Tied To You (5 page)

I watched in shock at the sheer amount of food disappearing between her plump pink lips. I had no idea how she could eat like that considering she had just lost everything in her stomach less than twenty minutes before. It must have had something to do with being pregnant, as she had said.

Pregnant. The word made me pause, almost stumble in my thoughts, and I stopped talking. I don’t even know what we had been discussing, but it was something lighthearted and unimportant. As the shock soaked into me again, and I struggled to comprehend and accept it, my gaze dropped to her stomach.

I couldn’t see any signs of pregnancy yet, except I was sure her breasts were larger, straining against the white button-down blouse she wore under the jacket she had removed. I had the strongest urge to reach over and unbutton it, to feel for myself and see the changes. My cock twitched in my pants, but that reaction faded when I contemplated why her breasts were larger.

My baby was inside her, a baby I’d sure never intended to give her, and one I was doubtful that she wanted. Under the circumstances, it must have been the last thing she had anticipated, and I was surprised she hadn’t decided to abort. On the tail of that thought came a rush of relief that I wouldn’t have expected. I was pro-choice and supportive of a woman’s rights to make that decision, but when it came to my child, I found myself fiercely glad that she hadn’t terminated.

The silence lengthened, and I was aware of her staring at me in confusion, but I couldn’t seem to bring order to the chaos of my thoughts. “You’re pregnant,” I said stupidly. She nodded at me like I was a special snowflake before taking another bite of chow mein. I couldn’t help a small smile that suddenly turned into a huge grin. “I mean you’re having a baby.”

She looked either amused or exasperated, and I thought perhaps a mixture of the two. “Yes, that’s usually how it progresses.”

I frowned. “Usually? Is something wrong?”

Gabriella looked surprised. “No, not at all. I had an ultrasound at eight weeks when I saw the midwife for the first time. Would you like to see the picture?” She made the offer in a shy fashion, clearly uncertain how I would respond.

“Yes.”

She stopped eating long enough to reach into the bag she had brought with her, seeming to know right where she was looking, because it took her no time at all to pull out a little black and white picture that she handed to me.

I took it with trembling hands, unreasonably nervous at the first sight of my child. I looked down and saw a squiggly little blob of white on black. “That’s a baby?” I asked doubtfully. Then I feared she might interpret my question as an expression of disbelief, or an accusation that she was trying to scam me.

Fortunately, she must have realized I was just uneducated about such things, because she started laughing. “That’s what the midwife tells me, but I have to admit it doesn’t like much like a baby to me either. I expect to see a lot more at the next ultrasound.”

“When will that be?” I was already mentally clearing my calendar.

“At twenty weeks, so seven weeks from now.”

I nodded, reaching for my phone to input the data. “Do you know the exact time and date yet?”

Hesitantly she gave it to me, looking confused.

After I put it in, I nodded. “I’ll take you.” Seeing the apprehension in her expression, I dialed it down a bit. “I mean I would like to come along, if that’s okay?”

Slowly, she nodded. “Yes, that would be nice. I mean if you want to. You don’t have to feel obligated to—”

I glared at her before she could finish that sentence. “I’m obligated simply because half of my genetic material made up our child. You’re not forcing me to do anything, so please stop acting like you are. I know it wasn’t planned, and I’m sorry you ended up in the situation, but now that we’re in this, we’re in it together. Okay?”

She gave me a thoughtful look before she nodded. A second later, her stomach rumbled, and I reached for the trash can nearby as a precaution. Apparently, it was just signaling the need for more fuel, because she started eating again. Finally, I picked up a container of sweet-and-sour pork and tried to focus on eating as the shift in my reality sank in.

I was going to be a father, Gabriella was going to be its mother. I barely knew her, and that was a mutual situation, but I had a good feeling she would be an excellent mother for our child. I didn’t have such a good feeling about my family’s reaction to her.

Annika would be well within her rights to want nothing to do with anything even remotely touching the Chastain family, and my mother was bound to hate her too. Not just because she was a Chastain, but also because she was a white girl working as a receptionist.

It suddenly struck me as absurdly funny in a dark way that Gabriella’s stepfather and my mother actually had something in common. They were both against the idea of dating or marrying outside of one’s race, and my mother was further hung up on the need for someone to be professional and successful.

She would regard Gabriella’s bachelor’s degree as worth little more than a high school diploma. In my mother’s view, she wouldn’t garner respect with anything less than a Master’s degree in her chosen field or an M.B.A. That she was working at the firm in one of the lowest-paid positions requiring the least education and experience would certainly appall my mother.

