided in her that his dad resented Dorothy and him because Nathaniel thought Dorothy got pregnant on purpose, to trap him. He never loved her, and that was why he divorced her and married the woman he did love.

      As far as Lucy knew, he was still married to her.

      Lucy swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat. She would give Zane credit for being more evolved than that. She knew without even a second’s hesitation that he wouldn’t blame her or accuse her of trying to manipulate him. Of course, she had to prepare herself for the fact that this news was going to blindside him. She also had to accept the very real fact that he loved her about as much as Nathaniel Phillips had loved Dorothy. Although she wouldn’t insult him by comparing him to his father.

      “Zane does not love me,” she said to her reflection, thinking if she said it out loud her heart would hear it and wake up to reality.

      She said it again and listened hard.

      The words echoed off the bathroom tile as she said them again. Reinforcement. She needed to make sure the words sank in, that she fully understood the reality of the situation. He might care for her as a friend, and they might be darn good together in bed, but he did not love her.

      But of course, he was an equal partner in this, too.

      Even if she had started it, because she had been the one who had gotten the love train rolling, because she knew Zane well enough to be certain that if she hadn’t spelled it out, if she hadn’t made it clear that not only was it okay for him to cross that line but she’d wanted him to make love to her, he never would have touched her.

      Once the train was out of the station, so to speak, they had both been equally willing participants. She put her hand on her flat belly.

      This baby was nobody’s fault. The pregnancy was unplanned and not ideal, and Lucy was still reeling from the shock of it, but none of that changed the fact that next March, she was going to have Zane Phillips’s baby.

      In the meantime, she needed to figure out how to tell him.