An Unexpected Baby Read Free

and delighted, Emma reached over to hug him. What could she possibly say in response to those words? She made him feel like a real man!
     
    ***
     
    “Gina, you will never guess what happened to me this morning,” Emma said later in the afternoon as she spoke to her best friend on the phone.
     
    “Oh, no! What is it now, Emma?”
     
    “I’m going to be seeing my OBGYN in the near future.”
     
    “What? For your annual Pap smear?”
     
    “No, silly! I’m pregnant!!!”
     
    Emma heard glass shatter on the floor on the other end of the phone line. “Gina, are you okay?”
     
    Her friend screamed into the phone. “No freaking way! Honey, that’s huge! That’s great! Congratulations! How did you find out?”
     
    “That new ODS test stick. It’s really neat. When I saw the thick pink line…”
     
    “You mean two…”
     
    “Huh?”
     
    “ODS test sticks are two pink lines for pregnancy and one pink line for not pregnant.”
     
    Emma felt the contents of her stomach about to make an unwelcome appearance on the floor of her bedroom. The blood drained from her face.
     
     
    2.

Evan leaned back in the brown leather executive chair in his den. A wide grin curled his lips as he peered out at the rose garden through the glass double doors. Yes, life was looking rosy, wasn’t it?  
Emma’s pregnant!
    She’s really pregnant.
    I’m going to be a daddy.
    Though the words whirled in his mind, he could hardly believe it. So he could produce children after all. This had always been a fear of his. Not being able to conceive. Most of the friends he’d grown up with had children by the time they were thirty. Here he was married at thirty-four for six months and Emma kept having negative pregnancy test results, one right after another. It tore him apart inside to see the look of sadness and disappointment in her beautiful brown eyes when she told him it was a false alarm. Almost every week, she swore her breasts were swollen and tender—a sign of early pregnancy. She also swore she was having morning sickness and every time she rushed with joy to take one of her home pregnancy tests, her spirit took a nose dive as if she’d lost a child she’d never had. Six months wasn’t a long time, but he had read somewhere that couples who try to conceive for six months without success could need fertility counselling. That terrified him, too. It was as if he was admitting he was faulty.
    Of course, he didn’t let Emma know about his concerns. He had his sperm count checked and everything seemed okay but during their first six months of marriage he thought he may not be able to give her the family she’d always talked about having and this terrified him to the core but he could never admit that to her. Now, he wouldn’t have to.
    She was pregnant. She was really having his baby.
    He was paranoid as hell right now that something would go wrong if he wasn’t around her so he decided it was best to stay in town while his vice-president and long time friend, Dale Thomas, took charge and did the out-of-town visit into Dallas. No way was he going to leave her side. He was determined to be within minutes of her if she needed him during the entire forty weeks of pregnancy, if he could help it. She was carrying his bloodline inside her beautiful, precious body. That meant the world to him.
    Evan leaned forward and hit the speaker on his phone and speed dialed another extension in the house. He was calling his long-time  housekeeper, June,  who spent years looking after his father before his readmission back into the Dan Baker Center for the Mentally Ill. That was something he wished he could have controlled. He wished he could tell his father about his new unborn child. Well, he could but his father had reached such an advanced stage of dementia that he probably wouldn’t know. But that didn’t stop Evan from seeing him every day. It didn’t matter to him that his father didn’t know who he was—as long as he