One

Tyler

I hate math, but it doesn’t lie. And the numbers in this spreadsheet are telling a story I don’t particularly want to read.

It won’t work. Not without a major sponsor to help pay the bills.

Oh, I’m sure I can get us one. This team will be a powerhouse in motocross, but sponsorships always have strings. Strings I was hoping to avoid.

But I’ve got to make the compensation package attractive to the people I want to bring in or they’re not going to sign on. Not even with the promise of fractional ownership and decision-making power that I’ve been pitching. The folks I need to make this happen aren’t going to be satisfied with less than they’re already making, even for a bigger share of the pot. Because there just aren’t any guarantees when it comes to the size of that pot. Even with Owen Lenart, Alex Herrera, and Joy Chen riding for the team and Darnell Lewis as chief mechanic, we could still go bust.

Which means I’m going to have to do the nasty without at least one more company to make the ends meet. If I were in a cartoon, there’d be a dark cloud hovering over my head to indicate my annoyance with the prospect. Instead, I just scowl at the red number in the bottom corner of my computer’s screen.

The doorbell rings. I roll my eyes up and my desk chair back at the same time. If it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses again, I’m not going to be polite. Some people just don’t understand “No, thank you.”

I stalk out of the bedroom I’ve fitted out as an office, which is on the far side of the house, and down the hall. It’s not a particularly large house—I’m only one person, after all—but it’s all on one level so I can’t exactly get to the front door instantly.

The doorbell rings again.

“Keep your pants on,” I mutter as I reach the end of the hallway. Even in my bad mood, I pause to admire the view from the living room. Honestly, that view—of a hill densely forested with pines and aspens—is the reason I bought this house despite the lousy layout of the bedrooms and thirty-year-old kitchen. One glimpse of the 12-foot open-beams and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the woods and I was done for.

Inhaling as if I can smell the trees as well as see them, I reach the front door and pull it open.

And blink in astonishment.

It’s not proselytizers. It’s not FedEx delivering a package I need to sign for. It’s not even one of the neighbor kids trying to sell candy bars or magazines or some other shit to fund their sports team or band. (I never buy. I just give them cash, no strings attached, but they always offer the goods anyway.)

It’s her.

My brain takes several seconds to catch up to my eyes, though.

Mandy. That’s her name. Or at least all of her name I was ever privileged to know.

I knew the rest of her, though. Biblically. And briefly.

She’s even sexier than I remembered. Which is weird, because the first time I met her, she’d been wearing the most outrageous fuck-me stilettos I’d ever seen with a pair of ass-hugging short-shorts and a tight, thin tank-top with no bra. Sex on stilts, I’d thought at the time, and even though I usually avoid one-night stands with motocross groupies, she’d captivated me. And not just with her physical attractiveness and come-hither clothes, either. She might have looked like the stereotypical dumb blonde, but I knew within a few seconds that the airhead act was just that—an act. This woman was smart, savvy, and funny as hell, and after the lousy day I’d had, taking her to bed had seemed like the perfect antidote to everything that ailed me.

Today, though, she’s dressed in a satin, turquoise blouse and wide-leg ivory trousers that are obviously made of silk. A pair of diamond earrings dangles from her lobes. I’m ninety-percent sure they are both the real thing and way more than a couple of karats. Her long blond hair is done up in a complicated braid and her makeup is so subtle, I know it’s expensive and expertly applied. She looks like a million bucks. Literally.

And also like sex on stilts, although I don’t think the heels she’s wearing under her slacks are particularly high.

“Hi, Tyler,” she says. I recall, now, that her voice is unusually deep and has a throatiness to it that plays hell with my libido. “Are you going to invite me in or are you going to stand there and let all the mosquitoes in?”

Damn it. There are mosquitoes right now thanks to the rain we had earlier in the week and I really don’t want them in the house. I’ll be up all night wondering if I hear one buzzing around my bed.

“Uh, sure, come on in,” I say, stepping to the side so she can enter. But my mind is racing.

What the hell is she doing here? She had been the one to insist on one night and one night only. I hadn’t imagined that, had I? And how did she even know where I live? It’s not like my home address is common knowledge; I pay an attorney to keep that shit off the internet, in fact.

