The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,44

told me I had my mother to thank for. Broad cheekbones and a pointed chin that had caused kids in elementary school to make fun of me.

An expression that looked flat and emotionless.

It was the opposite of how I was feeling inside.

“A boy and a girl,” I breathed, the woman in the mirror saying the same thing at exactly the same time. Of course. Because that was how mirrors worked.

If only that woman could tell me what to do with the information my OB/GYN had just given me.

“So, since you’re so far along, we can actually start to see physical characteristics,” Dr. Madden had said cheerfully, acting like she was giving me the best freaking news in the entire world. “And boy do I have news for you.”

She’d handed me a printout of the pictures we’d just been looking at on the screen of the ultrasound machine, grinning. “You’re having a boy and a girl.”

My stomach lurched once again at the thought, and I almost dropped to my knees and scooted over to the toilet, thinking that I was going to throw up again—which was happening with increasing frequency these days. Despite the fact that I was finished with my first trimester, which I’d thought would mean that I stopped getting morning sickness. But it turned out that it hadn’t been morning sickness but rather a sensitivity to any stress that had me throwing up.

Which made working in a law firm a really, really inconvenient thing to be doing.

And it turned out that finding out the sex of my babies was also hell on my stomach. Though it was anyone’s guess why that might be. I wasn’t upset that I was having a girl and a boy. The opposite, really; I thought it was completely perfect. This way, I didn’t have to decide whether I would rather have the one I wasn’t having, and I wouldn’t have that whole ‘if I was having a boy, I would have chosen this name’ discussion that I heard other people having.

But it went way beyond just the naming or which sex I would have preferred. Something about knowing made them… more real. It made them actual little people in there.

And that, I realized suddenly, was what was making me feel so sick. Because they were actually little people in there. And I was legitimately thinking about giving one of them up… and potentially never seeing him or her again. And if I decided to follow through with that, how the hell would I ever decide which one I was going to give to Ethan?

And how would I live with myself if I did?

And that was a path I’d already been down too many times to count. I’d already asked the questions—again and again and again—and come to the conclusion—multiple times—that I had no idea what the right answer was.

The bigger problem… or rather the additional problem, I supposed, was that the firm was giving me more work with each passing day. The Harmon-e case had made me into some sort of spokesperson for artists who’d had their work stolen, and Barbor and Associates was taking full advantage of that. They’d been sending me out on PR appearances and to do stories with papers and magazines, as well as increasing my workload. I was ecstatic that they’d finally figured out that I could do the job, and that they were actually considering me for a higher position… but I was also starting to burn out.

Combine that with getting sick every time I got stressed out and a complete inability to deal with the taste or smell of pizza (because life really was that unfair—I loved pizza, and it was sold on every other darn street corner of New York), and I was quickly finding myself in an untenable position.

Throwing a baby into that mix was going to make things even harder. Throwing two babies into that mix, and two babies who would require a lot of different equipment—because a boy and a girl—so I would have to spend more money on things like clothes…

I had a lot of faith in my ability to see things through, but even I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle it.

All of which made Ethan’s offer—as horrible and outlandish as it was—even more of a temptation. Because I was seriously starting to wonder whether it would be responsible to keep both babies. If I couldn’t handle them, was it fair to curse them to that