“Your ex’s?”
“No,” I whisper.
Then something ghosts over his face, erasing the anguish with something else … something less terrifying.
Oh, god …
Does he think I’m pregnant with his baby?
“Sophie …” He exhales a long breath as though he’s … relieved?
But that doesn’t make sense. I’m reading him all wrong.
“Not yours.” I clear my throat, and before I can finish, he deflates like a bullet impaled his chest. Why is he reacting this way?
“It’s Chloe’s and Mason’s. I agreed to surrogate for them before I met you. They made me promise not to tell anyone until I’m a little further along, just in case …” I give him a sad smile. “And Jules knows because, well, she’s Jules and she managed to drag it out of me. But my parents don’t know. And if I tell them, Chloe will be so angry with me. I’m not dying. I don’t have cancer. I’m carrying a tiny human inside of me. So yeah, I’m not eating fish or drinking alcohol, and I can have sex and not get pregnant because …” I shrug. “I’m already pregnant.”
As he turns his back to me, he runs his hands through his hair again and blows out a slow breath. Shep has this mix of shock and relief on his face, yet there seems to be a storm of pain in his eyes.
“Please don’t say a word to my dad or Taryn.”
His head inches side to side, but he doesn’t respond.
“Are you mad?”
He releases a stifled laugh. “Mad …” he says it like an echo more than a declaration or an answer to my question. “No, Sophie. I’m not mad. I’m … I don’t know what I am.” Scrubbing his palms over his face, he grumbles something incoherent.
The best sex of his whole damn life. His words. What does one say to that when this particular one is pregnant with her sister’s baby?
“Shep …” This wasn’t the conversation I imagined having on this trip. I’m not ready. I feel like all the wrong words are tumbling off the tip of my tongue. “This pregnancy was carefully thought out and meticulously planned. And I haven’t had one moment of regret since I agreed to do this for them. Not one. I think I didn’t prepare for all the unexpected things, the unexpected people. I just thought I’d take a year off from dating. Grow a baby. Let my body heal. And get back in the game. I mean … what’s one year to give your only sister the one thing she wants more than anything else in life?”
Shep nods several times. “I’d expect nothing less of you, Sophie. It’s selfless. And generous. It’s … you.” He smiles, but it’s such a sad smile.
My heart aches. He’s feet away, but it feels like he’s untouchable.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
SHEP
“You’ve been really quiet,” Sophie breaks a long stretch of silence, her delicate hands working the crochet hook and yarn as I drive us back to Scottsdale.
“Sorry. What do you want to talk about?”
She shrugs a shoulder. “Well, I disclosed my health status to you. Thank you, by the way, for not letting it slip to my dad and Taryn. But you haven’t been yourself since I told you. If you’re not mad, then do you want to tell me how you are feeling?”
“How am I feeling …” I chew on the inside of my cheek while focusing on the road. “I’m uh … suffering from a bad case of irony.”
“Irony?”
I nod. “A few years into our marriage, Millie thought she was pregnant. I was elated. I never hid my desire to have a family. We didn’t discuss a family in great detail before we got married, but she knew my feelings. I wanted kids. I said those exact words. Her lack of saying otherwise is the reason I never questioned her more. So we married. I worked. She didn’t. It’s not that I didn’t want her to work; she just wasn’t sure what she wanted to do.
“I told her I could support us, and maybe it was a good idea anyway if ‘we’ wanted her to stay home when we started a family. She said nothing, again, leaving me with assumptions. So I worked, and she stayed home. Doing what? I have no idea, and I didn’t care. I loved her. I worked for us, for our family. The family I thought we were trying to have together. As time passed, and she didn’t get pregnant, I started to wonder if something was wrong with her or with me. She assured me it was that we were trying too hard.”
Sophie nods a few times, her lips pressed tightly together.
“Millie was beside herself with grief when she missed her period. It made no sense. We had been trying for so long. Only … we weren’t. She had never stopped taking the pill. She didn’t want kids. When she thought she was pregnant, the truth came out. I felt betrayed beyond words.” I grunt a laugh. “She took a dozen pregnancy tests, went to the doctor for another negative test, and finally got her period.”