by Simply BWWM
“It’s possible,” the doctor repeated. “It’s either that or the heartbeat is a little weird. At this stage in the pregnancy--you’re only about six or seven weeks--a weird heartbeat isn’t all that unusual.”
“I’m guessing that twins have a particular variety of weird heartbeat in ultrasounds,” Elizabeth suggested.
“It does sound more like an echo than the usual abnormalities,” the doctor admitted. “And if it’s a set of twins, with the placental sacs very close together--so close that we can’t tell that there’s two--that would make sense. It would sound more like one strange heartbeat than two distinct ones.” The doctor sighed. “We’ll be able to tell better in a few weeks, when you’re a solid two months and change along the way.”
“So, in the meantime, it’s kind of a Schrodinger situation,” Luke said. “Simultaneously a twin pregnancy and a non-twin pregnancy.” Dr. Marchman laughed.
“More or less, yeah,” she said, nodding. She took the ultrasound wand away and pressed a button on the machine to print out images. “If you want to go ahead and wipe the goo off your belly, Liz, you can run to the bathroom, and then we can finish up the tests.”
As she cleaned up and went into the bathroom attached to the office, Elizabeth thought about the real possibility that she was carrying twins. So far, she hadn’t had any symptoms more severe than occasional frustrating nausea; her “morning sickness,” such as it was, hadn’t even really been bad enough yet for her to actually throw up. She’d counted her blessings on that, but if she was carrying twins, Elizabeth knew that the second and third trimesters could be brutal.
Elizabeth washed her hands after emptying her bladder and remembered what Kelly had told her. Could she really take the gamble that Luke might abandon her kids as well, knowing that she might have two of them? Would she be able to raise two kids on her own as a freelancer, even with a stipend from Luke to cover their expenses? She would have to confront him about Kelly more directly than she had dared to so far.
The rest of the visit was more or less a blur for Elizabeth as she thought about what to say to Luke, how to ask him such an impossible question. She couldn’t just accuse him of abandoning a child outright, but at the same time, she couldn’t just beat around the bush about it. She responded to questions automatically and tried to keep up her end of the conversation with the doctor, but by the time she and Luke walked out of the offices together, Elizabeth knew she had to approach him about Kelly Lathem as soon as possible.
“What do you want for lunch? We can get anything you like,” Luke said as they walked towards the car where David--Luke’s driver--waited for them.
“Chinese sounds amazing right now,” Elizabeth replied.
“We can order from China Dragon; that’s on the way back to your place,” Luke suggested. Elizabeth nodded.
“You want to come to my place? You’re slumming it,” she said with a little grin.
“Hey, I got you an apartment in a reasonably nice part of the city,” Luke said. He opened the door to the back seat of his car.
“You did. But it’s never going to be as nice as your place,” Elizabeth countered. She grinned to take any possible sting out of her words.
“If you want to go to my place, we can,” Luke suggested.
“No, my place is fine,” she said. “Let’s put in an order and then let David drive us by there on the way home.” She could feel her stomach twisting inside of her slightly at the thought of talking to Luke about Kelly Lathem.
They got into the back seat of the car together, and Luke ordered from the online menu: crab rangoon, egg rolls, egg drop soup, General Tso’s chicken, Mongolian beef, and an order of pork fried rice. “I think that covers everything either of us could possibly want to eat,” Luke said, approving the order before giving the signal to David to start driving. They might have to wait a few minutes once they arrived at the restaurant, but it should be easy for Luke to go in, get the food, and come back out.
When Luke went into the restaurant, Elizabeth thought about how to handle the situation at hand. Obviously, she couldn’t talk to him about it in the car; there was no reason to get David involved. How long has David been Luke’s driver, though? Maybe he could tell you something about Kelly. She checked the time.
“Hey, David?”
“Yes, Ms. Raleigh?” Elizabeth started to roll her eyes at the respectful address.