I braced myself for the fight ahead, deciding I would focus on Mother and Annika later, after I had won over Gabriella. She had to be my primary focus, and I had to get her to trust me if I wanted to be part of my child’s life.

“Would you like to have dinner tonight?”

She shook her head. “No.”

I frowned at her. “Do you have plans? Can they be changed? I think us getting to know each other is very important, don’t you?” Since she was being so stubborn and wouldn’t just let me do the right thing and marry her, I was going to have to do it her way. That meant dating before I convinced her to take my ring and my name, and if she was going to be resistant to spending time together, it seemed like a doomed endeavor.

“It’s not that. I don’t eat dinner.”

I scowled at her. “You’re pregnant. That’s completely irresponsible.”

Gabriella glared at me, and I probably deserved it, but I was already feeling protective of her and the baby. “I don’t eat dinner because I get the worst nausea that time of day. I usually spend from six to nine p.m. throwing up, especially if I’ve eaten anything in the few hours before it. I can generally have a snack around eleven p.m., and sometimes I can eat a good breakfast, but usually this time of day is the only time I can really eat. Now, if you want to come over and watch a movie or something, we can do that, but do not bring food.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to boss you around or criticize you.”

She gave me a look that was full of skepticism, but was gracious enough to let it slide. “Are there any eggrolls left?”

I looked at the box where I had been saving one out of the six that had come with the order. With a small sigh I hoped she didn’t hear, I passed it over. Eggrolls were my favorite, but she clearly needed it more, especially if this was the only time of day she could really eat.

It seemed unusual to me, and I made a mental note to arrange her for her to see a specialist. She was seeing a midwife? Wasn’t that what she had said? We weren’t living in the dark ages, so perhaps it was an insurance issue. I’d have to handle that as well, making sure she was on my insurance as soon as she agreed to marry me. In the meantime, maybe I could arrange to beef up her benefits with HR.

“You’ve gone quiet.” She gave me an unreadable look as she crunched into the last egg roll, somehow making it look sexy.

I just smiled at her, not wanting to unveil my surprise yet. Okay, not wanting to deal with the fallout, because I had a feeling she was going to be stubborn about everything, and she probably wouldn’t appreciate me meddling with her insurance benefits just so she could see a real doctor. “I guess I’m still processing.”

She smiled sweetly, which was a marked contrast to her blunt words. “You’d better process quickly, because there are only twenty-seven weeks until the baby comes.”

Yeah, that helped a lot…

He insisted on driving me home, and I grumbled a bit about it, but I was secretly relieved not to have to walk five blocks with my ankles starting to swell. It was an unfortunate, but common, occurrence in pregnancy. I just happened to luck out and get it earlier than usual.

My blood pressure was fine, so my midwife was unconcerned, though she had me measuring my weight each morning to ensure I wasn’t gaining too quickly or showing signs of anything like preeclampsia. That didn’t usually happen until the second or third trimester, but if it developed this early, there would be no saving the pregnancy. Yes, I had consulted Dr. Google despite Amber’s advice not to when I had seen her for my first baby appointment.

The nausea was already starting, and in fact I had been battling it for the past hour at work. I waved him toward the couch, not having it in me to entertain him at the moment as I went to my bedroom and stripped out of office wear in favor of comfy lounge pants and a loose T-shirt that hid my growing breasts. It was disconcerting to have most of the chests of my clothes starting to feel tight, and I knew I’d have to shop for a maternity wardrobe soon.

It was an expense I wasn’t looking forward to, so I had been trying to put it off. That, and I was just sort of in-between. Right now I looked a little chubbier than I had, but nowhere near pregnant. It was silly to care what other people thought, but I squirmed at the idea of someone thinking I was just a fat lady shopping in the maternity clothes section because none of the clothes in my department fit.

The thought made me want to cry, and I sniffled and grabbed a tissue. That was another thing about pregnancy that no one had warned me about, except for some lame book that I only read a few chapters of before tossing aside. It had warned me my emotions would be on a rollercoaster, and I’d thought that was silly. Apparently not. I could laugh or cry at the drop of a hat, and I was only thirteen weeks along. If it got more pronounced as pregnancy progressed, I dreaded to see what a basket case I would be in a few months. Everyone in a ten-mile radius would run away from me.

Except maybe Mykael. He seemed adamant about being around for the baby, and though I knew it was still a possibility he could change his mind once the reality of it all set in completely, I was cautiously optimistic that I wouldn’t be a single mother. I wasn’t going to marry someone who didn’t love me, and who I didn’t love, but if he wanted to be a father, I’d be happy to let him as long as he was fully committed.

