“Because of the issues you’ve got just now outside of here, I requested—and was granted—your case. If I’m not here and you need treatment, Chris will take over for me, so you’re in good, safe hands. Now, your pregnancy—and you are pregnant, Sadie,” he added, leaning over slightly. “I’ve got someone coming in to do a scan to get exact measurements, so we know how pregnant you are. Without getting too technical, we got an hCG reading in your blood test that confirmed pregnancy. If we wanted to find out a guesstimate of how far along you were, we’d do another one called a ‘quantitative’ test. The scan gives us a better look at the baby and how it’s growing, though.”
That made sense, I guess. At least to someone who didn’t have a clue about pregnancy tests.
“As for the how—”
“La, la, la, la, la,” Craig sang, bumping the door open with his arse and disappearing into the hallway.
Smirking, MeeMee sighed and followed behind him. “I’ll bring you up a coffee, Elijah. And you, Sadie, I’ll get a decaf—”
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped. “You’ll get me a coffee, too.”
“You’re not allowed to drink coffee, sweetheart,” she explained patiently. “It’s banned.”
“Ah, technically, it’s not banned per se. You can drink it in moderation, so a maximum of two cups of medium strength coffee a day. But I’d recommend you not drinking it right now, given that you have nothing in your stomach and you’re battling nausea,” Parker advised.
Preferring his response, even if it meant not being able to drink it right now, I pointed at him. “He’s the one with the medical degree, so what he says goes. However, I’d be happy with something cool, please.”
Shaking her head, she exited out the door, mumbling about times changing and kids these days.
Dropping my head back onto the pillow and inspecting the ceiling, I braced for what else I was about to be told.
“Anyway,” Parker cleared his throat. “As for how you got pregnant—what were you using for birth control?”
“Condoms,” Elijah said, sounding confused.
“Okay, so condoms are only ninety-eight percent effective, so that means two in every hundred people get pregnant using them. To be fair, though, no contraceptive is one hundred percent effective. There’s always going to be a small number of people that it fails for.”
Turning my head to look at Elijah, I saw him frowning at the information. “So, that means if a guy had sex with a hundred women, two of them would get pregnant?”
This question rubbed me up the wrong way. “Doing the math in your head, are you?”
“No,” he sighed. “I’m just trying to figure it out. And I haven’t had sex with a hundred women.”
Before I could reply, Parker answered his previous question. “Statistically speaking, yes. But statistics don’t technically work that way. What they mean is two women out of one hundred in the world get pregnant. Then again, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities. That’s why the safest form of contraception is abstinence.”
Neither of us knew what to say to this, so we stayed quiet. For years I’d played the Lottery and EuroMillions every week. I’d won different amounts, but I’d begged for a more significant win so that I could set up a charitable foundation of some sort. The statistics for winning one of those was probably lower than a condom failing. Did this mean I needed to play the lottery again?
“And the problems you’re having right now aren’t uncommon. Quite a few women have excessive nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, but not quite to this degree. Once we have the measurements from the scan, we’ll be able to give you more answers. However, I’m going to admit you for one more night so that we can up your sugar levels and stabilize you, then you’ll need to make an appointment with an OB/GYN.” Looking at Elijah, he frowned and muttered, “Although, it might be better if we get one to come and speak to you while you’re here, just to make sure they’re happy with us releasing you. We’re giving you an antinausea medication that’s safe to take while you’re pregnant, so don’t panic.”
“Is Sadie at risk with it?” Elijah asked, sounding worried.
“It’s not uncommon for first-time mothers or ones whose own mothers suffered with it to have Hyperemesis Gravidarum. Now, we’ve also been going on the details helpfully supplied by your insurance card, Sadie. Have you lost weight since the one that’s written on the card?”
It took me a moment to find the answer because my brain felt like it’d shrunk to the size of an amoeba, but eventually, I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Excellent. Elijah, your brother was able to fill us in on what she’d eaten in the last forty-eight hours, too, so we’ll need you to be as aware as he was in case we have to admit Sadie again during the pregnancy.”
Anything else that was going to be said was drowned out by the door banging open and my brother helping a young lady through with a weird looking machine on wheels.
“Don’t hurt yourself, love,” he schmoozed, making me feel nauseous again. “But I’ll kiss it better if that helps?”
Definitely nauseous.
Blushing prettily—the lucky wench—she wheeled it over to where Parker was and smiled widely at me. “I’m here to introduce you to your baby. Are you ready to fall head over heels in love?”
Those words turned everything upside down. Suddenly I wanted to meet him or her. I wanted to make sure that the tests were right. And I desperately needed to know that it was okay.
Trying not to cry, I nodded and grabbed Elijah’s hand, hoping it would give me strength.
Seeing how badly I was struggling, he leaned over and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “He’s got the best of both of us in him, and we’re both stronger than the average person, pixie. There’s nothing to worry about, yeah?”
Breathing in a shuddering breath—that fucking, fucking tremble in my chin, making it embarrassingly loud—I nodded and leaned back. “Let’s do this.”
Pulling the blanket down, she lifted the ugly hospital gown I had on up.
