Joss Wood - One Night, Two Consequences

Remy had to smile at the very self-satisfied smirk on his face.

When he’d headed to the bathroom Remy scuttled out of bed, rummaged in her suitcase and eventually found a pair of sleeping shorts and a roomy T-shirt. In the mirror on the opposite wall she saw her reflection and pulled a face at her very messy hair and make-up-free face. She wasn’t looking her best, but what was the point of fussing over what she looked like when he was heading out through the door?

Out of her life.

One night. His staying any longer was not an option.

She shouldn’t want him to stay at all.

Bo stood in the generic hotel bathroom and stared at his reflection in the large mirror above the basin. This is a one-night stand, he told himself, a one-time deal.

So what if it had been some of the best sex of his life? He’d spent two hours with her and they had done it … he could hardly believe it … three times. He wasn’t in his dotage, but that was excessive even for him. He hadn’t been able to stop touching her, seemingly desperate to make every second count.

He didn’t want to walk back out there, pick his clothes up off the floor and walk out of her life. For the first time in far too many years he wasn’t racing to leave, wasn’t feeling the noose around his neck, the let-down after good sex with no emotional connection. All he wanted to do was to climb back into her bed and slide on home.

But that would not be sensible or practical and definitely not wise. Apart from the fact that she intrigued him—which he didn’t like—they were out of condoms. Although if he didn’t leave— now! —then he wasn’t sure he’d be able to control himself.

Bo flipped on the cold tap and ducked his head under the spout, hoping the cold water would shock some sense into him. Why was he thinking about her like this? She was sex, pure and simple—a good time, and that was it!

She’d offered, he’d accepted, they’d both had fun—the end. He should be walking out through the door with a fat smile on his face.

She’d been a superb lay—the best two hours of his life … so why wasn’t he feeling any better? Bo rubbed a towel over his hair and his hand over his jaw, now covered with dark stubble.

Since Ana he’d consciously, deliberately, kept all his sexual encounters casual and this had been supposed to be the most casual of all. A pretty girl—a tourist—someone he wouldn’t see again. How much more casual could he get? He didn’t know her surname, where she was from, what her cell number was, but she was the first woman in five years who’d managed to reach inside his gut and twist it into a knot.

And that was why he purposely, deliberately, strode back into the room and quickly yanked on his clothes. The quicker he left, the quicker he could go back to thinking straight …

Remy had left the bed and got dressed and Bo was thankful for the small mercy that she wasn’t still naked; that would have made leaving a lot harder than it already was. Than he already was …

He sent her a quick look. She sat on the corner of the bed, her long legs crossed at the knees. She looked cool and composed, so he walked over to her and dropped his head to kiss her high on her cheekbone, knowing that if he didn’t keep it light he wouldn’t be able to resist temptation … again.

‘Thanks, Remy. Have a good life.’

‘Yeah, you too.’

Bo yanked open the door, closed it behind him and shook his head. If someone had told him earlier that walking away from her would be difficult he would have told them that they had rocks in their head. Walking away was never difficult.

Except that this time it really was.

Six weeks later

IN PORTLAND, REMY stood in the smallest bedroom, which her mum had turned into a nursery for Callum, and kept her eyes firmly fixed on her baby half-brother’s face. Only the fact that her mother would kill her if she woke Callum kept her from running into the dark Portland night, screaming like a psychotic banshee.

She was on the edge of sanity and there were more than a few contributing factors …

Six weeks in her mother’s orbit was about five weeks and five days too long. As it turned out Callum slept a lot, and Jan had had plenty of time to nag her adult child.

‘When are you going to pick up your career? You have an obligation to use the brains God gave you for something more worthwhile than catching flights, learning another way to cook fish and then blogging about it. All that education wasted. You are not fulfilling your potential.’

Below those comments were the unsaid implications … You disappoint me. I expected more. What you do is important—not who you are.

But she now had a bigger problem than her mother’s nagging her about her life …

Remy looked down at the plastic wand in her hand and pulled another two out of her back pocket. One displayed a plus sign, one showed two lines and, just to make sure she got the message, the third had the word ‘pregnant’ in the display window.

She was going to have a baby.

This couldn’t be happening …

She was going to have Bo’s baby. The stranger from Bellevue. Her one-night, blow-her-head-off stand.

Remy slid down the wall and rested her head just below the butt of the happy giraffe painted on the wall. God! Why, oh, why was this happening to her? She couldn’t be pregnant—she didn’t want to be pregnant—but she held the irrefutable proof in her hands. And how ? Bo had entered her only once, maybe twice, without a condom. On neither occasion had he been close to his happy ending … The man had had incredible self-control and he’d used that control to bring her to orgasm after orgasm during the night.

