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“It’s only fair since your mom loves me.”
And she did. I had been worried at first that she wouldn’t approve, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. We got along better than I ever could have anticipated. She had only been so harsh that night in her penthouse because she had anticipated that I’d be overwhelmed and upset by bad press—like what had happened with thePostarticle—and she was genuinely worried She didn’t think I could handle the pressure and stress that went along with dating someone in the public eye.
She’d told me one day that she had never been more grateful to be wrong. “You’re the perfect person for my son.”
I’d cried again.
I was always freaking crying, it seemed.
My parents went back to Boston, and Joseph’s mom got ready to leave for her trip, signing paperwork and notarizing things to make Joseph’s role in the company official.
And when we dropped her off at the airport, where she boarded a private jet, I asked out loud, “How do you pack for something like that?”
She only had one suitcase and one carry-on bag. One of each!
“Knowing her, I’m sure she’ll just buy everything she needs when she gets there,” Joseph said, his arm wrapped around me as his mom got on board after telling us good-bye.
“How do you feel? Are you okay?” I looked at him, wondering if he felt abandoned, or free, or sad. Maybe it would hit him later that his mom wasn’t around. I knew that it would be an adjustment of sorts.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Should we tell her I’m pregnant?” I asked, and he shushed me, his finger instantly over my lips.
“She’ll never leave then. She’s so excited to leave. Look at her,” he said, and I went to argue but couldn’t.
She looked so happy, so ready for her adventure that I didn’t want to take that away from her.
Plus, we’d been disagreeing over how to handle this subject since the morning we’d found out I was expecting. It was all the crying. I couldn’t stop anymore. A commercial with a kitten? I was bawling. A social media post about a military dad surprising his daughter at school? I was bawling. A deer befriending a puppy? You guessed it—bawling.
“She is never going to forgive us,” I said, referring to us keeping the news from her, not the news itself. His mom was going to be over-the-moon excited about a baby.
“She will. We just need to tell her in a few months—after you’ve passed the first trimester and we have a due date. That way, she can decide if she wants to be here for the birth of her first grandchild or not.”
I looked at him and stomped my foot. “Of course she’ll want to be here!”
He kissed the side of my head. “I know. That’s why we wait. So she can live a little first before coming back here.”
“Fine, but when we finally do tell her, you’d better let her know it was your idea to make her wait, not mine.”
“Deal,” he said with a grin as the stairs started folding up into the plane and his mom waved at us from her seat at the window.
We both enthusiastically waved back, like we were the ones going away and not her. The plane started to pull away, maneuvering toward the runway in the distance, and I stood there in Joseph’s arms, leaning against him, feeling safe and at peace.
“I can’t believe you let me put a baby in you,” he said against my head, my hair sticking to his lips before he brushed it away.
We still weren’t sure what had happened orhowwe had gotten pregnant in the first place. I mean, of course we knew how it’d happened, but we had been safe every time we had sex—always using condoms, even when we didn’t want to. One of them must have torn or had a hole in it or something. There was no other explanation for how I’d ended up this way.
“I can’t believe you wanted to burn off your baby-maker to see if I could fix it,” I said with a laugh, and he groaned.
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Never,” I added with a smile.
I was pretty sure I’d never stop smiling as long as this man was by my side. He was going to be an incredible father. An unbelievable dad.
And I was the lucky woman who got to make him one. All because of a fake arrangement that had turned into something more. Way more.
The End