Neither the baby nor I needed a guy who was there and then gone again. I’d rather my baby have no father at all than one that was only around occasionally—or someone like Wayne, who had never hidden his resentment that I was alive and had to be endured if he wanted Sophie. He had never held back the criticisms or bothered to soften any of his comments just because I was young. He’d hated me, I think, and that was before he’d received the video.

I stifled a giggle as I remembered the moment I had dropped the videotape in the mailbox. I had already cleaned out all possessions I’d wanted from his house, and I was staying at a cheap hotel for a few days while searching for a job and a place of my own. It had been a good time to send it, and I could well imagine what his reaction had been.

He had made no effort to get hold of me or confront me, but the day after he would have received the package, my credit card was canceled, as was my phone account. I had been expecting it, so I already had a new phone, but I was avoiding credit cards like the plague since I was unemployed at that point. It had been worth it, and I still chuckled with satisfaction each time I thought about it. I’d have to remember to tell Mykael I had sent the video.

Mykael. That was going to take some getting used to. I had known him as Mickey for the past thirteen weeks, and though it hadn’t been a name that suited him, it was the name he had become in my brain.

Now, he was Mykael Tyson Watts, a junior partner at a prestigious law firm, with amazing prospects, at least according to the information I had dug up on him this afternoon when I was supposed to be working. I had been answering phone calls, but once I’d understood their system, it was pretty mindless work. In between, I had shamelessly snooped on the company website and on Google to find any information about him.

So in addition to knowing perhaps the worst secret of his family, I now knew more mundane things about the father of my child. Mykael had graduated early, at the age of twenty, from Yale with a bachelor’s degree, followed by a jurist doctorate from Cambridge, and had joined his mother’s practice as a fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old, two years sooner than the norm.

She had made him start at the bottom, but he had recently made junior partner just eighteen months before, and the things I had read had held no snark or hint of nepotism suspected. He must have earned his spot, so he was an ambitious, intelligent man.

I’d already known he was charming and had a good heart, even if he had almost done something awful when he was blinded by his need for revenge. In the end, his conscience had pulled him back from the edge, and I found that more important than any of the other tidbits I had gathered about him. It was far more important for me to know that he had a solid moral compass than that he was twenty-nine years old and one of the youngest junior partners in the city.

Realizing I had been dawdling in my preparations, I put my hair up into a ponytail before leaving the room and going to join him on the couch. He was sitting on my side, in my favorite spot, but I didn’t say anything. I just moved to the other side and stretched out awkwardly, putting my feet on the coffee table. Normally, I would just lay down on the couch, but his presence made that impossible.

“You live alone?” he asked me.

I nodded. “I found out I was pregnant before I found a place of my own, so I didn’t want to deal with roommates. I was lucky to find this place.” Even luckier, the tiny apartment I was leasing in the Lower East Side was above a coffee shop. The morning smells sometimes aggravated my nausea, but the shop was closed before I got home in the evenings, when it was the worst.

Even though LES was one of the most affordable neighborhoods in NYC, the rent was still astronomical, but I could just barely swing it with my salary as a receptionist at his law firm, and I was happy not to have a roommate. I’d spent the last four years with one at college, and I needed some time alone, or at least as alone as I could be while sharing my body with another. The birth was still more than six months away, but I knew that time would pass in a flash, and soon enough he or she would be here with me.

It was a tiny apartment and not at all ideal for raising a child, but it would have to do. There was space in my room for a pack-and-play, and I wouldn’t want to sleep with the baby out of my room anyway for at least the first year, so that worked out just fine. As he or she got older, we’d work it out. The couch folded down to a bed, so I could always let him or her have the tiny bedroom for their own once they were older.

Or maybe I would be able to afford a better place to live if Mykael really decided to commit to being a father. That would surely include some kind of child support, and I couldn’t see him as the deadbeat dad type who wouldn’t pay. More importantly, he seemed like he would come for his visitations and be involved in our child’s life.

I was still holding back from embracing that hope though, because I knew it was a lot to absorb, and as the baby’s arrival got closer, he might get farther away. It might end up being too much for him, so I intended to guard my heart, keep my optimism in check, and be cautious.

“I talked to HR today,” he said with a pleased smile.

I shoved a pillow behind my back to get more comfortable. “Okay?”

“You have really good insurance with us.”

I nodded. It had been one of the reasons I had gone after the job. I might have been able to find something utilizing my marketing degree, but it would have likely been an intern position that paid little or no money, or barely above what I would make as a receptionist. The law firm offered outstanding benefits, and I’d learned I was pregnant before I interviewed, so that had swayed me toward the job.

