Devil In The Waters: Book 11. Immaculate Conception // Chapter 1. Pink Lines

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

The fan roared in the quiet tomb of their master bathroom. Alone and sitting on the toilet, elbows on knees, she stared at the marker, believing and disbelieving the story it told. Two pink lines mean you’re pregnant. How was she pregnant? How on earth was it even possible? She’d been careful. In the time before she’d gone back on Ortho-Tri-Cyclen, Josh had worn condoms every time, hadn’t he? But Josh’s condom usage was not any kind of problem here. It would be a blessing of relief to remember a time where he had come inside her.

Why’s that? She sighed and rubbed her forehead. What if Devlin got you pregnant?

But how? She’d gone on the pill again mid-July, maybe around the seventeenth. She shouldn’t have had unprotected sex for six weeks after. She had unprotected sex with Devlin three weeks later in the Royal York. But there was no way she was ovulating. Her period would have been a few days after he’d come inside her.

The first missed period she’d chalked up to the renewal of her birth control pills. It was alarming, but not an emergency until she’d missed the second period.

Josh had to be the father. He had to be.

But there were what-ifs. Terrifying what-ifs. Like the time she and Devlin had messed around together in Devlin’s Mercedes outside her gym. He’d worn a condom. He’d worn a condom, but she’d rubbed her bare sex up and down his bare erection, humping it, teasing herself with its arousing size. Devlin must have leaked pre-come. Did his pre-come contain just the right amount of actual sperm to get pushed inside her and do its nasty business? Those condoms must have had a spermicidal. But what if he’d broken the condom? He could have torn the condom, and though he didn’t ejaculate, his leaky urethra had pushed so deep inside her it spit his payload right into her cervical aperture, like a slippery watermelon seed, the spermicidal lubricant never planting its kiss of death.

Those early days with Devlin seemed now to have been lived by a different woman. She’d been so sexually amplified, so hungry, so horny. A tramp. A hussy. Could she blame rampant hormones? Some post-natal supercharging that had taken place after the miscarriage, some kind of sexual hyper-drive pumping out sex hormones, getting her hot and bothered and looking for insemination? It would be a wonderful explanation. Now she would need an expert witness to testify.

She gathered up the pregnancy test stick and its related packaging, bundled them in the plastic Shopper’s Drug bag, and stuffed it all into the bottom of her purse, to be thrown into the trash bin on foreign territory.

* * *

His humiliatrix emerged from their bedroom, head down, looking tired and frail. And short. She wore a suit but just stocking feet, coming into the kitchen and opening the fridge. He said over his shoulder, “Good morning.”

Kimmy’s voice, quiet and low: “Morning.”

This was how it was now. Still together, but miserable and distant. A vast divide between them. Kimmy, ashamed and damaged, admitting to some great sin she didn’t know Devlin had cued him to, a mea culpa without punishment. Other than this disjointed purgatory they existed in.

But even meek and beaten, she drove his passion high into the clouds. She was bad. So bad. He’d used her as a lure to fish in his dark waters and Kimmy had let the big fish take her from him. Even if just for a moment.

He looked at her slender ass, her long legs. And, just like every time he’d spied her this weekend, he grew aroused. This perfect creature allowed Devlin to put his fingers inside her. To do it for pleasure. It felt good; he was sure. So good she’d betrayed him. Betrayed and lied.

He’d asked her if it turned her on when she’d humiliated him behind his back and she’d nodded. The pain drove him wild. The hurt had an exquisite, feathered edge. The sweetest, kindest, woman he knew had got her rocks off cheating on him with his bully. It had made their illicit encounter hot. He knew it had. Last night he’d laid sleepless in bed, hard as a rock, imagining how the encounter had come to be, picturing for the first time Kimmy as the instigator rather than the victim. Instead of Devlin pulling Kimmy’s strings, it was Kimmy pulling Devlin’s. Asking Devlin to finger her. Asking Devlin Stone to satisfy a sexual urge.

And maybe more than using his fingers.

But that wasn’t something he was ready to discover. That was something not so easy to believe. Still just a fantasy, and still just one of Devlin’s cruel taunts. If that was true, if Kimmy and Devlin had been fucking behind his back, Devlin would have presented those receipts the other night. He would have done it then, knowing he would never get Josh back to his apartment again, and sending videos would grow stale if Devlin enjoyed no responses.

Kimmy turned from the fridge, and he flinched like she’d seen his lusty imaginings, like he sat on the bed with a porn site open on his laptop. She snatched a clean spoon from the sink and peeled off the foil top on a cherry yogurt, and spooned a small amount past her pouting lips. Lips that wore no makeup, no blood-red color. Not anymore. Infidelity had robbed this pretty pheasant of her luster and fancy plumage. Kimmy was molting.

Eyes turned down, but head lifted now, she said, “I’m going to see him today.”

Josh’s stomach bounced and his balls hoisted like she’d faked flicking her fingers to smack them. Something Devlin would have done in the school halls so many years ago.

