Chapter Nineteen
Isucked in a loud breath, falling back against the closed door to the bathroom. “Fuck!”
Adam stared at me wide-eyed. “I’m sorry, did I scare you?”
I glared at him, folding my arms over my chest and resting my back against the bathroom door. “No, I’m just working on a new way to greet you.”
His mouth curved and an eyebrow twitched up.
My eyes narrowed. “Did you seriously do that on purpose?”
He shrugged lightly. “Maybe a little. Payback, ya know.”
I grabbed a handful of his t-shirt and balled it up inside my fist in a faux-threat. “I’ll give you payback, you dork. That last time I wasn’t even trying to scare you. You just startle easily, like a gazelle on the savanna.”
He pulled me into his arms, leaned down to kiss me. “I do not startle easily. You’re just too stealthy. Like ninja-level stealthy.”
“Hmm well there were twenty-two years where you didn’t know me. I could have done some secret ninja training in Nanda Parbat with Shado and Talia al Gul.”
“Exactly. You have superpowers. The power to startle even the least startle-able man. The powers of bullet-fast snarky comebacks. The powers of seduction...”
My brow twitched up. “There won’t be any seduction right now. You’re safe. I’m actually starving.”
He grinned. “Okay, food first, seduction later.”
I patted him on the chest and sent him a smirk. “Gotta earn that, my friend.”
Adam pulled out the food—a cold platter tonight and nothing terribly fancy. And though I wasn’t experiencing nausea, it was always safer to go with a light meal just in case. This would hit the spot and quell my hunger without being too much. It’s almost as if Chef knew...
Adam, of course, had to comment on it. “Wow, crunchy dinner tonight. Organic hummus and homemade whole wheat pita bread. This is picnic food.”
“Is it not floating your boat?” I tilted my head at him as I grabbed us some plates and silverware. “We still have some of that fresh sourdough bread from yesterday. I think there’s some left-over roast beef that she sliced up for sandwiches, maybe—”
He shrugged. “If I’m still hungry, I’ll fix myself a sandwich. No problem.”
It was a warm enough evening, so we set out the food on the table in the covered porch.
And the entire time, my mind was racing frantically trying to think of some special way to tell him our big news that wouldn’t require so much preparation, since I was dying to just spill the beans.
Before drifting off on that impromptu nap, I’d found a video on TikTok that showed a woman with notes stashed all over her body and instructions for her partner to cut clothes off of her to reveal notes that led to other notes, right down to taking off her shoes and then using a nerf gun to pop a balloon which revealed the positive pregnancy test.
Oh damn, the pee sticks. Where had I even stashed those? In my blur of finding the news and then going off to work, I frankly had no idea. Had I trashed them right in the bathroom? If so, that was dumb of me, and I hoped that Cora hadn’t done the wastebaskets today. Or maybe I’d just left them on the sink and if that was the case, then maybe she already knew—and by extension, Chef and the gardener and maybe just about anyone else who happened to pass by the house.
Hell, maybe half the city of Newport Beach already knew. Wouldn’t that just suck—if I somehow managed to keep the news while preparing something elaborate—for him to find out from someone else?
By the time we sat down at the table, I was a seething pile of anxiety. Especially when Adam pulled out a bottle of wine and two wineglasses to go with it. It was a bottle of wine that we’d had shipped to us from Italy.
I looked up, frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“You know I’m not drinking these days.” Or for the next nine months.
He hesitated. “Oh, yeah, crap, sorry.” He shrugged self-consciously. “I just thought that since we aren’t actively trying that you could have a glass. I haven’t uncorked the bottle yet. We can have it some other time.”
I stared at the bottle. What if I found an empty wine bottle and put the pee sticks in it and floated it onto the beach so he could find it, like a message sent in a bottle?
I could document it with cute pictures and put it on Instagram.
Now where to find an empty bottle—and where to launch the damn thing so that it would wash up on our beach? Fuck, was I truly considering calling an oceanographer to aid in my plans for breaking the news to my husband that he was going to be a father?
When I finally looked away from the bottle and back at Adam, he wasn’t eating. He was staring at me with a highly concerned look on his face. “Are you okay?”
I blinked and rubbed my forehead. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
“More than a little tired. I found you on the couch dead to the world an hour ago. You usually don’t nap that hard. You were making this little snore I’ve never heard before. It was cute.”
I dabbed a little olive tapenade onto a dry water cracker. “Lies, every last word. I don’t snore, have never snored, will never snore.”
