Tanya Michaels - Mistletoe Baby

The trim. Her mind was working furiously, one part of her brain pointing out that he’d put a lot of effort into this. He thought he’d done a nice thing. But the rest of her was enraged. She was carrying a baby she’d wanted for the past three years. She’d read parenting magazines cover to cover, thumbed through consumer rating reports and cut out pictures of baby paraphernalia-and David didn’t think she’d want any more input on the nursery than what color to paint the trim? An aborted scream caught in her throat.

“There’s a rocker on back order,” he continued, oblivious. “It doesn’t match exactly, it’s a blond wood, but the cushion will work with what we used in here-”

“By we, I assume you mean you and Tanner?”

He started, seeming perplexed that she wasn’t turning cartwheels of joy. “Well…yeah. You’re not mad because I told him about the baby a couple of days early, are you? Because I did this for you.”

For her, not with her. Crucial difference. “I know, David. Th-thank you.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she struggled to pull the sentences from her tired brain that would finally make him hear her. She rubbed her temples. “But I had thought that, once we were living together again, if we were living together again, we could…that we would-Were you just assuming that everything would revert to the way it used to be after Winnie got home from the cruise?”

“Well, that was definitely my hope,” he said carefully. “Come on, Rachel, I love you. You love me. I know you do!” Possibly not the best way for him to argue his case right now, telling her how she felt.

“We’re dating right now,” she reminded him. “Taking it slowly?” Or had he just been humoring her?

He sighed, shifting his weight. “If it’s that important to you, I can get an apartment. Give you your space for a little while. I could stay at Tanner’s place if it’s really necessary. I’d already decided that if you and I weren’t together, you and the baby should take the house, anyway.”

Her blood pressure soared. “If you and I didn’t stay together, don’t you think it should be my decision where I lived? You can’t make those choices for me, especially not without even consulting me.”

“But you already said you’d stay in Mistletoe until at least the birth, maybe longer. It just makes sense for you to stay here,” he argued, regarding her as if she were mentally unstable. “Hell, I got this place for you!”

“That’s right!” Inwardly, she flinched at her own raised voice, but she couldn’t seem to calm herself enough to get her volume back under control. “For me, with no input from me whatsoever.”

“Well, that would have spoiled the surprise. I knew you’d love this house. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

There was no sane way for her to explain that, at the moment, his being right-again-was more a liability than asset. Just as she was at a loss to explain how he could be right and dead wrong at the same time.

“We had been looking for houses on my weekends here,” she reminded him, thinking of Lilah and Tanner, building their home, trading opinions on everything from light fixtures to the welcome mat. A surge of envy pierced her. “Together.”

“But we hadn’t found any we loved. This met all your qualifications, and I knew it wouldn’t stay on the market long at that asking price!”

All valid points. However, it made it difficult to connect with her husband when, every time she tried to explain her feelings, he cut her off with logical arguments instead of understanding what she was trying to share.

“Rachel, if you didn’t like the house, why didn’t you say so four years ago?”

If she’d spoken up the moment he proudly handed her the keys-the way she was trying to speak up now-would it have set a different tone for their marriage? “Because I did like the house. You were right, of course. It’s perfect for us, so it seemed childish to whine, ‘But I wanted to help pick it out.’ Only now it’s four years later, and half the time I feel like a part-time consultant on my own life, with you making unilateral decisions. I wish sometimes that instead of my moving to Mistletoe, where you already had a life established, we’d moved to a neutral location where we could build a life together from the ground up. Because-”

“You love Mistletoe! You always have.” He scowled at her, equal parts angry and confused.

Some days more than others. But this wasn’t about the town. She was trying to explain her feelings about them. “Damn it, David! Could you please just listen? I feel…extraneous. I daydreamed about brainstorming nursery themes with you,” she blurted, tears rising. “Looking through catalogs, discussing baby names…Unless you’ve already picked out one of those, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous to me, David. I…” She glanced around again, hating how wrong she’d been, feeling stupid for all that hope she’d been nurturing for the past week. “I had this image of the two of us, paint smears on our clothes and faces, standing in the middle of a nursery we’d created together.”

“I didn’t think the physical exertion and fumes would be good for you and the baby,” he muttered, intractable. “I’m sorry you don’t like the nursery. I can-”

“No! This isn’t about me being some shrew who doesn’t appreciate her husband’s kind acts. I like surprises. Smaller ones, anyway. This is about your entrenched mantra of ‘I can.’ David, why isn’t it ever we can?”

She knew she’d ruined the moment he must have been picturing, savoring, while he sweated over furniture assembly and wallpaper paste. She saw the wounded look deep beneath his rapidly cooling gaze and hated herself a little for putting it there…and hated him a little for putting her in this position. This was too important for her to nod politely and pretend she was overjoyed. She’d let lots of incidents pass unremarked-if you could call buying an entire house an “incident”-because they were sweet and she didn’t want to hurt him. But she couldn’t go back to their marriage the way it was. She needed-she deserved-a partnership.

“You make it sound like I don’t think about you. I did this for you,” David protested.

“If you really thought about me, if you really knew me…For a couple of months, I was unsatisfied at my job, partly because I’d fallen into a rut, partly because of the subliminal guilt my parents heap on me that I’m not doing anything more ‘important.’ I’ve come to terms with never again having the kind of salary I gave up, never being an executive or having the type of career other people see as important, but I should feel important in my own house. I should feel important to you.”

