The Tycoon's Convenient Baby: A BWWM Pregnancy Romance (8 page)

Chapter7

Elise had been working hard at her new stores while still being careful with her pregnancy; she had managed to find a good balance between work and her health and personal life. The baby that she was carrying had grown to seven months within her. It moved and kicked, bounced around with hiccups, and nudged her ribs sharply from time to time.

She was visiting one of her stores on the Embarcadero one afternoon, stopping in to see that everything was going well and to pick up accounting records. She said goodbye to her staff and walked out the front door, but she hadn’t gotten three steps when a flash in her face blinded her and she stopped to blink and look around. The flashes continued and she put her hands up to block them, realizing that they were camera flashes.

She turned her head, looking to see what was happening and found herself in the center of a swarm of people who suddenly began pelting questions at her, all of them talking loudly, speaking over each other, moving quickly to get different angles of her in their camera lenses. Several of them had microphones pointed at her face and she drew in a sharp breath, trying to steady herself and make some sense of it all.

One woman stepped closer to her than all the others, and shouted the loudest, causing all of the other reporters to quiet so they could hear Elise’s answer.

“How is your husband going to defend himself in court?” the woman’s weathered face was too close to Elise’s, and her words were strange to Elise, they made no sense at all.

“What? What did you say?” she asked in confusion, looking around at them.

“Do you think he is a racist?” shouted another reporter.

Elise knitted her brow and scowled at the man. “I think you have the wrong person!” she said a bit sharply.

“Elise, do you have any comment about your husband’s actions or the charges he will be facing?” the woman shot another question at her as the cameras flashed and clicked.

She stopped in her tracks and stared at the reporters around her. They knew her name. They knew who she was and where she would be. She couldn’t understand how they knew that or how they knew her. She couldn’t understand anything they said. David wasn’t involved in a court case.

“Will you be supporting him through his trial?” another man asked.

Elise stared at all of them and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say to any of you!” she called out loudly, and just then, two of the men who worked in her café came rushing outside and guarded her, pushing the reporters away and walking with her to her car.

She felt tears stinging her eyes, confusion raging through her head and her heart began to pound wildly. “Who are those people?” she asked the staff that had come to help her. “What are they talking about?” The men got her into her car quickly and pushed the reporters back further while she started the engine. She looked back in her mirror at the crowd of them once more and then drove away, wondering what in the world they were talking about.

She went home in complete amazement, too dumbfounded to think. When she pulled into the drive, she saw Carlson’s car there, but she didn’t think anything of it, as he was often there to see David. She let herself into the house and looked around, but didn’t see anyone. The baby kicked her solidly and she winced in pain for a moment and then walked toward David’s office to see if she could find him there. As she reached the doors, she saw that they were open slightly, and she heard Carlson talking to David.

“Well it’s out in the press now, but thankfully the plan worked and Elise will be a believable diversion from their argument.” Carlson spoke in his low, older man voice.

Elise drew in a breath and stopped in her tracks, resting her hand on the frame of the door and listening to them as they spoke. She hadn’t expected to hear her name, and though she wasn’t a proponent of eavesdropping, she was anxious to hear what was going on.

David spoke in agreement with him. “It was a good plan, Carlson. I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t come up with it. Marrying her was the smartest thing I ever did, and having the baby was a stroke of genius on your part, although I thought you were two steps off when you first came up with the idea. Marry a black woman and have a child so the jury won’t think I’m racist. I thought you were going too far, but now I’m glad I listened to you. No one is going to believe Jackson now, no matter what they say.”

Elise’s mouth dropped open in horror. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The reporters that had been outside of her shop had been several steps ahead of her, thinking that she knew what was going on with her husband when in reality, she had no idea whatsoever. He had lied to her. He had told her at their first meeting that her marriage to him was to help his public image, not save him from the wrath of a jury. She covered her mouth with her hand to keep herself silent and she listened closer.

“He’s out for money, and we can show that to the jury, but we have to be careful how we present this. We can’t let them feel any sympathy for him or you will lose the case because they’ll feel sorry for a black man,” Carlson said.

Elise felt like she was going to throw up and her stomach tightened.

“I’m not giving him any money. I don’t owe him anything and he’s not getting a dime. It’s his damn fault. He started the fight. He threw the race card down and threatened to drag us through court, and he’s the one who took it this far. It’s because of him that I had to get married in the first place. How else was I going to show a whole courtroom that I wasn’t a racist? I will always be grateful that you came up with that plan, for so many reasons, Carlson. I really think there is no way we could win this without Elise and the baby behind me to prove Jackson is a money grubbing liar.” David’s words burned into Elise and she realized just how she was being used then. She covered her mouth again to stop herself from throwing up and her heart beat wildly against her chest.

Sarah had been right all along. She had known right from the start that there was something Elise didn’t know, something that David was hiding from her, and that was why Sarah never fully trusted him. All this time, after all the months that had passed and he had never said a word to her about it. He’d never been upfront or honest with her, not at their initial meeting, and not afterward, when he had declared his love for her. Her heart felt like it was going to break in two. Blood rushed in her ears and her stomach tightened again as she forced herself not to throw up. She had trusted him completely and he had betrayed her. He was using her and he was using their baby for something as horrible as defending himself in a court case.

She could not stand it any longer, she flung the door open and marched into the room, seething in anger at both men. Carlson and David, who were sitting across from each other at David’s desk, both jumped when she rushed in, staring at her with wide eyes and open mouths.

