Delivering His Package: A Secret Baby Romance by Jamie Knight (best love novels of all time txt) 📗

“Yup.”

“And..?”

“She’s a girl!”

“Really?” Aiden’s voice was wan through wind noise and the distant honking horns of New York traffic.

“Yeah, really. A girl.”

“Are you sure you want a baby?” He suddenly asked. It was out of nowhere. Maybe there’s been something right about Dr. Williamson’s caution.

“I drained my 401K and endured weeks of in vitro, didn’t I?” Of course, I wanted to have a baby. I didn’t want much else than to have a family and a baby.

“Yeah — but is it such a good idea? For us, I mean?”

“Aiden?”

“We should talk about this later?” He said, through even louder car horns.

“Yeah. Let’s talk about this when you get home from work.”

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t think, I—”

“Later. We’ll talk about it later.” I hung up the phone.

Exhaustion washed over my body again. I felt alone again. I’d gotten pregnant. I’d been in a fire. I’d taken leave from my job. I’d moved out of my apartment and moved in with Aiden. Aiden was my life now. I had entrusted my life to Aiden — and maybe the life of the baby too.

I had nowhere to go but Aiden’s arms, but maybe I’d been wrong about who Aiden was. He had rescued me from a fire and had invited me to move in together. But maybe he wouldn’t be the perfect father to the child that I had imagined him being. Maybe that part had all been my wishful projection.

Chapter Eleven - Aiden

The door wasn’t open or unlocked when I arrived home from work. Typically, Eleanor opened and unlocked the apartment door and even fired up the tea kettle in the kitchen when she saw my car pulling into the parking garage.

I unlocked the front door. The apartment was quiet.

“Eleanor?” No answer.

I found her in bed. She was under the blankets, completely, including her head, like a beautiful librarian-mummy. It was her usual way to escape from the world and the stress of pregnancy. I couldn’t even imagine the stress and pain involved in carrying a baby.

I sat at the edge of the bed and lay my hand on Eleanor’s feet through the comforter. “Hey, honey?”

The comforter rose up over her head. Her face was in tears. “I’m sorry. I was crying. I was upset. I’m sorry.”

“I know pregnancy is stressing you, and there are hormones, and your body hurts.”

I had no idea personally. I could even barely imagine.

“It’s not the hormones or the pregnancy. My hormones or pregnancy don’t give you the right to reject our child.”

“Reject our child?” I looked at Eleanor’s exhausted face.

“You don’t want our baby girl.” She again pulled up the covers over her head. She was mummified again. Maybe emotionally, too, she was mummified. I felt unable to get through to Eleanor.

“What, I—”

It was true that I was scared of raising a girl. And it was true that when I heard about Eleanor’s pregnancy, I always thought the baby would be a boy.

“I feel like an idiot,” Eleanor said from under the blankets. Then she uncovered herself again. A drizzle of tears rained down her face. “I wanted a family and a baby so badly. I spent my retirement savings on it. I left my job for it. And now it’s like I made a big mistake.”

“It’s not a mistake.” I squeezed her foot again through the blankets.

“It. Now our baby is an it?” She wiped a tear from her eye.

“Eleanor. I’m really sorry.” I lay on the bed, side-by-side with her. I embraced her and spooned her through the blankets. I didn’t want to be right, even if in my mind I was right, kind of. I just wanted to relieve Eleanor’s pain and comfort her.

“Sorry about what?” she asked quietly, biting her lower lip.

“Sorry about saying the wrong words sometimes and upsetting you.”

“So, you were reacting like that to our baby being a girl, that was just saying the wrong words? What are the right words for that?”

“I’m sorry.” I knew that was the first thing to say. “I was just suddenly terrified of how real it all was. Becoming a father.”

“What was it before? A movie?” Eleanor shook her head.

“No. I mean. Just thinking about raising a girl. I don’t know anything about girls.” I shrugged and shook my head right back at her. “Eleanor, I’ve been a man all my life.”

“Isn’t that normally how being a man works?” She cracked a small smile through her tears.

“I mean, yeah, but I mean, I was raised by my dad and my older brother. I never even knew my mother. I didn’t have any sisters. And there aren’t exactly a ton of women driving UPS trucks.”

“Ok, so you could have said I don’t know many women instead of freaking out like that when I told you the baby is a girl.”

“See, that’s my lack of communication skills.”

“Mister English Literature Ph.D., lacking communication skills?” Eleanor rubbed my thigh with her toe through the blanket.

“They teach us, you know, literature stuff. Not how to talk to your pregnant girlfriend.”

I thought back to graduate school. There was definitely no graduate seminar on how to talk to one’s pregnant girlfriend. Or how to talk to anyone, pregnant or not, girlfriend or not. Grad school in English literature wasn’t the place to learn everyday communication skills.

“I just reacted like that because it just hit me in the face when I thought about us raising a little girl.” Somehow the tidbit of information from Eleanor that the baby was a girl has intensified the feeling of the upcoming task being a severe challenge for me. I didn’t know anything about babies, much less about girl babies. “We’re, like, two idiots, two idiots with no idea about raising a little baby.”

“Aiden. This isn’t gonna be a sitcom.” Eleanor grinned as if she had a movie playing in her mind. “We have time to prepare.”

“I mean, I guess, I guess we could learn?” I didn’t know how to drive a UPS truck either when I’d finished