The Don's Baby: A Bad Boy Romance (14 page)

Sophia

I lay awake in bed, listening to Marcelo get ready. It was early. It had to be earlier than usual because I tended to get up before him. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to still be asleep. Did he have a meeting that morning? Why was he up so early?

It wasn’t because of what I had told him last night, was it?

He had said he wasn’t mad.

He had said he wasn’t mad, but then he hadn’t said what he
did
feel. His face had been blank. I could have told him that the sky was blue and he would have had the same nonplussed reaction. Did he just say that because he didn’t want to make me upset? Was he
actually
mad?

The only way to know for sure would be to ask him, but what if he just said what he had said the night before again?

Like he sensed me thinking about him, I felt his hand on my hair, he smoothed it off my face and kissed my forehead. I opened my eyes slowly and looked up at him like I had just woken up.

“Marcelo?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, babe. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.” His hand stroked my hair, and he kissed my forehead again. He made to leave, but I held onto him.

“It’s early, come back to bed,” I said. He sat on the bed next to me and looked down at me, stroking my cheek with his thumb.

“I have to go, baby, and you need your rest,” he said gently. I smiled and held onto the hand that was touching my face. I kissed his palm and pressed his hand to my chest.

“Is there nothing I can do to make you stay?” I said. He smiled and kissed me, caressing the inside of my mouth with his tongue.

“Not today. Get some sleep. I’ll see you soon.” He gave me one last sweet kiss and left.

Humph
. Thwarted.

Not only hadn’t I gotten answers, I also hadn’t convinced him to stay with me. I rolled onto my front and hid my face in the pillow. He was sort of right. I was tired. Last night had been… let’s just say I could still
feel
him.

It had been amazing. I had never let anyone do that to me before. I thought he had a dominant streak in him, but I could never have anticipated what he asked me to do on the chair while he watched. I felt an ache between my thighs just remembering it. So what if I still didn’t know what he thought about the baby. He would tell me later. I was just about to fall asleep again when I felt something in my abdomen. I sat up. I knew, I
knew
it wasn’t the baby…the thing was hardly the size of a Brussels sprout yet. I held my stomach, and then it hit me. The worst surge of nausea I had ever felt in my life. I scrambled for the bathroom, throwing up a sour, hot liquid and heaving when my stomach was completely empty.

I flushed and collapsed onto the tiled floor.

Ow
. That was horrible. My body felt weak, and my mouth tasted sour. I gave myself a minute before I stood and washed my mouth out with mouthwash. There it was…morning sickness. I was slowly checking off the symptoms for early pregnancy. I could deal with being tired all the time, but the throwing up, they could keep it.

I heard my phone ring and went back into the bedroom. Checking the contact, I saw it was Marcelo. “Hello?”

“Sophie,” he said. “Did you go back to sleep? Did I wake you?”

I was up before him every day, so no he didn’t wake me, and he knew good and damn well that he hadn’t. Suddenly something like anger started to rise in me. He had left that morning to avoid talking to me.

“No. I was awake. What is it? Did you forget something at home?”

“No. I wanted to speak to you.”

“You left really early this morning,” I said. Passive aggression was not the answer, but I was upset.

“I did. Listen. I won’t be home for the next few days.”

“Why? Where are you going?”

“I just need a few days away, Sophie. I need to think… after what you told me last night.”

And there it was. Of course, that was it. He was scared. He was scared, and now he was running away from me. He was pushing me away. It wasn’t even as if we were a real couple or anything, but I thought we had been getting along lately. Was I wrong? The conversations, the sex, the intimacy… was I wrong to interpret that as closeness? Part of me just didn’t want it to be true. I hadn’t expected him to be jumping for joy…that would have been an even more of a shocking reaction, but what the hell was this?

“I thought you weren’t mad.”

“I’m not, Sophia. I just need some time.”

“Time to do what?”

“This doesn’t have to be a fight.”

“Just a simple question, Marcelo. Time to do what?”

“I don’t exactly get this kind of news every day, Sophie.”

“And you think I do? I am the one with the human being growing inside of me, Marcelo. This might change a lot of things for you, but it changes more things for me.”

“What do you want from me, Sophie? I have to be gone for a few days. All I need is a little time.”

“Marcelo, do you really think that right after your wife tells you that she is pregnant with your first child is the best time to take a vacation?”

“It’s not a
vacation
. Christ, Sophie, why are you being like this?”

“Being like what, Marcelo? You are the one who is running away.”

