Decidedly With Baby
Stina Lindenblatt
Decidedly With Baby is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Stina Lindenblatt
Excerpt from Decidedly Off Limits by Stina Lindenblatt copyright © 2016 by Stina Lindenblatt
First Edition: September 2017
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This book contains an excerpt from the book Decidedly Off Limits by Stina Lindenblatt.
Cover design: Okay Creations
Cover art: iStock
Editing: Bev Rosenbaum and Flat Earth Editing.
ISBN: 978-0-9958139-2-2
Created with Vellum
Contents
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Other Books in By The Bay Series
Acknowledgments
Also by Stina Lindenblatt
About the Author
Read on for an excerpt from DECIDEDLY OFF LIMITS
One-Night Stand Rule #1: always check the condom’s expiry date.
Oops.
Career-orientated Holly Whittaker has a plan, and being a mom is not part of it. Her not-quite-a-fairytale childhood involved being brought up by thirty nannies (yes, thirty!), so what the heck does she know about being a mom anyway?
Playboy Josh Hoffer has no room in his life for a family or steady girlfriend. His hockey career comes first. Life is tough when you’re on the road more times than you’re not. Besides, what does he know about diapers and baby yoga and fairytale princesses?
After Holly receives some unexpected bad news, she’s looking to blow off a little steam, and hot sex with Mr. No Commitment himself fits the bill just fine. But sex is never without consequences, and this time it’s more than her heart that is at stake. This time, Mr. No Commitment and Ms. Career need to figure out what’s really important to them and find room in their heart for another—plus one.
To everyone who understands the power and beauty of love…
1
Holly
Sex—it was a life-altering event. From the time your hormones came to life and encouraged you to get laid, you were pretty much screwed.
It was a bargaining chip.
A stress reliever.
Some girls needed to love the guy in order to do the deed. Others were only in it for a good time; commitment wasn’t in the books.
Sometimes it rocked one’s world.
Other times you wondered why you had even bothered—the guy had no idea how to make a woman come. Unfortunately, they didn’t wear a warning label.
They really should.
And sometimes sex came with consequences. The kind of consequences that started with you in the bathroom, the peed-on pregnancy test doing its thing next to you on the counter.
There it was, by the sink as I finished washing my hands. My life? Now at the mercy of a frigging piece of plastic.
If there was ever a time to fail at something, this would be it. Except, when had I ever failed at anything I did?
Never. That was when.
I dried my hands and escaped the bathroom as though it contained a ticking bomb. Kelsey and Erin, my closest friends, were standing in the hallway of my apartment with expectant looks on their faces. I shrugged. “I don’t know yet.” I indicated over my shoulder to the bathroom. “It’s in there…but I can’t look.”
“Do you want me to tell you?” Kelsey asked. Her tone had enough sympathy to overflow an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Sympathy with a splash of excitement. Kelsey loved babies.
Normally, I was a brave woman. I had moved thousands of kilometers from my home in Australia to do my MBA in the U.S., even though there were plenty of great schools back home. After that, I’d landed a brilliant job here in San Francisco. Every day, I lived, breathed, survived in the testosterone-dominated world of finance which required me to be a brave and confident woman.
But normally brave and confident me couldn’t find even a millimeter of courage to check my fate when it came to the pregnancy test.
I nodded in response to Kelsey’s question.
“Okay,” she said softly, possibly to avoid freaking me out more than I already was. Good luck with that.
She entered the bathroom with Erin and I trailing after her as though she were a brave warrior princess getting ready to slay the evil dragon.
I would have gladly taken an evil fire-breathing dragon any day over what was really waiting for us. Behold Holly—destroyer of all things not so pleasant. For that, I could be kick-ass confident.
My bathroom wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination, but it had never felt so small until that moment. And it had nothing to do with the three of us crammed into the space. Of course, Erin being eight-months pregnant didn’t help either. And right now? She was the poster woman of what the plastic stick possibly held for me—a future involving multiple trips a day to the loo.
She glanced longingly at the toilet. I guess that was my hint to get this over with ASAP.
Kelsey picked up the stick and studied it.
“What does it say?” Bonus points to me for not squeaking when I asked the question.
She didn’t say anything at first, her expression not giving any indication of what she was thinking—or what answer stared back at her.
