Page 18 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

CHAPTER FIVE

ITHADBEENforty days since he been with Jenna in the library.

In just forty days, his entire world had collapsed.

Sebastian stared at the report on his screen without seeing it.

Blood roared in his ears, but the only sign of his agitation was the single finger rapping on the gleaming hardwood of his desk.

Jenna was carrying his child.

He was going to be a father.

Pinching the place between his eyebrows with the other hand, he released a long sigh and pushed his chair away from the desk.

He was going to be a father.

The reality of it, here and now as opposed to an unmoored and vague concept happening somewhere in the future, was nothing like he had imagined it would be, and, as usual when things weren’t going according to his plans, Jenna was at the root.

He would never marry—not after a childhood spent as the collateral damage of the sloppy and public disaster that his parents’ marriage had been—but he had always anticipated fathering children.

Continuing the family line was the only thing he truly owed his ancestors in exchange for his life of incredible wealth and privilege.

The next head of the Redcliff clan, however, had been going to be born of a surrogate, chosen with the utmost care by himself, a man with access to all the information in the country.

He would then raise his child himself, keeping said child at his side because that made the most sense, and was the safest option for the offspring of a man in his line of work and in his wealth and status bracket.

His decision had nothing to do with being thrust away from his own home at such a young age—never to be with his parents at home again—nor did his decision have anything to do with the circumstances under which he had been sent away.

He had simply spent enough time revisiting the mistakes of his parents and past to ensure that he avoided their pitfalls and failings entirely. Love and marriage had destroyed his parents, and in particular his father. The emotion and the institution had constricted both of them, squeezing every last drop of decency out until all they had left to give their child was resentment, guilt and spite.

Sebastian’s child would fare better.

His choices were simply a matter of practicality.

But then there was Jenna.

Jenna was everything he would have chosen in a surrogate and more—beautiful, exceptionally healthy, fit and strong, highly intelligent, determined, diligent, steady, compassionate, honest...the list went on, and on, and on, and on.

In fact, it was the endless list of on and on that was the problem.

Jenna was too ideal, too much of everything he wanted crammed into one woman.

He’d spent enough time brooding about it since leaving her in the library to know for certain.

In fact, the only way he’d been able to focus up to this point had been to review her intelligence file daily, noting every small new detail as to where she was and what she was doing. As former royal security, it was procedure to monitor her whereabouts and activities for the first two years post-employment. That review just didn’t typically fall to the director of intelligence.

Outrageous though his behavior had been, the instinct had been sound. How else would he have learned about his child? From Jenna?

Would she have come to him on her own?

Given what he knew of her, he trusted so.

But how long would it have taken her?

She hadn’t taken or returned any of the calls she’d received from the palace, nor from her now returned former partner in the queen’s guard, the newly minted Duchess Helene Andros, very recently d’Tierrza—that family name was now defunct.

If Jenna was not speaking with those closest to her, how long would it have taken her to tell him she was carrying his child?

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