Do you know what none of those baby websites tell you?
None of them tell you how to break the news to a prince that you’re pregnant.
Or possibly they do, but I got bored with looking after my search results brought up questions about if girl babies can get pregnant in utero and if it’s possible to get pregnant from oral sex and how do I know who my baby’s daddy is?
It’s also possible I should’ve picked a better phrase for the search bar, but I hate typing as much as I hate letters and numbers, so I just went with whatever popped up as the first suggested question once I typed in preggo and…
And I got so stinking irritated because I’m so far from the smartest cookie in the package, but seriously, those questions make me worry about humanity.
Also, it was a nice distraction from contemplating traveling here solo and figuring out how to hail a cab and if I’m supposed to talk to the taxi driver and if they take cash or credit and if I’d even be able to open the door to Manning’s building because I live in Goat’s Tit and I just don’t know.
But the point is, I’m alone in a big city that I’ve only been to once before with Joey, traveling by myself for only the second time in my entire life, which would be way more exciting if I wasn’t here to tell a fascinating man I like but barely know that I’m carrying his baby while he does this weird smiley ghost-fish impersonation.
I had no idea it was possible to smile while gaping like a flounder.
Or that skin could go that pale. And against his thick, dark brown-auburn scruff, the change in his complexion is super apparent.
Also, his chest is pale too. His broad, chiseled chest, his muscled arms that are so strong thick veins run down his forearms and hands to his talented fingers, the ridges in his abdomen…
Heat pools between my legs, my nipples tighten, and I stifle another hiccup. Forty-eight hours in, I officially hate pregnancy.
Safe to say Manning does too, and I should probably go get his guard, because he’s really not looking well.
I’m about to suggest he bend over and put his head between his knees and breathe when the front door swings open and Ares walks back in.
Oh, shit.
If he hears—if Manning tells him—if Zeus hears—
Joey is going to flipping kill me.
Okay, she’s going to kill me no matter what.
But if I can sneak this past her for another six months or so, there’s a solid probability the baby will be able to survive the pre-term birth and go on to have a long, happy life without her mother.
Like I did.
Oh, shit shit shit.
No.
No tears.
Joey’s not going to kill me. My baby won’t be motherless. I’m not going to die by sistercide or in childbirth or in some freak accident where a random space toilet takes me out on the sidewalk and leaves her an orphan.
Ares freezes as he watches me.
I don’t sniffle.
No, that was definitely not a sniffle. More of a…an…allergy sniff. Not a sniffle. A sniff. Total difference. Yeah.
I sniff again. “Allergies,” I croak out. “I’m not here. Please please please don’t tell Joey you saw me. Or Zeus. Please.”
With total tears and panic and my baby is not going to grow up never knowing her mother clogging my voice.
I’ve barely started processing that I’m going to be a mother and have a baby, but I already know I love her more than life itself, even with the preggo hiccups driving me batty.
A baby. A family of my own. That bigger purpose I’ve been looking for since I was a little girl, struggling through school, realizing I’d never grow up to be a nurse or a doctor or a teacher, while my daddy blamed the teachers and Joey went mother-bear overprotective and promised to always take care of me no matter what.
Ares snags a red shirt off a lamp and shoves it at me, presumably to use like a tissue. It smells like pizza and too much deodorant, and I’m about to gag when he gallops to the kitchen and returns with four bakery bags, three chocolate bars, and a gallon of milk. “Nice girl no cry,” he says with a gentle pat to my head. “Not here. Didn’t see.”
He backpedals, dives down a short hallway beyond the long galley kitchen separated from the massive living room by an island the size of my entire bathroom back home, and a moment later, a door slams.
Manning’s color is closer to ivory than bleached ghost now, and he’s managed to shut his mouth.
And he’s not smiling.
Which is honestly terrifying, because I’ve never not seen Manning smiling. Not in the brief times we’ve spent together, not in pictures, not in that video he did with all the other Thrusters players where he’s sitting in some office wearing a ridiculous crown adorned with pucks and telling them his skate blades aren’t shiny enough, his stick not taped right, and his number too crooked on his jersey. He’s even always smiling when I’ve watched him on TV on the ice.
Even Joey complains that it’s fucking creepy how much he smiles, and Joey and I have a silent agreement to never speak about Manning because I went out of my way to flirt with him at that charity golf tournament the night we met just to aggravate her, so if I know she thinks his smile is creepy, then you know he’s smiling enough that she’d be willing to comment on it.
Also? Is it wrong if I confess that even when he’s not smiling, he’s so very classically handsome that I can’t look away? He has this thick, well-trimmed, dark brown hair that seems plain one minute, but sparkles with hints of copper in the sunlight. A way of watching you like he’s seeing everything you’re saying and everything you’re hiding inside. And of course, that chest sculpted out of granite, broad and chiseled like his arms and shoulders.
