Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes (Surprise Baby Daddies #17)

Harper

The marble is cold under my bare feet and I've been pacing this bathroom for so long that I've memorized every vein in it.

Cream and gold and white. Soft luxury lighting that makes everything look expensive and forgiving. The kind of bathroom that exists in a life I didn't grow up in and don't technically belong to.

The kind of bathroom where a girl like me absolutely should not be taking a pregnancy test.

I glance at my phone on the counter. The timer is still counting down. Two minutes and forty-three seconds left and I'm going to lose what's left of my mind before it goes off.

I resume pacing.

My reflection catches in the mirror every time I pass it and I look insane.

Hair in a messy bun, mascara I didn't wash off last night still smudged faintly under my eyes, wearing an oversized sweater and absolutely nothing else because it's barely seven in the morning and I woke up nauseous again and my body apparently decided that today was the day we were going to stop pretending everything was fine.

Everything is not fine.

I spin at the wall and pace back the other direction.

Three weeks ago I slept with three men in one night.

Not sequentially. Not accidentally-ended-up-in-the-same-bed-once. Not a misunderstanding that can be chalked up to wine and poor lighting and a complete lack of moral infrastructure.

And then I kept doing it. Not as some isolated, forgivable lapse I could file away and never repeat.

As a pattern. As an actual, ongoing, four-person situation that has somehow become the realest thing in my life, three weeks of falling asleep in one suite and waking up in another and never quite making it back to my own bed before someone's hand finds my waist and convinces me to stay.

I knew exactly what I was doing every single time, and I kept doing it anyway, because apparently the universe decided that my life hadn't been interesting enough after the job loss and the parental disaster and the cross-Atlantic relocation.

Apparently what I needed was a relationship so spectacularly complicated that there's no version of this where I come out looking like the reasonable one.

Two minutes, eleven seconds.

“Okay,” I say out loud to no one, because I've been talking to myself for the last twenty minutes and at this point it's the only thing keeping me from sitting down on the bathroom floor.

“Okay. So. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's stress.

Maybe my cycle is just completely wrecked from the time zone change and the emotional whiplash and the fact that I haven't eaten a full meal without feeling sick in almost two weeks.”

My reflection stares back at me.

She doesn't look convinced.

“Or maybe,” I continue, stopping in front of the mirror, “maybe you're a complete and total idiot and you should have kept your feelings and your body and your increasingly terrible decision-making skills to yourself and literally none of this would be happening right now.”

My reflection nods slightly. Or maybe that's just me nodding. Hard to tell.

I press both hands flat against the cool marble edge of the sink and breathe.

One minute forty seconds.

Here's the thing. Here's the actual thing, the one I've been circling around since I woke up this morning and sprinted to the pharmacy in the village before anyone in the main house could see me: if I'm pregnant, and that is a massive if that I am not ready to confirm, it might not be the apocalypse.

It depends entirely on who the father is.

Because here's where the math gets genuinely interesting.

Asher. If the baby is Asher's... okay. That's complicated.

He's Sophia's godfather. He's forty-six years old and built like the universe spent extra time on him and three nights ago he made me a grilled cheese at midnight when I couldn't sleep and sat across the kitchen island from me and listened to me talk about nothing for two hours.

He looked at me the whole time like I was saying something important, the same way he looks at me every single time, which is part of the problem.

If Asher is the father, Sophia is going to need some time.

A significant amount of time. Maybe a year.

Maybe several. But she would come around. Eventually. Probably.

Maddox. If the baby is Maddox's, it's still complicated.

He's also Sophia's godfather and forty-eight years old and he flirts like it's involuntary and he made me laugh so hard at the festival that wine came out of my nose and he didn't even flinch, just handed me a napkin and kept talking, and he's been finding reasons to touch the small of my back at least once a day ever since.

Maddox as the father is a crisis, genuinely.

But it's a survivable crisis. Sophia would be horrified.