It was boring and certainly wouldn’t be my life’s work, but it filled the gap for now and provided enough money and stability to raise my child. “Yes, I’m aware.”

He frowned slightly. “I thought maybe you had misunderstood the benefits or something. You can see a real doctor, you know?”

I arched a brow. “A real doctor?” I pretended to be clueless, but I knew what he was talking about. Maybe I wasn’t as good at pretending to be clueless as I thought, because his expression changed, taking on an edge of concern. I hoped he was smart enough to be concerned for his own hide.

“You could see an obstetrician instead of a midwife.”

I gave him a sweet smile, though I was feeling anything but good-natured at the moment. “Yes, I can do that, but then I set myself up for a far greater likelihood of having a cesarean section instead of a natural birth, along with medical interventions that I don’t want unless they are absolutely necessary.

“I’m not a complete moron, Mykael. I’m capable of researching and making a decision, and I had good reason for picking a midwife over an obstetrician. You might be pleased to know that she’s almost a
professional
.” I rolled my eyes as I spoke the word snidely. “She’s been to nursing school anyway, and she’s delivered over five hundred babies. Do think she’s qualified enough?”

Yes, he was definitely looking panicky now, clearly having realized he had pissed me off. The funny thing was, I was usually slow to anger, but I was going to pass off this extreme reaction as induced by pregnancy hormones.

“I didn’t mean to offend you. I thought maybe you chose a midwife because she was cheaper.”

I nodded, finding a little pity for him. “Amber is cheaper, but that’s simply because she’s not going to do a bunch of medical interventions unless they become necessary. I’ll be delivering at a birth center near the hospital, and she has an obstetrician in her practice who will come in if I need an emergency cesarean.

“The baby and I are perfectly safe, and we’re quite likely to have a low-risk delivery because of my age and health. Okay?” I wasn’t asking for his permission, but my tone had turned nicer than it had started out. Maybe I’d been a tad defensive and had overreacted. Maybe. A bit.

He nodded. “Okay.” He sounded meek, but I wasn’t fooled. He might let this drop, but I expected there would be a million other arguments just like it as our ideals clashed over the intervening months. And then once the baby got here, if we had different views on parenting, it could be a never-ending argument.

For the first time, I was a little disgruntled that he had expressed an interest in living up to his responsibility. It would have been simpler to be the only person making the decisions, though it would’ve been a lot harder in the long run. Our baby would still be better off with two parents, I reminded myself, even if its father was the annoying, bossy billionaire-type.

I didn’t think he was actually a billionaire, but all the articles I had read about him referred to society functions and charity events and all the things that rich people like my stepfather considered important. I wondered how Annika had come to be at Wayne’s mercy, since she came from money. Perhaps with her background and family’s reputation, she would have had a better chance of getting her rape report taken seriously, but I could certainly understand why she was afraid to risk the exposure and had decided not to go to the police.

I’d never even met her, but I shared Mykael’s desire for revenge. I would have felt the same for any woman who had been raped by four men, but personally knowing the four men involved, and having been subjected to the undisguised lust of three of them over the years, made my skin crawl. I would love to see Wayne and his cohorts suffer.

That reminded me I had wanted to share the information about the tape, so I told Mykael amid giggles about having edited it down to a surprisingly tasteful soft-core porn that still made it obvious I was getting fucked by a black guy for the first time—and my first time.

I had expected him to laugh, but he looked concerned instead. “Did he hurt you when he found out?”

Aww, he was sweet when he wanted to be. I shook my head. “I didn’t give him the chance. It was a bit on the cowardly side, I guess, but I didn’t mail the package until after I’d moved out. He never talked to me or tried to get hold of me, but he did cancel my credit card and my phone service.”

“I’ll arrange for you to have a bank account set up at my bank.”

I frowned him. “I wasn’t trying to get money out of you. I can take care of myself. I was just telling you what he did.”

Mykael held up a hand. “Calm down, Gabriella. I’m not trying to buy you off or step on your independence. I simply want to make sure you have everything you need for you and my child. There will be a bank account established for you, and it’s my hope you’ll actually use it. Whether you spend it all in one shopping trip or just use it as needed, please consider it another resource at your disposal.”

When he put it like that, I couldn’t object too much, so I nodded and tried to appear a little grateful. In all honesty, it would be nice to have an emergency fund upon which to fall back, since my own savings account was pretty low. It was an expensive city, and I probably would have done better if I had moved away, but I hadn’t been able to leave.