Hard No: Secret Baby Enemies to Lovers Romance by Hazel Parker (fun to read txt) 📗

“Oh, I know it will be,” I reply. “It’ll be fine. I have all the ingredients already. And it’ll be a good nesting activity. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be wanting to do? Nesting activities?”

“I’m not talking about making ice cream.”

“Well, could we? Because I don’t know if I could handle…talking about anything else right now.”

She leads me over to the couch and we sit down.

“Does Trent know you…might be making ice cream?” she asks.

“Of course not,” I answer quickly. “I haven’t spoken to him since I…well, not to put too fine a point on it, since I drove him away.”

“You didn’t drive him away, Steph. You two had a fight. He stormed off, that’s all.”

“That’s all? You make it sound like he went into another room to simmer down. He left the country!”

“Okay, but remember what I said about him and grand gestures? That applies to all kinds of situations.”

I put my head in my hands and groan. I had thought when I had gone to Trent’s house a couple of days ago and been told by Curtis that Trent was in Europe “for an indeterminate length of time” that I couldn’t feel any worse. Oh, how life can throw another layer onto the rock pile.

“Let’s try this again,” Tira says gently. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I honestly have no idea.”

“In the short-term or the long run?”

“Either. Take your pick.”

She looks at me, somehow sad but smiling at the same time. “Just remember, I’m here for you, no matter what.” She puts her arm around my shoulders. “I’m here for you.”

“Thanks, T.” I nod towards the kitchen. “Can we make some ice cream now?”

“You were serious about that?”

“There are two things I’m always serious about—being pregnant and working in the kitchen.”

An hour and a couple of bowls of homemade ice cream later, Tira takes her leave. She offers to stay with me, but I tell her I need some alone time to do some thinking. She only departs after extracting a promise from me to call her later tonight.

Tira is everything a person could want in a best friend. She is as fiercely loyal as she is determined to keep me from having the finer things in life pass me by. I know she will have my back through this.

Alone for the moment, though, the situation looms over me. My life, formerly on such solid ground, now seems to be spinning like some crazy carnival ride.

It’s not like I have ever actively not wanted kids. I like children. The thought of having one of my own, though, had always seemed like something I would get to later. It was a classic case of the ambiguous later, which, left to my own devices, would most likely have ended up as being never.

Later now seems to be just a bit less than nine months away.

There really are only three choices that I can see—have the baby and keep it, have the baby and give it up, or don’t have the baby at all. There’s a fourth option, which is to go to sleep and wake up to find this is all a dream, but I don’t see that one as happening with any reliability.

I put my hand on my stomach, trying to comprehend the consequences of what that little test had told me. I try thinking about it in terms of my career. Nope, I can’t get a handle on it. I try thinking of it in terms of my body. I come up empty on that one, too. My living situation? Nada. The money angle? Uh-uh.

I start to wonder how things had come to this, only to quickly realize that I knew perfectly well who had turned my life upside-down. I also realized how much I like the upside-down version of my life, and how much I like the person who has done the life-flipping.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I’m more inclined to believe that it gives you a sharper perspective on your heart’s concerns. At least, that’s what it was doing for me.

I love Trent.

I haven’t known him for a long time, but I have fallen in love with him just the same. Otherwise, why would it hurt so much when he had left? And why else would I feel such anxiety at not knowing when or even if he would come back?

Not just that, but a million other things could happen—plane crashes, car wrecks, asteroid strikes. I was very rapidly coming to learn that a large part of love is terror, the terror of imagining all sorts of terrible things happening to the object of your affections.

And it struck me that I also felt that terror when I imagined giving this new life away or denying it its chance in the world at all. It was at that moment that I realize that I love this baby, too, and that I intend to both have it and keep it. I don’t know how I’ll be able to do either, but I’m sure that it’s the course of action I intend to follow.

I feel a sense of accomplishment. Major life decision made. Now what? Start babyproofing the apartment? Go online to shop for cribs? Figure out how to explain to Daniel and the rest of my staff how different things are going to become in the near future? Make more ice cream?

No, the thing to do is to alert the other party involved here. I have to call Trent. He needs to know what is going on.

Technology can be a wonderful thing. It can reach out to someone half a world away, no matter where they are, and tell them that you’re thinking of them and want to speak to them. It