She'd scream. She'd probably cry a little.

But Maddox is Maddox and even Sophia knows that Maddox has always operated at a frequency that's completely his own.

There's a universe where Sophia eventually forgives me for Maddox.

And then there's Killian.

One minute, two seconds.

Killian Thorne. Billionaire. Vineyard owner.

The man who commands every single room he walks into without raising his voice or trying.

The man with the muted green eyes and the silver at his temples and the tailored suits that make my brain malfunction on a consistent basis.

The man who looked at me across a crowded wine festival three weeks ago and made me feel like the only person in southern France, and who has been quietly, deliberately unable to keep his hands off me ever since in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with being subtle about it.

Sophia's father.

Her actual biological father.

I would like to formally file a complaint with whatever cosmic entity is responsible for the fact that the most inconveniently attractive man I have ever encountered in my entire life is my best friend's dad, and that I have spent three consecutive weeks doing absolutely nothing to fix that particular problem.

If the baby is Killian's, I'm not dealing with a crisis.

I'm dealing with a biblical event. I'm dealing with Sophia Thorne learning that her best friend has been sleeping with her father, on purpose, for almost a month, and is now carrying his child.

I'm dealing with a conversation that I cannot even begin to script in my head because every version of it ends with Sophia looking at me like I'm a stranger.

I've been ignoring this particular possibility for going on two weeks now.

Telling myself I'm being dramatic. Telling myself the nausea is anxiety and the exhaustion is just what happens when you're sleeping in three different beds and none of them are technically yours, and the way my body feels wrong and hypersensitive and weirdly tender is just stress finally catching up to me after everything that happened in New York.

I've been lying to myself with impressive commitment.

But I also know myself. I know my body. I've been taking care of it entirely alone since I was sixteen years old, and somewhere in the last week my body started sending me a message I couldn't keep ignoring no matter how good the distraction was.

So here I am. Marble bathroom. Seven in the morning. Pregnancy test sitting face-down under a folded piece of tissue on the counter, like I can somehow change the result by not looking at it.

Thirty seconds.

“It's fine,” I tell my reflection. “Whatever it is, it's fine. You've survived worse. You survived your parents showing up at your office. You survived getting laid off. You survived moving to a different continent with basically nothing. You can survive this.”

My reflection looks like she's considering pointing out that none of those things involved potentially being pregnant by three men at once, three men who happen to currently be the most stable, consistent, devoted relationship she's ever had in her entire life, but she keeps it to herself.

Twenty seconds.

Okay so here's the other thing. The thing underneath all of it.

I actually want a baby. Someday. I've always wanted a family, a real one, the kind that stays and shows up and doesn't disappear the second things get hard.

The kind I didn't have growing up. The idea of having something that's mine, someone who is mine and who I get to love without conditions or manipulation or strings...

But not like this. Not now. Not three weeks into the strangest, best, most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me, with three men I still don't have a clean word for and a relationship nobody outside this estate would understand if I tried to explain it.

Not when I'm still figuring out where I belong in it.

Ten seconds.

I stare at my phone.

Nine.

Eight.

I think about the wine festival. The lights strung through the vineyard.

The way that night felt like it existed outside of regular time, like the normal rules had been suspended for approximately twelve hours, and I'd made every possible use of that suspension and then, somehow, never quite found my way back to the normal rules afterward.

Three weeks ago I came as each man came with absolutely zero restraint and apparently zero regard for consequences. And I've been doing some version of that almost every night since.

FUCK.

Three.

Two.

One.

The timer goes off.

The sound fills the bathroom and I stand completely still for three full seconds, hands still braced on the sink, staring at the folded tissue on the counter.

Then I reach out and lift it.

I look at the window.

I feel the room clutch its pearls.

Because there are two lines. Clear, unambiguous, deeply committed to ruining my morning, two lines.

Positive.

My brain offers me exactly one coherent thought in the silence that follows.

She's going to burn my Louboutins.