Page 37 of Forking the Billionaire

But Jasper didn’t deserve to loseallof his clothes. Just his left socks.

He also didn’t deserve all of the space in my head I’d allowed him. It was a hostile takeover, and I didn’t care for it.

When he’d shown up at breakfast, I should have ignored the fluttery feeling in my stomach. No, I should have ignored him altogether. And I never ever should have agreed to help him find his luggage.

Why did I do this kind of thing to myself?

To balance a bad decision with a good one, I slipped off after breakfast while everyone got ready for the day’s outing.

And I peed on a fistful of sticks all at once.

Then another.

Then one handful more.

My bladder empty, my hands shaking, I spread the tests across the kitchen counter and set timers on my phone.

The seconds relentlessly stretched into an eternity. The distortion felt like the universe mocking whatever courage I’d thought I’d mustered. My heart pounded in my ears until the thumping ran together in a high-pitched ring that drowned out the sounds of the sea in my backyard.

No matter what the test showed, my situation wouldn’t change. It would be whatever was already happening with my body.

I tried to relive the positivity I’d felt on the beach before breakfast, when I’d imagined a mini me building sandcastles on the shore. But even when I pictured her, when I ran through the memory, I couldn’t manage the same feelings.

What if the tests were all negative and then there was no mini me? Even though that was what I thought I wanted, what if that meant I was destined to be alone forever with no one to truly understand me?

What if the test was positive but I didn’t get a mini me? What if I got a mini…whoever the father was? A complete stranger. What if mini-stranger questioned every single choice I made?

My stomach twisted and threatened to shoot my breakfast straight up into my mouth.

Then the alarm went off, or at least the first of them. My stomach froze, too terrified to spew. Saved by the bell, or damned by it, or both, or neither. I didn’t know what to think. I only knew I had never been so afraid of anything in my life.

I sucked in a sharp breath, let the air linger in my lungs until it burned, and checked the results.

Positive.

Okay, that was just one test. It didn’t mean anything, not when twenty-six other tests could be negative.

The alarm went off again. I checked the second test.

Positive.

I felt numb as the next alarm went off and the next. All twenty-seven tests, including the fancy ones and the shoddiest ones from the dollar store, came back with the same result.

Pregnant.

Any hope of a misunderstanding or mistake slowly evaporated from my brain, leaving only the certainty that this was real. It was happening to me.

I was going to have a baby.

Hey, look at that, I could say the actual B word. At least in my head. There was no reason to get carried away just yet.

Baby, baby, baby, baby.

I made my way back to the resort, loaded up in one of the cars with Morgan and Layana, and directed the driver to an unnamed secret spot on the island that was my own private hideaway. I hoped Layana and Gabe would appreciate the uniqueness of it and choose it as the venue for their ceremony.

During the drive, I’d have probably been freaking out over what Gabriel would think of my hideaway if I wasn’t so distracted. But…I was havinga baby.I didn’t even throw up in my mouth thinking it. I, Esme Stryker, was going to be the mother of a tiny human who would grow up into a real live person with their own hopes and dreams.

In accepting reality, I felt a strange certainty. I knew exactly what I was going to do. Against all odds, my one-time hookup while using protection had resulted in something extraordinary.

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