“Maybe I was imagining things then.” He winked and sent me a grin that flashed that dimple. That damned dimple that had magical panty-dropping powers over me. God, my husband was so fucking handsome that it stopped me in my tracks on a regular basis when noticing it.
Lucky, lucky me.
Except for when he made false claims that I snored. But for now, I’d let that pass, because he was pretty. And because he was going to be a daddy and he didn’t even know it yet.
Adam turned back to his plate and began piling things on it—cut sections of pita bread, roasted red pepper hummus, a few olives. I bit into my cracker and chewed again before spearing a couple thin slices of cold turkey and some Swiss cheese for my plate.
“You know, when I was going over my calendar with my assistant today, I realized that I have nothing on my schedule at the end of the year.”
I blinked. “Wow, that’s a miracle.” And providential, really, considering that his—and my—lives were about to completely change right around that exact same time.
“Yeah, and since we both loved Venice so much, I was thinking we could break away and go back, depending on your schedule. They have some big celebrations for New Year’s with fireworks over the lagoon and parties. If you like the idea, I can reach out and book the place we stayed at last year—”
“Uh, yeah don’t do that yet.”
His brow quirked. “Oh, okay. No time off, or you don’t want to celebrate New Year’s like that?”
I froze, thoughts racing. Some kind of excuse—I needed something to put him off making plans for New Year’s. My mind sped through possibilities, and I blinked, confused, and, strangely, a little panicked as well.
Adam frowned, concern clouding his features.
“Emilia, you’re starting to worry—”
“I’m pregnant,” I blurted, eyes bulging wide at the shock of the news exploding from my lips when all my best-laid plans were just that...plans. I honestly didn’t even have any of those, either. Just ideas swimming around inside a mire of anxiety that was my current mental state.
Adam’s expression didn’t change in the slightest during the longest five seconds of my life. Then his brows pinched together. “Are you—”
“Yes, I’m sure. Two positive pee sticks and a blood test sure.”
He blinked. “How long have you known?”
So apparently, I hadn’t left the tests out where he could discover them. At least that was some small relief after the fact. The news was out now, and I didn’t have to think up some cute, fun or crafty thing to document for social media—or future generations.
“Since yesterday, just before I went to work. I ordered up a blood test to confirm and have been stressing out about how to tell you ever since.”
Now it was just a story about how silly I was—to plan and stress about how to tell him in a way that was so totally not us. And then, only to be thwarted by a propensity to blurt things unceremoniously.
The Clydesdale had already left the barn. No need to shut the door after it. I bit my lip, fidgeted, and stared wide-eyed at Adam, waiting for his reaction, hoping, maybe even crossing my fingers or some other superstitious nonsense.
Adam stared at a space on the table just in front of his plate, both hands resting just on either side. He didn’t even blink—kind of looked like a robot scrolling through possible responses as they popped up on his inner menu. It took long minutes before appearing as if he finally remembered how to breathe. First, he blinked, then his fingers twitched, and then, the statue he’d become slowly came back to life as if someone had just stuck a magic hat on his head and called him Frosty the Snowman.
He shook his head. “This is...wow.”
“Are you okay?” I blinked.
He ran a hand through his hair and had that weird sort of shell-shocked look on his face. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. More importantly, how are you?”
I bit my lip quickly. “I’d be better if you didn’t look like I’d just shot you in the nuts with a paintball gun again.”
He laughed then got up from the table and came around to my side. I popped up and he pulled me into his arms and kissed me.
“So, you’re okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m tired but that’s probably just the on-call hours. And I have to pee a lot. That’s about it.”
He shook his head. “When—?”
“Well—you’re not going to believe it.”
“Sometime around the end of the year, obviously, given your reaction to the New Year’s suggestions.”
I nodded. “The online calculator set the due date as December 25th. So yeah, definitely don’t make any elaborate plans for the end of the year.”
He pulled me into a tight hug and held me for a long time. I rested my chin on his shoulder and waited. He obviously needed time to process this.
I was sure that when the time came for him to be able to talk about it, he’d say something thrilling and romantic and give us a memory we’d savor, maybe even laugh over fondly in years to come.
I pictured us driving back from dropping off our kid at college, turning to each other tenderly, holding hands and cherishing the moment we first found out we were going to be parents over eighteen years before...
“Well, I guess this means we don’t have to go back to baby-making sex. That’s a relief.”
I should have known better, honestly. Oh, Adam.
Sigh. Well, between my blurting and his less than romantic rejoinder, we were being so typically us, weren’t we?