Page 47 of A Baby Surprise For My Billionaire Boss

He was not the father she would have chosen, in spite of her feelings for him.

And yet… She thought of the good moments. The way he had panicked the day she’d met him, when he’d thought he had lost Charlie. The way he had taken to Charlie’s bedtime routine inorder to be a part of the process of putting his son to bed. Maddie couldn’t help but love those things about him. If only she believed those were things her child would be able to have…

Eli had made his choice clear, though. When it came to him, work came first. Before family. Before anything. It always would.

And that left Maddie with a terrible question.

What was she going to do about this baby?

And for that matter, what was she going to do about Eli?

CHAPTER 18

MADDIE

“Ineed to speak to you.”

Eli looked up from his computer. “Now?”

“Yes, now.” Maddie had spent the last twenty minutes trying to summon the courage to come into the office and talk to him. She wasn’t about to wait any longer than necessary.

“I thought you didn’t like talking to me late at night.” He looked pointedly at the clock, which read eleven forty-five.

“And you also know that I would happily talk to you in the middle of the day if you were ever around then, but you’re not. It’s got to be eleven forty-five.”

He let out a sigh.

Maddie felt awful. This wasn’t at all the way she had wanted this to go. “I don’t want us to fight,” she said. “I want to have a conversation with you without it turning into a fight. Can’t we do that?”

“I don’t know if we can. It hasn’t seemed like it lately.”

“Eli, please. I just want to have a conversation with you. Surely we can do that.” They were in for a rough time if they couldn’t, Maddie thought. This was going to be one of the most important conversations of her life. She had imagined it many times before walking in here, and she had envisioned several possible outcomes, but one thing she hadn’t allowed herself to think was that the two of them might spend the whole time sniping at one another. God, wouldn’t that be miserable?

“Sit down,” Eli suggested.

“So we can talk like normal people?”

“Yes, yes.”

She lowered herself into a seat, feeling anxious and uncertain. She wouldn’t have known how to begin a conversation like this one with her most trusted friend, let alone this man she could barely stand to talk about the weather with.

“What’s on your mind?” Eli asked her.

Maddie swallowed hard. Maybe the best thing to do was simply to jump into it. “I have to tell you something,” she said.

Suddenly, she found she had his attention. He was looking right at her, an expression of concern on his face. “Is this about Charlie?”

“About Charlie? No.”

“You seemed so serious. I just thought it must be about him.”

That made sense, she supposed. “Everything’s fine with Charlie.”

“Then what’s going on? It can’t be that big a deal, if things with Charlie are okay.”

If only that were true.

If only she could simply agree that it wasn’t a very big deal, get up, and walk out of here without any more damage to either one of them.

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