“Of course I do,” I say, surprised she would ever think otherwise. “You’re incredible. The strongest person I know.”
She gives me a soft smile and then returns to chewing on her bottom lip. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Anything,” I say. And I mean it. I’d tell her my deepest, darkest secrets if she asked. Anything to make her mine.
“That night in ... Ivan’s office,” she says, avoiding referring to him as my father. “He gave you a choice.”
“My family or the bitch,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“And you chose your family.” Bella looks up at me, her blue eyes wide and searching. “What did you mean by that?”
“Honestly, I didn’t think about it at the time,” I say. “He called you a bitch and then wanted to refer to himself as my family, and I wanted to show him that he wasn’t my family. Not anymore. Not after what he’d done.”
“Oh.” Bella shifts in her chair, folding her napkin in her lap. “Okay.”
“But,” I continue. “I’ve realized in the two weeks since that I was choosing my idea of family over his. My father taught me that family was nothing but blind loyalty and devotion no matter what. He taught me that he was my family and the only person I could count on. But I learned that family was more than that. Is more than that. Family isn’t about blood or loyalty. It’s about love and choice. My father chose money over me, so he isn’t my family.”
She blinks quickly, her eyes glassy. “And what did you choose?”
I tip my head to the side. That answer is easy. I smile at her. “I chose you.”
Immediately, tears spill out of her eyes, and I’m so unprepared for it that I start and then slide around the table to sit in the chair next to her. “Bella? What’s wrong?”
She laughs through her tears and wipes at her eyes with the palms of her hands. “Nothing. Everything is perfect.”
I wipe a stray tear from her cheek and grab her chin, lifting her face to mine. “Then why are you crying?”
Her lower lip trembles and more tears start to come. It takes me a moment to realize they’re happy. She shrugs. “The hormones?”
My forehead wrinkles as I stare at her, trying to understand if she’s saying what I think she’s saying. When her eyes glance down to her stomach nervously, my heart clenches.
“Are you pregnant?”
Her smile is almost a wince as she nods. “I just found out this morning. Are you mad?”
I grab her hands and bundle them in my own before bringing them to my chest. “Mad? How could I be mad?”
She’s staring at me like I’m a mythical creature. “Because it’s unplanned and unexpected and a kid is a huge responsibility that will change everything, and we haven’t even decided what we are to one another, so throwing a kid into the mix feels crazy, and—”
I wrap my hand around the back of her neck and pull her to me, silencing her worries with a kiss. She’s stiff for a moment before she sinks into it, sighing against my mouth. When we pull away, she looks dreamy.
“None of that matters,” I say, drawing my thumb down her cheek. “Besides, I know what you are to me.”
She raises a dark brow. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, pulling her close again, rubbing my nose against hers. “You’re my family.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Bella
Three Months Later
I pinch the fabric around my waist and sigh. “There’s no way this is going to zip.”
Ivy laughs and rubs her hands together. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, my friend. And I have a will.”
“And I have a growing human taking up residence in my abdomen,” I say, turning to the side to study my small bump in the mirror.
“Didn’t you just get the dress fitted three weeks ago?”
“Yeah, but the baby was a pomegranate then. Now it’s a banana.”
Ivy scrunches her face in confusion. “Wouldn’t a banana be smaller? Slimmer?”
“I don’t know. That’s just what my pregnancy app says, and regardless, this dress is way tighter than it was three weeks ago. Even if I get it zipped, I’ll squish the baby.”
Ivy circles around me, lips twisted to the side. She looks killer in her deep purple bridesmaid dress. Since she’s the only bridesmaid in my rushed wedding, I let her pick it out herself. I wasn’t much up to dress shopping between bouts of morning sickness. The hem reaches to a respectable mid-thigh, but the cut of the top is daring. If she doesn’t go home with one or more of Yuri’s brothers, it will be a miracle. “I don’t think you can squish a baby. It’s all protected in there.”
“How would you know?” I ask. “You’ve never been pregnant.”
“Neither have you,” she says. “Before now, obviously.”
She waves away my eye roll and claps her hands. “Okay. No time to waste. Suck it in, girly. We have a groom waiting for us.”
I suck in and hold while Ivy coaxes the zipper up my side, over my hip, and miraculously, to its resting place beneath my armpit. I’m in.
“You’re in,” she says, breathing a little harder than I think is necessary. Then she steps back and immediately begins to tear up, her hands coming up to cover her mouth. “And you look gorgeous.”
There’s a knock at the door and then my dad steps in. “You two ready? The ceremony is about to start.”
I’m grateful for his presence, thinking he’s about to save me from getting emotional with Ivy, but then he sees me and stops in his tracks. He runs a hand down his cheek and shakes his head. “Bells. Oh my. You look—”
I hold up my hand to stop him. “I spent an hour on my makeup. We can’t ruin it.”
“We’ll let Yuri ruin it later,”
