The Baby Proposal Read online

  Kal nearly tipped his chair backward in surprise. He surged forward and gripped his desk to stay steady. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope. Apparently you’ve been charging up and down the halls like a man on fire, barking orders, criticizing everyone’s work and being a general pain in the a—”

  “Okay,” Kal said, interrupting him. “I get it. I’ve been unpleasant.” He knew he’d been in a bad mood, but he hadn’t realized how bad. “Did someone really call you and ask you to come?”

  “Actually they asked for permission to slip you a sedative in your morning coffee, so I thought me coming out here was a better solution.”

  Kal crossed his arms defensively over his chest. “I’ll work on it. It’s been a bad week.”

  Mano nodded thoughtfully, then reached out to feel Kal’s left hand. “That’s what I thought. No ring,” he noted.

  Kal pulled his hand away and gazed down at the naked ring finger of his left hand. He’d only worn the ring for a month, but he could feel the phantom sensation of it on his finger even with it gone. “No ring,” he repeated. “No marriage. No baby. It’s all over and done.”

  “What happened?”

  He sighed, not really wanting to admit the truth to his brother but knowing he had to. “You were right about the two of us. None of it was real. We had to let everyone believe it was in case Child Services was sniffing around, but it was all for show. Lana’s sister went into rehab and it was the only way we could get guardianship of her niece. Her sister has since completed treatment and has been reunited with her daughter. So it’s done. Lana left.”

  Mano listened, making that infuriatingly thoughtful face that always made Kal nervous. He’d always heard that losing one sense made the others stronger. His brother had picked up some kind of superpower lie detector in the accident that blinded him.

  “You mean you let her go,” Mano said at last.

  “No, I mean she called the lawyer, started the divorce proceedings and moved out.” That was all true. Aside from the teeny, tiny detail about her asking if he loved her and him choking.

  “It seems strange to me that a woman so obviously in love with her husband would just walk out like that. It sounds to me like self-preservation. What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t do anything to her,” Kal argued. “I stuck to the agreement. She’s the one who broke the rules.”

  “And what, exactly, were the rules?”

  “That it was just for show. That it was just for the baby and nothing more.”

  “So you didn’t sleep with her?”

  Kal was starting to feel like he’d woken up in the Spanish Inquisition. When he found out who had called his brother on him, he was going to show them what a grumpy manager he really could be. “Yes, I slept with her.”

  “More than once?”

  Kal gritted his teeth. “Yes, damn it.”

  “So you broke the rules, too?”

  He supposed that he did. “Yes. We broke that rule. But she wasn’t supposed to get attached, and it wasn’t supposed to ruin our friendship.”

  Mano nodded and reached over to pat the top of Hōkū’s head. “So you spent a month together playing house, making love and acting like a happy family for everyone, and now you’re mad at her because she fell for you in the process.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or,” Mano postulated, “are you mad at yourself because you fell for her, too?”

  Kal closed his eyes and groaned aloud. He did not want to have this conversation with his brother, but he could tell there was no getting out of it. “This is a conversation better suited for the bar,” he said. “I need a drink.”

  Mano smiled cheerfully and stood up. “Lovely. I could use a drink myself.”

  They made their way to the bar and found a dark corner booth. It was too early for most drinkers, so they had the place to themselves. Once they were settled with beverages and a bowl of Asian snack mix, Mano sat back and waited for the answer Kal had stalled responding to for ten minutes.

  “I’m not in love,” Kal said at last.

  Mano just sighed. “You know, it wasn’t that long ago that I was sitting at Tūtū Ani’s birthday party while you talked me into chasing after the woman I loved but had let walk out of my life.”

  “That was different,” Kal insisted. “You were in love with her.”

  “And you can honestly say that you have no feelings for Lana?”

  Kal tried to search himself for something he was hiding, but he didn’t come up with anything novel. “I feel the same way for Lana that I’ve always felt. She’s my best friend. I enjoy spending time with her, and I miss her when I don’t see her often enough. I like sharing things with her, and I can tell her anything. She’s great to talk to and always gives good advice.”

  “If you were in this situation with another woman and you asked Lana for advice, what would she say?”

  He knew the answer immediately. He could even hear her say it in his head. “She’d tell me to get my head out of my ass and tell the woman that I love her.”

  “Considering that you say nothing has changed, is it possible that you’re confused about your feelings for her because you’ve been in love with her all along?”

  His brother’s words stopped him cold. He gazed silently down into his drink as though the answers to the universe were there among the ice and the scotch. Was it really possible that he’d been in love with her all this time? Was that why he was never interested in anyone else? Why he’d rather spend time with her than go on a date? Why he was terrorizing his employees since she’d walked out on him? The answer washed over him like a tidal wave of emotion that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck and his chest ache with his foolishness.

  His head dropped into his hand and he clutched his skull to keep his mind from being blown. “Oh my God, I’ve been in love with her the whole time.”

  “Yep,” was all Mano said. He reached a hand out to feel for the snack bowl and grabbed a handful of sesame sticks and peanuts. Kal watched him pop a bit into his mouth as though they were discussing the weather.

