Not Precisely Pregnant Read online

  Carrie’s puppy, Muffin, had eaten the ring and the vet had told them it would eventually come out. Jack had spent the better part of a week sifting through... byproducts searching for it. Carrie had claimed the duty made her squeamish and her parents refused to oblige her by doing it.

  “You finally did find it,” she said in a triumphant voice. The smile she shot him almost made up for the task.

  Almost.

  “You even cleaned it up for me,” she said.

  “But you never wore it again.”

  “Would you?” Her sobs turned to laughter.

  That was the thing about Carrie; she never could make up her mind just what mood she was in. And when he was with her, Jack’s moods shifted just as rapidly.

  Carrie got herself into ridiculous situations and expected Jack to get her out of them. Then she somehow made him feel like a cross between a white knight and a court jester.

  “So you think me pulling wax off your legs will be easier than digging through Muffin’s muffins?”

  “For you, not for me. It really does hurt.” She shifted on the couch and placed her right leg onto his lap. “I think it would be easier if we just talk and you pull when I least expect...ow!”

  She yanked her leg off his lap and began massaging it.

  “That hurt,” she said, looking at him as if it was his fault.

  He tossed the piece of wax and hair covered paper on the coffee table. “You said I should pull it off when you weren’t expecting it.”

  “But I want you to do it when I’m expecting not to expect it.”

  She rubbed the injured limb a moment and then placed it back on Jack’s lap.

  He rubbed the slightly red area. “Do you remember when you were ten and decided you could slam-dunk?”

  Carrie groaned and threw her head back against the pillow in the comer of the couch. “It could have worked.”

  “If you had let go. Jumping off the ladder and grabbing the rim was a decent idea, but hanging there—”

  “I didn’t want to fall and hurt something.”

  “So you screamed for me to help you down.” Jack pulled another strip.

  “Ow! I should have kicked you harder.”

  She rubbed the offended area.

  “You kicked me hard enough to break my glasses.” He pulled another sheet.

  “Hey! That was too fast. You didn’t let me recover from the last one.”

  “Sorry. But we’re almost done with this leg.” Jack rubbed the exposed skin for her.

  “So, what’s new?” he asked, grasping for some topic to distract her.

  “Since we talked yesterday?” She paused for a moment. “I dumped Ted.”

  Jack had never liked the guy. He had shifty eyes and a habit of toying with Carrie’s hair. Jack had no rational explanation for why, but Ted’s habit set his teeth on edge.

  Trying to forget the fact that he wouldn’t miss Ted a bit, Jack tried to sound sympathetic. “I’m sorry. You’ve been seeing him almost a year. What happened?”

  “Well, last night, while we were at dinner I decided he’d never do.”

  Jack pulled another sheet, but Carrie didn’t even yelp this time, just glared at him and rubbed.

  “Because?” Jack prompted.

  She sighed. “We both ordered the fettuccine.”

  Jack should have been used to Carrie’s twists and turns. He was a lawyer, used to sorting through mountains of information to get to the truth. But with Carrie the twists left him lost in the muddle of her weird brand of logic.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And I realized if I was with you, you would have ordered the shrimp,” she replied.

  He smiled encouragingly, because she was right, he would have ordered shrimp. But that didn’t explain why she’d dumped Ted.

  Carrie smiled right back at him and nodded her head.

  Jack frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  Slowly, as if he was just a bit dim, she explained. “When you order shrimp I always steal some. That way I get the best of both worlds—my fettuccine and your shrimp. I mean it’s just like when we go to the movies. He never got the Jujyfruit candies and I’d have to buy my own along with the licorice. It’s too much. I looked like a pig.”

  Jack ripped off two more sheets in quick succession.

  “Ow!” Carrie glared. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “One leg down, one to go.”

  He grabbed her left leg and pulled it onto his lap with the right one. “So you dumped him because he ordered the wrong food?”

  Carrie shook her head and blushed.

  Jack stopped. He’d seen many things in the years they’d been friends, but her blushing wasn’t one of them.

  “No.” She shrugged. “I dumped him because while he was kissing me goodnight—a rather sloppy, pathetic kind of kiss, I might add—I realized that you weren’t a sloppy kisser. Not that I’m asking you to kiss me,” she hastily added. “It’s just that I want to find a man someday who can kiss as good as you and knows how to order the proper food and all.”

  Jack stopped, mid-rip.

  “Hey, finish it off, that’s even worse, making me worry about when you’re going to finish... Ow.”

  She jerked her leg off his lap and rubbed the hairless strip of skin. “Doggone it. Men don’t have to have hairless legs. It’s not fair. Maybe I’ll move to Europe where women can go hairy.”

  “When did you kiss me?” Jack asked, ignoring her grumbles. He didn’t remember kissing Carrie. She’d kicked him, and there was the time she set him on fire, the time she locked him in a locker for an entire health period, the time...

  No. Jack was sure he’d never kissed her. Looking at her lips he was equally sure he’d remember it if he had.