“Whoa, whoa, how far up does it go? I mean, I want to meet my niece or nephew, but I don’t want to do it seeing her…” Craig pointed at his chest. “You know?”
“That’s as far as it goes, man. You might want to let your grandmother in before she kicks the door down, though,” Parker snickered, pointing at the little glass window where MeeMee was glaring in and mouthing something at my brother.
While he let her in and she hissed something at him, the woman with the machine squeezed something freezing onto my stomach. Before I could say anything about it, she plopped a weird thing with a cable on it right in the gel and started moving it around as she pressed in slightly.
“Is it a bad time to say I need to go to the bathroom?” I asked, not joking at all. I hadn’t realized it until she’d pressed a particular area, and now it was a pressing matter.
“That’s what we need at this stage to get the best image of baby,” she murmured, her eyes on the screen. All I could see was something out of a sci-fi movie on it until she stopped and squealed, “Gotcha!”
That one word had even Parker leaning around to look at the screen, but it was Elijah’s big shoulders that blocked my view.
“Okay, so here we have—” the girl said, stopping suddenly. “Uh, sir, Mommy can’t see the screen.”
Mommy.
I was an ugly crier. I’d always looked like a constipated bulldog with conjunctivitis when I did it. But silent crying was a whole new issue for me, and I had zero doubts that it made me look like a constipated and conjunctivitis-ridden bulldog trying to hold back a sneeze. And it was all because of that one word—my first mommy.
Swearing quietly, Elijah moved out of the way by getting on the bed and leaning back next to me, giving me his strength and support the only way he could at that moment. I was still hurt by what he’d done, but I could’ve kissed him for it.
“So, as I was saying, this is baby’s head right here, then you’ve got a nose…�
�� she continued pointing out parts to us. “Baby’s got long legs,” she giggled. “Obviously takes after Daddy.”
Well, given that I made my grandmother look like a giant, it was hardly taking after me.
She did some clicking and weird stuff with the screen, with lines and numbers coming up on different parts of the baby, then hummed and looked at Parker. “Looks like fourteen weeks and three days gestation.”
I almost hit Elijah in the chin with my hand. “That’s not possible. We only did it—” I looked at my brother, who was glaring at me now. “Um, roughly twelve weeks ago for the first time.”
“That adds up, Sadie,” Parker explained for her. “We go by the date of the last period, which would’ve been two weeks before the twelve weeks, so we add those weeks onto the pregnancy, and it works out at fourteen plus three days.”
Chewing my lip, I nodded and accepted the response. What did I know about medical stuff?
“Is the baby okay after how sick she’s been?” Elijah asked.
“Everything looks perfect. I’ll print you off some pictures and put some with the measurements on it in your new pretty pregnancy file.” She held up a pretty yellow folder to show me what she meant. “We like to have a backup at this hospital, so you get a copy to carry with you in case you’re somewhere else when you go into labor, and we save the information on a file in the hospital, too. Depending on where your OB/GYN is, they’ll do the same thing.”
“Holy shit, this is legit,” I whispered, staring at the baby on the screen as black and white images started printing out. Then, I swear my life changed in the next second as the baby began to move around, kicking its legs and waving its arms around.
“You’ve got a party animal in there, Dee,” Craig chuckled. “Cute little bugger, though.”
“She’s perfection,” I croaked, tears running down my cheeks now. “The most perfect little human I’ve ever seen in my life.”
As soon as the alien probe was lifted off my stomach, Elijah was there with some paper towels to gently wipe the gunk off it. Once he’d achieved the task, he looked up at me, and something changed between us.
We needed to have a long talk, and I had a shit ton that I wanted to say to him, but he looked more at peace than I’d ever seen before. His eyes were clear, he didn’t have the tension in him that he’d had previously, and he just looked happy.
A knock at the door ruined the moment, and then Jackson was poking his head around it with a massive grin on his face. “Did someone call uncle?”
“Yeah, and I got here first,” Craig said smugly. “Number one right here. You can be a number two.”
Ignoring him, Jackson came and looked down at the photos that I was now holding. “May I?”
I hadn’t met all of the family, but I knew right then that my baby was going to be lucky. He or she was an against the odds baby, so immediately they were special. But if the rest of Elijah’s family were as amazing as the ones I’d met, added onto my own, this baby would be born blessed.
Something that was proven only seconds later, when a tear slowly made its way down Jackson’s cheek.
His one word then sealed it. “Perfection.”
Chapter Twelve
Elijah
I hadn’t slept in well over thirty-six hours, but I wasn’t tired. I was riding a high that I hadn’t ever felt before.
Even her dad glaring at me couldn’t bring me down.
“So you just knocked her up and left?”
“No, sir. I acted like a dick, left to clear my head so that I could come back to Sadie the man she deserves, and then discovered she was pregnant.”
“He also made sure his brother was watching over her,” MeeMee added, pointing at Jackson, who waved.
“We’ve met!” he shouted across the waiting room we were all standing in, drinking shitty coffee.
“And what are your intentions?” Ned growled.
Seeing as how he was sitting down, I took the chair next to him, not wanting to look like I was trying to intimidate him. Talking to him at the same level was more respectful.