I’m still adjusting to this idea that my entire life is about to completely flip upside down and inside out. I’ve just dropped possibly the worst news of his life on him. I should not be interested in sex right now.
But I’m getting warm and tingly and interested in those same parts of me that got us into this situation in the first place. Just because I’m looking at Manning Frey without a shirt on.
Am I attracted to him?
Of course I am. But it’s not that he’s so handsome he makes my breasts ache. It’s more that when we went for a walk on a golf course here during that charity tournament back in mid-August, he tucked my hand into his elbow.
Like a dashing gentleman would do for a lady.
Goat’s Tit has a lot going for it, and there are no gentlemen in the world like Southern gentlemen, but Manning?
He’s strong. He’s talented. He’s seen parts of the world I can only dream about. He smiles. And he has presence. It’s electrifying and magnetic and—once again—terrifying.
“I don’t need anything,” I blurt into the silence. I’ve gotten the hormones and the threat of tears under control, and now it’s time to pretend I’m my sister. “I don’t want anything either. I’m doing this on my own. I have my own business, a really strong community that loves me, plus Joey, you know, once she gets over the whole wanting to kill you thing, which she’ll most definitely go through once she knows, which she doesn’t yet, but I’ll leave your name out of it and tell her I was impregnated by aliens because she’ll be distracted enough at the idea of me seeing alien life forms even though she won’t actually believe me that it might work. But I thought you should know, because…well, if a guy was pregnant with my baby and didn’t tell me, I’d be pretty pissed. And I thought we were friends, so…yeah.”
Okay, maybe not exactly like my sister would. But she’s a total take-charge, handle-it kind of person, and honestly?
I’ve got this.
Did I want single motherhood?
No.
But I’m going to fucking own it. And probably try to learn to say fuck less in the next seven or eight months or so.
I lapse into silence while I shuffle the milk, cookies, and chocolate to the marble-and-slate end table beside me. Chocolate milk even. Very thoughtful.
Though I think Manning might need it more.
“You’re…certain,” he says.
“Four home kits and a blood test later, yep.”
“And it’s…mine.”
I tense. I can’t help the knee-jerk reaction, and I refuse to apologize for such a blatantly rude question getting to me. “No, I’m flying all over the country telling all the men I’ve slept with so we can go on the freaking Jerry Springer Show and make spectacles of ourselves with paternity tests for fun.”
Huh.
Turns out he has a freakishly terrifying royal glare which probably scares the piss out of small children, sheep, and chefs who prepare his meals wrong.
Too bad for him, I was practically raised by Joey, so I’m pretty much immune to terrifying glares from anyone but her.
Also?
His glare is kinda hot, and my nipples are getting tighter and there’s some intense humming going on between my thighs.
But he doesn’t get to be hot, because if I let him be hot, I’ll lose all my nerve in coming here to do the right thing, to tell him I have no intention of taking advantage of him, and that I just want to do what’s right for my baby.
For most of my life, I watched my daddy pine for a woman who didn’t want any of us. Who left us before I was in school, and who never even called to check on us.
My baby deserves better than that. If Manning wants to be part of her life, great. He doesn’t have to marry me—I might be from a small town, and I might still shudder when people say words like algebra and English lit, but I’m certainly not going to shackle myself to some guy because he donated a sperm cell. However, he’s not going to slip in and out randomly and disappoint her by not showing up when he promises he will either.
My knowledge of parenting is pretty thin, but I think I have a handle on what it takes to be a decent human being.
I pick up another shirt randomly thrown on the couch and scoot to the center, because whatever’s in one of those bags on the end table is making me nauseous.
Or possibly it’s the pizza smell off the first shirt Ares handed me.
Which I have also delicately discarded.
“We used protection,” he says, low, I assume, so he won’t be overheard.
“Sometimes it doesn’t work.”
“And you haven’t been with…”
“You know what’s hard? Getting a date when you’re Joey Diamonte’s sister. And now that she’s dating Zeus? Forget it. It’s like being permanently double-benched in the dating game. Forever. And ever. And ever.”
No need to mention Ted.
Apparently he’s sterile, which is why Joey had no objections to him. Plus, we didn’t get that far—which I hadn’t been planning on before his impromptu striptease—even if he was capable of siring children. And it’s not like I’ve been fooling myself into thinking Manning wouldn’t have been with anyone else either.
It was a one-night stand.
Not a marriage proposal.
“I can send you a copy of the official doctor results.” I pull a small black-and-white photo from my bag and slide it onto the wide coffee table separating the two couches. “And there’s this.”
He hunches forward, elbows on his knees. When he pulls the ultrasound photo toward him, his fingers are unsteady.