But apparently one of his super-sperm had sneaked out and had been hell-bent on finding its own happy ending. With her egg.

Remy muttered a series of silent curse words as tears pooled in her eyes.

In his wooden crib Callum snuffled and Remy tensed, thinking that he was about to wake up. She stretched her neck to look at him. Crap! She was going to have one of … of those ! They didn’t even look all that interesting to have around; all Callum seemed to do was cry, eat and sleep.

She wanted to send hers back… Why didn’t life come with a remote control? Whoops, didn’t mean to do that — rewind. Don’t like that channel — swap.

Remy banged her head lightly against the wall. Life doesn’t work that way, chicken. She couldn’t duck, ignore or rewrite her life or her past … no matter how much she’d like to.

Remy stared at the carpet between her knees. She was her mother’s daughter in more ways than one: stupid when it came to condom use, apparently, but brilliant academically.

Like her brainy mother—a professor in mechanical engineering—she’d been in an accelerated learning programme most of her life and at sixteen had started at the same Ivy League college Jan was a lecturer at. She’d spent her entire undergraduate degree years feeling that she was an exhibit, her mum’s pet project … paraded around when she was in favour, held at a distance when she wasn’t.

After completing her PhD in computer science she’d been headhunted by Tiscot’s, the biggest media and PR company in the country, to be their Chief Information Officer at a stupidly massive salary. Her desire to please and to achieve had followed her into the workplace, and she’d given the company, and her boss, more than a pound of her flesh—part of her soul as well.

Her life had been consumed by work, and such dedication, obsession, such stupidity , had caused her ulcer to perforate and she’d landed up in hospital—which had given her some much needed time to think.

Lying in that hospital bed, she’d never felt more alone. She’d had no visitors—why would she? She had no friends—and the only flowers she’d received had been from the firm, probably ordered by the junior receptionist. Long, long hours on her own had given her the time to examine her life and she had come to accept that she was twenty-five, lonely—because she never made an effort to make friends—perpetually single—because she never took the time to date—and desperately unhealthy because she never took the time to eat properly.

She was also burnt out and possibly depressed. And every time she thought about returning to Tiscot’s the flames of hell fired up in her stomach.

That had been a freaking big clue that she’d had a choice to make: she had to change her life or allow hell to move permanently into her stomach. She’d chosen to save herself and her sanity and had walked away from her corporate, high-pressure, immensely demanding job.

From New York she’d flown to England, but that hadn’t quite been far enough to silence her mother’s voice in her head constantly reminding her that she was making a huge mistake, that she was being a coward, a cop-out. That she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t working hard enough, wasn’t achieving enough.

The rest of Europe had still been too close, so she’d headed for Asia, and by the time she’d got to Africa Jan’s voice had been quieter. But sadly it still hadn’t disappeared entirely.

Leaving her corporate life had been the right decision, Remy thought. And she’d seen some amazing places, met some extraordinary people. But travelling hadn’t filled all the holes in her soul. She was still looking for …

Remy racked her brain. Why couldn’t she define what she was seeking? Why did she have this belief that she would only know what it was when she found it? It wasn’t love, or a man, or a relationship—love was conditional, an iffy emotion that wasn’t steadfast and true. And, as she’d been shown all her life, it could be used as a weapon or a bribe. She had spent her life chasing it, catching it and then having it ripped from her grasp. She was so over it.

As a result, she didn’t buy in to the premise that love, or a man, would make her happy. So what would ? She wished she knew.

Was she looking for a new job? Possibly. A new passion? Definitely.

What she hadn’t been looking for was pregnancy or incipient motherhood. That was taking her whole turn-over-a-new-leaf attitude a forest too far.

But a baby was on its way, she was keeping it, and she had to adjust. She had to make plans—start thinking for two.

But before she could make plans she had to tell Bo—tell him that she was pregnant and expecting his child. Bo deserved to know he’d fathered a child, and her child needed to know who his or her father was. She knew this because nearly thirty years ago, in a rare display of loss of control, her mum had gone to a party, got totally high, and couldn’t remember exactly who she’d slept with that night.

As a result Remy didn’t have a cookin’ clue who her own father was.

Telling Bo was the one thing she was sure of. She owed him that. She supposed that she would also have to tell her family … which meant—unfortunately—having a conversation with her mother.

Remy sighed and pushed her hair back off her face as she stood up. That was going to be fun. Jan would respond as if she’d told her that she was intending to juggle with vials of something lethal. It was going to be ten times worse than telling her mother that she had given up her job to go travelling to ‘find’ herself.

Way. Way. Worse.

Unlike travelling, she couldn’t just give up a baby and resume the life Jan had spent so much time planning.