You Were Meant For Me (Wishful 10)

“You’re evil. You know that, right?”

“Gotcha thinking about something else, didn’t it?”

For all of twenty seconds anyway. “Sneaky man.”

Dr. Jenkins rolled over the ultrasound machine. “With the date of your last period, you should be right at eight weeks along, so we’re going to confirm that.”

Tess moved to lift up her shirt.

“Oh, no honey. This early the baby’s too small to see on an external sonogram. It’s about the size of a raspberry right now. We’ll be using this transducer to do an internal one.” She held up a sort of wand that looked for all the world like a dildo. The condom on it didn’t help that impression.

“Um.” Tess didn’t know what to say.

Mitch made a small choking noise, as if holding back a laugh.

Dr. Jenkins chuckled. “Yeah we get that reaction a lot. Lie on back now. You’ll feel a little pressure.”

Tess jerked, everything in her going tense again at the alien sensation.

“Just try to relax now.”

She took a few deep breaths, aware she was clenching Mitch’s hand like a vise.

He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. “You’re doing great.”

God how could he be so calm? Did he not realize the enormity of all of this?

Shapes appeared on the monitor. Dr. Jenkins made a few adjustments.

“Ah, here we go.”

And there it was, in stark black and white. A distinct baby-shaped thing. With feet! And an actual face. Or the profile of one, at least. Something was moving. A rapid little flutter that said, Hey, I’m alive.

“Mitch.” Tess could barely do more than whisper his name, but he squeezed her hand tight.

“Ho-ly shit,” he murmured.

Dr. Jenkins pointed to the fluttery bit. “That right there is the heartbeat. Good and strong.”

“It’s so fast,” Tess said. “Why is it so fast? Is something wrong?”

“Fast is totally normal. You have a healthy baby here.”

“Healthy baby. Okay. Okay.” The relief flooding through her was staggering. Healthy baby. With everything else going on and all the terror over the changes, she hadn’t even realized how worried she’d been about that. There was a part of her—a small, selfish part, that had wanted this situation to take care of itself. To just wake up and have it over. A bad dream.

But this wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a child. Her child. And maybe she was taking a little while to get on board with that, but she was in it now. They had a healthy baby and they were doing this thing.

She just had to figure out if they could actually do it together.

Chapter 11

Mitch stared at the ultrasound as Dr. Jenkins pointed out various features and talked about different signs of the baby’s stage of development. That was a real, live baby in there. His baby. That little lima bean was his son or daughter. It kinda looked like a big-headed alien at the moment, but it was distinctly headed toward human-shaped. A freaking miracle.

He and Tess had done that. They’d made that, despite all the odds. It had to mean something, didn’t it? Like the hand of Fate ensuring they’d be together. How could they not? All the stars were aligning.

Mitch wanted to hug Tess. To kiss her. In truth, he wanted to make love to her all over again. But when he shifted his attention to her, wanting to share the bubbling joy, she didn’t look at him. He couldn’t read the expression on her face as she continued to stare at the screen. She wasn’t saying a word. She’d loosened the stranglehold on his fingers after Dr. Jenkins declared the baby healthy, but he couldn’t tell if she was really tuned in to what was being said or not. So he was the one who finally released her hand to take notes and ask a thousand questions. He made lists of things to research, topics he and Tess needed to discuss and decide. The recommended reading alone was staggering. It would be the most he’d studied since he got out of grad school. And all the options for genetic testing… Dear Lord. They had seven months to do what felt like seven years’ worth of pl

anning.