Page 101 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“What the fuck is a BYOO party?”

“Bring Your Own Opinion.”

“That’s not a real acronym. You just made that up right now.”

“Doesn’t matter if I made it up. It still applies to you.”

“I showed up, didn’t I?” His nostrils flare. “It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact, because I’m standing right here.”

Maddox snorts into his glass. “Yeah. A week later, asshole.”

“You know I had every intention⁠—”

“Again.” Maddox sets his drink down hard enough that it rattles against the table, and he’s on his feet, squaring up to Killian like the two of them are thirty seconds from throwing actual punches. “Get off the fucking cross, Killian.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Killian doesn’t back up an inch. “Stop whining that you had to be more of an adult than usual for once and think about someone other than yourself for a change.”

“Excuse me?”

“Is there a single person in your life you haven’t let down eventually? You’re the most indignant excuse for responsible I have ever met.”

“At least when I let people down I don’t pretend it’s a strategy. You went dark for eleven days and called it protection. I’ve never once dressed up running as a virtue.”

“You ran to Milan.”

“I ran to New York to get her parents’ entire criminal history into a file because somebody had to actually do something instead of just sitting on a board call deciding who gets to know what and when.”

“I was deciding how to take Evelyn off that board permanently without burning this estate down in the process. Forgive me for not consulting you on the timeline.”

Wait. What?

I don’t have time to ask, don’t even have time to fully register the sentence before everything else swallows it whole. The two of them are talking over each other now, voices stacking on top of voices, and Asher’s saying something I can’t make out over the noise, and the room feels smaller than it did thirty seconds ago, the air thick and close, every sound too loud, the three of them folding in toward each other like the whole suite’s shrinking around us.

“You guys.” Asher’s up too, drink abandoned, trying to wedge himself between them with both hands raised, and the room is getting loud, voices climbing over each other, the air pressing in close, and something in my chest finally gives out.

“I’m pregnant!”

The room goes completely silent.

All three of them stare at me.

I’m not entirely sure if I screamed it or just said it too loud, but judging by the look on every single face in this room, I’m fairly sure it was somewhere closer to the former, and it is absolutely not how I planned to say it.

37

HARPER

Nobody moves.

I’m fairly sure I just blurted out the single biggest sentence of my entire life to three men who were seconds away from throwing punches over a vineyard board seat, and now all three of them are just staring at me like I’ve started speaking a language none of them studied. Killian’s still got his jacket and tie balled up in one fist, forgotten. Asher’s hand is still half raised from where he’d been trying to wedge himself between the other two. Maddox hasn’t moved at all, frozen mid-step toward the table like someone hit pause on him specifically.

The silence has a texture to it. I can hear the ice shifting in Maddox’s abandoned glass, the low hum of the refrigerator somewhere behind me, my own pulse thudding loud enough in my ears that I half expect one of them to be able to hear it too.

I can’t watch this. I can’t stand here and wait to see which one of them walks out first, so instead I do the only thing my body seems willing to do, which is keep talking.

“Errgh.” I bury my face in my hands for one full second, then slide them up into my hair, smoothing it back before crossing my arms over my chest like that’s going to hold me together. “I’ve always taken my pill religiously. Even when I wasn’t having sex, and let’s just say I’ve been having more sex this summer than I have in my entire life put together, but I was still taking it. Or at least I thought I had been. I’m not totally sure how far along I am, but based on my blister pack I missed a week somewhere, and we’ve been going at it almost every single day, either one on one or all of us together, so no, I didn’t suspect I was pregnant, because I thought I’d gotten my period. It was just lighter than usual. Lasted maybe a day. I figured it was stress messing with my cycle. I haven’t really been nauseated, or if I have been I didn’t think much of it, but I took a test the morning after Midsummer and. Yeah. I’m. Uh. Pregnant.”

None of them say anything.