“Did it work?” I asked. There was always a chance I had done it wrong. Peeing on a stick wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Or maybe the test was faulty. There was always that too.
She nodded slowly, still staring at the stick. Then her gaze slid to mine, and without her saying anything, I knew the answer. Sympathy and awe and happiness all shone back at me. “You’re going to have a baby.” dpg
She handed me the test and the answer was there for the world to see.
But it was the wrong answer.
I wasn’t pregnant. I was sure of it.
Pregnancy tests weren’t a hundred percent accurate. They were ninety-nine percent accurate. It said so on the box. Which meant one out of a hundred times they were incorrect.
And this test was that magical one—the test that got the answer wrong.
Right?
2
Josh
Two months earlier
Quiz time. What makes an NHL hockey player both excited and fearful at the same time? That’s right. The final minutes of game seven during the Stanley Cup playoffs. More so when the two teams are tied and the game could go either way.
Too bad for the Rock—it hadn’t gone our way.
And we were now on an early vacation.
But first…we had to pull up our extra large, big-girl panties and congratulate the other team.
Like little boys who lost their favorite toy truck, we skated in a single line and congratulated each member of their team, including the support staff. Some of the congratulations were spoken half-heartedly; I didn’t know those guys and they didn’t know me.
I gave Sutter, my former teammate, a one-armed hug. Until he was traded a few years ago, he used to play for the Rock. “Congratulations. You deserve this, man.” Sutter had been my mentor the first year I played for the team. He was the guy who kept me from becoming a much bigger cocky ass than I was now. Now I was one-eighth cocky ass—maybe a little more during a full moon.
Although compared to Grant—the pain-in-the-ass Ducks defenseman—I was fucking Snow White.
No, I didn’t mean literally fucking her, not that I would complain if I did get to. But if we were talking about getting to fuck a Disney princess, it would totally be that red-haired mermaid—what was her name?
“Now I have to hope Jenny doesn’t go into labor until after the playoffs,” Sutter said.
I stared at him for a heartbeat, letting his words sink in. “I didn’t realize you guys were expecting.”
His face beamed with pride. You would’ve thought his team had won the Stanley Cup instead of the Campbell Bowl. Not that the Campbell Bowl was anything to sneeze at.
But we weren’t talking about the much-coveted trophy here. We were talking about a small human who did nothing but shit, cry, and generally take over your life.
I shuddered at the thought. There weren’t any babies in my future. I’d learned the hard way that the NHL and kids weren’t a good mix.
Just ask my old man.
If you could find him.
Sutter and I didn’t get a chance to talk further. The guys behind us were waiting for us to get moving. The Ducks were eager to get their trophy and we were eager to leave.
Once we were finished with the congratulations, we returned to the locker room.
“Are you heading out tonight?” Mark asked Travis and me. You couldn’t miss the wistful expression that passed briefly on his face. Even his scraggly playoff beard couldn’t hide it.
“I’m meeting up with some friends,” I told him, knowing that the only thing he was doing tonight was diaper duty.
“You’re still joining me and the guys later at The Unicorn, right?” Travis asked me.
“I will if I can,” I replied, spying Coach Woodcroft heading our way with the look he always wore whenever he had to deliver bad news…the type of bad news involving a media request.
“Hoffer,” he said, “they’re asking for you.”
Mark and Travis snickered and started to turn away.
“Not so fast, gentlemen,” Woodcroft said. “They asked for all three of you.”
I did my own share of snickering. Fair is fair.
One of the assistant coaches led us from the safety of our locker room to the awaiting media in the dressing room. They separated into flocks, each pecking at their own victim with their questions.
“How did you feel tonight’s game went?”
“The Rock’s defense was on fire for this game. In what way do you think it could have gone better?”
“What are your expectations for next year?”
The questions seemed never ending, and only delayed me from getting together with Trent and his girlfriend, Kelsey. And let’s not forget Holly, the redhead he worked with who could easily be mistaken for that mermaid Disney princess—only a lot hotter.
And with a sexy Aussie accent.
No, I haven’t fucked her.
But don’t think for a moment that she hasn’t starred in a few of my fantasies, when it was just me, my hand, and the shower.
How did I meet her? She was at a dinner party Trent and Kelsey had thrown a few months ago. After getting together with them a few more times, Holly and I eventually became friends. But our friendship didn’t mean fantasizing about her was off limits—even if I didn’t want to date her.
