CHAPTER SIX
SHEWASPREGNANT.
After dragging her feet and then overcompensating by using more at-home tests than was recommended, Jenna had still refused to accept the positive results, but was now faced with the family doctor’s prognosis, which now replayed in her mind on a continuous loop—relentless and undeniable.
Jenna was pregnant. She was going to have a baby, and not just any baby, but the Duke of Redcliff’s baby.
She was intimately familiar with how it had happened, but it was still unbelievable.
And to think, she’d been under the impression that the worst had already happened, that losing everything she’d worked and built toward her whole life was the bottom of the pit.
Here was proof to the maxim then, that things could always get worse. She’d been caught in flagrante delicto with a man she’d just met by a man whom she had sworn to protect—a man who she respected and whose respect in return had mattered to her—and that was all in addition to losing the career she had worked for her entire life.
But if there was an oldest crime in the book, then there was also an oldest consequence, and what had befallen her thus far wasn’t it.
Babies were.
Happy, chubby babies who thundered into the world and left nothing the same in their wake. Babies who deserved the entire world and the best start.
And all Jenna had to give hers was a disgraced single mother.
As to what their father would be willing to give, she realized, nauseous and dizzy at the same time, she had no idea... She didn’t even know his phone number. Had no idea how she would get in touch with him to let him know.
How would he react? Numbly, it occurred to her that he might deny it. What if he forced her to prove it? Or worse, what if he asked her to end it?
Her hands came to her belly protectively. She might not have planned for it, but she would not lay down the responsibility now. She had transgressed her code of conduct, but she had not completely given up the values she had been taught. While the Priory taught that individuals had God’s blessing in the governance of their bodies, they also taught that children were gifts from God.
She had apparently been chosen to receive such a responsibility-laden gift as a result of proving just how far into the depths of irresponsibility she had been willing to travel.
How easy it had been to go too far with Sebastian.
Making a disgusted noise, she tried to shake the thought of Sebastian out of her mind, scrub away the lingering want of him, to snuff out the terrible candle burning inside her, a flame at both ends—one, the ever-present desire to taste him again, the other shame.
Shame that her recklessness meant that the father of her child was a virtual stranger to her—regardless of how magnetically attracted to him she had been at the time. Shame that she had been so caught up in him that she’d not even considered the possible outcomes, but most of all, shame that in the face of the most transformational news she had ever received, the one feeling she could not seem to muster was joy.