Pregnant with Father-in-Law’s Secret Baby (Forbidden Pregnancy #12)

1 - A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT

The Beckley summer pressed against the windows like a living thing, all humidity and cricket-song and the distant hum of coal trucks downshifting on the highway.

Victoria Carter stood at the kitchen sink of Brock Carter’s house—her father-in-law’s house—and watched the ice cubes fracture in her glass of lemonade.

The air conditioning rattled in its frame.

Seventy-two degrees, and still she could feel the sun through the glass, could feel it on her neck where she’d pinned her blonde hair up that morning.

Three months they’d been here. Three months of Brock’s quiet footsteps on the hardwood, his coffee brewing at five-fifteen before his shift at FCI Beckley, his voice through the walls saying morning,

kids like they were teenagers crashing in his basement instead of married adults who’d failed at making him a grandfather.

Victoria pressed her palm against her belly. Flat. Always flat.

Joey’s voice drifted in from the living room. “Babe, you see my laptop charger?”

“Check behind the couch.”

“Checked.”

“Then I don’t know.”

She heard him mutter something, followed by the sound of couch cushions being upended. Joey was always losing things. Keys, wallet, the future they’d been trying to build for four years now.

Four years.

The fertility specialist’s office had smelled like antiseptic.

Dr. Harmon, a woman with kind eyes and a way of delivering bad news like she was reading a weather report, had spread the test results across her desk.

Mr. Carter, your sperm count is significantly below the threshold for natural conception. We’re looking at severe oligospermia.

Victoria had watched Joey’s face go slack. Watched his accountant’s brain try to calculate the odds, the costs, the reasons why his body had betrayed them.

That had been January. By March, they’d sold their apartment in Huntington, packed their lives into a U-Haul, and pointed the GPS toward Beckley.

Toward Brock’s three-bedroom ranch house with its American flag on the porch and the weights in the garage.

Toward saving twenty thousand dollars for a single round of IVF.

She hated the hormones. They made her feel swollen and strange, made her breasts ache and her moods swing like a pendulum on greased hinges.

Every morning she swabbed her thigh with alcohol and pressed the needle in, the plunger resistance telling her this is for the baby, this is for the baby, this is for the baby.

The screen door slammed.

Victoria turned from the sink just as Brock filled the kitchen doorway, still in his correctional officer uniform, the dark fabric stretched across his shoulders.

Fifty years old and built like a man who’d spent thirty of them refusing to soften.

His dark hair was buzzed short, his jaw sharp, his gray eyes finding hers with that easy warmth he’d shown her since the day Joey had brought her home four years ago.

“Hot one out there.” He rolled his shoulders back, shaking off the physical weight of the shift. “How you feeling, Vicky?”

“Fine.”

He gave her a look. The look that said he’d spent decades reading people who lied to him.

“The injections,” she admitted. “Headache. A little nausea.”

Brock nodded slowly, pulling a glass from the cabinet. His forearm flexed with the motion, and Victoria’s gaze caught on the line of muscle before she pulled it away. “You want me to make dinner tonight? Give you a break?”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Didn’t ask if I had to.”

Joey appeared in the hallway behind him, laptop charger dangling from his hand in triumph. “Found it.” He looked between them, brown eyes tired behind his glasses. “What’d I miss?”

“Your dad’s cooking tonight,” Victoria said.

Joey playfully grimaced. “God help us.”

“I heard that,” Brock said, already grabbing a pan.

Victoria forced a smile. The hormones made it feel like a mask.

—

The embryo transfer happened on a Thursday in late June.

The fertility clinic was in Charleston, a two-hour drive through the green rolling hills of West Virginia.

Joey held Victoria’s hand the whole way there, his thumb tracing circles on her knuckles.

He’d taken the day off work. So had Brock, who was driving them in his truck, his presence a steady quiet in the front seat.

“You nervous?” Joey asked.

“Terrified.”

“It’s gonna work. I can feel it.”

She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe the way she’d believed on their wedding day, when Joey had stood at the altar with his brown hair combed back and his eyes wet, and she’d thought this is it, this is the beginning of everything.

The procedure itself was clinical and quick. Dr. Harmon used a thin catheter, guided by ultrasound, and Victoria watched on the screen as the embryo—their embryo, created from her eggs and Joey’s sperm in a petri dish three days ago—was deposited into her uterus. A bright dot against the gray.

“Bed rest for the next two days,” Dr. Harmon said. “Then we wait.”

