Page 6 of Pregnant Behind the Veil (Brides for Greek Brothers #3)

My lips quirk. She wasn’t peaceful when she was wheeled into the elevator and realized we weren’t being taken to the emergency room but up to the hospital’s exclusive eleventh floor.

A luxury room complete with a living room, views of Central Park and a dedicated concierge.

I have no doubt she would have argued, perhaps even attempted to get off the cot and walk down to the emergency room, if she hadn’t still been nauseous.

I don’t care if she sees it as overkill or not. The entire unit is locked down, with strict protocols for who comes in and out. Privacy is important to both of us. Until we figure out how we’re going to move forward with co-parenting our son and the story we’ll tell the public, we need discretion.

My eyes move back to the fetal monitor. Watch the line bounce up, slide down, then up again.

A substantial donation to the hospital’s foundation at ten o’clock last night fast-tracked all of Alessandra’s tests.

Everything was normal. Under the doctor’s gentle prodding and my sterner follow-up questions, Alessandra had admitted to being nervous about our meeting and having nothing more than a smoothie for breakfast. A fact that had me biting back words that would have only deepened the divide between us.

I don’t want there to be something wrong. But what if they missed something? What if this happens again? I don’t like the uncertainty, the possibility of something else lurking in the background. The uncertainty is harder to control.

The paper crinkles as I unfold it and read the results for the dozenth time: “99.99% probability Michail W. Sullivan is the biological father.”

When the doctor had rattled off the tests they would be performing, I asked for them to include a paternity test. To his credit, the doctor didn’t even bat an eye at my request. I wanted to be able to trust her.

But the fact that I wanted to believe her was a problem in itself.

Emotions are volatile creatures. The last time I let myself hope, truly hope, was also the day a man I’d never met ripped my seven-year-old heart apart.

The paper in my hand, however, is concrete proof.

Whatever happened in Santorini, whatever Alessandra did or didn’t do, doesn’t change the fact that she’s pregnant with my son.

I’m not going to let him grow up without me in his life.

There will never be a day where he questions where I am, if I care, if he did something to drive me out of his life.

My grip tightens on the paper, creating creases in the print.

The man who fathered me taunted me for years with the promise of his presence, only to never show.

Learning he had kept my mother on a financial tether during my early childhood, offering meager handouts as long as she sent photos like I was some damn trophy, deepened my hatred for a man who only seemed to be happy when he was hurting others.

I couldn’t hate my mother, though. She worked herself to the bone trying to claw us out of poverty. She loved me and let me know it every day, even on the days she struggled to keep herself together.

Even when I broke her.

My throat tightens. I don’t like that she accepted Lucifer’s handouts.

But I can’t say I wouldn’t have made the same one if I’d been forced to choose between having a roof over my child’s head or the streets.

And given that I hurt her nearly as badly as he did, I have no room to judge.

That she loved me through it all is more than I deserved.

I think back to the will. The one I finally pulled out and reread a month ago, only to discover Lucifer’s last attempt to break me: a bequest for my mother.

Specifically, paintings. Paintings she had completed that summer when she was an eighteen-year-old art student with stars in her eyes and fell for a much older man who accept her work as he seduced her for his own pleasure.

Even after he’d abandoned her, he’d held her works in an iron grip for over thirty years.

Taking the art she gifted him and hoarding it simply because he could.

I resist rubbing at my temples as a headache creeps in.

My mother will never get them back if I don’t get married within a year of Lucifer’s passing.

She gave up the life she could have had to be my mother.

Forewent her parents’ promise to welcome her back into the wealthy lifestyle she grew up in if she put me up for adoption and pretended like I never existed.

My mother chose to raise me in a one-room apartment in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood instead.

I don’t want to get married. I saw what falling in love did to my mother.

Saw plenty of examples in our run-down apartment building of men and women trapped in dead-end relationships by the people they cared about.

Even if I wanted to risk it, I’m not capable of opening my heart up to a woman.

It took me years to master my emotions, to choose control over anger, sadness, heartache. I’m not good husband material.

But how can I not get married? How can I deny my mother the chance to finally have her paintings back? To do something so monumentally important for the woman who never gave up on me even when I’d given up on myself?

A rustling sound makes me look up. Alessandra stirs.

Her eyes flutter, her gaze landing on me.

Her full lips curve into a soft smile. Blood pulses through my veins as my body tightens.

I remember the last time she looked at me like that, except it was moonlight that caressed her face, not the glow of a sunrise.

Then she blinks. Her gaze sharpens as her mouth thins into a straight line. I feel her shut me out like she just slammed a door in my face.

She sits up as her head snaps around toward the monitors.

“He’s okay.”

My voice rises above the various beeps and ticks of the machines.

But her shoulders bunch up until she sees the steady pulse for herself.

Slowly, she sinks back into the pillows.

Her eyes shift to the window. The room overlooks Central Park, the flourishing greenery a stark contrast to the skyscrapers and buildings that ring the perimeter.

“Any more updates?”

Her voice is huskier than it was last night, her tone firm but with a trace of worry beneath the bravado.

I debate for all of two seconds if I should wait for the doctor.

No. Alessandra and I need to be able to have hard conversations, just the two of us.

She’s not going to like what the doctor has recommended after she’s discharged.

But to me, it’s not a recommendation. It’s common sense that will keep her and the baby safe.