  “I’m in love with Lana,” he said aloud, letting his ears get used to the sound of it. If he ever said it to her, he couldn’t have the slightest hesitation or she wouldn’t believe him. He certainly hadn’t given her any reason to believe him before.

  He replayed their last moments together again in his mind, thinking about how she’d looked at him with her heart wide-open and he’d blown it. She’d been right, though. If he’d told her he loved her then, it would’ve been just lip service to keep her from walking away. Being apart from her this last week had cemented it in his mind. Now he understood the truth of his feelings.

  All this time he’d been afraid to get close to anyone and risk losing them, and here he’d gone and pushed away the only person he’d ever loved. The result was the same—he was alone and miserable. The only difference was that he still had a chance to make things right with Lana.

  He had to tell her how he felt and stand his ground. He wasn’t going to let her walk away this time, or ever again. She was still legally his wife and he wasn’t about to let that change.

  “Now the question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  Twelve

  It was Lana’s turn to go on. The lights dimmed for a moment and the musicians started chanting an ancient Hawaiian prayer as they beat their drums. She stepped onto the stage, finding her mark in the center before the spotlights focused on her.

  Lana had performed this routine three nights a week for three years. She knew it like the back of her hand, and yet she felt sluggish as she started to move. One of her professors in college had told her that she danced with her whole heart and soul. Her heart just wasn’t in it lately.

  She pasted a smile on her face and fought through it. She’d performed with the flu, she’d performed with a sprained ankle—she could get through this. That was what professionals did.

  Instinctiv
ely she looked to the far corner of the courtyard as she danced. That was where Kal had watched her every night for as long as she could remember. He wasn’t there now and he hadn’t been since she moved out. Lana supposed that was her fault. She told him she needed space and he was giving it to her.

  Still, it hurt her heart to look up and see nothing but a stone wall where his tall, dark silhouette should be.

  Mele had insisted that Kal wasn’t a fool and that he would come around. Lana wasn’t so sure. Their father had never recovered and moved on; why did she think that Kal would change his ways after all these years? And for her of all people?

  She closed her eyes for a moment and forced that negative thought from her mind. If she got nothing else from her time with Mele, it was that she was a valuable person. She needed to stop thinking she wasn’t good enough. She was her mother’s daughter, and every time she let those negative thoughts creep in, she was tarnishing her mother’s memory. She couldn’t allow that.

  Better to believe that Kal was a fool if he didn’t see what a gem he had right in front of him. Lana wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him to change his mind, either. She was going to buy that condo, move out of the hotel and start building a life that didn’t revolve around him and his resort. She’d actually heard that one of the big luaus in Lahaina was hiring a choreographer. It was a scary thought to leave the place she’d considered home, but maybe it was time.

  Her eyes drifted over to the corner even as she considered leaving the Mau Loa. This time, she was startled to see a familiar dark shape. Kal was there. Watching her.

  Missing a step, she forced herself to focus back on her performance. When she looked up again, Kal was gone. Her heart ached with disappointment. She couldn’t take much more of this. She had to go, she decided. She had to get away from him if she was ever going to be able to move on with her life.

  The routine came to an end. The lights went out, allowing her to leave the stage just as the male dancers came rushing out. Turning the corner, she ran face first into Talia, one of her dancers.

  “We’ve got a problem, Lana.”

  Lana’s stomach started aching with dread. “What is it?”

  “Callie is puking her guts up in the rehearsal room. There’s no way she’s going to be able to perform the new South Pacific number at the end of the show.”

  Damn it. That was a really important number, and a relatively new one she performed with one of the male singers from the band. She didn’t really have an understudy yet, so that meant that Lana would have to do it. Her worries about Kal faded into the background as she rushed around making last-minute arrangements for the change. “Go over to the band area and let Ryan know that I’m taking Callie’s place.”

  Talia nodded and headed off toward the pit where the musicians sat just to the right of the stage. Lana returned to the dressing room to change out of her current outfit and into Callie’s costume. It was a flowing white dress that was paired with a crown of white orchids. It pained Lana to put it on, reminding her too much of her wedding dress. As performance after performance went by, she fidgeted nervously in the dress. She couldn’t wait for the new number to be over with so she could take the costume off.

  Finally the last routine of the night was up and she went out to do her job. She stepped out onto the stage first. The setup was a little different from their usual numbers. Ryan would step out behind her and while she danced, sing the song “Some Enchanted Evening” from the musical South Pacific. It had been an instant hit with the audience, and gave them the chance to showcase Ryan’s singing talents.

  Thankfully Lana didn’t have to sing. She just had to dance, and in the end, end up in Ryan’s arms just before the lights went out. It was a simple dance number, drawing more on her background in contemporary and ballet dance than her hula skills.

  The musicians started playing the acoustic guitar version of the song and Lana waited for her cue to begin dancing. She stared out into the crowd, trying not to look for Kal. Then Ryan began singing and her blood went cold. Something was wrong. That wasn’t Ryan’s voice. It was pleasant enough, and relatively on-key, but it lacked the professional vocal tones of a trained singer like Ryan.