“I’m not your employer,” she said, remembering his reasoning for never calling Luke by his first name.
“No, but you’re his friend,” David countered.
“Fine. How long have you been driving for Luke?” David thought about it for a moment.
“About two and a half years,” he said. Okay, so he might know something.
“Do you remember someone he was dating up until about a year ago named Kelly?”
“Ahhh, Ms. Lathem,” David said, nodding. “I remember her.”
“Do you know anything about their breakup?” David turned around in his seat.
“If I did know something, it would be unethical for me to tell you what I know,” he said, holding her gaze steadily.
“Would you be able to confirm or deny something, based on what you do know, if I suggest something?” David thought about that.
“If it’s something you’re asking me about, and I know whether the answer is yes or no, I could say,” he replied. “But I would want to be really careful.”
“I understand completely,” Elizabeth said. She looked towards the front of the restaurant; Luke wasn’t coming out yet. “Do you know if Kelly was pregnant when they broke up?” David’s eyes widened.
“That I don’t know about,” he said. “I never heard anything about it, but I wouldn’t necessarily have heard anything either.” Elizabeth nodded. She wanted to ask more, but as she was trying to figure out how to ask what she needed to know, Luke came out of the restaurant. She would have to wait, to see if David could or would confirm any of the other details.
“This smells amazing,” Luke said as he climbed into the back seat of the car, burdened with the takeout bag.
“It does,” Elizabeth agreed. “I can’t wait to dig in.” She shifted in her seat and decided that she would have to ask Luke more or less directly, and then she would have to find a way to prove which of the stories was accurate. If she was, in fact, pregnant with twins, she needed to know what the chances were that Luke would abandon her.
Just because he was being thoughtful didn’t mean that Kelly was wrong; of course, it didn’t mean that she was right either, even if he was following the same kind of program that he supposedly had with her.
“I still say we should have ordered dessert of some kind,” Luke said. Elizabeth chuckled.
“Look: I know I’m expected to gain weight, but I’m not going to go that crazy with this,” she said.
“But don’t worry about it too much either,” Luke countered.
“I’m not,” Elizabeth said. It was true; on the list of things she had to worry about, her diet and the risk of gaining weight were close to whether the price of sugar had gone up two cents in the last two years. “I just don’t want to use being pregnant as an excuse to just stuff my face all the time.”
“We can always get you a gym membership if you get worried about it,” Luke suggested with a playful grin. He leaned in closer to her and kissed her lightly on the lips. Elizabeth returned his grin and the kiss and shifted in her seat. They would be back at her apartment in less than fifteen minutes, and then she would figure out how to talk to Luke about what she’d heard from Kelly.
Chapter18
Luke finished setting out the Chinese food on Elizabeth’s coffee table and sat back, glancing at her. “Before we eat, I want to talk to you about something,” Elizabeth said.
“Okay,” Luke said. He’d noticed--again--that she had been acting differently from usual since the doctor’s office; he had thought that maybe it was just shock at the prospect of potentially carrying twins. He had
been fairly stunned himself--but then, Luke thought, he had the advantage of not being the one who would have to grow the babies and carry their weight inside of his body and then give birth to them. It was necessarily less shocking to him.
“What’s going on?” Elizabeth pressed her lips together and looked down at her hands. Luke watched her take a deep breath, and then she met his gaze once more.
“About a month ago--after we had the doctor’s visit to do the pregnancy test, you remember?” Luke nodded. “I got home, and someone was standing here, waiting for me. Your ex-girlfriend, Kelly.” Luke groaned.
“Oh god, I should have known,” he said. Just the mention of Kelly’s name was enough to bring back dozens of memories--not all of them pleasant. She had been the last woman he had dated before giving up on the prospect of finding love, and while he had told Elizabeth the truth of the situation between them and how it had ended, he had tried to avoid gossiping about the specifics or trying to make Kelly into more of a monster than she was.
