Shopping for a CEO's Baby (Shopping for a Billionaire Series Book 16), стр. 3

“It's a statement of fact. Not one-upmanship.”

“Okay. Fine.” Shannon flags down the server, who stops and gives us a patient smile.

“Yes?”

“You have microcreamery ice creams, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Any chance you have something orange and something salty?”

“How about orange sherbet and salted caramel ice cream?”

My stomach sings.

“Yes!” I say. “Can you add a side of anchovies?”

“Excuse me?”

“That was a bad joke,” Shannon tells her, laughing and rolling her eyes.

But it wasn’t.

“Two servings of orange sherbet and salted caramel ice cream,” I say.

“God, no!” Shannon practically screams. “Not two! Only one. I want a double scoop of chocolate peppermint, like normal people.”

I look at her like she’s crazy. “I wasn’t talking about your order!”

“Okay, then,” the server says, backing away slowly. “Two orange sherbet and salted caramel ice creams, one double scoop of chocolate peppermint,” she mutters as she walks away.

“‘Normal people’?” I throw out at Shannon.

“You know. Women who aren't eating for three.”

“You typically eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting, Shannon. Those pints say 'serves four.'”

She pats her stomach. “Then maybe I'm having triplets.”

“The older you get, the more you sound like your mother.”

We laugh, but I'm not kidding this time, either.

“How's Ellie?”

“She’s marvelous.”

“That Mommy and Me class working out?”

“It's going slowly. We're working on getting her used to the playgroup at the preschool, and next month, we're going to try leaving her there. We can't have a repeat of the gym daycare fiasco.”

I wince. “Did the daycare worker's toupee survive being torn off like that?”

“Yes.” She hunches over. “His ego was bruised more than his scalp, thank goodness.” Her eyebrows go up. “Dec says the guy got off easy. Ellie kicks Daddy's balls regularly, like her foot is a stick and his boys are a pinata.”

“She just loves you. A lot.” I bring my water glass to my neck and press the wet side of it under my earlobe, hoping it'll quell the unease in my stomach.

“And I love her a lot, too.” She eyes my belly. “Wait until you’ve spent almost a year holding a human leech against your skin twenty-four/seven.”

“Andrew has his moments.”

“Hah!” Sympathy takes over her face. “I'm sorry about the morning sickness, though.” A single orange globule of fish egg sits on my plate, taunting me, daring me to press my fingertip into it and lick it off the pad.

“Thanks.” Who knew one little fish egg could make my entire stomach start to rebel?

The server appears, tray aloft, setting my bowl of ice cream in front of me, delivering Shannon's with a flourish. Two napkins, two spoons–and then one intense whiff of Shannon's chocolate mint ice cream makes eating for three suddenly turn into nausea for three acres.

The server loads our dirty plates onto the tray as everything in the universe warbles. Wobbles. Warbles and wobbles into a sickening vibration that's about to make me spew.

“Excuse me,” I say urgently, moving around the server, who bends her back so she can lift the tray of dirty dishes in the air. Finding an opening, I squeeze around her, walking as fast as I can to the bathroom, where I find–

A line.

“Oh, no,” I groan, pressing my palm against my stomach, wondering how I'll make it. My skin tingles, chills overtaking me. Who knew a stomach could change temperature in waves like this?

“Are you okay?” the woman in front of me asks, gray hair framing a kind, worried face.

“I'm pregnant, and, and morning sickness, and smells, and–”

Gray Hair turns into my own personal lead blocker, sweeping aside the women in line like pee wee football players. People move back in waves, backs slamming against the wall as I lurch into a stall and everything comes back up.

Orange.

“PREGNANT!” Gray Hair announces.

“Oh, honey.”

“Poor thing.”

“I remember those days!”

The chorus of sympathetic voices form a wall behind me as my stomach unclenches, the wave over.

And as I hear them talking among themselves, the shared experience of growing a human being–or two, in my case–with nothing but food and blood, I realize Gray Hair was right.

All she had to do was shout “PREGNANT!” in a group of women and they instantly banded together in solidarity to help.

To help me.

I am a member of a new group now.

One I didn't really understand even existed.

Tap tap tap

“Amanda?”

I peel my face off the cool toilet seat and turn to see Shannon's navy high heels under the door. She really needs a pedicure, because the chips on those nails are big enough to have been chiseled.

“Mmmm?”

“You okay?”

“Pregnant,” someone in the background mutters.

Shannon laughs. “Oh, I know. I have a toddler at home.”

Murmurs of understanding fill the air.

Shannon's in the club, too. The one I didn't know about. One you only join through trial by fire. And my body decided to enter this new realm with double the impact.

Damn Andrew and his supersperm. Of all the ways to beat Declan at this whole fatherhood thing, he had to do it with my body?

“Andrew gets all the glory, and I get all the puking!” I choke out, spitting twice after, disgusted.

“At least there aren’t any cameras these days,” Shannon commiserates. “The pap are leaving you alone.”

“Only because Andrew forced James to stop using us to generate PR.”

“And that article about how Andrew stopped being eligible once you were pregnant.”

“Pffft. Doesn’t stop plenty of women from hitting on him, still.”

“Yeah, but it keeps the asshole pap away, and that’s something.”

She’s right. This would be so much worse if my puking were being documented.

A hand comes under the door, a box of orange Tic Tacs in Shannon's fingers. “Here.”

“What's that?”

“I got them on the way here. Made sure they were orange.”

Shaking them, she urges me to accept. Slowly, I move a few inches across the floor, the nausea holding back enough to snatch the little box, pop the top, and shake a single orange pellet into my hand.

Gently, I put it on the center of my tongue, the taste buds on the tip too sensitive to assault quite yet.

I close my eyes. I cross