“She’s due in June.”
“I’ll take care of your medical bills, of course,” he says crisply as though he’s just been sentenced to death.
I jerk back and hiccup so hard my breastbone aches. Not that I expected him to fall over himself begging for my hand or anything, but it’s so…formal. “That’s not necessary.”
His still-pale expression hardens. “You’re carrying my child.”
You’re carrying my child.
Not I fancy you, Gracie. Not You are a gem of a woman. Not This is the best news in the world, I love you with all my heart, and it would be my honor to marry you.
Of course he doesn’t love me. Of course he doesn’t want to marry me. Honestly, I don’t want to marry him either. Not because I’m pregnant, anyway.
But would it be too much to wish that he’d like to get to know me better? I grew up without my mother. My visions of my own family and children always involved a husband and dogs and cats and possibly a lizard or bird or a big ol’ fish tank too, because it’s so soothingly normal, when my childhood was as normal as Joey and Daddy could make it, which was my normal, but never exactly fit the vision of my hopes and dreams.
And don’t think I don’t know or appreciate what they both sacrificed for me, but I still want more for my own family.
Fuck it. I’m taking the chocolate bars. I shove them into my bra. “I’m a competent, rational woman who can handle pregnancy and motherhood just fine on my own. I’d rather do it on my own, especially if the alternative is working out arrangements with someone who doesn’t even apparently like replying to my text message in what normal people would consider to be a timely manner. If you didn’t want my cookies anymore, you could’ve just said so.”
“Cookies? What the bloody hell do cookies have to do with anything?”
“Cookies have to do with everything.”
His lip curls beneath his beard as he gapes at me once more.
“And if you don’t understand that, then you’re hopeless,” I finish.
I rise, because I don’t really understand why I’m putting cookies on a pedestal either, or even why I brought them up since our communications the last month haven’t even really been about cookies, but that’s not the point.
He doesn’t love me. I don’t love him. I’m having a baby that happens to have some of his genes, now he knows, and that’s that.
End of discussion. My job here is done, so now I can figure out this cab thing in reverse, take myself back to the airport where I hope I don’t look like a fool for getting back on a plane two hours after leaving the last one.
He rises too.
I march toward the door.
He blocks me with a glower.
“You’re carrying my child,” he repeats.
“Doesn’t mean you own me, you big jerk. Get out of my way.”
“An heir to the crown of Stölland.”
Swear to dog, my blood ices over. I haven’t fully processed that. “Distant heir. What are you, fifth? Sixth in line?”
“My child won’t be denied his birthright, regardless of his place in line for succession.”
The reality of my situation hits me, and my knees quake.
I’m not carrying a baby.
I’m carrying a potential international incident.
Shit damn fuck hell.
“My child won’t be denied her mother, and this mother isn’t moving to fucking Stölland. Now move. Before I show you a few things my sister taught me.”
He doesn’t move, but something shifts in his expression. He’s less regal now.
More human. More like the man who made up names of constellations while we were out walking on a golf course, and who whispered conspiratorially that he liked doing things to piss off his brothers too, though his pranks had never before been anything as fun as flirting with a pretty woman like me.
“Do you have a place to stay the night?” he asks as if we were discussing something as trivial as a cup of sugar.
“Again, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Thank you.”
“Gracie—”
“Unless the phrases Thank you, I’m sorry, and I defer to your judgment are about to come out of your mouth, you can shove it up your royal ass.”
I punctuate the statement with a hiccup that’s not quite a hiccup, but not quite not, and it’s so disgusting I swear the air turns green. Mark airplane cookies off the list of things I can eat while I’m pregnant. Dammit.
I like those airplane cookies.
While he twitches in surprise as my hiccup cloud hits him, I duck around him and head for the exit.
“Gracie—” he starts again.
I ignore him and bang out his front door.
Where I now have to wait for an elevator. In a fancy-ass elevator waiting room that sparkles and glitters and has a marble floor that’s probably worth more than my entire house.
Fucking cities. Why can’t a girl just walk outside, climb in her car—if she ever finds her keys again—and drive off in a billowing dust storm of doom when she wants to make a grand exit?
The door opens behind me before the elevator slides open in front of me.
“If you want something from me,” I say, “you can call my lawyer.” My lawyer, Joey’s lawyer…whatever. I should probably find my own if I want to hide this from her for another six months though.
Dammit again.
“Will you please—”
He’s cut off by the ding of the elevator. I step on, hit the button for the first floor—it’s the only button, because his apartment is so fancy it has its own freaking elevator—and don’t turn around until the doors shut.
I half expect to see him behind me.
But I don’t.
And I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed.
I do know one thing though.
I’ve made a major royal mistake.
And no doubt, it won’t be the last.
