herself. More than fifty comments on bedroom shenanigans.
“You go, Daisy!”
“Just what we needed. Thanks, Tiger Mama!”
And her favorite: “My husband thanks you!”
Her blog was doing phenomenally well. Her post on “Valentine’s Day with Baby” had the most comments she’d ever gotten from a blog post (more than a hundred), and her stats showed more than 100,000 hits that day. Apparently, a lot of people searched the Internet for Valentine’s Day with baby ideas. Her post on bedroom shenanigans had an astonishing 200,000 hits. Her new focus on love and sex after baby was striking a chord. Sex sells.
Too bad she wasn’t getting any.
She exhaled sharply and focused again on the screen. What to post today, the day after Valentine’s? How to top that? Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten anything since that turkey wrap she’d had on break at Garner’s more than three hours ago.
She stood, stretched, and headed to the kitchen. She grabbed a bag of potato chips she’d picked up at the health food store in town, Gary’s Greens & More, and chomped on a chip as she walked back to the sofa, feeling good about the fact it said “All-Natural” in big letters on the bag. She liked to buy all of her junk food at the health food store—chocolate crème-filled sandwich cookies that were almost like Oreos, organic peanut butter cups that were sorta like Reese’s. The only exception was Sno-Caps. The health store brand made of carob just couldn’t compare.
She settled back at the laptop. Ooh, maybe she and Darling Husband could plan a fabulous vacation with baby. She glanced toward the bedroom, where Bryce was sleeping. Hard to imagine traveling with him. Still, she had to keep things interesting on the blog. Where could she go with baby in tow? She had mentioned in her Valentine’s post that Darling Husband had a Bermuda travel brochure in the desk. She could say he gave her a trip to Bermuda as a Valentine’s gift and then talk about their plans. She warmed to the idea—sand, surf, sun. Lord, how she missed the sun; the Connecticut winter dragged on and on.
She switched over to another tab and searched for family-friendly resorts in Bermuda. Her mind boggled at all the choices. And it was all so expensive. Oh, what the hell. She was already pretending to live in a beautiful house with a perfect husband and baby. Might as well pretend to be rich too. She’d throw in a bunch of sex on the beach ideas too.
She quickly typed a glowing post about her dream vacation with Darling Husband playing her Romeo at every turn. Flowers, couples massage, tropical island drinks, and lots of handsy action in the ocean while Baby Delight was with the hotel babysitter. Ahh...if only. She added a planned moonlight stroll on the beach, ending with making love on a blanket right there on the soft sand just like they had on their honeymoon in Hawaii. So what if her mysterious Darling Husband looked like Trav in all her fantasies? It was just because she saw him so much because of Bryce.
She hit post and, not for the first time, considered what her life would be like if she and Trav ever did marry. Why was she resisting? It would be a sensible, stable marriage with a sensible, stable guy in a sensible, stable small town. Sensible and stable, two words that had never been applied to her. An unwanted memory pushed in of Max, the man she’d once loved in an open-to-the-soul way that she’d never managed again. They’d had a whirlwind romance in the city, their time together an exciting adventure, until the miscarriage. Max’s relief in the face of her wretched grief had devastated her. And then he dumped her.
She sucked in a breath, the memory still cut deep even after all these years. She hoped Max was fat and bald and living alone in a rat-infested apartment. She smiled to herself. Sometimes having a big imagination made life a little easier to swallow.
Marrying Trav would be good for Bryce. Trav always made that point,