Page 35 of Secret Daddies

Which I still couldn’t believe. In fact, I had been in firm denial of it until I went to the doctor earlier this week to confirm that, yes, I was actually pregnant. There was no shadow of a doubt about it now, I was with child, even if I had no idea whose child it actually was.

Which was a total mess in and of itself. I had considered taking the route of ending the pregnancy, but honestly, I couldn’teven really entertain the thought. Even if it might be the more sensible option right now, I was a mom at heart, and the thought of Matty getting to grow up with a sibling was too tempting for me to deny.

And I knew, at least, that their father had the money to support them, whoever they might be. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to admit to it, when the time came, but at least I had some practice now, given that I had told Devon the truth about Matty.

Not that he had given me much of a choice. And not that he hadn’t deserved an answer before that, if I was being honest. If I had just come clean to him when we first started working together again, maybe I would have been able to keep my distance and keep from sleeping with him again. Though that wouldn’t have dealt with the issue of his co-stars, of course.

He had taken it…better than I had expected. He’d let me leave without any argument, though perhaps he had been too much in shock to fight me any further on the matter.

I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like, discovering that he was a dad like that, out of the blue. I’d had years to wrap my head around being a parent, but here he was with a kid dropped into his lap like it was the most natural thing in the world.

My heart twinged when I remembered the pain in his voice, the way he had spoken to me, like he would have done anything to be part of Matty’s life. But I was standing my ground there. Matty was young, but not so young that he wouldn’t be susceptible to the stress and publicity that would explode around him if people knew he was Devon’s secret love child. These guys couldn’t even blow their noses without attracting attention from the press of the entire country, and the thoughtof my son being thrust into the limelight like that scared the hell out of me.

And the downside of sticking to my principles on this? I was going to have to find some way to handle all of these bills alone. I sifted through the bills in front of me, trying to figure out if there were any that I could push back a little…

My rent was the only thing that jumped out. Olivia, who owned the building, had been a single mom herself, and she was sympathetic to the struggles I went through raising my little boy alone. Maybe I could beg for a little reprieve, just for the rest of the month.

I pulled out my phone and dialed up her number—it rang a couple times before she answered, her voice as bright and warm as it always was.

“Hello, Maya. You alright, dear?”

“Yeah, I’m…I’m good,” I replied, taking a deep breath as I tried to prepare myself for what I was going to ask her. “Look, I know it’s never a good time to ask you something like this, but I was hoping…I was hoping that you might be able to give me an extra couple of weeks to pay the rent this month?”

I winced as I waited for my answer. She fell silent for a moment, and then let out a small snort. “But you’re already paid up for the rest of the year, Maya. What are you talking about?”

My eyes widened.

“Wh-what?”

“You’re paid up till the end of the year,” she repeated, as though I might just not have heard her properly. “I got the account settled up yesterday. You didn’t know about it?”

“No,” I blurted out. “Who—what are you?—”

“Yeah, I got a deposit in yesterday morning, it should have cleared by now,” she remarked, and I heard her rustling some papers at the other end of the line. “Here it is, yes—your rent and utilities, paid in full for the rest of this calendar year. You really didn’t have any idea…?”

“No—no, I didn’t,” I confessed. My head was reeling. Who would have done something like this? And why? It wasn’t like Lana could have paid off such a huge bill out of nowhere, though I knew she would have if she was able.

“Oh, well,” Olivia muttered, sounding confused. “I suppose it was just some Good Samaritan.”

“It must have been,” I agreed, trying to keep my voice as steady as I could. “Hey, Olivia, could you—could you tell me the name on the account that transferred the money in?”

“Yes, of course,” she replied. Another pause as she went through the papers on her desk, and then she answered, “Hart. The name on the account is Hart. Does that ring a bell…?”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Yeah, it does. Thanks, Olivia. I’ll talk to you soon…”

And with that, I hung up the phone and stared off into space for a moment.

Devon. Devon was the one to pay up my rent and bills for the rest of the year. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know what he intended to get out of it, but there was nobody else it could have been, nobody else who would be that invested in setting me upfinancially and who would have had the cash to follow through on it.

I pulled up his number on my phone at once, hesitating for a moment before I actually dialed it. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to him, how I was going to thank him. What if he expected something in return? What if this was his way of forcing me to remain in contact with him, something he could hold over my head when I felt like I would be better off keeping my distance…?

But I knew Devon. Well, at least, I had known him. And the version of him I’d known all those years ago would never do that to me. He wasn’t that kind of guy, the kind of guy who would twist and force his way into my life if I didn’t want it. And besides, I needed to thank him for going out of his way to help Matty and me. I wasn’t going to sit around and pretend like I didn’t care about how much he had done for us, the difference he had just made to our lives by giving me this freedom.

I pressed the call button and lifted the phone to my ear, drumming my fingers on the table as I waited for him to pick up. It didn’t take long, as though he had been expecting my call all day.

“Hey,” he greeted me, and despite myself, my tummy flipped at the sound of his voice.

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