Your planned speech is no good.
Shit. This means I need to wing it. And I hate winging it. But as I look at Emmett, I hate the possibility of wasting this opportunity more.
“Okay. Um, first of all, I’m not going to the Blaire Group. Actually, I went out to Virginia, but turned the offer down after visiting their office. So, there’s that. Um… If you’re wondering whether I have another job lined up, I don’t. But I’m okay with that.”
Emmett frowns. “What about your plan?”
I raise one hand and release an imaginary balloon. “Poof. Gone like the wind.”
His eyes grow curious.
I decide to take that as a positive sign. “I’ll probably have to make a new one.”
“I suppose you will,” he says.
“But I still want the things I want. That isn’t changing.”
His expression shutters a bit.
I need to get to the point before he gets bored and throws me out. Emmett Lasker can’t stand people who bore him.
“Things like a family—a husband who loves me, and children he and I both adore. I thought I’d get around to that once I was more advanced in my career. Done with my student loans and had more savings. But the, uh, timelines have changed.” I put a hand over our baby growing in my womb.
“Yeah,” he says slowly.
“I have issues, Emmett. I don’t…” I sigh. “My mother ran away when she decided she wasn’t going to have the kind of excitement she wanted in her life if she had a baby to be responsible for. Settling down wasn’t for her. I like to act like that didn’t impact me—or hurt me—but I think it did. She reached out to me on social media a little while back, and when I saw the pictures she posted… They were of her partying, drinking, smoking joints, that whole scene. Basically a forty-something woman acting like a teenager, and it just…hit me the wrong way.” I swallow and inhale a shuddering breath. “So when we went to your father’s party, I started to doubt, especially when your dad came and said the things he said about wanting a grandbaby. I…”
The words trail off as my courage starts to fail. I really should’ve made a PowerPoint presentation. Or some kind of prop with timelines and plans and things. Emmett’s just staring at me, his gaze intense, and I’m too nervous to interpret his reaction.
When I stay quiet, Emmett sighs a little. “Thank you for explaining. I was actually planning on calling you or stopping by. Because, well… I lied while we were together.” He looks overly somber.
My gut tightens unbearably, and I feel like I’m about to throw up. Just how bad is this lie going to be?
“I don’t get along with Dad at all.”
Huh…?
“He’s more like a sperm donor. Well, a sperm donor who paid for things, but I think he did that to make sure my brothers and I weren’t around to bug him. He shipped us all off to a boarding school in Switzerland when we were three.”
“Oh my God… Three? You were so little!”
Emmett shrugs. “Mom and all the other mothers of my brothers came with us. But it was obvious that Dad didn’t really want his kids. We were a group of vasectomy-fail babies to him. Nothing more—”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah. He only ended up with us because a vasectomy he thought would keep him child-free failed, and seven of the women he was banging got pregnant.”
“Seven women? All at the same time?”
“More or less at the same time. And yeah, seven. That we know of.”
I cover my mouth with a hand. This is crazy. And here I thought my situation with Mom was awful.
Emmett continues in a wry tone, “He only contacts us when he wants something, and we only go see him on his birthday. We try to avoid him as much as possible because nothing good ever comes out of the encounters. There are more scandals attached to his name than anyone wants to count, and frankly, I find them—and him—embarrassing. I didn’t want to have you meet him, ever, which is why I d
idn’t want to take you to the party. I didn’t want us to have a private dinner or something with him either, because spending that much time with him, in such close quarters…” Emmett shudders.
He doesn’t have to say more. Now his reactions make much more sense. I wish he’d told me the truth—at least the part about not getting along with his dad—so I wouldn’t have put so much pressure on him to make the introduction and so on. I would die if Emmett ever met my mom.