Page 40 of Wicked Ambition

She pointed at his sausage patties. “The smell is making me sick.”

“What?” He lifted the small plate and sniffed, but it smelled okay to him. “There’s noth?—”

“Get it out of here!”

“Relax, Pollita, it’s gone.” Oz stood, took the plate with him into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. Leaning against the wall, he used his fingers to eat one of the warm patties. Tasted fine to him. He reached for the second one.

Oz stiffened as the door to a room down the hall opened. The man was older, dressed in a suit and tie, but he paused as he neared. His brows went up when he saw the plate in his hand, and he waited, expecting an explanation for why Oz was eating in the hallway.

Shrugging, he said in Spanish, “My wife didn’t like the smell of the sausage.”

The man smiled. “When my wife was pregnant, she couldn’t tolerate the scent of coffee. It made mornings difficult in our house.” With a nod, he continued down the hallway and headed toward the elevators.

Pregnant.

Oz couldn’t breathe for a moment. It was seven weeks since he and Ayla spent the night together. His own stomach churned. He couldn’t finish the final sausage and deposited the smallplate on a credenza located partway down the corridor beneath a wall-mounted mirror. Returning to his position beside the door to their room, he pulled out his phone and began searching for symptoms. He could be jumping to conclusions.

Fatigue. Check. Mood swings. Check. Food aversions. Check. Nausea. Check. There were more symptoms, but he didn’t know about those, not without asking Ayla.

Why the hell hadn’t she told him?

Maybe he was wrong. Some of these symptoms—fuck, almost all of them—could be attributed to adrenaline, stress, and worry. It had been one adventure after another for her since she stepped off that bus two days ago. That was on top of how concerned she was about her sister. Not just her sister, but her identical twin.

Putting the phone away, Oz closed his eyes. He needed a minute before he and his Pollita had a discussion. The one thing he couldn’t do was react without thinking things through. This was too important to fuck up, and that meant his head had to be clear when they talked.

He was absolutely finding out if he was going to be a father.

Oz lethimself back in the room and returned to the table. His food was cold, but he wasn’t hungry anymore. He checked her plate. Ayla had eaten her toast, but it appeared as if she’d done nothing except push her scrambled eggs around the dish.

“Better now, Pollita?”

She looked up at him, and while she remained pale, the green was gone from her face. “Yes. Thanks for getting those sausages out of here.”

“No problem.” His coffee was cold, too, but Oz drank it anyway. He needed caffeine before broaching this conversation. He wanted to talk, not piss her off.

“You haven’t been eating very much,” he said, gesturing toward her plate.

Her lips pulled back in a gesture that was half smile, half apologetic. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so worried about Io that I just can’t eat.”

“Because you feel nauseated.”

“Well, yes.”

Bracing himself, Oz asked, “Pollita, when was your last period?”

Confusion gave way to startled realization, and Oz had his answer. Ayla wasn’t keeping secrets from him. She legit never considered she might be pregnant.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and there was a note of what he labeled desperation in her voice. “I’ve always been irregular.”

“When was your last period?”

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Ayla—”

“You wore condoms.” There was more than a note of desperation now.

Oz shook his head. “Not that last time. I ran out, and we decided to risk it, remember?” It was the only encounter where he’d gone bareback. Ayla was the only person with whom he’d ever considered taking that kind of chance.

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