Jeremy just sat there, stunned. Had he heard that right? Bernie was having not one baby, but two?
The doctor looked back and forth between him and Bernie, clearly sensing she hadn’t presented the best news possible. She hurried through the rest of the exam, gave Bernie some perfunctory instructions, and left the room.
Bernie shimmied to the edge of the table and stood up, awkwardly holding the paper gown closed. “Go away,” she told Jeremy. “I have to dress.”
“I was here when you undressed.”
“I can’t deal with you right now.”
“Deal with me?”
“In fact, why don’t you just go back to your office? There’s really no need for you to hang around.”
“Come on, Bernie. Your doctor just dropped a bomb. We need to deal with the fallout.”
“We? There is no ‘we’ here.”
“First you want me here, and now you don’t? Which is it?”
“Get out of here, Bridges,” she said, her voice growing shakier by the second. “I mean it.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“When I told you I know a dozen ways to kill a man, I wasn’t joking. And make no mistake this time. That’s exactly what I intend to do if you don’t get out of here.”
“Bernie—”
“Get out of here now!”
Jeremy drew back. When the hell had this happened? When had Bernie stopped being calm and rational and coolly sarcastic and turned into a raging crazy woman?
Okay, so maybe it was the moment she discovered she was getting two babies for the price of one. Toss that together with overactive hormones, and she clearly wasn’t thinking straight, which meant he needed to take control of this situation.
As soon as she stopped shrieking at him.
“I’ll be in the waiting room,” he told her. “Get dressed. Then we’ll talk.”
He strode out of the room with as much authority as he could muster, which didn’t feel like much right about then, and went back to Pregnancy Central. As impossible as it seemed, there were even more pregnant women in the waiting room than there had been twenty minutes ago. He sat down in the only empty chair and grabbed a magazine. A moment later he realized it was a copy of American Baby and threw it back down as if it was on fire. He felt a sudden nervous energy that made him want to get up. Walk around. Maybe punch something.
No. That reaction was for hormonal crazy women.
Twins. Good Lord. Jeremy knew that very, very soon he’d have his own private mental breakdown over that, but as of right now, he was more concerned with Bernie’s state of mind. It wasn’t like her to fall apart over anything, and it rattled him more than he could have imagined.
Being a father was one thing. Being a father of twins? He couldn’t even fathom that. Then he thought back to something Bernie said yesterday that sounded like a challenge he had to rise to.
My child could do so much better. Unfortunately, he’s stuck with you.
When she said that, Jeremy felt as if she’d slapped him. Where fatherhood was concerned, he knew he stood an excellent chance of screwing it up. But when he realized Bernie thought so, too, something inside him had snapped, and he felt as if he had as much to prove to her as he did to himself.
He took a deep breath. Let it out. Spent the next few minutes trying to think of a controlled, workable way he could deal with her and the babies she was carrying. He would have thought that magnifying the problem times two might make it easier to sort out, but it only made things even more complicated. Two babies, two babies, two babies…
The words reverberated inside his head until he thought his skull was going to explode.
A few minutes later, his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID, then answered. “Max? What’s up?”
“Bernie’s gone.”
Jeremy snapped to attention. How did he even know she was here in the first place? “What do you mean, she’s gone?”
“She left the building through the back door and drove away. Five minutes later, you’re still in there, so I thought maybe you weren’t aware that she’d left the premises.”
Jeremy couldn’t believe this. Bernie had given him the slip? He’d been sitting in here waiting for her, and she was already out the door?
Well, that was just great. And wasn’t it great, too, that Max saw Bernie and assumed she was the reason Jeremy was here? Why else would Max alert him to the fact that she was gone?
“Bring the car around,” Jeremy said.
“Yes, sir.”
Jeremy stuffed the phone back into his pocket and headed for the door. As he walked outside, Max swung the car to the curb and he got in the backseat.
“Where to, sir?” Max asked, putting the car in gear.
Jeremy slipped out his iPhone. Opened his address book. “Creekwood Apartments. Fifteenth and Sycamore. Apartment two-fourteen.”
Max glanced in the rearview mirror. “I wouldn’t recommend that, sir.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s Bernie’s apartment, and it seems she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “Watch yourself, Delinsky. This is none of your business.”
Max shifted the car back into park, then turned around to face Jeremy in the backseat. “I know she’s pregnant.”
That statement didn’t come as a huge surprise to Jeremy. Chances were that everybody at Delgado & Associates knew it.
“And from what I’ve seen today,” Max went on, “it appears you’re the father.”
Jeremy froze. He hadn’t expected such an in-your-face accusation from a man with barely functioning vocal cords. He considered denying it, but it was pretty clear what was happening here, and this was all going to come out in the open soon enough, anyway.
“That’s right,” Jeremy said. “I’m the father.”
“There’s an obstetrician’s office inside that building.”
“Yes.”
“Why did she leave without you knowing it?”
“That’s none of your business.”
Slowly Max slipped off his sunglasses, revealing those dark, piercing eyes and a wicked slash of a scar on his left orbital bone. “Bridges?”
Jeremy was instantly aware of the absence of the “Mr.” that Max always inserted before his last name.
“I don’t know what’s going on between you and Bernie,” Max said, “and I don’t need to know. But I will tell you this. She’s a good person. If you hurt her in any way, you’ll answer to me. Are we clear on that?”
Jeremy was flabbergasted. Was this man actually threatening him? He leaned toward Max with an unblinking stare. “One phone call to Gabe Delgado about your insubordination, and you no longer work for me. Are we clear on that?”
Max’s gaze never faltered. “Make the call.”
Jeremy slumped back against the seat. “Good God, do you want to lose this job?”
“Nope. I just want to make sure we understand each other. Do we?”
For a second or two, Jeremy was on the verge of making good on his threat, only to think again. If Max was this protective of Bernie, they were better friends than he’d realized, so firing Max wouldn’t exactly put him in Bernie’s good graces. And right now, that was where he needed to be until he could get this whole mess sorted out.
Jeremy swallowed his anger and spoke evenly. “I have no intention of hurting her.”
With a slight nod, Max put his sunglasses back on and turned back around in his seat. Great. From now on, Jeremy was going to be forced to spend time in this car with a grizzly bear of a man who was just looking for a reason to rip through his jugular.
“She’s upset because she just found out she’s having twins,” Jeremy said.
True to his nature, Max didn’t overreact. He merely glanced at Jeremy in the rearview mirror. “Then you can take my warning times two.”
Bastard.
Jeremy had to practically sit on his hands to keep from calling Delgado, but what would it accomplish? It would only make Bernie even more irritated with him than she already was. Still, somebody needed to take control of this situation, and judging from Bernie’s state of mind, Jeremy had already decided that somebody was going to be him.