“Well, hell.  I’ll bring the wine.”

It was a few hours later.  I was on my third glass of wine, and I was cooking Danika dinner.

The unpleasant phone call had gone about how I’d expected.

“So what do you do now?” Danika was asking me.  “What are the particulars of dating a super spy?”

“I’m not exactly sure.  I’ll keep you posted.  A lot of going about my life as usual and waiting for him, I suppose.”

She made a grunt of a noise at that.  I looked at her.

“You think I’m a fool,” I noted.  “That I shouldn’t wait for him.”

She shook her head, eyes widening like I’d misunderstood her.  “I didn’t say that.  Only you can say if it’s worth it to wait.  I’ll tell you one thing I learned the hard way, though.  You can’t unlove someone just because you want to.  Trust me on this.  So if you love him, really love him, then of course it’s worth waiting.”

“Even years?”

“Even your whole life.  What’s the other option?  Settling for Kevin?  That wouldn’t work.  I had a Kevin once, too, you know, back in the years when I thought that Tristan and I were hopeless.  And just like you can’t unlove a person, you can’t make yourself love somebody, either.”

“So I’m not a total fool for this?”

“No.  Hell no, you’re not.  I’ve taken the foolish route, and it involves going against your heart, not following it.  You are in love with him, aren’t you?”

I don’t know how it happened, but I didn’t even have to think about my answer.  “I am.”

“Then no wait is too long, if you ask me.”

I thought of something, and grinned at her.  “God, I’m terrible at casual sex.”

We both laughed long and hard at that understatement.

“Join the club,” she told me.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I was freaking the hell out.  Straight up tripping.

I didn’t even know whom to call to talk it out with, girlfriend-wise.

This was embarrassing and too crazy to be believed.

It was nothing obvious that tipped me off.  That’s why it took me so long to notice that something was different about me.

It was the smell of pizza that did it.

It was just a few days after Heath had visited me.  My boys were over for dinner.

It was Gustave’s turn to cook, and he was making his best dish: Margherita pizza.

I’d taught him the recipe.  We all knew it by heart.  I could pick out by smell and taste every single ingredient he put into the sauce, but as he cooked it, it smelled off to me.

Not like anything had gone bad.  It wasn’t even necessarily a smell I didn’t like.  It was just wrong.

“What’s that smell?” I asked Raf.  We were in the dining room, setting the table.

“That is the best pizza sauce in the world that you taught us both to memorize at birth,” Raf shot back, grinning at me.

He didn’t smell it.

I went into the kitchen, looking over Gustave’s shoulder at the saucepan.  “Did you do something different to the sauce?” I asked him.

He shot me a puzzled look over his shoulder.  “Are you kidding?  Who messes with perfection?”

Well, hell.

Gus didn’t smell it either.

I tried to ignore it, but ended up thinking about it more and more.

The smell of a lot of things had changed to me of late.  But it took something that familiar, a family recipe, to make me realize that it wasn’t the food that was off.

It was me.  I was changing, and that wasn’t the only change.

I’d gained a bit of weight, but I’d attributed that to the fact that I’d gone out to eat so much when I’d been dating Kevin.

And so back to me, freaking the hell out, driving to the store after my sons left, in the middle of the night, to grab a home pregnancy test.

It’s impossible, I reassured myself, for maybe the thousandth time.

It’s at least improbable, I tried telling myself when the impossible didn’t work, because it was simply a lie.

My God, what was I going to do?  This was not a problem I should be having at this stage of my life.  It was ridiculous.  Too silly to give any credence to.

Dammit.

I’d always had problems with the pill, and Eduard had gotten a vasectomy after Gustave was born, so it wasn’t something I’d had to worry about for a very long time.

Until that one night, months ago, when Heath had decided to show up to my house without condoms.

Dammit.

I couldn’t believe it.  It was too silly.  I was too damn old to be dealing with a mistake like this.  Okay, making a mistake like this.

I bought five home pregnancy tests, brought them home, laid them out on my bed, and just stared at them.

And then I used them each, one by one.

And just stared at them.

Five plus signs.

I was well aware how unlikely it was to get five false positives.  The home pregnancy tests were pretty damn accurate these days.

Even so, I made an appointment with my doctor, taking her first available window.

But I knew what I needed to know.

I was pregnant.

Heath had knocked me up.

My first reaction, and it lasted a while, was pure shock.

Heath had left me a number, nothing else, and he’d said very clearly that it was for emergencies only.  That’s why I waited until after my doctor’s appointment to call it.  I wanted to be absolutely certain before I freaked him the hell out right along with me.