She brushes past me, and I get a whiff of her fragrance—lemons and honey and something spicy, like cloves or nutmeg. The scent instantly activates the memory of kissing my way down her torso to her pussy and lapping her like a lollipop. She’d tasted as delicious as she smelled, and when she came on my tongue, I’d felt like I was on top of the world.

My cock twitches, because not only do I remember eating her out, I remember what happened next. We went through every condom I possessed.

Has she changed her mind about the whole once-is-enough thing? Because it certainly hadn’t been enough for me. The evidence of that is currently straining against the zipper of my jeans.

Once inside, she does what everyone who comes through my front door does; she lets out a soft sigh of appreciation and says, “Wow. Great view.”

Right. I need to get a handle on this situation.

“Not that it isn’t nice to see you, Mandy, but why are you here?” How are you here?

Her back is still to me when I ask the question, so I can’t see her expression to gauge her emotions, but the set of her shoulders tells me this isn’t a social call. What. The. Fuck?

“Maybe we should sit down,” she suggests, turning her head just enough that I can see her profile. There’s a little more color in her cheeks now, and my heart starts racing because I’m starting to have suspicions, but none of those suspicions make any goddamn sense. We used protection. It can’t be that bad, can it?

I gesture at the sectional that takes up most of the living room, surprised to find my hand is completely steady. “Wherever you like.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she chooses the far side of the sectional closest to the windows, so I sit down on the opposite end of the L-shape. I’m not going to crowd her.

She looks out the window for several long seconds, making me wait for it, and I’m about two seconds from demanding an answer when she faces me and announces in staccato bursts, “I’m pregnant. It’s yours. I’m keeping it. I don’t need money or anything else. I just thought you should know.”

If there were any mosquitoes in the house, I’m pretty sure I’d be collecting them in my mouth.

Pregnant? With my kid?

I’d been thinking more along the lines of some hard-to-cure STD like herpes or even HIV, although why my mind had gone there, I can’t say. I mean, the health department notifies you of that kind of shit, don’t they? So obviously, pregnancy is a much more likely explanation, and I should have thought of it. But for some reason, that was the last thing that came into my head.

Our baby. My baby.

My brain must have stopped braining for a while, because suddenly, Mandy stands up. “Okay, that’s all I had to tell you. I guess I’ll be going.”

I spring from my seat to block her path. Not in a threatening way, I hope. “No, no. Shit, I’m not mad. Just surprised.”

For the first time, she cracks a smile. “Not half as surprised as I was when the plus symbol showed up on the pee stick. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.”

Under other circumstances, I’d probably debate who was more shocked, but instead I ask, “How do you think it did happen? Nothing went wrong with any of the condoms as far as I can remember.”

She shrugs. “I asked my OB the same thing, and she told me there can be microscopic holes in condoms. It’s rare, but not unheard of. And sometimes, they just don’t work; no one even knows why.

“The real mystery is that my fallopian tubes are allegedly one hundred percent blocked—a souvenir of my former fiancé fooling around on me—and I’m not supposed to be able to get pregnant. Or if I do, it’s supposed to be ectopic.” A bemused expression overtakes her face as she presses her hand to her—as far as I can tell—very flat abdomen. “Apparently, this one wound up in the right place. So I hope you understand why I’m not going to terminate.”

The last declaration is delivered defiantly, as if she expects me to demand she have an abortion. Like I would ever tell a woman what to do with her own body. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

“Absolutely,” I say. My voice sounds like I’m shouting down a rain barrel, though. I’m going to be a father.

And that’s when the full implication of what she said when she announced the pregnancy hits me. I don’t need money or anything else. I just thought you should know.

She thinks I don’t want a child. Or at least that I won’t want this one. The only reason she told me was because she doesn’t want to have that whole secret baby problem twenty years down the line where the kid wants to know who their daddy is and everything blows up in your face. That’s why she was very clear about not needing anything from me—she wanted me to know she isn’t keeping the baby because she’s planning to shake me down for child support.

And suddenly, I have a new—and very pressing—question. Because she seems very sure that she can raise a child without any additional income. And then there are her clothes and hairstyle and makeup, all of which practically scream, “I’m loaded.” Not to mention, now that I think of it, she was so cagey about her full name the night we spent together.

“Mandy,” I ask gently but firmly, “who are you? Exactly?”