Page 10 of Pregnancy Scandal
I loved Gilly to no end, but look how he’d behaved with me earlier. No tact, no care, and just a plain asshole.
“Mia, what happened?” I thought I’d simply ask the question again.
“Eric Declan. He’s an asshole.”
“Oh God. Mia, that guy is a dog and a half. What drew you to him?” I winced.
“I don’t know. I just thought we sparked. We talked and connected, and then we…connected.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Then what?”
“He left straight after. I never even got my clothes back on before he left me. That was last week, and I could have gotten over it, but I saw him at work today flirting with Samantha Port.”
I frowned. “Really?” The woman was … well, she was odd. She was a bitch of a different kind. Not to us because Dad owned the company, but she went out of her way to seduce married men. It was just married men. Like she had a thing for them.
“Yes, he saw me and shamelessly flirted with her, and they left together.”
I blinked several times. Mia didn’t usually get this worked up over a guy. “Mia, do you like him? You sound really upset.”
“I’ll get over it. I’m just pissed off. He seemed nice. I was stupid and allowed him to fool me. I’ll be fine. It was just unpleasant. What about you? What happened to you? You seemed excited about your date, and he was cute.”
I leaned back in my chair and rested my head against the soft leather. I wasn’t certain if I could handle having one more person tell me how crazy my idea was, but she was my sister. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she would get me.
“It’s a really long story, but the essence of it is this.” I straightened and pulled my knees in, hugging them to my chest. “I want to have a baby.”
Her mouth dropped and her eyes snapped wide open. “What, Abby?Jesus.Really? An actual baby, as in lots-of-sex-without-any-kind-of-protection baby?” She laughed.
“Yeah. I went off the pill a week ago. I had one of those mini pills, so if you missed a day, you could get pregnant. Going off them was the first step for me, and it felt right. It felt like my body was ready for this.”
“You’re actually serious?” She set the ice cream down on the coffee table and brought her hands up to her cheeks. “Oh, Abby, have you been dating with that in mind? Having a baby?”
“Today was the first date, and I didn’t exactly want to date. Mia, I don’t mind not having a man present. If he wants to be part of my life and our child’s, that’s fine, but I’m only looking for a good guy I can have a baby with, and the understanding would be that we have this child but aren’t actually together. Does that sound crazy?”
She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “It… doesn’t necessarily sound crazy. It doesn’t, but it tends to sound that way because what you’re talking about is the end stage of a failed relationship, where all you share is a child. You’re saying that’s what you want?”
“I’m not looking at it like that. It’s not that at all. I guess I’m just very liberal and have this open way of thinking that a lot of people don’t get.”
“I get you. I really do, and I can see where you’re coming from. I just don’t want you to… give up on having a real relationship. Abby, we couldn’t ask for better examples than Mom and Dad. They’ve shown us what true love is. I may be the party girl who’s out every night, but I want that. I want what they have. Will I find someone? Probably not, but I might. I don’t want you to jump the gun thinking this is the only way for you to have a family. You may as well go to a sperm bank.”
Sperm bank. She was the third person to say that today. “I don’t want that.”
“You want the old fashioned traditional?” She smiled.
I nodded. “I want that part to be real. I can be liberal to some extent, but I want that part to be real even if I’m not in a real relationship.”
“Abby… it’s going to be hard to find someone like that, and personally, if it were me, I’d want someone who knows me and who I know. You can’t just pick a random person to do something like this with. It has to be someone you trust, even if it’s not real. For God’s sake, you’ll be having sex with this guy without protection. You can’t just pick someone off the road to do it with and say, ‘Goodbye, thanks for the baby’ after.” She sighed. “If it were me, I’d want someone I knew would look after me when I’m pregnant, and for damn sure he’d want to have some say in our child’s life.”
As if in answer to her, my phone buzzed in my purse. I picked it up, reached for my phone, and saw I had a message from Gilly. On the preview it said:
Still mad at me? I’m just looking after you the way I always have.
I looked from the phone to Mia and sucked in a sharp breath as an idea popped into my head.
Yes, Gilly had always looked after me. Always. And he was everything Mia had just described and then some. Also, I loved him. I actually loved him.
I loved him, I knew him, and he was a guy I trusted with my life.
He was also a man who was very capable of making a baby.
