Page 75 of Finding Forever

“Jesus,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut as the headache migrated to his temples. “What does Petra think we should do?”

“She’s lined up a couple of interviews with the usuals; WSJ, Bloomberg, and a—uhm—segment on thatHolmes@Homeshow.”

“Holmes@Home? Dad, come on, I’m not a fucking celebrity. Nobody who watches that show will know who the hell we are. It’ll look ridiculous and desperate to appear on something like that.”

“I agree. I’ve said as much to Petra. But she argues that you and Fern are young, good-looking and wealthy, the public are going towantto believe in your star-crossed lovers story. And public opinion?—”

“Won’t matter to our investors and shareholders. And it won’t matter to Pete McPherson.” Greenleaf’s CEO.

This was turning into a goddamned clusterfuck. Cade could wring Abernathy’s throat with his bare hands right now.

He released his nape to scrub his hand over his face and sighed.

“Dad, there’s something else,” he admitted in a low tone, reluctant to give voice to the words. Once spoken there was no turning back. No pretending it was all just some mistake or misunderstanding. His life would be forever altered. “Fern’s pregnant.”

There was a long, fraught silence and Cade glared unseeingly out at the horizon, uncomfortably aware of his father’s every even breath on the other end of the line. He shouldn’t feel like a chastened adolescent and yet… he did.

His father finally spoke, a long string of invective that would’ve made a pirate blush.

“She looks like such a sweet, butter wouldn’t melt wee thing. I didn’t have her pegged as the type to pull something like this,” his father finally said once he’d run through his encyclopedia of profanity.

Cade’s glare deepened as he tried to puzzle through his dad’s baffling words.

“What do you…”

“Is the father in the picture? Is it that weasel, Wilson?”

“Jesus, no.” Cade hastened to reply, finally grasping his father’s misapprehension. “Dad, you don’t—”Christ. “Her baby is…I’m the father.”

This time he could practically hear his father’s absolute bafflement in the silence that followed. Cade ground his teeth, longing for some ibuprofen and a cold compress, and waited for his father to process his words.

“That’s a little fast, isn’t it?” The old man’s tone was wry and rippling with amusement. Cade bit back a groan. The amusement somehow worse than confusion or outrage or whatever else he might have expected. It made him feel like the butt of some cosmic joke.

“She’s two—nearly three—months pregnant. It was conceived at the gala.”

“That so?” There was determined neutrality in his father’s voice now. Which was unusual. James Hawthorne lacked subtlety and believed thattactwas just another four-letter word.

“Yes.”

“I distinctly recall teaching you lads to always slap a rubber on ye wee rascals, aye?”

Their father had taken time out of his busy life—he’d literally had his executive assistant pencil it into his schedule—when Cade and his brothers were kids, to give them the frankest,dirtiest talk about sex and the dire consequences for “men like them” if they didn’tpack their own parachutes. He’d sat them down in his office, intimidating and larger than life as he glared at them from across his desk and over his steepled fingers. It had been the most uncomfortable moment of Cade’s life—recently usurped by his first encounter with Fern—and he and his brothers couldn’t look one another in the eye for days afterwards.

“I used a condom,” Cade defended himself bleakly, feeling exactly as he had all those years ago at fourteen.

“Then how can it be yours?”

“It is.” He wasn’t about to get into Fern’s lack of experience. It was none of the old man’s business.

“Niall…”

“It’s not up for debate, Dad,” he inserted steel into his voice. His father was just going to have to take his word on this one.

Surprisingly, the old man—stubborn though he was—backed off.

“Okay, you’re the father. I’m sure that Petra will agree, this’ll add weight to your love story.” Even though he’d thought the same thing, for some reason hearing his father say it made Cade uneasy. He found he didn’t like the idea of using Fern’s pregnancy in this way.

It was private. Not open to public scrutiny. He didn’t like that others might speculate about the child’s paternity as well. Didn’t like that it would open Fern to even more critical scrutiny. He was supposed to protect Fern, not sacrifice her and her baby to the hypercritical court of public opinion to save his and his company’s reputation.

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