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Dr. Kyler chuckled. Xavier looked even more shocked.
“I—Christ.”
“Not showing yet,” the doctor remarked, nodding at my still-flat stomach as she started to move the wand around a little. “To be expected.”
I flinched, watching a screen full of what looked like static. It didn’t hurt exactly. But it was…intrusive.
“Is that bad?” Xavier asked, eyes now glued to the screen as well.
“Sofia was the same,” I told him. “Started small too. Don’t worry. In another month or two, I’m going to look like I swallowed a basketball.”
“Not quite that big,” Dr. Kyler said with a distracted smile. “More like a grapefruit. You didn’t really pop until almost the third trimester, if I remember correctly.”
“Well, my boobs certainly have. They already look like I’m breastfeeding,” I joked.
Xavier’s eyes darted briefly to my chest before moving back to the screen as Dr. Kyler focused more on what she was doing.
I giggled, earning another flash of humor and a crooked smirk from Xavier that warmed something deep in my chest. He still didn’t smile much and hadn’t at all since we broke up. It was kind of funny seeing him so tied up in his emotions, overwhelmed and in the dark, and slightly turned on all at once. It was basically how I felt around him always, so it was about time we were even.
“There we are,” said Dr. Kyler, as she finally held the wand still. “Let’s see…yep, there’s your little peanut, growing like a weed.”
She pointed a finger toward the screen, and Xavier and I both followed, riveted by the flickering image. In the middle was a black triangular area, and within that were the clear, discernible shapes of a head and body. It wasn’t much, but it was moving. And almost certainly alive.
“One second…” Dr. Kyler murmured as she moved the wand around again. “Yes, there it is.”
She pressed a few buttons on the machine, and a rushing sound filled the room, something like wind whispering through cattails on a windy day in Central Park. The even, hushed call of a fetal heartbeat.
Beside me, Xavier stiffened as if he’d iced over.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
Without thinking, I offered my left hand to Xavier, which he swept between his in an iron-tight grip. I squeezed his fingers, but he didn’t move his gaze from the screen as we listened to the heartbeat and watched Dr. Kyler take a few measurements.
“My God,” he finally managed. “It’s—there it is. It’s—she’s—he’s—fuck, the baby is really coming, isn’t it?”
I could understand his shock, if that’s what you could call it. It was an intense experience, hearing the heartbeat for the first time. When I heard Sofia’s, I almost fainted. It made her a fact in my life, rather than a dream. Something very real. And very scary.
“Yeah, hon, it’s real,” I told him with a smile. “And in about seven more months, they’ll be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life.”
He looked down at me then. “I doubt it.”
I ignored the way the warmth in my chest bloomed into a heated ember. Honestly, when Xavier Parker flashed his baby blues that way, a dead woman would have blushed. It really wasn’t fair, pulling bedroom eyes on a pregnant woman pumped with hormones.
Xavier turned back to the screen, as rapt as a fortune teller looking at a crystal ball. “Can you—could you tell the sex already? Is it a boy? Is that it’s—Christ, he’s really packing, isn’t he?”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Could you be more of a man right now?”
“That’s the beginning of a leg,” the doctor said with the dry patience of someone who has explained that difference at least a thousand different times to a thousand different fathers. “We won’t be able to determine the sex for another ten weeks or so.”
Xavier offered us both a lopsided smile that made my heart squeeze. “Ah. Well, can’t blame a bloke for wishful thinking, can you?”
“Do you want a boy?” I wondered, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
For some reason, the idea that he would prefer a son bothered me. Maybe it was the fact that as a duke working hard to protect his estate, he would need a male heir to carry on the title under the laws of primogeniture.
Of course, that would require us to be married too, which, at this point, was completely out of the question. Xavier hadn’t mentioned the big pink ring once since I’d turned him down, and I’d pretended that horrible proposal hadn’t even happened.
I also pretended the idea of it never happening didn’t render me nauseous in a different way than morning sickness.
