The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,14

time for a baby?

It’s not a thought a girl ever really expects to have when she’s focused on her plan for life rather than the social scene and doesn’t have a steady boyfriend—or even a habit of sleeping with guys on the regular.

Two months. No, my cycle had never been what you would call regular. I sometimes went a month without seeing it, and would often experience super light periods, to the point that they were easy to miss. I’d never been able to tell the time based on when I got my period, so I didn’t really pay that much attention to it.

But I’d never gone two months without having it before.

I yanked my phone out of my pocket and quickly brought up the app I used to track my cycle—in an attempt to be at least a little bit responsible with that part of my life—and ran my eyes through the months. This month, nothing.

Last month, nothing.

The month before that, a week was marked with the stupid red hearts this app gave you for tracking your period days. Red hearts that had seemed completely ridiculous to me at the time, and seemed even more ludicrous now. I made a mental note to find a better app… and then went back to the thing that got me here.

Two months. God.

I turned around, forgetting all about the frozen berries I’d been hunting for, and made my way quickly to the aisle that carried All Things Feminine. You know the aisle. The one men refuse to go down, because everyone knows that feminine products probably aren’t even safe for manly men to look at, let alone touch.

One quick turn through that aisle, and I had several pregnancy tests, of all different brands, tucked into the shopping cart. I didn’t bother with anything else in the grocery store. The food could wait.

I had a very big, very scary question that needed answering before I could even think about food again.

Half an hour later, I was back in my little apartment, stuffed into the very tiny bathroom (where the toilet was now working perfectly) and staring at the sticks I’d just peed on. I’d grabbed three of them, and was going back and forth between staring at those sticks and reading the instructions for each test again.

Dammit, why had I thought it was a good idea to get three different types? Now I had to look for three different things. A purple plus sign on one, two lines on the next, and a red heart on the final one.

I jerked my phone out of my pocket and almost deleted that stupid cycle-tracking app, irrationally sure that it had somehow caused my predicament—but stopped myself when I realized that I might still need to know when my last period had been.

Then I glanced at the time on my phone, and my heart did a triple beat.

It had been three minutes. My time was up. The moment I looked at those sticks, I’d know whether I was pregnant or not. Or at least whether I needed to go to the doctor and have myself seriously checked out.

I took a deep, shaking breath, trying to appreciate the last moment of not knowing—and then swiveled my gaze over to those sticks, completely unsure about what I wanted to see there.

As it turned out, I saw a purple plus sign, two lines, and then a stupid, idiotic red heart.

“Pregnant,” I said, dropping onto the toilet when my knees actually gave out under me. “Oh my God.”

And that was an understatement. Because on the list of things I’d wanted to do by the time I was thirty-one, getting pregnant hadn’t even been in the top ten. Not even in the top twenty.

Yeah, maybe I’d wanted to do it eventually—settle down, have a family, give my babies everything I’d never been able to have, and all that jazz—but it definitely wasn’t in the cards yet. I wanted to have my career settled first. I wanted to have made a name for myself, preferably even made partner, so that I was making decent money and was in a position to get to dictate my own work hours. I wanted to be able to count on weekends off, and a workday that ended at five o’clock sharp.

I wanted to be able to be there for my child the way my dad had never been able to be there for me. And right now, that definitely wasn’t a possibility.

Add to that the fact