For some reason, Margie’s words hit Diana like a lopsided punch.
“Come on, I’m hungry, and now I apparently have another mouth to feed,” Diana quipped, the truth of her own words poorly masked behind humor. She grabbed her purse, unlocked and opened the door, and led a strangely silent Margie to the bank of elevators. “Margie…” she began, desperate to get Margie’s mind off of her predicament (the last thing she needed was Margie getting her fingers all up in her problems). “Just give me time to think about this, okay? I just learned about it not more than ten minutes ago. I need time to process this before I try to get anyone else to process it, too. I’ll tell him when I am ready, but I will tell him.”
Margie sighed, meeting Diana’s pleading gaze.
“Fine. I’ll drop it. But you’d better make me the godmother of this little bundle,” she declared, her lips in a pout.
Diana chucked, looping her arm through Margie’s.
“Of course.”
Chapter 10
The next day Diana returned to her desk after a meeting with Ayers to find a stack of books on her desk. Startled, she dropped the folio of depositions beside her laptop and stared down at the cover of the book on top.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
She sucked in a breath.
“Margie,” she muttered, panic rising into her throat. Diana glanced up, her eyes frantically searching for anyone who could have seen the books and rightly guessed their purpose. “Fuck.” She raced to the office door and shut it, then returned to her desk and picked the book up, intending to stow it in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet until she could find some way to smuggle it out of the building without anyone seeing it.
As she lifted it, the cover flipped open, and an inscription caught her eye.
“For the best mommy in the whole word. Love ya, girl!” It was signed, Auntie Margie, and Diana couldn’t help the smile that lifted the sides of her mouth. Lord, that woman was going to drive her to fits. What was she thinking leaving the books where they could be discovered?
What if Ayers saw them? He wasn’t the kind of boss who pried into his employees’ private lives, but she couldn’t take the chance that he’d start connecting the dots—no matter how widely spread they were.
Distracted by her thoughts, she placed the book down and picked up the next one.
Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy.
She tipped her head, rereading the title. She’d never heard of that one, not that she’d spent much time cruising Amazon.com for pregnancy books. She traced the title with a trembling finger, her thoughts racing and stalling at the same time. She’d spent the night before wearing sweat pants, her threadbare Flinstones Rock Vegas t-shirt, and comfy socks. Instead of the glass of wine she’d usually be nursing, she settled for a mug of green tea—which later, after finally looking up first-time pregnancy online, she learned was a no-no. Caffeine was on the list of banned pregnancy foods. The guilt came quickly after that, and the tears began in earnest, and then the headache from all the sobbing, but then she couldn’t take her usual headache medicine because it was basically caffeine with a hit of Advil, and so she ended up lying on the couch in her bedroom, hiding from her concerned mother, an ice pack on her forehead, while she watched on-demand episodes of A Baby Story.
As she watched the stories unfold on screen she experienced horror, terror, disgust, mystification, and then awe. She’d cried some more, then gave up staying awake. That morning, though, she couldn’t stop the images from the night before from forming; newborns wrapped in their mother’s arms, the mother’s smiling down. Love glowing from them as a beautiful beacon. The baby’s father standing near, peering down at his child with love on his face. The hope, the fear, the elation… Each father had worn a similar expression. Would David?
She had a little human being growing inside her. She would, in two hundred and sixty-six days, meet her baby. Her child. The life she created during a night of passion with a man who could reject her claim that he was the father. That’s how it usually went with men as rich and powerful as him. He probably had dozens of false paternity claims each year, and she was just another on that list—to him she would be, anyway. But hers wasn’t a false claim; she knew he was the father.
But he didn’t need to know…did he?
Of course, he needs to know. The child deserves to know both of his or her parents, even if one of those parents doesn’t give a shit.
But that wasn’t fair. She had no way of knowing what kind of father David would be. Maybe he would believe her. Maybe he’d asked for a paternity test, and since it would prove her claim, he’d welcome his baby into his life.
And that’s when the internal struggle began. Tell David and risk being called out as a liar and losing her job at his best friend’s law firm, or not tell him, and live the rest of her life a single parent. Or, she could tell him and it would all work out for the best.
Needless to say, she didn’t get much sleep, so when she finally pulled her big girl panties on and headed to work, she wasn’t even the littlest bit ready to find those books on her desk.
Blindly, she reached for her desk chair, descending into it slowly, her gaze pinned to the word “pregnancy” on the cover of the book in her hand.
A knock on her door jerked her from her troubles and she snatched the books, slammed them onto her lap, and then slid herself behind her desk to
