Or maybe she was pregnant and he was the father.
A baby.
With a woman who wasn’t his wife. His brand-new, only-been-hitched-for-six-days wife.
Oh. My. God.
“I don’t know, Kendall, I think you’re a bad luck bride,” Jim teased her over the radio. “Your new hubby is awfully distracted out there today.”
“What’s he doing?” Kendall frowned as she took turn two on lap fifty-seven, wishing she had an additional blocking strip on her visor, since the sun was brutal on the track in Phoenix. Evan had seemed fine before the race. Downright relaxed.
“He’s all over the place. Skittish. But don’t you worry about him, you’ve got your own problems given how tight you’re running.”
“Then quit teasing me about my husband,” she told him, still getting a thrill over the use of that word.
“Come on, I have to, it’s too damn good not to.”
She laughed. “Fair enough.”
There were only a few seconds of dead air between them before Jim was back on. “Caution. Evan just spun out into the infield.”
Even as she reacted automatically to the information, keeping her car under control and assessing what was going on around her, Kendall’s heart plummeted in her chest. “He okay?”
“Yep. He’s heading to the garage with a message for you to kick some ass.”
She grinned inside her helmet. “Tell him I’m on it.”
“If I have to start relaying love messages back and forth I’m going to puke in my mouth” was Jim’s opinion.
So just to screw with him Kendall made kiss-kiss sounds.
He laughed.
“Now leave me alone, I’m working here.”
With extreme effort, she forced Evan out of her mind and her focus back to the task at hand.
“WHAT the hell?”
Evan glanced over at his sister. “I don’t have time, Eve. I’m trying to get back out there.” His crew was pounding away on his car, trying to repair the damage he’d done when he’d spun out into the infield.
But Eve touched his arm. “Are you okay? For real? That was a weird accident, Evan. It’s like you just forgot to pay attention for a second.”
“You guys are doing awesome. Give me five,” he told his crew and walked Eve to the other side of the garage, where no one could hear. “Look, if I tell you this, promise not to yell at me. Just help me figure out what the f**k I’m supposed to do, okay?”
Her eyes widened. “Okay. What’s going on?”
“You remember Nikki Strickland, Jonas’s wife?”
“No one can forget her. She has the intelligence of a sock puppet.”
“Well, she has a friend, Sara.” Evan pulled off his glove, suddenly feeling the need to gnaw on his fingernail. “And she’s just like Nikki, only maybe a little angrier, a little smarter.”
“Yeah? What about her? I see her with Nikki all the time. Who’s she dating, by the way, because she’s clearly pregnant.”
Evan spit out the nail he’d just ripped off of his finger. So much for his hopes that she wasn’t really pregnant. “How do you know she’s pregnant?”
“She weighs like seventy-three pounds. A pregnant belly is totally obvious on a woman built like that . . . Oh, my Lord in heaven.” Eve’s hand went up to her mouth. “You aren’t saying . . .”
He was. Evan felt the need to puke again. “They came up when we were camping last fall at Lake Norman. I’d been drinking, she’d really been drinking. I tried to say no, but then she was relentless, and it had been a long time since I’d had sex . . .”
God, it sounded even worse out loud than it did in his head. He went at his nail again.
Eve grabbed his hand and shoved it to his side. “You’re making yourself bleed, get ahold of yourself. So she’s pregnant. You slept with her. What makes you think you’re the father?”
“Because she said I am. Today. She’s been sending me text messages, but I told her I wasn’t interested in seeing her again. Then . . . bam. Today she says she’s pregnant.”
“Why would she wait like five months to tell you?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, I’m going to go find her and ask her. I saw her in the boxes with Nikki not ten minutes ago.”
“What is she doing in Phoenix? We’re two thousand miles from Charlotte.”
“How the hell should I know? But I imagine she came with Nikki.”
“You’re going to talk to her? Shouldn’t I talk to her? Are pregnant women even supposed to fly?”
“I think they can. I mean, obviously she did. But yes, I’m going to talk to her. I’m going to arrange for the two of you to meet somewhere completely private where no one will see you. We’re keeping this totally quiet until that baby is born and we can do a DNA test.”
His sister’s face had gone mulish. “I don’t want to be an ass**le, Eve . . . she’s pregnant.” She’d already gone through half the pregnancy alone, he couldn’t see giving her the cold shoulder until some test proved it was his. Unless she’d slept with another guy a week before or after him, it was looking highly likely this kid was his, and even if it wasn’t, he had to give her the benefit of the doubt and some support. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
He had been there in that tent that night, too. He’d been as irresponsible as she had.
“No one says you have to be an ass**le. But for the love of God, do not sign anything without me and our lawyer.”
“What would I be signing?” His own death certificate, when Kendall found out what a goddamn idiot he was? “What am I going to say to my wife?”
There was a pause, then Eve rushed to his defense, which he had to say he totally appreciated. “What can she say? This happened long before the two of you were back together. Accidents happen. Sex happens. It’s awkward and awful and not exactly a great newlywed discovery, but what are you going to do? It will all work out.”
“You’re right. We’ll just deal with it. Okay. I’m going back out there to finish this race for whatever points I can get. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Eve gave him a smile, even if it looked somewhat maniacal. “We’ll figure it out.”
KENDALL zoomed past the checkered flag, less than two seconds behind Jack Daniel Davidson, in an unbelievable second-place finish. She yelled into her radio as she could hear her crew all giving shouts and whoops of excitement. When she flew into pit road, they were jumping up and down and fist pumping, which is exactly how she felt. As soon as she could, she was out of the car and jumping up and down with them, joy making her feel like she might burst.