Page 61 of His Secretly Pregnant Cinderella

“Well?”

“I will think about it.”

“I may not give you the choice.”

“Alex...”

“You think about things for too long,” Constantine said. “You are inactive for too long.”

“I was not there,” his father said, his voice suddenly turning to ice. “You were the one that was there. You were the one that failed the test.”

His father had never been cruel to him before, but this was certainly edging close to it. Of course...he had fired the first shot.

“I’ve accepted my part in it,” Constantine said. “I do not deny my own weakness. But that is not a skill I learned from you.”

His father made a wrenching sound that chilled Constantine’s soul. “I know it. Don’t you think I don’t know my own weakness, Constantine? To have lost two children as I have... I thought... I did believe that we would have this part of your brother.”

“Sadly,” Constantine said. “It is only me.”

“Your mother...”

“Leave it for now,” he said.

He hung up the phone and went to the window, looking out at the sea below. He had known they would not take this well. He was not taking it well.

For this very reason.

There was a strange, cloying fear that threatened to choke him. Something in the way that he breathed and moved.

These children were to be his responsibility. And then there was Morgan. Morgan who...

None of this was her fault. He had been angry with her. For appealing to him. Angry with her for daring to be beautiful when she belonged to his brother. When the fact of the matter was, she had been his downfall from the very beginning, simply by breathing. And it was more than her belonging to his brother, it was...

But now she’s yours. She is yours, and you can keep her separate from the world.

Perhaps... Perhaps his father was right. Perhaps allowing the world to believe that these were his brother’s children...

Maybe it would be better. Maybe it would keep them safe.

Because one thing Constantine knew for sure.

That which he loved ended up lost.

He could not bear for that fate to meet his children.

Morgan hadn’t seen Constantine all day. She had found a fruit tray in the fridge, and she had spent the day grazing on it, and she would have said that she couldn’t be satisfied by something so alarmingly healthy, not in this state where she craved carbs and cheese, but here on the island it felt somehow glamorous, and she found she enjoyed it.

She didn’t bother to change out of the bikini that he had given her, because why? There was no one here.

She was beginning to feel like he wasn’t here either. She missed him.

She had told him, and his response had been... So not what she had expected. He seemed angry with her, but desirous at the same time, and her own feelings had been thrown into a wild wind and whipped around until she couldn’t sort them out.

And the longer she sat by herself the more she wondered if she... She did not want to. But the more she sat by herself the more she wondered if she needed to contact her own mother.

She was becoming a mother.

And it made her ache to reach out to the woman who had given birth to her. The woman who had not nurtured her.

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