He was furious now, stomping past her as if he couldn’t wait to get out of that room. “I was trying to show you how important you are to me! I go out of my way to do things like this, to take care of you, to…And your reactions have varied from sullen acknowledgment to outright criticism. Most women would be thrilled to be married to a guy who thought to send flowers, who surprised them with grand gestures.”

“Then maybe I am not the woman for you!” Her pulse was racing, and she couldn’t believe she’d just yelled that at him. But this was crucial-the point she was trying to make, this was a deal breaker-and he wasn’t hearing her. Again.

David shot her a look of something perilously close to contempt. “Maybe you’re not.” Then he was gone.

At first she was too stunned to move, but when the front door shut, she sank to the floor, her eyes hot and dry. This felt too big for tears, the gaping hole that had just been punched through her. She didn’t know why she was so horribly shocked; after all, she’d known they were standing on a fault line and that one more good-size tremor might be more than their marriage could take at this point.

She just wished she hadn’t been so right about them in November and so wrong about them making the most of their second chance.

David watched his brother through an invisible wall of cynicism. I don’t remember being this discombobulated at my wedding. Was it because he was a more inherently organized person, or was there something wrong with him? Had he just not loved Rachel as much as Tanner loved his bride?

No, that was ridiculous. I loved that woman with everything I had in me. Not that it had been enough for her. He’d told himself for months that the reason he couldn’t make her happy was because she so desperately wanted to get pregnant that nothing else could make her happy. Yet here she was, finally pregnant, and still-

“David, I think I left my cuff links in the car!” Tanner said. “I’m supposed to meet Lilah and the photographer in just a sec. Would you mind…?”

“Of course not.” David easily caught the keys his brother tossed his way. “Stop messing with your tie, bro. It looks fine. I straightened it myself. And for pity’s sake, take a breath.”

“Right.” Tanner smiled then. “Right, thanks.”

See, had that been so hard? He’d given perfectly sensible advice, which Tanner had recognized and been grateful for. Tanner had not thrown an incomprehensible fit.

A much nobler part of David, which he’d tried to silence at the rehearsal dinner by sipping Scotch and not looking anywhere near his wife, asked, Is it really that incomprehensible that she wanted to have a hand in decorating the nursery? But it hadn’t just been that. It hadn’t only been that after his planning, after his hard work and soliciting Tanner’s help, that Rachel had rejected his gift-had practically thrown it back in his face. (How would she have felt if Tanner and Lilah had balked at that scrapbook she’d expended so much effort on? Instead, they’d laughed and cried and hugged her. All the responses he’d envisioned getting from Rachel.) What had chilled David to the core was how easily she’d snapped that maybe she wasn’t the right woman for him. It had sounded ominously like a threat. He’d recalled with brutal clarity the shock of when she’d left him in November.

Was that how it would be now, the specter of separation hanging over him like a married man’s Sword of Damocles? Would he have to worry that whenever things got rocky at home, calling it quits would be her go-to solution? He couldn’t put himself through that. And what about after their child was born? Kids deserved a stable environment.

David’s righteous anger lasted from the walk at the back of the church, all the way to the front steps. As he descended toward the parking lot, Zachariah’s car stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and Arianne and Rachel got out. Apparently there had been a hold-up at the hairdresser’s earlier. Lilah herself had arrived later than scheduled, her nerves frazzled when she reached the church.

The hairdresser might have been slow, but she’d done an amazing job with Rachel, whose black hair had grown so long in the past year-a result, she’d speculated, of the prenatal vitamins. Now, it was up in some kind of pretty twist, tendrils curling down around her face here and there. Her makeup was smoky and soft, or maybe that was just the pregnancy. He’d noticed the way she was softening more and more lately-well, in general, not with him. Her voice had been hard at the wedding rehearsal. She’d greeted him with exacting politeness, her gaze as warm as an ice sculpture.

He extended that same cool civility now, nodding as she passed. “Rachel.” As he averted his gaze, though, trying not to notice how fantastic she looked, it snagged on the top of her dress and the tantalizing view of full, ripe cleavage. That wasn’t appropriate for church! But Arianne and Rachel were already hurrying past him and his wordless stupor, leaving him behind.

If it weren’t for the fact that he was the best man and took his responsibilities as such very seriously, he would be counting the seconds to the reception and the open bar.

THE GOOD THING about weddings, Rachel thought as she shifted her weight and tried not to look miserable in front of two hundred and eighty guests, was that no one thought anything of it if you cried. She’d wondered, as she first walked down the aisle to her position at the front, whether if she didn’t look at David, she could do this. But watching Tanner and Lilah-and the way they watched each other-made everything even worse.

We had that once. They were both good people, flawed but decent, and they’d loved each other very much. How had they let it go so wrong?

Then the vows had started, almost identical to the ones she and David had exchanged. The “richer and poorer” part had never really been an issue, but they’d failed spectacularly at the “better or worse” and “in sickness and health.” The promise that really haunted her, though, was “cherish and respect.” She recalled mood swings she’d had, excuses she’d made for not being intimate with him, days when she’d been so tempted to roll her eyes at his offering her or someone else advice that she’d forgotten entirely that she used to come to him for advice about everything under the sun.