“Sir, if I asked your daughter to marry me right now, I think she’d try to kill me.” Ned snorted and nodded in agreement. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not in the cards, though. It just means I need to explain myself to her, and then we need to have a long discussion about where I see us heading as a couple, and now with the baby, too.”
Hearing a “Psssst,” coming from across the room, I glanced over and saw MeeMee giving me the thumbs up.
“There’s also the matter of her safety,” I added, watching his cheeks turn pink. “I wasn’t aware of everything that was going on while I was in Florida, but what I know now has made me think about how I can keep her safe.”
“She’s moving to Austin,” he sniffed, ignoring his mother’s growl. “My place is safe—”
“And in the public eye,” I pointed out. “While I was away, I did some work on a small house I own in Sarasota Bay so that I could bring Sadie there one day. It’s hidden by trees, but I had security installed, and I own the land it’s on, so I had a company install some cameras and sensors in it as well.”
Ned looked at me assessingly, and I got the feeling that nothing went unnoticed. “Know why I didn’t tell you everything as soon as my men found out where you were?”
“I’ve got a lot of possible answers floating around my head for that, but I can’t pick just one.”
“That’s because they’re probably all wrong.” Leaning in closer to me, he held my eyes. “I know what it’s like to let someone you love down by not being there to protect them from that fuck wad. When I found out from my men what’d happened, I knew you needed to get your shit together so that you could come back with a clear head. No man looks at someone the way you look at my daughter if they don’t feel like she hung the moon, so there was no doubt in my mind that you weren’t trying to come back to her a full man.
“I needed to let you focus on that while also making sure you didn’t come back before you were ready. Only a man who’s fully with it can keep his woman safe. You had your brother watching out for her, but I knew you’d do something dumb like come back before you were ready unless I showed you that I had eyes on her, too.”
There was no way in hell that I could pull my eyes away from him to see what the others thought of this news.
“That’s why you sent me files with just enough information in them, but not the most important?”
He nodded. “I can understand someone needing time to get their head around something. When Sadie’s mom died, even though we weren’t together, I lost it. She meant the world to me, and it was hard to cope with, so I took off without warning anyone after the kids decided to stay in the UK. It doesn’t work for everyone, but time alone to come to terms with it worked for me, and I’m seeing that it worked for you. All I’m asking is if you ever need to do that again—”
“I won’t.”
“—that you explain it to her first, and let her know what’s going on inside you. Sadie isn’t a stranger to doing that, so she’ll understand.”
Blowing out a breath, I had to admit he was right. What he was asking and saying made sense, and it wasn’t something that I hadn’t thought about doing not long after I’d left, except I didn’t have my cell, and I didn’t know any of my family’s numbers off by heart. It was pure luck that I’d texted Jackson before I left to ask him to watch over Sadie, otherwise…
Fuck me, I’d have left her on her own.
“Get those thoughts out of your head, son,” Ned muttered. “She wouldn’t have ever been alone, even if you hadn’t had your brother come and babysit her. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dumb thing to do.”
Anything I was going to say was cut off by loud, familiar voices heading toward us. Voices that I’d know anywhere.
“Uh oh,” Jackson snickered, getting a glare from Marcus. “Looks like the backup has arrived. Prepare to get your ass kicked properly now.”
S
ure enough, my parents and other brothers walked into the room, all of them glaring at me.
And then they let rip.
In the end, the only way I’d been able to get them to shut up so I could get a word in was to show them the photos of the baby.
“God, she’s beautiful,” Mom murmured for the millionth time.
“Why is it that the men automatically call it he, but the women go for she?” Craig mused, having been introduced to them all while they were tearing me a new one.
“I think it’s a she,” Marcus shrugged, getting a nod from Ned.
“Mom, can you find a good OB/GYN in Sarasota? I’m going to move Sadie and Dobby to the house until Orson Riley’s been found.”
Looking up at me with unfocused eyes, almost like she was in a baby fog, she nodded then immediately went back to looking at the pictures. Dad wasn’t much better, but the grin on his face was almost comical.
“She’s beautiful,” he said through the grin, reaching around Mom to smack me on the back. “You did good, son.”
“You, too?” Craig huffed. “Mr. Rossi, you’re going against what I said only seconds ago.”
“And I’m doing it on purpose, Craig,” he winked.
“Wait, what’s that you’re looking at?” Ari asked, almost scaring the shit out of me, seeing as how I hadn’t even known she was there until her head poked out from behind my parents. “Is that— Whose baby is that?”
I swear my chest almost exploded with pride. “Mine.”
“You knocked Sadie up?” she choked out, glancing at Ned nervously. Then, she swung around and poked Parker in the chest. “And you didn’t think to tell me this when you rang and said she was in the hospital?”
“That would be a violation of HIPAA, baby. You know that.”
“How does HIPAA override the best friend data disclosure act?” she cried, swinging her arm in the air. “I’m going to see her.”
Shooting us all a glare, she marched down the hallway in the direction of the rooms, only stopping when it occurred to her that she didn’t know which one Sadie was in.
Great Sass: Providence Family Ties Series Page 14