“I’m assuming things didn’t end well with her,” Elizabeth said.
“That would be an understatement,” Luke said. “She threatened to blackmail me if I didn’t get back with her.” Elizabeth raised an eyebrow at that.
“Blackmail you with what?”
Luke rolled his eyes, shaking his head.
“She threatened to go to the press and tell them all kinds of lies about me and provide some kind of fake documentation.”
Elizabeth pressed her lips together.
“Maybe I should tell you what she came to me with,” she said. “And then...we need to talk about it.” Luke nodded his acceptance of those terms.
“Go right ahead,” he said. “I want to know.”
“She said that you broke up with her about four or five months into a pregnancy,” Elizabeth said, and Luke stared at her in shock. “She said that you’d been great to her right up until around that time, and that you made her sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement in exchange for a trust fund set up to take care of the kid.”
“You don’t believe her, do you?”
Elizabeth grimaced.
“Let me show you what she sent me in the mail,” she said. She got up and went into her bedroom, and Luke tried to decide whether he was more disgusted or infuriated at what Kelly had done.
A few moments later, Elizabeth emerged with a manila envelope in her hands. She handed it to Luke, and he took out the contents one at a time, looking at them. A picture of a baby of about eight months of age--one he’d never seen before. Copies of legal documents authorizing a trust fund of fifty thousand dollars a year, a contract specifying that Kelly would not tell anyone that the child she had was his, along with other things.
“It’s total bullshit,” Luke said, setting the papers aside and looking at Elizabeth. “It’s complete and total bullshit.”
“I mean...I really want to trust you. I do. And it doesn’t make any sense that you would try and have a baby via a surrogate when you already have one. But…” Elizabeth shrugged.
“Kelly and I had a bad breakup for a few reasons,” Luke said slowly. “One of them was the fact that I’d allowed her to get the idea that things were getting serious between us when I didn’t have any real feelings for her. I figured it would come eventually; she was beautiful, smart, the whole package, on paper.” He sighed.
“So, she thought it was serious when it wasn’t, you broke up with her...and then what?”
“She actually pushed me to have a baby with her,” Luke said. “She thought that if we had a kid together, that it would...change something. I think she tried to sabotage her birth control a few times, but I never had any proof.”
“So, could she have been pregnant?” Luke shrugged and shook his head at the same time.
“If she was, she wasn’t very far along; she couldn’t have been,” he said. “And she didn’t tell me about it.”
“Okay,” Elizabeth said slowly. “So, you’re telling me that this contract is total bullshit.” She gestured to the copy of it.
“I have no idea where it could have come from or who could have come up with it, but it wasn’t me,” Luke said. “And there sure as hell isn’t a trust fund set up for her kid, if she has one by me.” He looked at Elizabeth for a long moment. “If you don’t believe anything else, I can at least prove that to you.”
“Okay, that would be a start,” Elizabeth said. Luke took out his phone and opened up the secure site for his bank--all of his accounts available in one spot. He also went into his Cloud server and pulled up all of his ongoing accounts as he kept them together for his accountant, for additional proof. He shifted closer to Elizabeth on the couch and passed her his phone, showing her how to navigate each set of information.
“If there was a trust fund set up somewhere, it would be in one of these two places,” Luke explained. “You can see that there’s nothing like what she described.” Elizabeth looked through what he had to show her, taking her time, and Luke wondered if--and how--he could prove the rest of what Kelly had said false.
“I am willing to accept as fact that you don’t have a trust fund set up to pay someone off,” Elizabeth said finally. “The other issue at hand is whether the kid in that picture is yours.” She gestured to the picture that Kelly had sent her, and Luke nodded.
“I can promise you that if it is my child, it’s news to me,” he said. “She never said anything to me about being pregnant, and I kind of feel like if she were carrying my child and did have my child, she would have told me about it.”
“You said she threatened to blackmail you,” Elizabeth mused. “What did she threaten to blackmail you with?” Luke shrugged.