I heard him sigh. It was quiet wherever he was, so I couldn’t even try and guess what the location might be. Where would he go? His family most likely had more homes dotted around the city and likely in the suburbs somewhere, too. There were always hotels, as well, for him to do his
thinking
.

“Sophie. Please. I just found out that I’m going to be a father. I just found out last night. Of course, I need some time to get used to this. It isn’t like you just told me you got a haircut or something. This is serious. How long have you known?”

“Since we got back home from the last hotel.”

“What? So a week or so? I’m not even asking for that long, Sophie. Look. If you’re afraid and you don’t want to stay alone, you can call my mother.”

“I don’t want to call your
mother
; I want to be with my husband.”

He sighed again.

“Just a couple days, babe. Just a few days. I’ll be back before you know it.”

He hung up then.

I put the phone down and went up the stairs. I felt sick to my stomach, and it wasn’t because I was pregnant. What had I done? All the progress we had made. All the times we had smiled together. It was all gone. It was as if we had taken ten steps up and I had just shoved us back to the bottom of the staircase. Tears started spilling down my face.

This was awful. This was
terrible
. Why did he feel he had to leave? What the hell did he need time to do? Even if he did need time, he couldn’t spend it with me? What kind of man abandoned his pregnant wife, right after he learned he was going to be a father? I was no fool. I knew rejection when I felt it.

And then he had tried to pass me off to his mother. It wasn’t her I wanted. It was him. We were in this together. I was carrying the child, but the child was his! We were married. Why would he think it was okay to leave at a time like this?

I fell onto our bed and rolled into a ball. I felt
crushed
.

If he felt he had to be away from me when he was thinking, that could only mean one thing. There was no way he was thinking something good. I wrapped my arms around my midsection as all the dark, horrible thoughts from the day I found out I was pregnant came flooding back. He wasn’t thinking about how happy he was going to be as a father. No. He wasn’t brainstorming baby names. He was probably on the phone with his lawyers asking how to get out of legal parenthood. He was likely on the phone with my dad, telling him that he would be sending me back home.

I swallowed, thinking the worst possibility. He was making calls to clinics trying to find one that would perform an abortion. The thought terrified me to death. He
wouldn’t
. He
couldn’t
. If he tried it, I was out the door. If he really didn’t want the kid, I would make the decision for him and I would leave.

Was he really that upset about it?

Could he possibly think that I was lying to him? Trying to manipulate him? Was he on the phone asking for a lab that would perform a paternity test? Did he think it wasn’t his?

I couldn’t take it. I had to talk to someone. My parents were out of the question because they would immediately ask about Marcelo. His mother was out of the question, too. She probably knew already if he was telling me to go to her while he was away on his
thinking
trip.

I called Elena and waited impatiently as she picked the phone up.

“Hello?”

“He’s gone.”

“What? Sophia?”

“He’s gone. I told him last night, and now he’s gone.” I barely got the words out through my sobs.

“Oh no…where are you?”

“Home. He’s gone, Elena. He told me… he said—”

“Don’t. Just stay there. I’m coming to get you, okay?”

I quieted down by the time she showed up. Daniella probably let her in because I hadn’t moved when I heard the doorbell ring. I wasn’t crying anymore, but that was likely because I had just managed to tire myself out. She took kind of long getting to the room, probably because she didn’t know which one was the master suite. When she finally found me, she came straight to the bed and squeezed me in a tight hug.

That set me off again. She was such a great friend. She probably had things to do but she was there with me, comforting me in place of my husband, who had more important things to do.

“What happened, sweetie?” she asked me.

“When I woke up this morning, I didn’t find him. He had already left.”

“To go where?”

“I don’t know. It was too early for work, but I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t want to make it into that big of a deal. His job isn’t the most
regular
one in the world. He probably had some weird meeting he had to attend. But then, he called me.”

“He called you? From the meeting?”

“He wasn’t at a meeting. Maybe he was. He didn’t say where he was. He just told me that he would be away for a few days because he wanted some time to think?”

“That was the word he used?
Think
?”

I nodded.

“He said that he was going to be away for a bit because the news was really big and he wanted some time to
think
about it.”

“He has to leave to be able to think?”

“Apparently.”

“What the hell would he be thinking about without you? It’s not as if he’s in a position to make any independent decisions about your future child.
You’re
carrying it.”

“I don’t know if that’s enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marcelo’s rich, Elena. He’s rich and he’s powerful. He could do
anything
.”

“What are you thinking? That he wants to take it from you?”