“All the tests have come back normal. He wants to keep you for another twenty-four hours for observation.”

She’s still, almost unnaturally so, as she watches me. Then, at last, she nods. “What are you not telling me?”

Admiration flickers through me. Smart woman. It’s easy to picture her as a lawyer, someone who observes and evaluates. I still want answers. And I need to broach the subject of the will and the bequest for my mother. Once she’s feeling better, she will be a valuable resource.

“The doctor recommended you have someone stay with you for at least a week.”

The obvious solution hangs in the air between us.

I know it. Judging by the instant hardening of her face, she knows it, too.

She lives alone and, as of three months ago, wasn’t dating anyone.

Aside from the occasional happy hour with her coworkers at Kingston, she rarely socializes.

All details included in the lengthy investigative report one of my employees conducted following Lucifer’s will reading three months ago.

“If the doctor recommends it, I’ll make it work.”

I cock my head to one side. “You’re staying with me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll stay with someone else.”

Jealousy flares in my chest. Did she start to date someone before she found out she was pregnant? I loathe my reaction as much as I do this faceless, nameless person she would prefer to stay with.

“Who did you have in mind?”

She folds her hands primly in her lap. “None of your concern.”

I hold up the paternity results. “This paper says otherwise. It’s not just about you, Alessandra. It’s making sure the baby is healthy, too.”

The sudden sadness in her eyes throws me for a loop. She shakes her head.

“So that’s it, then. Now that you know I’m not lying, at least about you being the father,” she adds with a snarky glance in my direction, “you think you suddenly have a say in my life.”

“I want you both to be safe.” She blinks as if that surprises her.

And, I acknowledge with reluctance, it’s understandable given how our interactions have gone the last two months.

“My penthouse is secure. I’ll be there most of the time, but all rooms are wired with state-of-the-art cameras and alarms that can alert first responders if I’m not and you have an episode like you did last night.

You don’t have someone that can offer you that kind of reliability and stability as you heal. ”

She looks down at her hands. Her fingers are threaded together so tightly her knuckles are white.

“No,” she finally whispers, her voice hoarse with grief. “I don’t have someone like that in my life. Not anymore.”

I force myself to stay seated even as my mind goes back to that night.

We lay side by side, harsh breaths mingling as we recovered from our second bout of mind-blowing sex.

She had been lying on her stomach, her back bare.

Need guided my hand to her body, my fingers drifting over her heated skin with a light tenderness I’d never felt for anyone.

Every time I touched the rises and falls of her body, the curve of her spine, the swell of her hips, it felt like leaving traces of me embedded in her skin.

I’d looked up at her then, seen the glint of tears in her eyes.

I’d moved to her, pulled her close in the dead of night, cradled her as she’d cried.

Her tears had flown hot against my neck as she’d leaned into me and taken every bit of comfort I’d offered.

Even as she’d grieved, I’d been floored by her acceptance, her trust.

As her tears had dried, she’d told me about her mother. The woman who had raised her alone, fighting against odds to give her a shot at a successful life. For the first time in my life, I had shared, too. Felt seen by someone who had lived an almost identical experience to mine.

We’d gotten out of bed after that, donning robes to sip champagne on the terrace as our conversation shifted to more mundane topics like our favorite places to travel.

But those revelations had forged a connection.

One I had felt as I’d knelt before her on the balcony, undoing the belt of her robe and spreading her legs before I’d feasted on her in the moonlight.

Then, with the taste of her on my tongue and her body warm and pliant in my arms, I’d carried her back into my room and made love to her again.

I remember the sex, yes. But I remember that moment, too, when something more than simple lust bonded us.

Remember her grief as I see it etched on her face now, her loss juxtaposed by the steady beep-beep of the heart monitor.

New life growing even as she mourns someone who won’t be around to see it.

It’s hard not to go to her in this moment, to offer comfort as she grieves her mother. My mom is one of the few people I still trust in this world. Alessandra has no one.

“I’ll hire someone.”

Alessandra’s pronouncement wipes away the sentimental bullshit and reminds me that whatever we had that night is gone.

“You would rather waste money on a stranger than let the father of your child help?”

“Look at us, Sullivan,” she snaps back. “Three out of four times we’ve ever seen each other have been a disaster.

How are we going to survive an entire week?

And how can you give up—” her voice trails off and she waves one hand in my direction “—whatever it is you do with your security company to just monitor me on the off-chance I keel over?”

“To answer your first question, given that we’re going to be connected for a lifetime, we better be able to figure out a week.” The color drains from her face. “And as to the second, I own the company. I can delegate any work I need to. This is more important.”

Silence stretches between us. The machines continue to beep relentlessly in the background. At last, Alessandra speaks, so softly it takes a moment to register.

“All right.”

There’s no sense of victory. No rush of success. Just a hollowness as the mother of my child looks as if she’s lost something very important.

She eases back down onto the pillows. “I’d like some time to myself.”

I want to lay a comforting hand over hers or offer a shoulder for her to lean on, the desire to touch her so strong it’s almost a compulsion.

So I step back, skirt around the bed and head for the door.

She needs space. So do I. Given how strongly I’m reacting to her, time apart to evaluate everything that’s happened is in both our best interests.

My reactions to her are understandable given the nature of her revelation and the massive upheaval to my life.

But I need to get my guard back up, solidify my walls before she comes to stay with me for a week.

I open the door and walk out without a backward glance.