She was Olive Monroe, CEO of Ambient technologies, and she had been trained to handle every single thing that was thrown at her. And Gunnar was...well, he was Gunnar. But as genetics went...
Hell, this baby was going to be a genius.
This baby... As it was a foregone conclusion that she would be having the baby.
A little voice inside of her nudged her. You know that it is.
Of course, she would need the baby to work for her, and not for Gunnar.
Will then. That had allowed her to put something into a category. And that felt... Reassuring. In a very strange way.
She took a deep, fortifying breath, and went back out to the room that Gunnar was in. But then, the nurse met her again. “IV,” she said.
And she found herself ushered into a gloriously beautiful bedroom, where she was stuck like she was a little pincushion, and wrapped up in blankets again, as they began to feed liquid directly into her veins.
What an indignity.
And Gunnar was there for all of it, standing there looking forbidding, his arms crossed across his broad chest.
“Well,” she said, attempting to find some sort of haughty manner, even if she was wrapped in an extremely fluffy blanket, her arm propped up on a stack of pillows, and her face poking out as if it was a sea of blankets and she was barely keeping her head above the surface. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “So. Interesting.”
“Interesting is not the word I would use,” he said. His voice hard.
“Oh. Well, don’t worry about it. You might not be the father.”
His gaze did something terrifying then. And she was transported back to the medieval Viking books that she enjoyed reading.
He looked every inch the marauder. Ready to do something... Drastic.
“Is that so?” he asked, his voice deceptively quiet.
“I mean, it’s been... Two months? It’s... You never know. Things happen...”
“Do I have the right to assume then, that you have taken a string of other lovers since coming to my bed?”
“Well, you make it sound as if you’re not just part of the string of lovers. The ones that came before, the ones that came after. You’re acting as if you were a singular event, Gunnar.”
“And you are on dangerous ground, Olive Monroe. Is this my baby?”
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” she said, feeling sick.
Of course it was his baby. She had never even seen another naked man, much less had sex with one. She had never wanted anyone but him. This was... This was so twisted. Such a strange expression of a girlhood fantasy gone wrong.
But she wanted to wrench back some of the control here. She didn’t want to be the only one that was confused and out of sorts. She didn’t want to be the one without...any power.
Her father had taught her to never go into a business deal without leverage. She needed time to find leverage.
Or even a foothold.
She was in shock.
As if it wasn’t a completely logical thing that if you had unprotected sex you might find yourself pregnant.
But the first time? It just seemed... Like a bad lottery. People tried really hard to get pregnant.
She had just been trying to feel something. To feel him.
To finally give in to the experience that his eyes, his hands and his body had been promising her for all of these years, and now here she was.