Free Forget Me Not (Escape Contemporary Romance) by Nina Blake Page B

could do anything else. He wasn’t giving up. That was something inside him, something Stefan could feel, even if he couldn’t remember it. He certainly wasn’t going to take some drastic action or commit suicide in the time it would take his parents to reach him, though it occurred to him that even if he’d been in the most dire of straights, they wouldn’t have be here to help.
    He had an all new appreciation for Claire. She’d given him so much more than they had. So had her mother, for that matter. She’d been calling Claire daily, hadn’t just left Claire to go through things alone. She’d dropped by. And she made a damn fine lemon cake to boot.
    This didn’t make sense. His parents were supposed to be on his side. Claire’s mother had made it clear her allegiance was to her daughter, but had done more for him than James and Barbara Porter.
    Still, they were his parents, even if that didn’t mean much to him. But he couldn’t help feeling disappointed, as if something was missing.
    They simply didn’t get it.
    Between her mother and sister’s constant calls, Claire felt like lately she spent half her time on the phone. Sophie was on the other side of the country, but Claire wasn’t going to let a few thousand kilometres come between her and her sister.
    ‘How long until you finish work?’ Claire asked.
    She was determined to find out more about her sister’s pregnancy and how she was coping. They’d had the Claire-Stefan discussion last time, so they could have the Sophie-Jeff-Junior conversation.
    ‘Yesterday was my last day,’ Sophie said. ‘But if I’d known how I’d felt, I’d have left work sooner. Also, there’s mostly men I work with, and they just wouldn’t have had a clue.’
    ‘So how do you feel?’
    ‘Fat.’
    ‘No, really?’
    ‘I feel like an elephant. Baby elephants have a gestation period of twenty-two months and that’s what this feels like. I have a lot of sympathy for the female elephant right now. It feels like I’ve been pregnant for a hundred years.’
    ‘How long to go?’
    ‘Four weeks exactly, if Junior is on time.’
    ‘That’s wonderful,’ Claire said. ‘And, seriously, have you been feeling okay?’
    ‘Tired, mostly. My back hurts and my ankles are swollen, but I’m so happy and excited, I can’t believe it’s really happening.’
    Claire could believe that. She’d imagined it happening many times to her. She longed to have a child. Claire had other goals in life but the yearning inside her to have her own little one felt different, like it ran deep, to her core.
    She wasn’t stupid, and knew that though her biological clock was ticking, but there were still plenty of good years ahead of her. It wasn’t like she’d missed the boat completely, but her whole life was so far out of whack that she wasn’t in any position to have a child.
    That didn’t stop her thinking about it.
    ‘I don’t want to rub it in,’ Sophie said. ‘And I hope it’s okay if I talk about it. I didn’t mean to complain about this whole pregnancy thing.’
    Sophie deserved all the happiness in the world. Claire just wanted a little for herself, too.
    ‘Of course, it’s all right.’ She said, deciding to lighten things up. ‘For your sake, I only hope it’s a human child and not a baby elephant.’
    Sophie chuckled. ‘At this point, nothing would surprise me.’
    ‘I’ll visit you after the baby is born,’ she said. ‘I won’t be able to get time off work right away, but I should be able to make it by the time the baby is a few months old.’
    ‘Whenever you get here, I’d love to see you. Jeff would, too. But that’s enough about me. That wasn’t why I called. I wanted to hear how you were coping.’
    ‘I’m hanging in there. Stefan still hasn’t remembered anything. He’s him but not him, if you know what I mean I don’t know how else to explain it.’
    ‘You’re still in love with him,’ Sophie said. ‘That’s it.’
    ‘For crying out loud,