Page 23 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

She smiled, as he’d intended, and he felt the same thrill of accomplishment he did after coordinating a successful intelligence mission.

But soon her smile faded, her eyebrows coming together before another long moment passed in silence. Then she said, shaking her head, “I can’t believe I just took it all at face value.”

She still felt like a fool, that was obvious, but she no longer hated herself for it.

It was an improvement at least.

Then she said, “This makes you my boss, you know. I could sue you.”

He stared at her blankly for a moment before he chuckled. “That’s a new reaction.”

“To?”

“To learning my job title.”

“I should hope this is a new situation,” she said primly. “You could have called or sent an email. You didn’t have to break into my house.”

“Your parents’ house.”

“My home.”

He looked around, noting the girlish decor, the discrete boxes of items that obviously did not belong to her, were merely being stored in a space that was rarely occupied. “Your childhood home. You might have put your clothes back in the closet, but you don’t live here.”

“Your parents’ house is always your home,” she countered.

He looked at her pityingly. “Is it?”

Instead of fire, sympathy flashed across her eyes. “It’s supposed to be.”

Irritated by the unintended shift in subject, he waved her off. “I didn’t come here to discuss our parents. I came here to discuss us as parents.”

Her abruptly tired eyes narrowed as she tilted her head to one side, her arms coming to cross in front of her stomach in a protective position. “So talk.”

“We have a lot to go over.”

“So you broke into my house in the middle of the night?”

“It was the only way I could be sure of reaching you. You left the capital and have refused every call from there—barring the single instance of contact you had with Helene d’Tierrza upon her return—including three calls directly from the palace.”

“As the head of intelligence, do you personally take such a close interest in all of the severance monitoring?”

He could appreciate that she was as intelligent as she was good, even while she challenged him. “Absolutely not, that would be ludicrous. ‘Severance monitoring,’ as you so eloquently put it, is normally rookie work. But I have never encountered anything with the power to distract me that you have, Jenna. You fascinate me. And that was before I learned you were carrying my child.”

He spoke the truth.

Honesty was his only course with Jenna. And yet every time, he was left holding his breath and waiting for her response. It wasn’t a particularly welcome sensation.

For another long stretch of heartbeats, she said nothing, only stared. Then she sighed, long and slow. Then she nodded.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

The breath that had stuck in his chest eased free. “Thank you, Jenna.”

“I’ve got to get my bags and leave a note,” she groused.

“What will you tell them?”

“My mother knows about the baby. I’m just going to tell her the truth, that I’ve gone with the baby’s father to sort things out.”

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