  Unfortunately she couldn’t turn around. She didn’t turn in the performance for a full minute. She danced, listening to him sing about spying her across a crowded room and being enchanted by her.

  Then, at last, the routine allowed her to stop and turn to look at her partner. It was Kal, wearing the white linen suit Ryan typically wore.

  She froze in place. He was standing there, crooning words of love to her. Lana couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. What was he doing crashing the luau? She hadn’t even seen Kal in over a week and now he just appeared in her show without telling her? Lana didn’t even know Kal could sing. What was going on?

  Either way, she told herself it didn’t matter. She would finish this number, then drag him backstage and give him a sound talking-to for putting her on the spot like this. She reached out to him longingly, then turned away and spun across the stage with the dress twirling around her.

  She dreaded the final chorus of the song, knowing she would have to look lovingly into Kal’s eyes as he serenaded her. If ever there was a time she would blow her professional facade, it would be now.

  He started the last verse and she slowly made her way to him. She swallowed hard as she looked into his eyes and saw the serious expression on his face. It was as though he meant every word as he sang to her about finding his true love and flying to her side. She tried not to read too much into it, though. These were Rogers and Hammerstein’s words, not Kal’s.

  As he wrapped his arms around her, he looked down at her as though they weren’t onstage surrounded by hundreds of people. He sang the last few lines of the song to her, looking deep into her eyes.

  The music faded and the crowd broke into roaring applause. Lana expected him to let go of her, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I don’t want to go through my life dreaming alone. I want to go through it with you.”

  Lana didn’t know what to say, and even if she did, she didn’t want to speak it aloud. Kal was miked, and everything he said was broadcast to the whole audience. “You don’t really mean that, Kal,” she whispered, hoping it wouldn’t pick up her voice.

  “If I didn’t mean it, would I be onstage, singing to you and making a fool of myself? Would I have convinced your dancers to fake being sick to make sure you were the one to perform this song?”

  It was a setup. Lana turned her head and noticed her entire dance crew, including a quite healthy Callie, watching anxiously from the backstage area. Lana squeezed her eyes closed and tried to wrap her head around what was happening. So was the crowd. The courtyard was so quiet you could hear the waves beyond the stage.

  “I went to all this trouble because I wanted to tell you, to tell everyone here tonight, how much I love you, Lana.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “You could’ve just told me this in private.”

  “You and I both know that wouldn’t work. I wanted witnesses. I wanted you to know I mean business. And I didn’t want you to be able to run away so you’d have to listen to what I have to say.”

  Lana was stiff in his arms. He was right to put her on the spot so she couldn’t avoid him, but onstage?

  “I’m not letting you get rid of me,” Kal said. “This last week without you has been pure hell. I don’t want to go back to the way things were. I don’t want to live in that big house all alone. I want a family. A real one, like my brother has and my parents had. And I want it with you.”

  “You don’t mean that. You’re just confusing our friendship for something more.”

  “You are my friend. You’re my best friend. But you’re also the love of my life and I’m not confused about that. I’m not going to settle for anything less than you as my wife for the rest of my life.”

  Kal’s words stole her breath away. With his arms wrapped around her and
his eyes pleading with her to love him in return, she didn’t know how she could tell him no. But she summoned the strength anyway.

  “You’ve lost your mind. Let go of me,” she said angrily, pulling from his arms and running offstage.

  * * *

  The minute Lana turned to Kal while she was dancing and realized it was him singing, he knew he had made a mistake. There was a hardness in her gaze, a stiffness in the set of her jaw. He’d thought that a big, romantic, public gesture would be the way to go. That declaring his love for her in front of everyone would convince her that he meant what he said, but as she ran offstage and the audience audibly gasped at her rebuttal, he knew it was the wrong tactic to take with Lana.

  He ran after her, pushing through the crowds of dancers and chasing her down the sandy path that led to the beach. “Lana!” he shouted, hearing his voice echo through the speakers in the distance. He ripped off his microphone and tossed it into the bushes as he chased her down the beach. “Lana, wait!”

  She finally came to a stop at the edge of the water. She stood there, with her back to him, as he slowly approached.

  “Lana?”

  She finally turned to look at him. Her face was flushed and her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. “How dare you!” she shouted.

  Kal froze. He wasn’t expecting her anger. “What do you mean?”

  “How dare you make me look like a fool in front of all those people!”

  “You didn’t look like a fool! I made myself look like one to try and prove to you how much I love you.”

  Lana could only shake her head. “In front of my dance team, in front of the hotel guests...”

  “Who all thought it was an amazing and romantic gesture. They were all superexcited to help me out. And the audience loved it until you ran away and ruined everything.”

  “What made you think that putting me on the spot was the right thing to do?” she asked. “Even if I was in love with you, I’m a very private person, Kal. And a professional. I don’t like my personal life bleeding into my work like that.”

  Kal sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Lana. I should’ve known better.” He took a few steps closer to her, closing the gap to inches. “I’d just seen them perform that song at the last luau, and it seemed so perfect. The man knows he has to act now if he doesn’t want to lose his chance to be with the woman he loves. That was what I was doing. I wanted to sing those words to you so you’d know they were true.”