Him was Devlin. She would see Devlin Stone today because she still worked for the man who’d fingered her married pussy. He swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Okay,” wanting to know more but too afraid to ask right now. Did she want a man who would forbid her? Did Kimmy want him to put his foot down and say no, she would never work at Stone Custom Brokerage again, no matter what? If he did, would her luster return? Did his lust drive her to Devlin, drive her away? Did his lust remain now?—excusing her loyalty to Devlin’s employment because a man shouldn’t tell a woman where she could or couldn’t work, when deep down he knew even no matter how awful this situation was, he’d grown hard watching Kimmy in meager misery, reduced to a fallen angel in his kitchen, her wings burned off after hot proximity to the man she knew she should never have trusted. But she couldn’t help herself. Devlin was attractive, no matter how bad a man he was.

The urge to tell her she had to quit, she had to stay at home today and make cat baskets, withered on his tongue. He bowed his head like he had a hard task to do, but one that he must perform.

Even though she gripped the blade still lodged in his aching heart, love bloomed, and he crossed the kitchen and put his arms around her. She melted against him, light as paper, resting her head on his collar. He pushed his hard on into her stomach.

* * *

She and Devlin had a scheduled meeting after lunch with a company called Big New Harvest, a Chinese-Canadian, Chinese-nationals endeavor out of Agincourt, by way of Qingdao. Devlin wanted her at his side when they met with Benjamin Chan, an important meeting set before Josh’s discovery of her indiscretion with Devlin Stone. Last week Devlin told her to meet him downtown for lunch, then they’d go to the meeting together, and now she sat waiting in Bonjoubar for him to arrive. A man who revolted her, but one who might be the father of the tiny life growing inside her. For a heart that weighed so heavy in her chest, its beat came so light and fluttering.

Devlin appeared in the doorway, coming into the restaurant off the alleyway from Cumberland to Yorkville Avenue. An alleyway she and Josh had passed by only a few weeks ago, the day she’d bought her husband a suit to wear out for his fun night with Devlin and some of Devlin’s friends. She’d dressed her husband to walk into a trap set to humiliate him and to sink their marriage. The hostess pointed Devlin her way, but she didn’t wave or acknowledge him. Devlin spied her and led the way through the restaurant while the hostess followed.

Devlin smiled as he sat in the leather chair across from her, but she only nodded, and neither of them spoke until after the host had left. Devlin laced his big fingers together, combined hands near his cheek, elbows on the table, regarding her with sparkling mirth. Like the situation he’d put her in by humiliating Josh with her panties was only a small thing done so many days ago. “I hope you’re not wearing sneakers with that suit.”

She didn’t answer right away, taking a moment to sip from her ice water first. “So what if I was?”

His head rocked with a silent chuckle, his eyes narrowing. “I really wish I was sitting with the Kimmy Chang I used to know.”

“Kimmy Chang, as you call her,” she said, “is a product of her environment.”

“You’re saying what, you’re like a houseplant I’ve put in the wrong window?”

She looked away from him, over his head and around the luxurious Yorkville restaurant. “You can’t have everything, Devlin.”

He scoffed and looked away as well. “I hate such limiting speech.”

She shook her head, exhausted. “Even one who conquers all knows it’s there’s nothing without nurturing.”

He showed her a brief, unimpressed face, then looked around for a server. “Sun Tzu or something? Ooh, or some samurai, I bet. Five Rings?” He got the server’s attention.

She said, “Common sense.”

He said, “Let’s have whiskey.”

“I’m fine with water.”

Devlin bowed his brows and showed a pout. “You won’t even drink with me now?”

“Benny Chan doesn’t drink. I don’t want to smell like alcohol.”

He grunted. “Qingdao has some great bars.”

“That’s the Bavarian influence,” she muttered.

Devlin laughed it off like she’d been joking and asked the server for a bourbon. The man knew nothing of Qingdao. He looked her way and asked again, “Wine? A white wine?”

She told the server she’d like another Perrier with ice. When they were alone again, she said, “Do you like Chinese people, or are they just money to you?”

The question bothered him, and he said, “Everyone I do business with is money to me, and I don’t care where they come from.” Then he regarded her through narrowed eyes. “And I don’t make money in this business without relationships. How am I going to make a relationship with someone I don’t like, especially for some dumb characteristic like their ethnicity? What a crazy question to ask me.”

She said, “You think you’re good at building relationships?”

“It sounds like you don’t think I am, which is insane, because you know I am.”

She sighed and rubbed her brow. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

“I hope you know everything about Benny’s contracts.”

She did, and she didn’t need to respond.

Now Devlin sighed, too, touching his brow, doing it in a purposeful imitation of hers. He regarded her from below his brows, his gaze amused and alluring.

She asked him, “What?”

And he said, “There are things I don’t know, too, Kimmy. It’s not just you.”

“Like what?”

He smiled and leaned closer. “Like what you got up to in my apartment last Friday afternoon.”