“Different things. She threatened to go to the press with stuff saying that I was some BDSM freak or something like that,” Luke said. Elizabeth snorted.
“Okay, so I would assume--I would think--that if she were going to blackmail you about anything, it would be a kid,” Elizabeth said. She sighed. “So, I’m guessing you want her out of your life for good, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Luke said. “I have no idea what she’s going to try and do next. I’d thought, after I hadn’t heard from her in a while, that she’d moved on or at least given up.”
“We need to find out if she has a child of yours,” Elizabeth said. “And then, if she does…”
“If she does, I am going to go for custody,” Luke said quickly.
“If you do that, then she is going to be part of your life for the rest of your life,” Elizabeth pointed out. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t try and get custody or at least visitation, but if there’s a kid, and it’s yours, then if you want visitation, you’ll have to keep dealing with her.”
“Yeah,” Luke said, nodding his agreement. “So then, the first thing to do is to find out if she even has a kid and if it’s even mine.”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth said. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I have to say I’m kind of glad that you’re not a jerk.” She looked at him wryly. “I mean, I’m sure Kelly thinks you are, but at least you’re not as much of an asshole as she tried to convince me you are.”
“What was her goal, even? I guess to scare you off,” Luke said. Elizabeth nodded and reached for the container with the crab rangoon in it.
“She said I should think twice about being a surrogate for you,” Elizabeth told him. “So yeah, I think she was thinking she would throw off your attempt to get a kid of your own.”
“It took you a month to talk to be about this?” Luke frowned, and Elizabeth shrugged.
“I didn’t want to just say, point blank, ‘Hey Luke, you haven’t recently abandoned a baby mama and the baby she had for you, did you?’” Luke snorted and grabbed an eggroll.
“That was thoughtful of you. I appreciate you not dropping the bomb on me that way,” he said drily. “I would hope--I guess I’m being a bit self-centered here--but I would hope that you know me enough as a person to know I would never do that to s
omeone.”
“I didn’t think you were that type of person, but I’ve been disappointed by people I thought were good before,” Elizabeth said. “And considering that way you started to push me away before…”
“I guess I can see where you’re coming from, with that in mind,” Luke said. “I was definitely stupid to try and keep feelings out of it.” He finished a bite of eggroll, leaned in close to Elizabeth, and kissed her lightly--if greasily--on the cheek. “I would never abandon you and our child--or children--to your own devices.”
“I believe you,” Elizabeth said. “I really do.” Luke smiled slowly. He brought his lips over to Elizabeth’s and kissed her. He only intended it to be an affectionate peck, but after a moment, she began to kiss back, and then the kiss between them began to intensify. Luke tossed the remainder of his eggroll aside, and in a matter of a dozen heartbeats--maybe a few more--they were both kissing each other eagerly, caressing each other in teasing touches.
Luke had had no intention of moving into lovemaking, but as he and Elizabeth kissed more and more passionately, he felt the heat flooding to his groin and felt himself starting to get hard. He guided Elizabeth’s hand towards the bulge forming at the front of his jeans and heard as well as felt her soft half-moan. “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to,” he murmured, dropping from her lips to the column of her throat.
“I definitely want to, right now,” Elizabeth said. Luke chuckled lowly and brought his mouth back up to Elizabeth’s. He kissed her hungrily, even as his hands moved over her body, carefully grazing her breasts to make sure they weren’t too tender before he searched for the hem of her short dress.
Heat surged through Luke’s body, and he pawed at Elizabeth’s clothes more aggressively, trying to get the dress up over her head, past her breasts, trying to find the hooks at the back of her bra. He nibbled at the column of her throat, pulling back just enough to let Elizabeth get his shirt off him. Their limbs tangled as they tried to strip each other’s clothes off as quickly as possible, touching each other teasingly all the while, groping and exploring each other’s bodies.