The two-week wait.

Victoria had read about it on the forums. Women called it the TWW, speaking of it like a season in hell. Every twinge became a sign. Every cramp, every moment of fatigue, every trip to the bathroom accompanied by the terrified check for blood.

She spent the first three days on the couch in Brock’s living room while Joey worked remotely from the kitchen table. Brock brought her tea and magazines and didn’t comment when he caught her crying at a diaper commercial.

“You need anything,” he said, “you holler.”

On day five, she felt a flutter in her lower belly and spent an hour convinced it was implantation. She called Joey over, pressed his hand to her stomach, watched his face light up with hope.

“You think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

They started talking about names.

Joey liked traditional ones. Michael, Elizabeth, Sarah. Victoria wanted something that felt like possibility. River. Sage. Autumn.

“We’re not naming our kid after a season,” Joey said, but he was laughing, and she was laughing, and Brock stood in the doorway watching them with something unreadable in his gray eyes.

Day ten. Victoria peed on a pregnancy test she’d hidden in the bathroom cabinet. Her hands shook as she waited the three minutes.

Negative.

“It’s too early,” Joey said when she showed him, his voice steady in the way she’d come to recognize as forced. “The trigger shot can mess with the results. We have to wait for the blood test.”

“I know.”

“It’s too early.”

“I know, Joey.”

She threw the test in the trash and didn’t buy another one.

—

Day fourteen.

The blood draw happened at eight-fifteen in the morning. The nurse, a different one this time, had cheerful scrubs with cartoon storks on them. Victoria watched the vials fill with her blood and imagined them carrying the answer she’d been waiting for her entire adult life.

They waited in a small room with a box of tissues on the side table. Victoria wondered if that was standard or if they’d been put in here specifically because Dr. Harmon anticipated tears.

Joey’s knee bounced. Bounced and bounced and bounced until she put her hand on his thigh to still it.

“Whatever happens,” he started.

“Don’t.”

“Okay.”

The door opened.

Dr. Harmon’s face was neutral, professionally arranged. Victoria had gotten good at reading medical neutrality over the past six months, and she knew the answer before the woman opened her mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Harmon said. “The embryo didn’t implant.”

Victoria heard the words. They registered somewhere in her brain, a clinical notation. Embryo. Didn’t. Implant. But her body understood before her mind did, because she was suddenly shaking, her chest was caving in, and a sound came out of her that she didn’t recognize.

Joey’s arms were around her. His voice in her ear. “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’ll try again, it’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay.

None of it was okay.

The ride back to Beckley was silent. Joey reached for Victoria’s hand as he drove. She let him. She didn’t squeeze back.

When they got back to the house, Brock was waiting for them. When he saw Victoria’s face, he didn’t say anything at all.

The house felt smaller that night. Every room closed in, the walls breathing with disappointment.

Victoria changed out of her clothes into an oversized t-shirt and sweatpants, then sat on the edge of the guest bed—their bed now, in the room that still had Joey’s high school trophies on the shelf—and stared at nothing.

Joey came in with a glass of water. Set it on the nightstand. Sat beside her.

“We can try again.”

“Twenty thousand dollars, Joey. We spent twenty thousand dollars.”

“We’ll save up again.”

“That took us three years the first time. And we had an apartment. We had—we had our own life, and now we’re here, and it still didn’t—”

Her voice cracked. She pressed her palm against her mouth.

Joey’s hand found her back. Rubbed small circles. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know it’s not my fault.” The words came out sharper than she meant them to. She saw him flinch. Saw the guilt flicker across his features, the guilt he’d been carrying since that first doctor’s appointment, the guilt that made him agree to the move, to the savings, to everything.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Don’t be.”

But the distance was there. It had been there for months now, a gap between them that they kept trying to bridge with baby names and hopeful ultrasounds that never came.

Joey went downstairs around nine. Victoria heard the fridge open, the clink of bottles. She stayed in bed, listening to the ceiling fan turn its lazy circles, feeling the ache in her body that the hormones had left like a bruise.

When Joey came back, he smelled like beer. Four, maybe five. His movements were loose, his eyes unfocused. He collapsed onto the bed beside her, one arm thrown across her waist.

“Love you,” he mumbled.

“Love you too.”

Within minutes, he was snoring.

—

Victoria lay there, her husband’s dead weight pinning her to the mattress, and felt the resentment coil in her chest like a snake.

She slipped out of bed at eleven-thirty.