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Maybe he’d been wrong about where he and Victoria were headed. He’d been wrong before. His ex-wife, Trish, had been wrong for him, but that had been a tumultuous relationship from the beginning. They fought angry and fucked angry. It wasn’t a healthy relationship and certainly not one he wanted his kids to see. Seeing how scared their daughters had been after a loud fight had been one of the key factors in his decision to move forward with the divorce. They’d tried marriage counseling, but it had been ugly. Andrei had had a series of low-key one night stands since his divorce, but nothing too serious. He broke things off if he thought that they were going somewhere. He was just too busy to deal with stuff like this…like Victoria refusing to work things out.
“Maybe we should take a break from each other,” she said. “This all has happened so fast. Maybe we need a few days to figure it out on our own first.”
How was separating going to help them work this shit out? He didn’t say it, because he wanted her to know this was her decision. Even though he fucking hated where it was leading.
“I don’t want that,” he said. “You have to know that’s the last thing I want.”
“I need it, Andrei. Give me a few days to find my head and get back into everything. Then we can talk.”
“A few days. That’s it.” She started to protest, but he held up his hand. “A few days, like you said. You’ll know by then. You have to.”
“You sound so sure,” she said.
“I am.”
The silence between
them stretched until it almost became a living thing that he could see. He wanted to chop it off with a damn axe as he waited for what she’d say next.
“All right,” Victoria finally said. “Just give me a few days, and then we can talk.”
He nodded even though he knew those few days were going to feel like lifetimes.
It wasn’t over, no matter what decision she came to. He wasn’t going to ever let Victoria Bellamy go, even if he had to storm in that fucking District Attorney’s office and drag her back to his place kicking and screaming. He’d give her a few days, and if she didn’t make the right decision, he was going to be there to remind her that there was only one decision to make, and he was it.
Chapter 13
Victoria
Victoria tried to get all her crying out before Deedee arrived the next morning, but she was still doing it when her friend rang her doorbell.
“Are you ready to go?” Deedee asked when she opened her door. Then she noticed her wet face. “Oh, honey.” She hugged Victoria tight. “Pregnancy isn’t that bad. I promise, and you may not even be pregnant.”
She didn’t have the energy to tell her friend that it was so much more than that. She also left out the fact that she’d gone to the nearest pharmacy and convenience store to buy three pregnancy tests.
She’d downed so much water and diet tea to pee on those damn sticks, all three of them. She was positive she wasn’t the first woman to cry on the closed toilet after reading the same three results. Positive. That was a joke in itself. Positive wasn’t a happy thing to celebrate when she wasn’t even sure where she stood with the baby’s father.
Andrei was a woman’s dream: rich, confident, and sexy. He was one hell of a good lawyer, going by his track record. She could have just accepted him having kids and stayed with him, but she couldn’t. What he’d done felt like betrayal in the worst way.
Her ex-boyfriend had betrayed her, too. Sure he cheated and blamed her for spending too much time on cases. It was a different type of betrayal, but what Andrei had done still hurt her.
“Let’s go before I depress the hell out of both of us,” she said after pushing away from the hug.
She had a lot of respect for Deedee by the time they got to the doctor’s office. Her friend talked the entire time, but she didn’t demand Victoria’s undivided attention or response, almost as if she knew mindless chatter about nothing was needed to lessen the stress of the situation. It was refreshing to get lost in someone else’s drama for twenty minutes without having to be an active participant.
Victoria signed in and filled out the necessary paperwork that was almost long enough to distract her from the reason why she was in the doctor’s office in the first place. She sat and fiddled with her phone while Deedee talked her ears off and kept her company in the sterile waiting room with magazines that were probably a couple years old.
When they finally called her name, she asked for Deedee to come back with her. Yeah, she was strong enough to put on her big-girl panties and be the strong woman she was when she was a prosecutor, but she didn’t want to be strong. She needed all the support and help she could get at the moment, and she could see Deedee’s appreciative smile as they went to the back together.
The doctor was an OB-GYN specialist named Dr. Jacob James, and Deedee was right. He was a prominent doctor. Victoria couldn’t have chosen better on her own. Considering that she normally thoroughly researched every major decision, that was saying something.
Still her trained mind had taught her not to trust too easily. Victoria had prosecuted enough idiots to make that a personal rule, but she’d also had problems trusting most people. That’s why Andrei surprised her. She’d trusted him easily, which wasn’t like her at all.
The nurse came in and took Victoria across the hall, where she had her blood drawn, provided them a urine sample, and got on the dreaded scale to get her weight, which was already higher than she thought it was. Already she wanted to go home and crawl back into bed, but she forced herself to stay put. She’d never run from anything in her life, and she wasn’t running from this.
“Ms. Bellamy,” the nurse said, “I’m going to need you to undress and put on this gown. Then sit back on the examination table.”
Deedee gave her a moment to change, standing with her back to Victoria and looking at some sort of horrifying diagram that explained the parts of the uterus. That gave her a minute to collect herself before she wound up having a crying fit in front of the doctor.
