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He was in a bedroom at his father’s place.
He took a few deep inhales as he dragged his hands down his face.
“Jesus fuck,” he whispered shakily. He snagged his cell phone off the charger next to the bed and hit the side button to light it up.
Two am.
A soft cry came from the corner of the room temporarily turned into a spare bedroom. His head twisted in that direction and he cursed Google for being right. Babies ate a fucking lot.
He groaned and kicked off the bedding.
He’d gotten shit sleep for the past three nights. He was fucking exhausted and he hadn’t even gone to work all week.
How could babies be so fucking exhausting? They slept, shit and ate. That was it.
He rolled out of bed with another groan and, without even looking in the thing Cassie called a bassinet, he headed out the door and into his father’s small galley kitchen.
He automatically went through the motions of preparing a bottle and making sure the formula wasn’t too hot, then he bare-footed it back to the room.
Yep, she was still crying, but now sounded pissed.
“At least I’m not the only one fuckin’ annoyed,” he told her as he placed the bottle on the little table next to the bed and went over to scoop up the baby.
Who the fuck would want to have a kid on purpose? He felt like a slave to this baby.
He carefully climbed back on the bed with the baby now wrapped in one of the baby blankets Stella had dropped off, along with some other shit.
Both Cassie and Stella had given him pointers, cooed over the baby, then left with smirks on their faces as soon as they could.
They both had also voted no on naming the baby Duchess or Harley. He agreed with them on the first, not on the second.
He settled the infant against his chest and grabbed the bottle. She already started to “root” against his bare skin. They said it was a sign she was hungry.
He had thought the sign was all the crying she did.
He stroked the baby’s cheek with his fingertip to let her know the bottle was coming, then tucked the nipple between her little pink bowed lips. Thank fuck she latched on immediately this time. He tilted the bottle up to avoid the air the women warned him about. Once she was sucking strongly, he sighed.
He was tempted to lean his head back and close his eyes. But if he did that, he knew he’d be out instantly, especially with her warm body snuggled against him.
He needed to keep his mind active and awake. He wedged her into the seam of his thighs, bending his knees slightly, and with one hand on the bottle to keep it in place, he snagged his phone with the other. He placed it on his thigh next to her and scrolled through his email until he spotted one he hadn’t noticed the last time he fed her.
What the hell? How had he missed that?
Exhaustion, that was fucking how.
His heart lodged in his throat and a ringing filled his ears as he read the subject line. Paternity Results for Baby Dietrich.
Baby Dietrich.
Fuck.
His gaze bounced from his phone to the nursing baby, who stared up at him as her little lips were busy.
“Christ, monkey, this is it. What I’m about to read decides what happens to you from here.”
His finger hovered over the lab’s email. He closed his eyes, took a breath, then when he opened them, he tapped the email and it popped up to fill his screen. He skipped all the bullshit at the top, the column with the heading child, the column with the heading alleged father, and each column consisting of a bunch of numbers called alleles...
Then found the most important part. What he needed to know.
What they all needed to know.
What would determine this baby’s future. His, too.
The unbearable pressure in his head began to throb.
Thanks to Reilly, he heard Maury Povich’s voice as his brain deciphered what his eyes skimmed over, which was the interpretation at the very bottom in bold:
Probability of Paternity: 99.9998%
He blinked and read it again, just in case he misread it. Then the little voice in his brain said, “Hey, it’s not one hundred percent! There’s still a slight chance she’s not yours.”
Right?
He could ask Google if that was true, but he’d asked the search engine so many damn questions in the last few days that the Google lady was no longer speaking to him.
He pushed the button on the side of the phone, anyway, hoping the Google lady had at least one more answer for him for a very important question. “Google, now what?”
Of course, the only answer he got was silence.
He guessed it was better than hearing, “You’re fucked,” in an emotionless computer voice.
