The Billionaire's Temporary Bride (Scandal, Inc #3)(86)

Charlotte's eyes fell on the bookshelf against the wall. The silver lettering glowed in the moonlight on the spine of Pride and Prejudice. She buried her face in the blankets and tried not to cry as she drifted off to sleep.





Chapter 33

Charlotte woke to a soft knock on the door. For a brief moment as she drifted between sleep and consciousness, she wondered where she was.

"Honey, is everything alright?" her mother asked from the hall. "Your father and I weren't expecting you. We were quite confused this morning when we saw Jack's car. Don't tell me the two of you slept on the tiny bed in your room."

"I'm fine," Charlotte mumbled as she rolled over in her narrow bed.

She knew she wasn't fine, but she didn't want to go through everything with her mother, not while she was still half-asleep. The bed creaked beneath her as she sat up, and she wondered how she had been able to sleep through the night at all.

"Jack's in Boston," she added.

"I'm coming in," her mother said. Ellen stepped into the room, took one look at Charlotte's mascara-stained cheeks and her wrinkled dress and rushed over to the bed. "Honey, what happened?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Charlotte said.

She felt like a little kid trying to hide her problems from her mother. She wanted to pull all the curtains shut and wallow alone in darkness and silence. She felt sick to her stomach. She didn't know if it was morning sickness or exhaustion or the feeling of her heart breaking inside her chest, but she felt dizzy and anxious and upset.

She couldn't bear the thought of getting out of bed, and she just wanted to bury her face in her pillow. She wanted to snap her fingers and go back to the way everything had been before she fell in love with Jack, before he fell in love with her and was too stubborn and afraid to admit it, before she had messed everything up by doing the one thing that could have sabotaged their relationship. Jack didn't think he was ready to be a father, and she wasn't sure if she was ready to be a mother on her own.

Charlotte looked up at her mother. "I'm sorry I didn't call."

"You know you're always welcome here," Ellen said. She sat down on the edge of the bed. "If you need to talk or anything at all, you know your father and I are here for you."

"Thanks, Mom," Charlotte said. She felt a surge of emotion almost like pressure behind her eyes.

"It's good to feel needed sometimes," Ellen said. "You girls are so grown up, and now that you're jet-setting and campaigning all the time, I feel like you're slipping away from me. So if you want to show up in the middle of the night, you don't have to explain a thing. Just let us know, and we'll make sure your bed is ready. If that husband of yours decides to follow you here, we'll set up the sleeper in the den. I remember when you and your sister were both so little that you could lie on opposite ends of this bed, and I could fit between you and read you a bedtime story."

"Mom," Charlotte said. She couldn't take it any longer. If her mother reminisced for another second, Charlotte was going to burst into tears all over again. "I'm pregnant."

Ellen jumped up from the bed. "I'm going to be a grandmother? Oh honey, that's wonderful! Why are you so upset about it?"

"I had a fight with Jack, and I didn't know where else to go."

"What happened?"

"I didn't tell him about the baby until last night, and he got upset."

"About the baby or about the not telling?" Ellen sat down again next to Charlotte, pulling her close.

"It's complicated."

"I've got time."

"He has a screwed-up relationship with his family and doesn't think he'd be a good father," Charlotte said. The rest of the story poured out of her as she tried to keep from crying all over again. "That and he has some very understandable trust issues, and I was the only person in the world he truly trusted, like deep down in his soul trusted, and I violated that trust by not telling him I was pregnant.

"I didn't want to upset him, and I wanted to buy some time before I figured out what to say, but I did everything the wrong way. I hid the truth from him after demanding he be completely upfront with me about everything. And then I told him, and he was furious with me for not telling him and for waiting until five minutes before he had to give the biggest speech of his life, and I didn't know what to do, so I left. He has every right to hate me."

"Calm down, honey. I'm sure he doesn't hate you," Ellen said.

"We got in a fight right before he went on stage to accept the nomination. I put him in an impossible situation. It was the one thing he said he feared. The one thing, Mom." Charlotte let her head fall against her mother's shoulder.

Ellen ran her fingers through Charlotte's hair, massaging her head slowly the way she used to when she was home sick from school. "Honey, if having a child with the woman he loves is his biggest fear in life, then he has a pretty good life. Just because you got in a fight doesn't mean it's over. Just because he's afraid doesn't mean he won't rise to the occasion and do the right thing. He's your husband. He might need a few days to wrap his head around the idea that he's going to be a father, but he's a good man, and he loves you, and the two of you will make this work. This is the kind of thing that happens when people rush into a marriage. You haven't been together long enough to know that a few fights aren't the end of the world."