Pregnant in an Open Marriage (Before the Due Date #1)

1. The Incubator

Chapter one

The Incubator

Bella Monroe favored a bright red lipstick that didn’t smudge. I knew that, because right then it was smeared down the length of my husband’s cock.

I stood frozen in the dark of the cabana’s bathroom, the door cracked an inch, my eye pressed to the gap. The air was thick and hot. It smelled of chlorine and cedar, and underneath that, something I didn’t want to name.

Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Whatever you do, Maeve, don’t make a sound.

Through the gap, they were perfectly framed in the main room.

Elliott had his back half-turned to me, his trousers shoved to his thighs.

Bella knelt on the tile in a sundress the color of a traffic cone.

His fingers were buried in her bleached hair, and his hips moved in a way I hadn’t felt from him in months.

“Fuck, yes,” he snarled, his voice sharp and ugly. “Take it deep. God, your mouth. Feels amazing.”

The baby kicked. Hard, right under my ribs, like she knew.

Stay still, baby. Please. Stay still for me.

I clamped my hand over my mouth and pressed until my breath went hot against my palm.

I’d come here to surprise him. An hour ago, standing at our kitchen counter wrapping sandwiches in wax paper, I had told myself a marriage was a thing you could fix with lunch. Roast beef for him, turkey for me. The bag still sat warm on the bar cart out in the main room.

The girl at the front desk had waved me through with a smile, no questions.

A pregnant wife was the most invisible thing in the world.

I’d found his cabana easy enough and let myself in to wait.

Then I’d slipped into the bathroom to check my hair.

Even bringing a peace offering, I’d wanted to look like something worth coming home to.

That was when the main door opened. Two voices. His, and a woman’s, easy with each other. The bolt sliding home. So I’d eased the bathroom door to a crack and stayed behind it. And now I knew exactly what my husband had been hiding.

“That’s it,” Elliott breathed. His hand fisted in Bella’s hair, guiding her. “God, just like that.”

I bit down on the inside of my cheek. The pain gave me something to hold onto. I tasted blood and kept biting, because a sound would change everything. A sound meant I’d have to open this door. I’d have to stand in the wreck of the room with my belly out to here and let them look at my face.

So I watched instead. I didn’t let myself look away.

Some cold part of me wanted every second of it on record. Later he’d smile at me across the kitchen and call me ‘crazy’. I needed absolute proof.

So I burned it into my memory. The freckle on his lower back I used to kiss. The watch I’d given him for his thirtieth, still on his wrist. The low filthy things he said to her, in a voice he hadn’t used with me since before the baby was even a hope.

His breath hitched, his grip twisting tighter. With a ragged groan, he pulled back and jerked on his own cock—once, twice, three times. An instant later, he came. His cum landed on her chin and cheeks. And still, that unsmudgeable red stayed perfect.

My hands were fisted so tightly my knuckles ached, the tension pulling taut through my forearms. A wave of nausea rolled over me.

Bella opened her eyes. She wiped her thumb along her lip, slow, like she had all the time in the world. She didn’t seem to mind that she had semen splattered across her face.

“Better than the incubator at home?” she asked with a smirk.

The incubator.

I had been called a lot of things in twenty-eight years. Never that. It should have hurt, and maybe it did. Or maybe not. I honestly couldn’t tell, not anymore.

Elliott laughed. It was easy and warm, the laugh he used on clients.

“Don’t be jealous of a uterus.” He reached past her for his shirt, unbothered, already half somewhere else.

“I’m not jealous.” Bella got to her feet, smoothing the dress over her hips. “I just want to know when this becomes a real thing. When she’s out of the picture.”

When she’s out of the picture. That was me. I was the picture. I was the thing being cropped.

“You knew the situation when we started.” He started buttoning the shirt, the same one I’d ironed just this morning. “Let me clean up. Give me a second.”

He turned toward the bathroom, and a spike of panic flared in my chest.

Move. Move now.

I backed away from the door on socked feet, slow, praying I wouldn’t slip on the tile. The tub sat in an alcove at the back, half-screened by a frosted glass panel that ran most of the way across it. It wasn’t a wall. A suggestion of one. It would have to do.

I eased in over the lip of it and lowered myself against the cold porcelain. I pulled my knees up as far as the belly would let me. Through the frosted panel the bathroom blurred into smears of light and shape. I was a blur too, from his side.

