Page 74 of Act Like You Don't Care
This was going to be torture.
Tam
Isat for a few minutes in the car, just thinking. It was almost frightening to think that Miles had accepted every boundary I’d put in place without any real push-back at all.
If this had happened at any other time, with any other alpha, I’d have laid money on me already being in the middle of a fight with the father. I’d gotten damn lucky with the timing of when I’d gotten unlucky. Which was the unluckiest part of it all, because I liked Miles and if everything kept going the way it had been, I couldn’t imagine anyone else I’d rather co-parent with.
Should I take the chance? Call him, ask him out? Ask for more of those nights wrapped around each other, his scent and his arms chasing away the nightmares that still sometimes woke me?
The terror came back, graying out the world around me until I’d given myself a firm no on calling Miles.
My mother’s words came back to me.You can’t have everything, you just have to choose to pass on the things you’ll miss the least.
She was a smart lady, my mother. If she were here, I was sure she’d tell me to let my heart guide me into the future I really wanted and not look back at the might-have-beens. Might-have-beens very often were the same as never-would-have-beens anyway.
So, no time to sit here wishing things had been different.
My next stop was my agent’s office, to strategize how to bring this to the studio without getting me dropped from the film.
"What in the hell were you thinking?" were the first words out of my agent's mouth.
"When?" I demanded, already irritated and wishing I'd just gone home instead.
Summer ignored my question. "How far along are you?" She squinted at my waist as if she could read the size of the baby from the fit of my clothes already.
"Not far," I admitted. "Maybe seven weeks, a little longer. It doesn't matter, I've already decided to keep it. I need some help on spinning this with the studio so they'd don't just drop me."
"I don't think there's anything that will spin it that hard. There's no way they're going to be able to hide it once you get to five or six months."
"Smart costuming and a smart director can," I said stubbornly. "Come on, work with me on this. What else am I going to do for the next nine months if they do drop me?" I rubbed my fingers together in the air between us, the universal sign for money. "This is to both of our benefits."
"It would have been better if you'd never gotten pregnant at all," she muttered and rubbed her temples. "How did it happen, anyway?"
"In the usual fashion," I said sarcastically. "You know, when an alpha and an omega find each other smoking hot--"
"Stop!" She glared at me. "Be serious about this, okay?" She stared at her phone for a second, then looked back over at me. "You were on birth control, right?"
"Yes." I'd thought about that. "I think after this I'm going to switch away from the hormonal ones. The doctor says that sometimes they fail when you're under too much stress." He’d also said that sometimes the right alpha could overcome the hormonal interference, but I quickly pushed that thought away. To many might-have-beens to live with.
"You certainly did have some stress going on a couple of months ago." She sighed and cleared the papers on her desk away into a drawer. "Let me see who I can get hold of. You might as well go home. This could take a while."
I nodded and left her to do what she did best.
Miles
Even knowing the explosion this news was going to cause when I sat my parents down and made my confession, I couldn’t help the excitement spinning butterflies in my stomach.
He’s having my child.
My heart raced and I drove back to the office on automatic pilot, pulling into my parking space without remembering any of the turns and stops I’d made on the way.
I’m going to be a father.
This would be the first grandchild in my family. I hoped that would enough to keep my parents from roasting me alive.
It wasn’t.
“You slept with a client?” Dad yelled at me when I broke the news.
