The Misconception by Darlene Gardner

She put both hands on his boulder-like shoulders and shoved.
He staggered backward, but righted himself with the grace of an athlete. “Hey.” His voice was injured. “What was that for?”
“For telling me you were Harold McGinty, that’s what!”
“I didn’t say I was Harold. I told you right off the bat to call me Jax.”
“You let me believe you were Harold McGinty, and you know it!”
    “Only because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Harold is an old high school classmate. When I ran into him at the airport, he was planning to stand you up. I told him I’d let you know he wasn’t coming.”
    “So instead you decided to see if I could make you come, is that it?” Marietta challenged.
    Jax rubbed his chin. Despite his dark looks, he didn’t have a heavy growth of beard, and she remembered how good his skin felt. Smooth, warm, electrifying. Remembering made her angrier, because she should never have touched him in the first place.
    “Of course that isn’t it,” Jax said. “I thought you and Harold were meeting for a blind date. How was I supposed to know you had some crazy conception scheme?”
    He was making her crazy. Her heart rate was up, her body temperature rising at an alarming rate. “It was a perfectly logical plan until you showed up and ruined it.”
“Are you nuts? There’s nothing logical about advertising for a candidate to father your child.”
“I advertised for a sperm supplier. That’s an entirely different thing.”
“Oh, excuse me. That makes it entirely logical.”
“You don’t need to be sarcastic.”
“What do you expect? I think I’m going on a perfectly innocent blind date, and two months later I end up an expectant father.”
    “You are not an expectant father.”
    “I didn’t sign those contracts, Marietta. And I don’t want your money.” He took the envelopes of cash and threw them on her desk. “One of those envelopes contains the money you sent Harold. The other has the five hundred dollars you left at the front desk of the Hotel Grande. So, you see, sweetheart, we didn’t have a deal.”
    Marietta tried to think. She had to do something even if it was only to throw him off track. “You can’t even be sure I’m pregnant!”
    The second the statement left her lips, her stomach did a roll worthy of one of the logs fancy-stepping contestants tried to keep afloat during those crazy he-man competitions.
    “Marietta.” Jax’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Are you okay? You look really pale. I mean, ghostly pale.”
    Marietta didn’t answer. She couldn’t, because the contents of her stomach were rising. She hopped off the desk and dashed for the restroom, dimly aware that her actions confirmed her pregnancy.
    She reached stall number one and got to her knees in front of the toilet. She retched but nothing came up. The dry heaves. Someone lifted the fallen mass of hair off her hot neck, and she closed her eyes as a wave of shame washed over her. Jax had followed her.
    “False alarm?” he asked softly.
    “Only because there’s nothing in my stomach besides salted crackers,” Marietta said as he helped her to her feet. His touch was ridiculously comforting. . . and nice. But the calming effect of skin-to-skin contact was a noted biological response. New mothers soon discovered it was the best way to soothe cranky babies. Anybody could have elicited the same response in her. That it was Jax meant nothing, except that she had let him see her in a moment of weakness.
    She needed to make it clear that this wasn’t how Marietta Dalrymple dealt with adversity. She was strong, self-sufficient. She didn’t need a man to get her through anything. She didn’t need a man. Period.
    She turned around and nearly came up against his chest. He seemed even taller and broader in the close confines of the toilet stall. She held herself still, not wanting to come into contact with all that potent male flesh, but she couldn’t stop her eyes from rising. When