Brodie stared at her great-aunt while Poppy’s words sank in.
No, no... God, no!
“I’m not pregnant.” Brodie ground out the words, pushing back her hair. She wasn’t even going to consider such a ridiculous scenario. She was on the pill! Brodie scrabbled in her bag for another bottle of water and after trying to open it with a shaking hand, passed it over to Poppy for help twisting off the cap. Brodie felt her body ice up with every drop she swallowed.
“Pregnancy would explain how you are feeling and is a result of sex. So, have you had any lately?”
Admitting to sex made the possibility of her being pregnant terribly real. “One time, weeks ago. The condom split.”
“Ah, that would explain it.”
“It explains nothing! I’m on the pill!”
“Even the pill can fail sometimes.”
Brodie lowered the bottle and started to shake. Could she possibly be pregnant with Kade’s baby?
From a universe far away Brodie felt Poppy’s hand on her back. “Come on, Mata Hari, let’s find you a pregnancy test and you can tell me who, what, where and when.”
* * *
Three pregnancy tests could not be wrong. Unfortunately.
It had taken a week of Poppy’s nagging for Brodie to find her courage to do a pregnancy test and now she desperately wished she hadn’t.
Brodie stared at the three sticks lined up on the edge of her bathroom counter and hoped her Jedi mind trick would turn the positive signs to negative. After five minutes her brain felt like it was about to explode so she sat down on the toilet seat and placed her head in her hands.
She was pregnant. Tears ran down her face as she admitted that Poppy had called it—the girl who had the sex life of a nun was pregnant because Kade Webb carried around a faulty condom.
Jerk. Dipstick. Moron.
Brodie bit her lip. What was the moron/jerk/dipstick doing tonight? It was Saturday. He might be on a date with one of her suggestions for his first date. Which one? The redhead with the engineering degree? The blonde teacher? The Brazilian doctor? Brodie pulled her hair. If she thought about Kade dating, she’d go crazy.
Maybe, instead of feeling jealous of those women, it would be sensible to consider the much bigger problem growing inside her. The exploding bundle of cells that would, in a couple of weeks, become a fetus and then a little human, a perfect mixture of Kade and her.
She wasn’t ready to be a mommy. Hell, she wasn’t ready—possibly wouldn’t ever be ready—for a relationship. And motherhood was the biggest relationship of them all. It never ended. Until death...
Brodie felt the room spin and knew she was close to panicking. She couldn’t be responsible for another life. She couldn’t even emotionally connect to anyone else. How would she raise a well-balanced, well-adjusted kid with all her trust and loss and abandonment issues?
How could she raise a kid at all? She couldn’t do this. She didn’t have to do this. It was the twenty-first century and if she wanted, she could un-pregnant herself. Her life could go back to what it was before... She could be back in control. She wouldn’t have to confront Kade. She wouldn’t have to change her life. By tomorrow, or the day after, she’d be back to normal.
Brodie stood up and looked at her pale face in the mirror. Back to normal. She wanted normal... Didn’t she? She wanted smooth, unemotional, uncluttered. She wasn’t the type who wanted to sail her ship through stormy seas. She’d experienced the tempests and vagaries and sheer brutality of life and she didn’t want to be on another rocking boat.
Right. Sorted. She had a plan. So why wasn’t she feeling at peace with the decision? Why did she feel at odds with herself and the universe?
“You can’t hide in there forever.” Poppy’s voice drifted under the door. Brodie reached over and flipped the lock. Within ten seconds Poppy’s keen eyes saw the tests and the results. Poppy, being Poppy, just raised her eyebrows. “What are you going to do?”
Brodie lifted her shoulders and let them hover somewhere around her ears. It would help to talk this through with someone and since Poppy was here Brodie figured she was a good candidate. “I’m thinking about—” she couldn’t articulate the process,“—becoming un-pregnant.”
If she couldn’t say it, how was she going to do it?
Poppy, unmarried by choice, didn’t react to that statement. “That’s one option,” she stated, crossing her arms over her chest, her bright blue eyes shrewd.
“Raising a child by myself is not much of an option,” Brodie snapped.
“Depends on your point of view,” Poppy replied, her voice easy. “Your parents thought you were the best thing to hit this planet and they had you in far more difficult circumstances than you are in now.”