What Happens in Vegas... by Kimberly Lang Read Free Book Online Page A

done in soothing colors and also falling down on the job.
    She looked carefully at the array of tests lined up on the vanity. Six different brands, purchased at four different stores in the next county this morning after she’d called in sick to the office.
    Every last one of the damn things said “positive.”
    Oh, she really felt sick now. She sat on the edge of the tub while the horrid reality settled on her shoulders.
    Last night, she’d turned the calendar over to June and realized she hadn’t had a period in May. That thought lead her to her day planner, where she realized she last had her period the week before she went to Las Vegas.
    Sleep was impossible after that.
    But she’d kept calm—sort of—telling herself there was no need to panic until she had a reason to. She looked at the line of tests. Oh, she had reason to panic now. Good reason.
    She was pregnant.
    She was going to be a mother, and, dear God, she wasn’t ready to be someone’s mother. She wanted children—several, in fact—but motherhood had always seemed like a distant prospect. Motherhood would come after she’d built some kind of career for herself, when she could have a house in the suburbs and do the whole nuclear-family thing with a white picket fence and a dog. And, most importantly, a husband.
    Instead, she would be raising a baby alone. Well, not alone, exactly—she did have family—but it wouldn’t have a father. How would she tell her child one day, “Your dad? Well, honey, I met him in a bar in Las Vegas…”
    The child wasn’t even born yet and she needed to start looking for a good therapist to help it through the issues of growing up without a father because its mother was stupid enough to get pregnant during a two-night stand in Vegas.
    She ran her hands through her hair and pulled at it. “I’m so screwed. This is so screwed.”
    And it would only get worse from here. This news would kill Uncle Marcus. His heart wasn’t very strong these days, and the shock and horror would kill him for sure. Pain throbbed behind her left eye. Of course, the upside was that Will was going to kill her anyway, so she wouldn’t have to live with that guilt on her conscience for very long.
    Oh, and the papers were going to have a field day. It wasn’t enough that she was unwed and pregnant—and that would be plenty for the gossips to chew on its own—but they were also going to brand her a giant slut because her last breakup had been quite public and fodder for the gossip mill four months ago. All of Dallas knew she was single.
    “Nice” girls didn’t sleep around and get knocked up. She was supposed to be some sort of role model for the youth of Dallas—a “real lady,” as Gwen put it. She was, as Uncle Marcus continuously preached, a Harrison—not some trashyHollywood starlet. Promiscuity might fly for the rich and famous somewhere else, but not here. Not in her world. That’s why she’d gone to Vegas in the first place.
    Society had rules: they weren’t fair, and they weren’t right, but they were still rules. And she’d just broken a major one.
    Oh, God. She’d pulled a lot of stunts, garnered a lot of publicity—both good and bad—but nothing like this.
    This was a nightmare.
    Would anyone believe she’d gone the single-mother route intentionally? Used a sperm bank or something? She snorted. Not likely.
    The tests with all their positive results seemed to mock her, and she swept them into the trash with one hand. Then she went to the bed to lie down.
    In her freshman year of college, she’d invented a boyfriend because she’d seemed like the only girl in her sorority who didn’t have one. Leonardo had been Italian, gorgeous and conveniently studying architecture in Rome. Leonardo had served her well that first uncomfortable semester, and she wondered if an imaginary boyfriend would work now. Maybe he’d been tragically killed in a freak scuba-diving accident off the coast of Australia before he even knew she