“A few months!” she yells, her perfect eyebrows raising all the way up her forehead. I can see the hurt that flashes through her eyes that I’ve kept this from her.
“Sorry.” I cringe, feeling guilty.
“This is why you’ve been so MIA lately.” It’s not a question but I nod my head anyway in response. Danielle is a photographer, so it wasn’t too hard for me to hide. She travels almost as much as I do. She was the one who took my first picture that got me noticed. From there it was history.
“I was scared.” I rub my hand across my stomach. “I’m still scared. What do I know about being a mother or having a baby?” The word still seems a little unreal to me, even though I know in a few months it will be my reality.
“When you’re scared is when you should be calling me.” I see the hurt on her face again.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I didn’t know what I was doing.” I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. The only thing I know about babies is that they are adorable. That I wanted them one day in the future. I’ve always wanted to have one of those cute little families you see around. I hadn’t had one growing up and I longed for one more deeply than anything else in the whole world. These were all the things that filtered through my mind when I first found out, scaring me.
“Maybe this Oliver will see the tabloids and put two and two together?” she suggests.
“I don’t think so.” Wouldn’t that be nice? It would save me the trouble of having to track him down. Unless he doesn’t want anything to do with me or the baby. Then he’d lay low. “He didn’t know who I was.”
“Hmm.” She clucks her tongue, thinking.
“I’ll hire someone.” My hand stops rubbing my belly as I look down at the small bump. I find out what I’m having soon. In all my days of dreaming about having a baby I never thought I wouldn’t know how to find the father. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be happily married. I should be fighting with him about what sex the baby is going to be. Instead I’m alone but still excited about tomorrow. It feels wrong to find out without him. I think I’ll tell them I don’t want to know the sex of the baby for now. At least that’s one problem solved.
“This is good, Maddie. I think this might have been the only thing to get you to quit modeling.”
“I have to work.” She has been trying to get me to quit for a couple of years now. I’ve made a ton of money. I never went to college and models don’t have a long shelf life. So I’ve worked my butt off and saved my money.
“No you don’t.” She rolls her eyes at me. “You won’t retire because you’re stubborn. If you say any differently then I’ll call you a liar face. Didn’t you get tagged the highest paid supermodel in the world?”
I shrug. “I can’t sit around all day and do nothing.”
“I think you’ve got something to do now.” She looks down to my stomach. Touché. I think I now have more than I can handle.
Chapter Four
Oliver
“Sir, I can’t let you in,” a uniformed, pinch-faced weasel repeats. “It’s a privacy issue.”
I’m tired from the cross-country flight. All the first-class seats were sold out and I wasn’t willing to wait the hour and a half it would take to get the jet ready so I ended up in the back of the plane. Never again. Once I arrived in LA, the traffic was so damned bad, it took almost two hours to get from LAX to the high rise near Beverly Hills were Madeleine is supposedly living. My temper is a very thin, very breakable thread. I clutch the flowers in my hand so tight I think some of the stems snap. “Then tell Madeleine to get her tush down here.”
“She has a no contact policy, sir.”
The doorman has a short neck but there’s still plenty of surface area to wrap my hand around and choke Madeleine’s contact information out of him. He must sense danger because his hand slides under the desk where a panic button is probably hidden. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“I hope you’re contacting the building’s occupants to let them know that there will soon be a party outside.”
His brows crash together. “What?”
“I’m calling for a live mariachi band. I figure there are a few in LA. Or a rock band or a hip hop crew or maybe a whole damned choir.” I wave my mobile.
“Why would you do that?” he cries and tries to swipe the phone out of my grip.