Page 16 of Bedding the Baby Daddy

Cedalie sat back, her silver black hair settling over the large purple sweater she wore. She tucked her feet, clad in mismatched socks, underneath herself and looked out the window. “If you keep the baby, you have to tell the father. It’s bad energy to keep a man from his offspring.”

Aurora swallowed down the bitterness in her throat. “I know.”

She knew that her mother’s only regret over the way that Aurora was conceived was that Cedalie hadn’t been sure who the father was. It had happened during a wilder time. When she wasn’t sure of the names of the men she took to bed, and she damn sure wasn’t sure how to contact them again.

Cedalie turned back to her daughter. “But you damn well better be sure you have your ducks in a row before you do. You need to know that man inside and out before you tell him.”

“What? Why?”

“A man that rich? A man who gets what he wants? There’s no telling what he’ll do if he does or doesn’t want the baby. You need to be ready. Prepared. And you can’t prepare if you don’t know him.”

“You’re telling me to get closer to him?” Aurora heard a tinny ringing in her ears. Her heart was leaping, both from nerves and from something else she couldn’t quite identify.

“If you’re keeping the baby, you owe it to yourself to know this man. If he’s someone who will take the baby from you, then you need to have the legalities in order. If he’s someone who will try to convince you not to have the baby, then you need to have an escape plan. If he’s someone who will want to raise the baby with you, then you’ll have to know him well enough to know if you want it. Pregnancy is a vulnerable time. You need to be armed with information. And a good plan.”

Aurora’s head was spinning. “I thought you were going to tell me to come home and move in with you. Or convince me it was time to move back to New Orleans.”

“No, child. You have untied strings with this man. You tie them up. And then we decide where we live.”

Aurora tilted her head back on the couch. “And what about Gio?”

“What about him?”

Aurora lifted her head at the dismissive tone in her mother’s voice. “I just go on pretending I don’t love him?”

Cedalie reached forward, picked up the tea from the coffee table and shoved it back in her daughter’s hand. “Time tells, daughter. You feel your feelings and time tells the truth.”

* * *

Dante half-heartedly sank a spoon into his portion of ice cream and tried not to wince at the cotton candy flavor in his mouth. He was more of a chocolate chocolate chip sort of guy. But anything for Michelle. She was sitting next to him at the breakfast bar, swinging her socked feet and humming to herself as she worked her way through her half of the carton.

“Dante, I think you need to start doing yoga,” she said out of the clear blue.

He blinked at his little sister, his eyes instantly going wide with humor and surprise. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, in that authoritative way of hers. Her messy hair fell in front of her face and for a moment, her eyes, exactly like Dante’s, were blocked. She brushed it away. “It’s proven to help with stress.”

“I’m not stressed.”

“Pffft.” She rolled her eyes. “Then how come you’re always going running at the butt crack of dawn? You only do that when you’re stressed.”

He leaned over and brushed the hair out of her eyes himself, chuckling at her choice of words. “I’d say you need a haircut, but you’re already seeing too much as it is, kid.”

“So I’m right?”

“About the stress or the yoga?”

“The stress.”

Dante eyed his sister, her little frame in the too big shirt, her face so much like their father’s. It never failed to be like a dagger in the heart when he saw that man staring up at him out of Michelle’s face. When he’d taken her in, he’d promised himself that he’d never do anything the way their father would. And what would their father do right now? He’d lie. So Dante scrubbed his hands over his face and tried to think of a way to tell the truth to a way too intuitive ten-year-old.

“Yeah. I’m stressed. I’ve been messing things up at work lately.”

“Why?” She not-so-surreptitiously dug into his half of the ice cream.

“I’ve been distracted.”

“Because of the woman you’ve been sending flowers to?”

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