“Jenna, it only took a single heartbeat for me to know you were the one. That you would hold my heart in your hands for eternity. I want you to wear my ring so everyone else knows how much I love you and that you’ll always be mine. Will you marry me?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her smile was big and bright. “Yes.”
Jenna wanted a big, beautiful wedding, and I wanted her to have whatever made her happy. I left a few days later and after my training was done, I was sent overseas. My specialty was military intelligence, and it kept me moving around. I was often unable to share much information with Jenna, especially since she wasn’t my wife. I came back as often as I could, but the whole situation was hard as hell. It took all of my love for her, not to demand she leave her life and join me.
At the end of my four years, they offered me a position stateside, and I considered taking it. Since Jenna was done with school, we could finally get married and start a family. But, a friend of Weston’s approached me with another job offer. Xander Gray ran a security firm, one that did everything from installing security systems, to body guarding, to the more specialized, black ops. He wanted me to be a part of his team of civilian contractors. Working with the military and government, while remaining a civilian and best of all, it was right there in Atlanta.
I’d taken him up on his offer and not regretted it once. For a year, I waited patiently for her to plan our wedding. But life kept getting in the way. Especially after her brother’s fiancée had been threatened, putting Jenna in danger as well.
After that, I gave Jenna a date and told her if she wanted a wedding, it better happen by then or I’d cart her off to Vegas. But, come hell or high water, she would be my wife by that day.
I didn’t share my second goal with her. I fully intended for her to be walking down that aisle with my baby in her belly.
1
Jenna
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned, tugging on the waist of my jeans and pulling hard. No matter how much I yanked, the darn things wouldn’t meet close enough in the middle for me to be able to force the button into the hole. To add insult to injury, they were my fat pants, too! My period was supposed to start yesterday, and my bloating had been out of control for the last couple of days.
Glancing in the mirror, I turned to the side and sucked my belly in. It didn’t do a lot of good, though. I still looked like I was...
“Pregnant,” I gasped.
My period was normally like clockwork, always starting on the twenty-eighth day. I’d assumed it was late because of the stress of planning my wedding to Quinn. After all these years, we were finally less than three months away from our big day. The school year would be ending in a couple of weeks, and I had about a million details to finalize so everything would be exactly how I wanted it.
“Except for one little thing,” I whispered, my hand hovering over my belly as I stared at myself in the mirror. I hadn’t planned to get pregnant before we were married. If I had, I would never have picked a mermaid, off-the-shoulder, sweep train lace wedding dress. It was a custom design and fit me like a glove—or at least it had before all the bloating had started. If I was pregnant, it would probably burst at the seams by the time our wedding date rolled around.
If. Such a simple word, but I didn’t want it hanging over my head. I wanted to be certain.
I pulled my pants down my legs, kicking them off when they reached my ankles, and grabbed some yoga pants to put on instead. Feeling rebellious, I snapped a quick selfie and sent it to Quinn. He deserved the torture of knowing that I was running around town in a pair of what he liked to call “ass corsets” because they lift and shape my ass. He hated when I wore them and he wasn’t with me since they could make a decent ass look amazing, and I already had what he thought was the perfect ass.
A few minutes later, my phone dinged with a text notification. I ignored it and pulled out of our driveway, intent on getting to the drug store immediately. As I passed my brother’s house, I briefly considered stopping to talk to his wife, Aspen, but then I decided against it. Weston’s goal in life seemed to be knocking her up as often as possible, so she probably had a spare pregnancy test lying around, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone other than Quinn—not until I knew the results.
I raced to the store, practically leaping from my BMW to run inside and grab a handful of tests since I didn’t want to waste the time to figure out which one was best. Then I headed towards the Gray Security offices, calling Quinn on speaker phone when I was only a few minutes away.
“Morning, baby. How’s all the errand running going?”
“About that—” I trailed off, my eyes glossing over with tears. Stupid hormones, they were another sign that the test was probably going to be positive. “I haven’t gotten anything from my original list done yet because I had to add two more stops to the list.”
“Not because of issues with the wedding, right?”
I heard the dread in his tone. Normally, I’d be understanding of it because he would have preferred to get married when he’d graduated from college, but I’d still had three years to go, so we’d waited. And waited some more, if you asked Quinn. But with thoughts of a possible pregnancy crowding my brain, I wasn’t in the mood to be reasonable. Especially not when it was all his fault.
“It depends on how you look at it,” I muttered.
“What do you mean; it depends?”
“Well,” I drawled out slowly. “You know how I am about surprises, right?”
“Of course I fucking know how much you hate surprises. I know everything about you.”
“Then you know how I get when even the tiniest surprise is sprung on me,” I snapped at him. “Multiply that by about a thousand, and you’ll get how I’m feeling right now.”
“What the fuck is going on? Tell me so I can fix it. I don’t like knowing you’re across town while you’re freaking out.”
“I’m not across town. I’m down the street from your office,” I corrected. “As a matter of fact, I’m getting ready to turn into the parking lot now.”
“Are you okay? Wait in the car. I’ll come down and get you,” he barked.
“No!” I yelped. I didn’t want to have this conversation in the middle of a parking lot. If it turned out that we were expecting a baby, I wanted this moment to be a little more memorable than us standing by my car where anyone could wander past us while I told him the news. “I’m coming up to you.”
“Jenna,” he growled.