Page 19 of Doctor Daddies

I wait until I hear Marianne finish up on the other side of the curtain, and she steps out, saying her goodbyes to Millie as she goes.

“I’ll be back to check on you in about an hour,” she tells Millie brightly. “But if you need anything before then?—”

“Would you mind stepping out, Marianne?” I ask her, my voice low, trying to contain everything that’s threatening to get the better of me right now. “I’d like to talk to Millie alone.”

Marianne glances between us and seems to notice, for the first time, the way my demeanor has shifted since the last time she set eyes on me.

As for Millie, she’s staring at me, her face pale, and I get the feeling that she knows exactly what this is about.

“Of course,” Marianne mutters, and she hurries through the door like she knows there’s a storm about to explode in here that she doesn’t want to be a part of. The staff at the clinic have been so supportive about our choice to do this of our own accord, butI have no doubt that’s come with some gossip about the nature of our arrangement. And no doubt Marianne is out there right now, telling everyone that I was looking at her like a man with a mission.

As soon as I hear the door click shut behind her, I stride toward the bed, where Millie has swiftly sat herself up, tucking her robe under herself.

“What’s the problem?” she demands, but I notice that her eyes are sliding away from mine, like she doesn’t want to acknowledge my presence right now.

Oh, she knows what this is about—the one thing she has kept from us, in all of this craziness. The one thing she knew would raise more questions than she had answers to.

“I was just looking over the files related to this procedure,” I tell her, keeping my voice as calm and even as possible given the circumstances.

“Hey, but you said?—”

“And they have this page in them,” I continue, ignoring her protests, “about previous pregnancies. And on that page, it said that you had been pregnant. Once before. That you’d given birth to a baby boy. And that you did that about nine months after the night we all spent together.”

She stares back at me, and I find myself willing her to laugh in my face. Tell me that I have it all wrong and explain it away. Make it so this mess isn’t actually happening.

But I can tell by the way her face falls that I am not going to be gifted that kind of reprieve, not today. No, whatever that file told me, it’s the truth, whether she’s willing to admit it or not.

And I don’t know what the hell that means for the embryos that have just been implanted inside of her.

10

MILLIE

“Cole, wait!”I call after him as he strides to the door, but he’s already gone by the time I get the words out.

I groan and put my head in my hands, heart thumping in my chest.What the fuck am I going to do now?

I can’t believe it happened like this. I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking, deluding myself into believing that nothing would come of such a gigantic fucking secret. But I had this idea that I would tell them when the pregnancy was confirmed, when they could get excited about the idea of having their own children, only for me to be able to reveal that they already have a child. It was about as close to perfect as I could imagine for a situation like this one—and what’s happening now is a far cry from anything I imagined.

I hardly have time to gather my thoughts before Cole returns, this time with James and Ross in tow. James is the first to close the distance between us, his eyes narrowed as he barks out his question.

“Is it true?”

“You have to listen to me?—”

“Oh, fuck, it is,” Ross mutters, as he closes the door behind them. “It’s true, isn’t it? You got pregnant from that night and you didn’t tell any of us?”

I close my eyes, my head swimming. Today has already been high-stress as it is, and being hit with this cavalcade of questions is hardly helping me get myself back in hand.

“Jesus Christ,” James mutters, as he looks over my files on the computer. “It’s here. No wonder she didn’t want us to look at her files. You thought we would find out that you had been hiding this from us…”

Ross is pacing, while Cole just stands there. James leans his head back into his hands and stares at the ceiling, and for a moment, a horrible silence rests over the entire place.

Ross is the first one to speak. “They couldn’t belong to anyone else, could they?”

I look up, lips parted. “You think I was just hooking up with anyone?”

“So that baby—it belongs to one of us?” James asks.