Nothing against Holly. I didn’t date. Period.
But it was cool having Holly for a friend. She was that female you could call when you needed advice and knew your male buddies wouldn’t know the answer. Or rather, they would have an answer—but it was always a bullshit one. She was that friend who teased you about your manwhore ways but without any judgmental crap.
And the added bonus? She liked movies, but she didn’t feel the need to drag me to lame chick flicks.
Mark was scooting toward the locker room doors, doing his best to escape.
“I need to go now,” I said, attempting my own great escape.
I had barely stepped through the doorway when Travis practically rammed into me from behind. I chuckled. “What, you didn’t want to stick around for more questions?”
“Christ, no. Besides, the sooner I’m out of here, the sooner I can get laid.”
Guess I wasn’t the only one with that post-game mission in mind.
3
Holly
Quick, name the one person you’d rather not talk to on a Friday night…while you’re still at the office?
First question—what was I doing at the office on a Friday night? Easy. Where else would you expect a workaholic to be?
Okay, I wasn’t planning to spend the entire night here. I did have a life after all.
I also wasn’t planning to talk to my mother on the phone while at the office on a Friday night—yet here I was doing exactly that.
“I tried calling your apartment.” Her tone for the last word was like battery acid with a dash of honey. My mother didn’t do apartments. And definitely not apartments the size of—as she had put it—my parents’ swimming pool.
She was exaggerating. Mostly.
Did I feel that my apartment was too small? Not at all. What did I need a large apartment for anyway? With two bedrooms, mine had plenty of space for me, especially since I spent more time at work than I did there. Besides, it was a nice apartment located in a Victorian house not far from the bay. I loved it, even if my mother didn’t.
I didn’t bother to point out she’d been calling my cell phone earlier, but I had let her go to voicemail. I hadn’t expected her to then phone my work number, which was why I’d answered it.
Although I had no idea, in retrospect, who else would’ve called me at 9 p.m. at work on a Friday night, which was Saturday afternoon in Sydney.
“I was just about to leave,” I said. “What can I help you with?” Even though she and Dad had a financial planner, it didn’t stop her from asking my advice.
Not that she necessarily listened to it, but it was one of the few things we could talk about that didn’t leave me feeling as though she was judging me in the worst possible way.
“First,” she said, “while it’s commendable that your career is important to you, you shouldn’t be working at the office so late. Especially not on a Friday night.”
Said the woman who spent my childhood doing the same thing. Only difference was, she had three kids and I was completely kid-free.
I didn’t even have a pet.
“I’m meeting up with friends in a few minutes,” I pointed out. I do have a social life, Mum. A social life that wasn’t all about being seen by the right people in the right places—something Mum had specialized in my entire life.
“Good. The reason I’m calling is to inform you that my mother died.” A small amount of emotion snuck into her otherwise cool voice.
“Nanna’s dead?” The words barely squeezed past shock and despair. I coughed to clear my throat. “What happened?” She had been fine the last time I talked to her.
“Heart attack. The funeral is on Thursday.”
I bit my lip to hold back the building sob. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Her voice wavered slightly. “Send me your travel
information, and I’ll have Simon pick you up at the airport.”
I smiled a little at the thought of seeing my thirty-year-old brother. “Okay.” I had no idea if she’d heard my reply. She’d ended the call the moment the word had left my mouth.
My gaze fell to the small, framed photo on my desk. The woman crouched on the ground with an adorable baby wallaby cuddling a teddy bear? That was Nanna. She had found him injured and nursed him back to health.
The photo had been taken at Christmas, when she was full of life, her cheeks glowing, her eyes holding the mischievous light that was all Nanna. Both of us were wearing ratty denim shorts and had dirt smudged on our makeup-free faces. Surprised? I know—the complete opposite of how people in San Francisco normally saw me.
I examined my perfectly manicured French tips, then brushed my fingers along the light-gray pencil skirt and the cream-colored cashmere cardigan hugging my breasts. Nanna wouldn’t have recognized me like this.
In San Francisco, I was more like my mother.
I shuddered at the thought—then turned off the computer, straightened my desk, and switched off the office light. Even workaholic Trent had left several hours ago, something that was new for him ever since he started dating Kelsey. I sent her a text that I was on my way.
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