David reached his hand out to her. “Elise! Elise, what’s wrong?” he asked with concern, seeing the rage in her face.

Sweat began to bead along her hairline and she shouted at him. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?! I left one of my shops today and was practically run down by a gang of reporters who wanted to know what I thought about your upcoming court case!”

David felt his stomach drop to the floor. He hadn’t known how he was going to tell her but that was definitely not how he had wanted her to find out about it.

“I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about,” she continued yelling at him, “so I told them I had nothing to say to them! Lucky you! Imagine if I had slipped and asked them what they were talking about! How stupid would we have looked then? How transparent would your little scheme have become?” She walked towards the desk and grabbed the back of a chair, leaning heavily on it for support as her stomach tensed again.

“Elise, I’m sorry, I didn’t-” David started to say, but she stopped him.

“You’re damn right you didn’t! You didn’t say anything to me about it at all! Ever! I’ve been with you for about eight months now and you have not said one single word! You deceived me! How could you do that? How could you sleep in the same bed with me and tell me you loved me, tell me you wanted our marriage to be real and all the time lie about why I was even here to begin with! How dare you!” she screamed, clutching her stomach as it tensed and a sharp pain seared through it.

“You’ve been lying to me the whole time, right from the start, letting me believe in you and trust you, and the whole time it was all a big lie. You never once said a single word to me about a court case, you never once told me anything about this Jackson guy, and now here I am, the fool who you expect to save you? That’s your idea of winning your case is to stand behind a woman and a baby? You’re the lowest dog I ever knew! Who hides behind a lie and a woman and a baby to win a court case? You’re despicable!” She felt the bile rising in her throat and covered her mouth again, closing her eyes for a second and trying to relax herself.

David rushed around the desk to her and tried to reach for her, but she pushed him away. “Don’t you touch me, you liar!” she shouted, backing away from him as tears burned her eyes and began to roll down her cheeks.

“I’m not a liar!” he insisted, still trying to reach for her. He was devastated that she had found out the way that she did, and the words that she had spoken had shown him what he was doing in a different light, a light that made him feel like the worst man he knew. He hadn’t ever considered it the way that she had said it, but he knew she wasn’t wrong.

“I never said anything to you because we weren’t sure if it was going to go to court. Let me explain this to you, please, Elise, there’s a lot you don’t know.” He pleaded with her, hoping against hope that she would listen to him.

“You want to explain it to me now? Now that the rest of the whole damn world knows except me? You’re a little late, David! If there’s a lot I don’t know it’s because you never told me, and you have had months, David,
months
to tell me, and you never said a word!”

She grabbed at her belly as another pain shot through it. “I’ll tell you what I do know, David. I know that you lied to me and the whole time we have been together, you have been planning on using me and using our baby as some false shield for you to hide behind in court, and that’s disgusting. I thought you were a good man, David. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you! Now I know that if I did it would be the worst mistake I ever made. I know that all I want from you now is a divorce. We’re through, David, you can fight your battles on your own.” She turned and hurried from the room, slamming the doors behind her, right in David’s face as he tried to follow her.

Panic hit him squarely in the chest and he tried to race after her to stop her, but the doors she had slammed shut delayed him long enough that by the time he reached the driveway, she was already in her car and pulling away. He chased after her down the driveway for a short distance, waving his arms and yelling to her to come back but he was calling out to the wind, because she was gone.

He watched her car disappear and he was sure that his whole world had just ended. Not because he would probably be facing court alone, but because his wife and child were gone, and there was no loss to compare with that.

Elise raced from the house, her emotions in complete chaos as she drove. For a moment she wasn’t sure where she was going; all she knew was that she had to get out of the house. But another sharp pain in her back and abdomen told her right away where she needed to go. She pulled over until the pain subsided and then she drove to the hospital, stopping a few more times along the way as it became horribly clear to her that she was having contractions.

Panic and fear flooded her. She was only seven months along in her pregnancy. She couldn’t have the baby yet. She told herself that maybe the hospital could stop her labor. She parked in the emergency lot and was in a wheelchair being rushed to the maternity ward in mere moments. The nursing staff set her up in a room in labor and delivery while they got her examined and checked in to the hospital simultaneously.

The pains were coming more often and were so sharp that they were causing her to double over and cling desperately to the bed she was in. She managed to get one of the nurses to call Sarah for her in between contractions. The nurse assured her that Sarah was on her way.

The head nurse was checking her dilation again and Elise reached for her, begging through the tears that streamed down her face. “I can’t have the baby yet, I’m only seven months along! Can you stop this? Can you stop the labor?”

The nurse looked at her with sad eyes and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Elise, we can’t. You’re too far along in your labor. There is no way to stop it now. We will do what we can to help you and the baby.”

Elise felt terror rip through her and freeze her body. She was alone and her baby was going to be born prematurely. Fear closed its icy grip tightly around her and all she could do was wish with all of her heart that her baby might survive. Nothing else mattered to her, nothing else in the world except the little one in her who was rapidly losing a chance at life. She looked down at her swollen belly and rubbed her hands over the hardness of it.

“Don’t you worry, baby, we’re going to do this, you and me… together, and you’re going to make it! You are! I’m not going to let anything happen to you, little one, don’t you be afraid! I’m going to take care of everything! Just be safe! Please be safe. Please be okay…” Tears streamed in rivers down her face as she laid back and clenched the bed in agony while another contraction tore at her.