The Tycoon's Baby Revelation - Elizabeth Lennox Page 0,46

torn and wouldn’t do you much good.” He lowered his head, nibbling along her neck. “I was a bit too vehement in my efforts before.” He lifted his mouth from her neck and she tried hard not to whimper at the loss of that touch. But his nose lightly brushed against the shell of her ear as he whispered, “I’ll replace them, but not tonight.”

With that, he led her out of the office and into the parking lot, leading her over to his Mercedes sedan. “We’re going to your place and I’m not letting you out of bed until morning.”

Sloane grinned up at him as she pulled her legs inside before he closed the door. As she watched him walk around to the driver’s side, she smiled, thinking that life was pretty darn good right now!

Chapter 16

How had her life gone so off track?

Sloane stared at the calendar and rechecked the date. Surely she wasn’t…! Impossible!

Flipping back to the previous month, sure enough, the notation on the sixteenth of the previous month was right there. She flipped to the previous month, hoping that it wasn’t on the expected date. But yep. There was the notation on the eighteenth. Twenty-eight days prior.

Sloane was about as regular with her periods as was humanly possible. From about the age of sixteen until now, her periods had always been twenty-eight days apart. Like clockwork. So that could only mean ….!

Swallowing, she flipped back to the month before. Then the month before that. Twenty-eight days. Going back to the current month, she went through every day, looking for the notation, praying that she’d put it somewhere. Or that maybe this month, she’d simply forgotten to type in the notation.

Nothing. She reviewed the meetings during the month, trying to remember if she’d had her period during the previous two weeks. But nope. There wasn’t anything that might remind her that she’d had her period.

She was two weeks late! Not two days, which she could dismiss, even though she was so regular, it was irritating. Two whole weeks.

Rubbing her forehead, she stared blankly at the calendar, hating herself because she knew better! She’d preached safe sex and dual contraception to Rayne and Pepper so many times over the years, they groaned whenever she brought up the subject.

And yet, she hadn’t followed her own rule. Oh, she’d gone to the doctor’s office and she had a prescription for birth control! Yep, she’d done the right thing. But she’d gone after she and Josh had become sexually active. According to the calendar, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. She’d most likely gotten pregnant that first night with him.

He was a powerful man. And the women in her family had freakish levels of fertility! She knew this. She’d preached this fact! She’d lived with the consequences of that issue all her life, not having a father around. So, why was she now surprised that using a condom, using just one method of birth control, hadn’t been sufficient?

Sloane glanced at the closed door between her office and Josh’s. Should she tell him?

Sloane’s arms wrapped around her stomach and her thoughts flashed back to the nights she’d heard her mother crying. Those nights always preceded the announcement that she was pregnant and Sloane was going to have a sibling. It also warned Sloane that the man her mother had been dating would no longer be coming around.

And it meant that the finances would be painfully tight. Her mother had been a hair stylist and, although she was very good with a pair of scissors, she had to work almost every day in order to get paid. Having a baby meant that her mother had to take time off, which meant no tips, no payment from her regular clients, and a lot of stress while her mother recovered from giving birth.

Sloane had adored both of her sisters from the moment her mother had come home from the hospital. Rayne had been a pale little lump with big, blue eyes and a red tuft of hair on the top of her head, although Sloane had been very young at that point. Pepper had been an adorable baby, exuberant from the first moment she’d come home. Sloane had been old enough to help diaper Pepper, feed her, and hold her at night…well, hold the tiny bundle when her mother placed Pepper carefully in Sloane’s arms.

And now, she suspected that she was pregnant. In the same situation as her mother! Rubbing her forehead, she wondered