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Now it was Jonah’s turn to sit up. “You were looking for someone boring?” He couldn’t imagine someone like Emma wasting her life with someone like that.
“Not boring. More like...responsible. Respectable. The kind of man you’d be happy to take home to your parents.”
“You mean the opposite of me?”
“No!” she insisted. “Well...not exactly.”
Jonah tried not to be offended. He knew he wasn’t the clean-cut lawyer or investment banker some parents wanted for their daughter. “Do your parents know you’re having my baby?”
Emma shook her head. “They don’t even know I’m pregnant yet.”
“Emma! How could you keep that a secret?”
“Easy. I assure you that it was far simpler to avoid my parents than to tell them I’m pregnant but don’t know who the father is. And I didn’t until a week ago. Listen, my parents are very overprotective of me. My sister ended up being an embarrassment to the family. I was just a teenager when she died and my mother was constantly on me not to make the same mistakes Cynthia made. So I guess I’ve been more worried about pleasing them than pleasing myself. It wasn’t until my ex said those horrible things that I gave myself permission to rebel for just one night.”
“And look what happened!” Jonah said jokingly, but he could instantly tell by the pained expression on Emma’s face that she felt exactly that way. He was used to scandal, but he sensed that Emma was out of her element with this entire situation. He opted to change his tactic. “Listen, I’m sorry about all this, Emma. I certainly didn’t expect you to suffer permanent consequences from our night together. At least outside of the tattoo. I know how you feel—”
“How could you possibly?” she interrupted.
“Well, you might be surprised to know that my parents were very conservative and very strict. I wasn’t allowed to do anything. Me and my younger brothers got sent to a boarding school in England when my father died. I only had a year or so left, then I returned for college. There, I realized that I could live my life the way I wanted to, and everything changed for me. I think my professional success is due in part to my rebellious management style. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it really worked out for me.”
“And what does your mother say about how you live your life?”
“She said plenty at first, when she thought I still cared. Then she realized I was a grown man, a CEO of my own company, and she finally let it go. At least until Thanksgiving rolls around. It wouldn’t be a family holiday without Angelica Flynn putting her two cents in.”
“I don’t know that it will ever be that easy with my parents. Once they lost Cynthia, I was all they had left. I’ve never wanted to disappoint them.”
Jonah put his arm around Emma’s shoulders. “I don’t know how you could possibly disappoint anyone.”
Emma brought her hand to her stomach and rubbed the small bulge there unconsciously as she stared off across the expanse of his loft. “They won’t be happy about the baby. My mother has been waiting years to put together a huge society wedding for me. Cynthia died before she could get married, so I’m her only chance to be the mother of the bride at an outrageous affair at The Plaza Hotel. You don’t have a big affair like that when the bride is obviously pregnant. And there’s no hope of a wedding at The Plaza, or otherwise, when the baby is the result of a one-night stand and they have no intention of marrying.”
There were a lot of things about Emma’s pregnancy that he really hadn’t taken into consideration until now. He’d only thought about how fatherhood would affect his life, not hers. Not really, and that was stupid and selfish of him. “Will your parents insist you get married?”
Emma shrugged. “They can try, but they can’t force you into it. My father doesn’t own a shotgun, so you’re safe there. I’m certainly not going to force you into it. The pregnancy was a mistake. I’m not going to compound it by demanding that we add a marriage into the mix.”
The last few days with Emma had changed a lot of the ways Jonah looked at the world. Once, long before she walked through the doors of FlynnSoft, Jonah told himself that if he ever found his butterfly, he wouldn’t let her go. That hadn’t entirely changed when he realized Emma was his fantasy woman. When he saw her, he saw a future without a line of women outside his door. Yes, he would absolutely stand up and be a father to their child, but for the first time in his life, Emma made him consider more—more than this cold, empty loft, trysts with random actresses and lonely nights working late at the office.
The idea of coming home after work to a nice, comfortable apartment and spending time with his very own family was suddenly more appealing than it had ever been. Having a family was something he’d never put much thought into, perhaps just because at heart he was still a teenager rebelling against his parents at every turn. As a grown man with a child on the way, things were different.
But it didn’t sound like a future together held the same appeal for Emma. “You don’t want to marry me?” he asked.
She turned to look at him with wide green eyes. “No, I don’t.”
Jonah had never asked a woman if she wanted to marry him before, and although it wasn’t really a proposal, he was a little hurt by her blunt rejection. “Why? Am I not good enough to be your husband?”
“Of course you’re good enough,” she chided. “It has nothing to do with that. Despite the fact that we’re having a child together, we hardly know each other, Jonah. That’s why. We agreed to give the relationship time to develop and see what—if anything—happened, and I’m fine with that. If one day, you decide you’re truly in love with me and want to marry me that will be completely different. But I’m not going to rush things because of an artificial ticking time bomb that ends with this kid entering the world. My mother and her dreams of a big Plaza wedding will have to just be dreams.”
* * *
Emma had hoped that the weekend would clear her mind and she could return to work Monday ready to wrap up this project at FlynnSoft. Instead she found herself just as baffled by the discrepancy in the financials as she was the week before. If her calculations were correct, and she’d checked them three times, someone had taken out three million dollars without logging the expense properly. The money had been transferred to an offshore account she couldn’t find any record of, nor did it have any relation to the corporation that she could find. It looked very fishy. And yet who would be foolish enough to steal such a large amount? Someone was bound to notice it.
This was the part of Emma’s job that she didn’t like. She had to tell the CEO that someone was stealing from him. Then she had to hope the finger didn’t point back at Jonah himself. He had that right, she supposed—it was his company, after all—but it wouldn’t look good. Then, worst of all, she had to report it back to Game Town, where the stodgy owner would likely pass on the contract. This wasn’t going to end well for anyone but the creep who made off with three million.
With a heavy sigh, Emma picked up her phone to call Mark, one of her coworkers at the firm. She needed some advice on how to handle this so she could make certain she wasn’t letting her relationship with Jonah cloud the issue. Mark had been doing this job for twenty years and had seen it all. He would know what to do.
“Hey there, Emma,” Mark said as he answered. “How’r
e the crazy kids over there at FlynnSoft?”
