A Mother's Secrets (Parent Portal 4)

He was with her.

But she wasn’t celebrating.

She was doing a job.

Chapter Ten

With hands that were shaking for no good reason, Christine pulled out her phone the second she was in her car, checking for pertinent emails or voice messages that might have come through during the time her phone had been on silent.

There’d been a few of both. Important, but not urgent.

And Olivia had texted. Her friend had been heading into court but wanted to know the results.

Positive, she typed back, and dropped her phone into the pocket on the side of her brightly colored bag.

This wasn’t life-changing news for her, just life altering for a short period of time.

The baby wasn’t even hers.

She started her car, pulled out into traffic, thought about the emails she’d briefly skimmed. The voice messages she’d sort of heard.

Wondered if Jamie had called Tom.

Hoped he had. Now Jamie was one who’d just had life-changing news. He’d been so happy he’d almost been irritatingly talkative.

Except that she’d found his uncharacteristic lack of focus endearing...

The man really wanted this baby.

Such a great thing.

Men wanted children. She saw it every day in her business. So why was she glomming on to the way his eyes had glistened in that first second after the announcement? On the almost uncontainable energy coursing through him so quickly he couldn’t seem to rein himself in?

Why did it hurt so badly that a man was feeling that way about a baby she was carrying?

No. She wasn’t going there.

This most definitely wasn’t about her.

And that fact made it much more difficult to smile at the barrage of faces entering her office, sometimes in duplicate, on and off for the rest of that afternoon. Her full-time staff of seven, the doctors who worked for them, the technicians who were assigned by their employer labs to clinic, even the crew from the cleaning company, one by one, came in to either hear the test results, or to congratulate her because they had heard them.

She smiled. Thanked them all for their support. And reminded every single one of them that Jamie Howe was the one deserving of congratulations.

The baby was his. Not hers.

* * *

Still in his dress pants and polo shirt, Jamie appeared at her office door at five minutes before four. The way she reacted to the sight of that athletic body with that dark hair tipping his collar, and the hazel gaze meeting hers, you’d think the man meant something to her. Personally.

She almost walked from behind her desk to give him a hug.

It was just the emotion of the day, she knew that, mixed in with a bit of hormonal fluctuation. Now that she was pregnant, her body, and prenatal vitamins, would be naturally producing everything her uterus needed, so she was to stop the fertility medication. It wouldn’t stop the roller coaster of emotions, though. She’d forgotten that from the past.

Jamie had barely said hello and mentioned that he might have found a house, when Cheryl rang in. Putting the phone on speaker, Christine and Jamie listened together as the doctor said that the blood test confirmed what they already knew.

And reminded them that their due date was March 14.

Cheryl congratulated Jamie again, reminded Christine to call her anytime before her next appointment if she had any issues and hung up, leaving them standing there on opposite sides of her desk, looking at each other.