Page 25 of Hometown Cowboy

Chapter Eleven

Darby glanced upat the tinkling alarm of her phone. She’d left it on Emma’s coffee table in her and Gabe’s lounge room. She sucked the juice of the pineapple she’d just cut up off her finger and walked out of the kitchen holding the fruit platter she’d brought with her.

Emma had Darby’s phone beside her on the sofa, face down toward the fabric.

How odd.

A laptop sat on the coffee table, full-sized pictures open and staring up at her. She’d come over to look at their honeymoon photos. The wedding album sat open beside the computer. It had come that morning in the mail and Emma had wanted her to see how it all turned out.

Darby sat near Emma and grabbed her phone to see what the notification was.

“Honey, can you do me a favour?” Emma called out to Gabe. He looked up from his position on the edge of the recliner. Darby looked over too, before seeing her phone screen.

“Sure.”

She sent him a huge smile. “I left the package on our bed. Could you get it for me?”

The package?Darby frowned.

Before she could ask what was going on, Gabe left the room.

“You might want to look at your phone before he gets back,” Emma murmured.

Darby’s frown deepened and she raised it. The screen brightened and she blinked a few times, not quite grasping the implication immediately.

Period expected +3 days ago.

A loud gasp left her before she could stop it.

Surely not?

She swiped at it to see the actual page. A pretty mountain picture with text overlaid on it said the same thing, along with dates of her last cycles.

+3.

She looked up to see Emma’s worried expression. She glanced at the phone again and bit her lip. She let out a huge, fake smile.

“Nothing to worry about. I’m always all over the place.”

Darby held the smile in place with some difficulty. She was as regular as clockwork. She just knew Emma could tell she was lying through her teeth.

She glanced at the expected date of her ovulation and grimaced. If she wasn’t wrong, that was the day Gabe and Emma came home.

She swiped up and closed the app and shoved the phone deep into her pocket as her brother came back into the room. She ignored Emma’s pointed stare.

Gabe held out a wrapped package, beaming with self-satisfaction.

She took the heavy rectangular item and sat it in her lap.

“A book?” she asked no one in particular.

“Open it,” Gabe said.

She carefully lifted the edges of the tape. She pressed the wrapping paper open to reveal a hard-covered, A4 sized book.

Embossed writing on the front said:

Gabe & Emma Jameson