LITMIR.BIZ

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after a toddler.

      Yet, here it was, happening.

      She spread her hand out over her as-yet-flat stomach. There was a teeny-tiny occupant inside now, no bigger than a speck. But he was growing. Growing by the moment. Frowning even as she stood here in this nice, pastel-colored room, agonizing over it.

      Him, she corrected herself. Agonizing over him. All she’d ever managed to produce was boys. There was no reason to believe this newest passenger would be any different.

      Oh God, this was different.

      She was forty-five, for crying out loud. What was God thinking, letting her get pregnant?

      “This isn’t funny,” she murmured, looking up toward the ceiling. “Not funny at all.”

      And the one who would be laughing the least would be her husband.

      Slipping on her shoes, she closed her eyes. How was she ever going to explain this to Jason?

      CHAPTER 2

      Pregnant.

      She could remember the first time she’d ever heard that word applied to her. She and Jason had been married just a little over a year. Jason had graduated from UCLA just that past June and she was set to get her liberal arts diploma that coming June. They felt empowered, as if nothing could stop them. The whole world was wide open for them and they were going to take advantage of it. Right after they took a little time off to do some traveling. That had always been the plan: graduate, then travel a little bit before settling down to a job and starting a family.

      The best-laid plans of mice and men…

      When Dr. Kilpatrick had told her she was pregnant, her reaction had been bittersweet. Being pregnant meant closing the door on being young and carefree. It meant opening the door to parenthood, which was something both of them wanted and anticipated with relish—sometime in the near future, but not right at that moment.

      “So we’re a little ahead of schedule,” Jason had laughed when she’d told him the news.

      She’d come home with a loaf of French bread and candlesticks, intent on creating as much of a romantic setting as she could before telling him. Jason had gotten the news out of her within ten seconds of her closing the door to their tiny furnished apartment.

      He’d hugged her, lifting her off the ground. He’d stopped short of spinning her around when she’d protested, saying her stomach contents were threatening to revisit the outside world.

      “What about the road trip?” she’d reminded him when her feet were firmly planted back on the floor again. She knew he’d had his heart set on it and had spent weeks planning it, in between going to work. There were maps littering every available flat space in the apartment, many of them with red lines marking possible routes to take.

      With a wide grin, he’d shrugged it off. “Plenty of time for a road trip once this little fella makes his debut.” He’d patted her stomach, then suddenly dropped to his knees, resting his cheek against her abdomen and talking to her belly button as if it was a direct connection to the baby within. “Don’t give your mom any trouble, now. She really doesn’t look very good in green.”

      She’d loved Jason so much at that very moment, she’d thought her heart was going to burst. “We’ll go on that road trip as soon as the baby’s old enough to travel, honey,” she’d promised him with feeling.

      Jason rose to his feet, a dazed, happy look of disbelief on his face. “It’s a date.”

      And then he’d gone on to seal the bargain with a deep, amorous kiss that had made her recall just how it was that she’d gotten into this state to begin with. Because Jason had undone her so quickly, she had completely forgotten all about taking any precautions against this very thing.

      But as soon as Luke—named after Jason’s late father—was old enough to take on the overdue road trip, Morgan was more than just a gleam in Jason’s eye. He was a bump in her stomach. A rather large bump.

      Christopher came two years later.

      Within a few months after her twenty-fifth birthday, Laurel found herself the harried mother of three children, all under the age of five. Her own mother presented her with a large eleven-by-fourteen book meant for the elementary-school set entitled, Where Babies Come From.

      Her mother’s idea of a joke, Laurel had thought at the time. “I know where babies come from, Mother,” she told the woman who had only given birth to two children herself. “They come from heaven, holding a small piece of it in their chubby little hands when they arrive.”

      And she’d meant that with all her heart. Because holding her babies in her arms was like holding heaven.

      But that didn’t mean life was peaceful by any stretch of the imagination. Her three, overactive boys had each been a trial in their own unique way, sending both her and Jason to the edge of their tempers and to the center of their ability to love.

      It was, all in all, a trial by fire. Three trials by fire. But there wasn’t a minute of that hectic, insane life that she would have eliminated—with the possible exception of when Morgan had brought home that jar of black widow spider eggs and they had hatched overnight. The babies had gotten loose, crawling out of the holes he’d punched in the top of the metal lid.

      Frantic, envisioning them all dying of spider bites in their beds, she’d almost insisted that they move out of the house. Jason had her agree to a compromise by getting an exterminator at a moment’s notice.

      But even the black widow spider incident had had its upside. Because of that, when she’d gone to the local real estate agent, she wound up getting friendly with the man who ran the agency. So much so that she began to seriously think about getting a part-time job selling houses as a way to bring in extra money. True to his word, Ed Callaghan signed her up with his agency the very day she passed her course and received her real estate license.

      She found that she was good at finding just the right house for people. And just like that, Laurel had a career. A career she still had and a livelihood she could easily count on. When the last of her boys had gone into the first grade, she began to put in more hours. Now she had three plaques on the wall of her cubicle proclaiming her to be the saleswoman of the year. Jason called her his go-getter.

      Go-getters didn’t go get pregnant. Not if they didn’t want to be, she thought glumly as she drove onto the main drag within the city she’d called home for the past twenty years. Once upon a time Molten Parkway had been nothing more than a two-lane road that went from one end of the town to the other, the only path to either of the two freeways that went through Bedford. But now they were a city, not a town, and Molten was a major thoroughfare with three lanes whizzing by in either direction.

      Whizzing, that was, in the off hours. During peak hours, the road was clogged with cars either intent on taking one of the two freeways back to wherever it was they came from each morning or returning home from some other region. Molten Parkway found itself the scene of the eternal Southern California shuffle of vehicles. And it was getting worse with each passing month.

      Laurel had seen Bedford, like her family, grow over the years. Often she found herself wishing that Bedford would finally stop growing and stay the way it was.

      She never thought that she’d find herself wishing the same thing about her family. Certainly not at this stage of her life.

      She remembered right after she’d brought Christopher home from the hospital and she and Jason had captured a quiet moment to themselves after Luke and Morgan had collapsed into a fitful sleep.

      The two of them had stood over the baby’s crib, absorbing the fleeting, rare silence, watching the brand-new third addition to their family sleeping.

      And then, suddenly, Jason had broken the silence. “Three,” he’d said.

      The single word had come out of the blue, surprising her as much as it confused her. She’d looked at him, puzzled, waiting for an

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