As long as he didn’t really look, he might not see me. My pulse hammered in my ears, so frantic I irrationally feared the sound of it would give me away.

The door swung open, and light spilled in. Elliott crossed to the sink. His shape went sharp and solid at the edge of the panel, close enough that I could smell him. Sweat, Bella’s perfume, the cologne I’d bought him last Christmas.

I held my breath and pressed both hands flat to my mouth.

The tap ran. He splashed his face and hummed something tuneless as he tore a paper towel from the dispenser.

If he stepped around the panel, if he came looking for a second towel, it was over.

He’d find his pregnant wife folded into a bathtub.

I had no idea what would happen then. But somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be good.

He held all the power here, and the thought of what he might do if he found me cowering behind the glass terrified me.

He didn’t step around the panel. Men like Elliott never check the corners. The world had always arranged itself for him.

“I know what I told you, Elliott, but we can’t keep hiding like this.” Bella’s voice carried in from the main room, sharp now. “I’m tired of squeezing into your lunch breaks.”

“Don’t worry, baby.” Elliott balled up the paper towel and dropped it in the bin by the tub. “I have a plan. Tonight, I’m going to ask her to open our marriage.”

My breath hitched. An open marriage. I’d never once imagined he’d suggest something so cold.

“An open marriage.” Bella let out a harsh, genuine laugh. “She’ll go for that?”

“She’ll go for anything that keeps me around.” He leaned both hands on the sink and studied himself in the mirror above it. His shape loomed through the frosted glass, just a distorted, unfamiliar outline. He was a careless turn of the head away from finding me.

“I’ll wrap it up nice,” he continued. “Tell her it’s about honesty. Tell her it makes me a better, calmer father. She cries, she signs off, and by the time the baby comes, I’ve got room to do whatever I want.”

Whatever I want. He said it like a man reading a wine list.

“And the open part goes both ways?” Bella called in. “What if she takes a hall pass of her own?”

That stopped me cold in the tub. It was a good question. I hadn’t even thought it yet, and the mistress had asked it for me.

Elliott snorted and pushed off the sink.

“Have you seen her? She’s the size of a parade float, and she cries at dog commercials.

Who’s lining up for that?” He walked back out toward Bella, and his voice went with him.

“She won’t use it. She wouldn’t dare. That’s the whole point.

I get the permission, she gets to feel evolved, and nothing in my life actually changes. ”

“And if she says no?” Bella asked.

“She won’t. But if she does, I act hurt. Tell her I’m the one trying to save us.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Pregnant women feel guilty about everything. Trust me. I know my wife.”

I almost laughed, folded into that cold tub. Because he didn’t know me. He’d built a whole picture of me. Frightened, grateful, small. He’d gotten so pleased with the picture that he’d stopped looking at the woman in his house.

And forty seconds ago, God help me, he might have been right.

He wasn’t right anymore.

“Come on.” He held the main door for her, gallant, a gentleman seeing a guest out. “I’ll walk you out.”

Don’t move, Maeve. Just wait.

They left through the main door. The bolt slid back. Bella’s heels clicked away across the pool deck. Elliott’s laugh trailed after her, and then the gate slapped shut.

I made myself count to thirty. Then I counted to thirty again. Once I was satisfied they wouldn’t be coming back, I gripped the cold edge and hauled myself up.

My knees had locked from the crouch, and a deep ache flared in my lower back. I carefully climbed out over the lip of the tub and gripped the edges of the sink until I felt steady again. Then I pushed the bathroom door fully open and stepped out.

The cabana was wrecked. A towel was balled on the floor. Two glasses sat on the low table, one of them ringed with that red. The whole space reeked of sweat and the cheap vanilla she wore.

I picked up the lipstick-stained glass without even thinking.

Held it up to the light. The print was perfect.

A whole crescent of her mouth pressed against the rim, the same red that had been smeared down my husband twenty minutes ago.

I wanted to squeeze the glass until it cracked, but my hands felt completely hollow.

Just like I didn’t have the strength to face Elliott. Not just yet.

I set the glass down exactly where it had been, and that small act of control put a floor back under me.

I waited to cry. It seemed like the thing a body was supposed to do here. I even reached for the feeling, the way you press a bruise to check it’s still there.

It didn’t come.

His careless words came rushing back. “God, just like that. Don’t be jealous of a uterus.”

The grief hit me, sharp and sudden, but my mind couldn’t make sense of it. A part of me was still suspended in the sheer shock of the moment.