The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,15

that I sort of needed a man to have a family and get pregnant, and didn’t currently have one of those on hand, and you had an even bigger hole in the plot.

A man. Oh, God! A man! I’d also had to have one of those to get pregnant in the first place, and if I was actually baking a little bun in the oven, then that meant…

“Ethan Parker,” I breathed.

Because it could only be him. He was the only guy I’d been with in the past six months. And no matter how much I’d searched the apartment the day after we slept together, I hadn’t been able to find one single shred of evidence to prove that we’d used protection the night we slept together.

I’d blown it off, thinking that maybe he’d flushed the condom when he’d fixed the toilet, and hurried right back into my work-focused life.

And now that looked like the stupidest, most naïve assumption ever.

Chapter 9

Bella

A week later, I stood in the grocery store again, staring blindly at the selection of frozen berries. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries…

For all that was holy, I needed to get a grip and make a decision here. The problem was, making decisions hadn’t been my strong suit lately.

I still hadn’t, for example, made a decision about whether or not I was going to tell Ethan about the baby. Yeah, I’d been to my OB/GYN and had the more official tests, and I knew for a fact that I was pregnant. Like, for real. I was two months along, and the doctor had even given me the date when the baby was probably conceived. It had been around when I’d slept with Ethan—which I’d told her had made sense, since he was the only guy I’d seen any action with in the last several months.

When she’d looked at me in surprise about that, I’d told her that I barely had time to go to my yoga class once a week, and I definitely hadn’t had a whole lot of time for dating. Lawyers might have made a lot of money—well, once they got high up enough on the ladder, I guessed—but they definitely paid for it with their personal time, at least in the beginning. The doctor had laughed and told me that doctors had much the same problem, and then jumped right into telling me about all the things I needed to do to make sure that the baby grew the way it should.

The baby. God.

I put a hand to my stomach where I thought the little one might be growing and groaned. That, at least, I’d decided about. I was going to keep it, no matter what. This baby and I, we were in it together now, and I wasn’t going to let the little one down. No, I didn’t have enough money to support him or her and no, I didn’t have the time. It definitely wasn’t in my life plan for this year. But that didn’t matter. I’d figure out what I was going to do later. How I was going to revise that plan to include a munchkin.

For the moment, all I needed to know was that I was going to keep this baby.

I was going to build the family I hadn’t had when I was younger. And I was going to give that kid everything I’d never had. Somehow.

I’d figure out the ‘somehow’ part later, too.

The thing I still hadn’t figured out—the thing I wasn’t even sure I was ready to touch yet—was the question of whether to tell Ethan. We’d made it clear to each other that we weren’t going to see each other again, or even talk, after that one night together. We’d both agreed that it would be too complicated, and could put our careers in jeopardy. And I hadn’t thought about him since.

Much. Unless you counted remembering exactly how his body felt up against mine, his soft kisses—which had turned deep and needy and demanding once we’d gotten into bed—and the way his skin smelled.

But those things didn’t really count, I told myself. And they didn’t have anything to do with whether I was going to tell him about the baby. Did I want him back in my life? Did I want him to be a permanent fixture? Could I handle that? Could my career? Because if it had been a conflict of interest to be seen dating the guy I’d just won a case against, I was guessing that having his