Page 65 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ITWOULDHAVE been impossible to hide the fact that she’d been crying when she finally left the hospital room, so Jenna didn’t bother trying. Thankfully, after her dramatic entrance and results, the nurses appeared comfortable assuming she was going to be fine.

Had it been worth it? Issuing an ultimatum to Sebastian like that—putting everything she wanted out there on the line. She thought so, even if inside she felt like a thousand tiny pieces of dull shattered glass scattered across asphalt.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s... she thought idly, suddenly very clear on the fact that she needed some air, fresh air, not the recycled stuff circulating inside the hospital.

Outside the maternity ward now, strolling through the regular hospital, the word king bounced around in her head giddily.

She had ignored phone calls from the king. Multiple.

She stopped in her tracks, in the middle of the hallway between the chapel and an elevator bank. She needed to call Mina.

Changing course, she found the nearest courtesy phone and dialed quickly. And because she didn’t just belong, she didn’t just matter—rather, she shone wherever she went and made an irrefutable place for herself wherever she wanted—she was the kind of woman who had the queen’s personal direct number memorized.

Mina picked up before the completion of the first ring.

“Hold on, I’ve got to get Hel on the line,” she said, not giving Jenna a chance to protest.

Jenna smiled, the sound of her friend’s voice and her rush to do things right as soothing to her soul as her mother’s homemade chicken soup.

The call was short, her friends somehow sensing the delicate, easily tired nature of her new enlightenment, but it was more than enough. They would work out the details in the months to come, but she was returning to the queen’s guard—and receiving all the associated maternity leave and pay.

She would need it now that she had drawn her line with Sebastian.

Stepping into the gray toned drizzle of the day was the final reset she needed.

She had come out a side entrance, one that faced the rising rolls of hill that disappeared into fog that obscured the road to Redcliff.

Misty and green, quilted with distant farmsteads, much like her own family’s, the view was one of her favorites in all of Cyrano—the view of home. Tourist brochures extolled the beaches and wine country, and locals adored the big city, but Jenna thought the sloping green landscape of the near interior leading all the way up to the upper reaches of the cliffs, was the most beautiful stretch of land of all.

Staring at it, her hair and dress and coat growing damp in the increasing rain, it wasn’t enough that she could feel his memory in her body, she also saw Sebastian everywhere.

She saw him in the colors, in the harsh planes and valleys, in the red in the clay-rich soil. In the earliest days of Cyrano, Redcliff lands had extended all the way to the coast, including her family home. It was only after unification that Redcliff had become landlocked.

Perhaps that was why she had never worried about being out of place when she was with him—because they came from the same place, even if not the same walk of life.

Unlike with her closest friends, or within her career, or even back in the place she grew up, she had never felt out of place with Sebastian. The cosmic thing between them made everything ordinary and human that separated them—incredible wealth, titles, centuries-old traditions—seem small by comparison.

But even cosmic connection was not enough reason to settle.

They would either travel this road together as full partners or they wouldn’t. It wasn’t a path they could travel halfway and then turn around. That would be too hard on everyone’s hearts.

Harder than the feeling in her heart now. At least now, she was the only one who had to deal with the pain of letting Sebastian go. If she had delayed, her child would have experienced this pain, too.

Turning her face up toward the rain, she let out a long sigh before setting out on her way home—not Sebastian’s, which had somehow slipped into the mental definition, but the home she’d grown up in.

No one had answered the phone when she’d called her parents from the hospital room, but she lived only a few miles away. Even pregnant she could walk. Growing up in these hills, she’d walked in the rain many times before. It was too depressing to wait for a cab.

A little water was fine. It could hide her tears if she needed to have any more outbursts.

She was walking along the long hospital drive when the car pulled up beside her, slowing to drive at her walking speed.

It was Sebastian.

Jenna squinted through the rain and the tinted windows.

Her reflection staring back at her in the shiny glass assured her that her hair and dress were plastered to her, while her heart beat fast.

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