Page 53 of The Prince's Green Card Scheme

CHLOE

Paolo has left me alone in my room for the day while he runs around trying to get everything ready for his parents to come home. He’s clearly nervous. He keeps fretting and sticking his head in to check that I’m okay, running up and down the stairs as if there’s something he can do to make this go more smoothly. I hope he doesn’t blame himself too much if it doesn’t.

There’s only so much he can do. If his parents don’t want this to go well, then it won’t.

For his sake, I hope it does.

I slept in his bed all last night, cuddled up close to his body, breathing in his warm scent. I’ve missed it. Maybe it was a mistake for us to have made love like that, but nothing about it felt like a mistake.

As he’s said multiple times, technically I’m his wife. And in actuality, we’re adults. We can do whatever we want with our bodies.

And I really liked doing what we did last night. A thrill runs down my spine as I think of it.

A thrill that’s quickly followed by a rush of nausea up my throat. I clutch my stomach, trying not to gag. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just nervous. Maybe Paolo’s anxiousness is rubbing off on me. It doesn’t need to.

The idea of meeting his parents makes me feel sick enough already. Literally, it seems, this morning.

When we woke up, we made an action plan. We’re going to face this together. We’re going to pretend that we’ve known each other for months, and we’re going to stick to the truth as much as possible. We met in the bar where I worked. We hit it off. We had some fun. We got married. By choice.

That doesn’t exactly explain the month and a half where he didn’t speak to me, but we’ve agreed to pass that off as him being confined to his quarters here at home if anyone questions it.

No matter how many times we run through the cover story, though, I’m still terrified that it’s going to go wrong. I don’t know how they’ll see through it, but if they do, I don’t think my acting skills are good enough to come back from it.

The thing I’m sure they already know about is Paolo’s ridiculous fake passport scheme. They probably know that our marriage is basically a sham, but we’re not here to try and prove the legality of our wedding. I’m just here to support Paolo, to help show his parents that he’s not the boy he was when he left.

The goal of this dinner isn’t to try and show that his idea was good, or that his way back into the country was the proper one. The goal is to prove that I’m someone who chose to marry him of my own free will because I wanted to, and we like each other for reasons other than titles or money.

What can possibly go wrong?

There are only hours to go until the big event. That thought makes my stomach lurch again, and this time the sickness is too much.

Retching, I run to the bathroom, stumbling to the toilet, where I promptly eject the contents of my stomach.

This is so humiliating. In all the times I’ve been nervous before, I’ve never actually thrown up from it. I usually get shaky and a little sick, but nothing this bad.

Then again, maybe nothing I’ve ever been stressed about before has had so much riding on it. I’ve never had the power to ruin someone else’s life before.

Thinking about it, I woke up feeling sick, like my whole body was swollen and lethargic. I put it down to our night of fun, but now a horrible thought is tickling the back of my mind because there’s no way I’m old and inflexible enough to feel this achy after a few hours of sex.

So… what if the sickness has another cause?

My hands shaking, I try to think of the last time I had my period. I can’t quite place the date… but no matter, we’ve used protection every time.

And then horror rises in me as it dawns on me. That night, the night we consummated our marriage. We didn’t use protection.

I guess we consummated it the good old-fashioned way.

I throw up again.

There’s a knock on my door. “Hello?” calls Maria. “Chloe, are you in here?”

My only response is to retch. Maria rushes to the bathroom and stands in the doorway, watching me kneeling by the toilet. “Are you okay?” she asks, frantic. “Are you going to be okay for the dinner?”

Tears streaming down my face, I turn to look at her, shaking my head. With a broken voice, I sob, “I think I might be pregnant.”

Maria rushes over and envelops me in her arms, sitting on the bathroom floor with me, holding me tight. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “What happened?”

“Do you really need me to explain?” I scoff, my voice shaking with tears. “It happened the normal way.”

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