  “Why, Jack, I’m hurt. Chemistry class, I was a junior, you were a senior?”

  He waited, still unable to remember a kiss.

  “I was mixing chemicals and they blew up. I passed out. There I was, lying on the floor and you leaned over and gave me the most wonderful kiss I’ve ever experienced. You quite ruined me for other men. I worried you didn’t kiss me again because I didn’t kiss good enough. When you went away to college, I spent my senior year practicing. I hoped the next time you were home, we could try again.”

  Jack took her leg back and ripped three sheets off, one after another, out of sheer frustration.

  “Hey, that wasn’t nice,” she protested.

  “And that wasn’t a kiss.”

  He kept his voice low and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. “I was giving you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

  It was insulting, having Carrie think that his rescue attempt was the best kiss he could give.

  Memories of the boys she dated her senior year, how he’d hated hearing his parents talk about each and every one of them. Never hearing Carrie mention one of them when they talked and all the while she’d practiced kissing them in hopes she’d get better.

  Carrie stared at him a moment before the giggles started.

  Moments before she’d been sobbing into his handkerchief, now she wiped her eyes again, but this time mirth was the reason. “You mean, I spent my senior year practicing so I’d be a good kisser next time you gave me mouth-to-mouth?”

  “Carrie,” he started, but she cut him off.

  “I thought I must have been horrible, but then Ben Thaker told me I was the best girl he’d ever kissed. You remember Ben? He kissed a lot of girls. So, I finally figured that you’d always called me kid because that’s how you saw me, just the kid next door. Your almost little sister. Plus by then you had Patti and then Lynda,” she paused a moment, and then smiled. “Yeah, then it was Amy, then that first year at the firm you met Julie, and then Sandy—” She cut off the sentence and shot him a look of sympathy.

  “Sorry. Anyway, I finally gave up.”

  Her smile slipped a fraction, but reappeared instantly. “In the end, I’m glad I gave up chasing you. You’re the best friend a girl could want.
I mean, we go to movies, hang out together. You even go on my Sunday runs with me.”

  “Eating orgies,” he corrected.

  He pulled the last sheet.

  “Boy, that hurt,” Carrie said, massaging her newly liberated left leg. “It had better last for six weeks like the box said or I’ll be...”

  Jack watched her, momentarily tuning out her chatter.

  She had chased him? He didn’t quite remember it that way. When she’d moved in next door they’d been too young for him to think of her as a girl, she was just a neighbor. As they grew older they moved from neighbors to friends.

  Friends.

  Of course that’s what they were.

  Friends.

  If she’d chased him, it hadn’t been very far.

  She’d always been there—ready to listen, needing to be rescued, rescuing him, though Jack doubted she knew how many times her generous heart had soothed him, especially over the last few months since Sandy.

  He shut off all thoughts of Sandy. He didn’t want to face them. Didn’t want to face his failure.

  Carrie’s list of women he’d dated proved what he’d begun to suspect—he was a failure with the opposite sex. Five serious romances since college and not one of them had lasted. He’d thought he’d finally found the right woman with Sandy. He’d thought they’d eventually marry and have a family. Those dreams had died with Sandy’s accident. It wasn’t long after the incident that they decided to go their separate ways.

  “Jack,” Carrie said, pulling him from his thoughts.

  She rose on her de-haired legs and smiled as Jack tuned back in. “Jack, I was just going to make dinner.”

  There was an unspoken invitation in that one statement or maybe it was a warning.

  Jack resisted groaning and thought fast.

  Carrie and cooking were two words that didn’t go well together.

  Carrie and indigestion were words that went together better.

  “Since your legs are so smooth, why don’t I take them, and the rest of you, out for something. I’ll promise to order shrimp.”

  A look of relief swept over her face. Carrie wasn’t any more fond of cooking than he was of eating her attempts. “I was counting on you asking. Now that I’m once again between boyfriends there will be too many nights of my cooking. I look at it as incentive to find another.”

  “Cook?” he asked.

  “Boyfriend.”

  She got off the couch and her robe parted revealing her hairless leg. Though Jack had just waxed them, watching them peek through her robe emphasized what shapely legs they were.

  Not that he was looking.

  Carrie was a buddy and no one eyed up a buddy’s legs.

  She knotted the robe. “Guess I better change. I can’t go out in this.”

  “Ah, Carrie, isn’t that my jersey?”

  Now that she’d recovered from her mishap, he didn’t feel bad about teasing her. Actually, teasing about the jersey had almost become a ritual.

  Both of them knew Jack would never get it back.

  Right on cue, Carrie looked down and her eyes widened. “Why now that you mention it, it is. I’d give it to you now, but it’s dirty. Let me launder it and I’ll get it back to you next week.”

  She walked into the bathroom to change and Jack stared after her, unable to resist watching the sway of her robe. She was a nicely packaged woman.

  He put the thought away. They’d been friends for so many years, that he was just sort of used to her.

  Carrington Rose Delany, his friend.

  Continue Reading I Waxed My Legs for This?

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