The Billionaire's Pregnant Fling (Jameson Brothers 2)

"Margot—"

But she brushed by him without another word and disappeared resolutely down the street. Eddie could do nothing but watch her go.

Chapter Thirteen

Eddie

"Margot...girl...what are you doing?" Margot muttered below her breath as she let herself in through the dock's security gate.

It was the question of the century, and one Margot had been posing to herself more and more often over the course of the last several months. 'Going with the flow' of things was proving to be easier said than done. She had always imagined the 'flow' as being something relaxing, something that would move along at a leisurely pace and work itself out in the end regardless of any force of will she tried to exercise over it. What she hadn't imagined was for her 'flow' to take the form of an unstoppable tidal wave that she couldn't prevent from crashing down around her, again and again and again. She felt like a perpetual Coney Island tourist at the beach with only a pool floaty to protect her.

She laid a hand on her stomach, as she often did now, and felt a sudden rush of comfort. She walked down along the dock, and she barely noticed the way it occasionally pitched gently beneath her feet. Eddie's boat rose up out of the fading light, proud and safe and familiar. She was here at his invitation.

She was here because she wanted a future together with him.

It was something Margot had found difficult to accept at first...even more difficult than the reality of her pregnancy, and of a potential marriage to the man who was her best friend. She had loved him for longer than she could possibly know. It was such a frightening revelation that all she had wanted to do at first was run from Eddie, and from the tangled web he had managed to weave around them in the name of doing the right thing.

No, it wasn't the perfect fantasy. But maybe it was better than that. They were a family. A dysfunctional, expectant family, but a family nonetheless, and their potential was limitless. When she thought about their relationship in those terms, the web suddenly disappeared, and was replaced by strings of attachment that could never be severed.

She loved Eddie. He, and the baby, and her happiness, trumped everything else. She was ready to take this plunge into the unknown with him. Nothing needed to be perfectly mapped out ahead of time… but that also didn't mean she needed to sit back and let fate take the wheel. She would be actively participating in this, because something told her it would be the most worthwhile thing she would ever do. And she wasn't willing to leave that to chance; to flow. Anything she cared about this much required her complete involvement, from beginning to end. She saw that clearly now.

She arrived at the boat; when she noticed the shadow of movement onboard, she glanced up from trying to navigate the step stool. Eddie was there, waiting for her. He cleared his throat, before bending to hold out a hand to her. Margot accepted without thinking and boarded.

"Evening, Margot," he said. "I'm glad you got my text."

"Evening, Eddie," she said. "I'm glad you decided to text me."

He was dressed up in his most formal yachting attire, looking as effortless as he did immaculate. His auburn hair was brushed back, though not slicked down; he was clean-shaven, but still wore the faint shadow of stubble that she had grown to love. It starkly differentiated the man from the boy she had once known. Margot's heart did a somersault now to see him standing in the faint light of the cabin, and kept up its sudden circus audition when she noticed the way he was looking at her. His eyes glimmered with an emotional sheen, like he still didn't quite trust his vision every time he looked at her.

He didn't let go of her hand.

"Margot, thank you for coming," he said. "I wanted the chance to explain everything to you. I wanted you to know that it's true when I first proposed to you, I did it because your father asked me to."

"I really doubt he 'asked'," Margot said, with a twist of a smile to let him know it was all right to go on.

Eddie chuckled. "If it had been up to me, I would have waited until I felt the time was right. I would have waited until we had discussed everything first, rather than try to play catch-up alongside making such a rash decision. But… I gave that responsibility to someone else. I let your father lead. And I know now that your father has no place in our relationship. Nobody does. And I may not always know how to do the right thing, but I'm the one who has to own my decisions. I can't outsource them." He looked at her a long moment. "I might have lost us your dad's account. And that's okay. I intend to win him back one day… and to win his approval. But I'm not going to go looking for it. And I'm not going to let it be the thing that motivates me to be a good husband to you."

"Oh, Eddie." Margot's h

eart broke to hear him say it, but she also couldn't deny the flood of relief she felt.

"I know now that the partnership that's most important to me requires me to learn to split responsibility and act as part of a team. This is your life, Margot, as much as it's mine. We're intertwined now."

Eddie's hand, the one that didn't hold hers, found her stomach. He touched the exact same spot that Margot had touched earlier, his hand filling the invisible handprint she had left behind. Tears sprang into the corners of her eyes.

"When I tried to exercise control over everything, it all went to shit," he remarked. Margot let out an outburst of laughter, the sound tinged with the emotion she was trying so hard to suppress, and Eddie's accompanying laugh was equally raw and relieved. "But I'm done trying to be so clinical and formal and aggravatingly right about everything. I want the life we were meant to have, if I wasn't trying so hard to be someone I'm not."

"Thank God," Margot said. She squeezed his hand in hers.

"Thank you, Margot," Eddie emphasized. "Thank you for being yourself. Thank you for standing by me and being the woman I could look at all along and realize I loved. Just knowing that now makes every fuck-up worth it to me. I'm just sorry it was such a journey for us both."

"I love you too, Eddie Jameson," she said. She stood before him, with only their child between them, and she knew her eyes shone as brightly as his own as she declared the truth to him. "I still want to marry you. More than anything, I want to marry you." She gave another half-laugh, half-sob, and felt such relief in the aftermath of telling him. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

"Then I don't want to let another minute pass us by," he said. "Do you?"

Margot shook her head. "There’s the impulsive Eddie I love. Not even another second more, if I could help it," she agreed.

Eddie grinned. "I'm glad you said it." He turned, and whistled over his shoulder. Margot rose up on her tiptoes to watch, as two shadows she hadn’t noticed before moved out from the wheelhouse.