“Are you interested in someone else?”
“It’s complicated, Gabe.”
“I never thought I’d see the day when you said that. Is she special?”
“She could be,” Rafe said. Or at least that was what his gut was saying. The rest of him wasn’t too sure.
Once his brother left and Rafe had wrapped up what he was working on for the day, he started getting ready for the state dinner. When he got out of the shower, he saw that he had a text message from Emily.
It’s official. Just got word back from the doctor’s office. I’m due in January.
Would he be able to get back to the States in January?
Being with Emily would mean giving up the monarchy... and possibly his job, depending on how much it pissed off his family. Montoro Enterprises and Alma were now all linked together. Could he walk away from one without walking away from them all?
But what kind of man walked away from his own child?
Not one that Rafe wanted to be. He knew that but as he’d said to Gabe earlier, it was complicated.
He braced his hands on the bathroom counter and looked into his own hazel eyes searching for answers or a solution. But there was nothing there.
And that really pissed him off. He needed to take control of his personal life the way he did the boardroom. No more doing what everyone else wanted unless it fit with his own inner moral compass.
Except that he’d been a playboy for so long he wasn’t too sure he had one. Everyone had one, right? Then shouldn’t the answer be clearer than this?
When he was finished shaving, he took the towel off his hips and tossed it at his image in the mirror before he walked into the bedroom to dress.
He hit the remote for his sound system and switched from Mozart to “The Man” by Aloe Blacc . He stopped in his tracks. Right now it seemed as if everyone had a piece of him and the man Rafe had always wanted to be had been lost.
He knew what he had to do. No use pretending he was going to do anything else. It wasn’t that he thought the path would be easy, but then when had he ever taken the easy path? It was simply that spending time with his siblings made him realize that family was important to him.
His mind made up, he grabbed his phone and began typing, hitting Send before he could have second thoughts.
I’ll be there. When is your next appointment? I’d like to go with you if I can.
He owed it to himself and to his child to at least see if he could be a real partner to Emily. And be a real part of the baby’s life.
Really? Okay. If you do this then I don’t want you making promises you can’t keep.
That right there showed him how little she knew of him. Hell, what did he know about her? He knew how she looked in his arms. He knew that she had wanted to be a mermaid when she was little. He smiled at that one. He knew she was having his baby.
I’m a man of my word, Red. I’ll be there.
* * *
Two days later Emily woke up to a beautiful sunny morning. Since it was her day off, she decided to take her paddleboard and head to a quiet cove on Geiger Key where there weren’t many tourists. She’d been too much in her head since she’d found out she was pregnant and needed to forget for a few hours.
After she’d had her daily bout of morning sickness, she took the prenatal vitamins the doctor had prescribed and then got dressed in her usual bikini. She stood in front of the full-length mirror mounted on the back of her walk-in closet door and looked at her body. No signs of her pregnancy were visible. In fact, she looked a little bit thinner than she had before. Her boobs were getting a little larger, though.
She’d always sort of been...well, smallish, but now she was actually filling out the top. Not bad, she thought. She patted her stomach and shook her head. She definitely needed today for herself.
Someone knocked on her front door. She grabbed her board shorts, putting them as she went to answer it.
There was a man in a suit waiting there.
“Hello, Ms. Fielding. I have a package for you from Rafael Montoro. He asked me to deliver it to you personally.”
She took the package from him. “You look a little fancy for a deliveryman.”
“I’m Jose, his assistant at Montoro Enterprises,” Jose said.
“That explains the suit,” she said.
She wanted to ask more questions, debated it for a moment, and then decided to heck with looking cool. “So when will he be back in the US?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Really? He sent you here but you can’t tell me that?” she asked. “I know it’s your job to protect his privacy, it’s just that he said...never mind. Thank you for getting up early to deliver this. Are you driving back to Miami?”