The Perfect Guy: A Romance Novel Read online

  That had been a major factor when I decided to do this alone. It felt so reassuring to know that Sue would take care of me through the entire thing and that every step was already planned thoroughly.

  Becca kept up our conversation as she drove me to my parents’ house where I would sleep tonight. Sue wanted to be close if my cramps became too bad because she would be able to soothe the pain with some light abdominal massage. She truly was the mother I’d wished I’d had from the beginning.

  As soon as we pulled into the driveway, Sue came running outside with Dad walking more slowly behind.

  “Well?” she asked when she stood in front of me.

  “It’s done,” I replied. “Now all I can do is wait and hope it sticks.”

  “Oh, I know it will! I can feel it,” Becca said with confidence when she climbed out of the car as well. “In nine months, there will be a small one sleeping in a crib at your house, darling. Mark my words!”

  I truly hoped she was right.

  I was pacing back and forth in front of the bathroom door with my entire family watching me. The curiosity and nervousness was palpable as we waited for the test lying on the bathroom counter.

  I had waited for exactly twenty-five days before I decided to take my first test, even though I’d had to really fight the urge to run down to the drugstore on the fourteenth day mark. My period was yet to make an appearance, but it wasn’t the first time it had been late, either, so it wasn’t a sure card that I was pregnant just because I hadn’t gotten my period.

  My hands were shaking with nerves, and when the timer beeped, I flinched away from the bathroom door, suddenly feeling scared of the result.

  “I can’t look,” I whispered out and pleaded to anyone of my family members to look for me. After a few seconds, Dad got up from his seat and went for the bathroom. He patted my shoulder on the way and gave me an encouraging smile.

  I saw how he looked at the test, but he didn’t move a single muscle in his face, so I had no way to read his reaction.

  He calmly picked up the test with a piece of paper and came back outside.

  Every single person in the room stared at him and waited for him to say if it was a positive or negative test, but he only had eyes for me.

  For the longest few seconds of my life, he gazed into my eyes as if he was searching for something there. It appeared he found it because suddenly he smiled and handed me the test.

  “Congratulations, Doll,” he said, and I quickly looked down at the test before I dared to hope.

  On the stick, the simple, blue plus sign stared right back at me.

  CHAPTER 22

  SHOCK AFTER SHOCK

  ”I can do my own grocery shopping, Dad! I’m five months pregnant, not fatally sick,” I said into my phone and rolled my eyes at my overprotective father.

  “You know I’m just worried about you two. I don’t want to hear about anything bad happening to you, and neither do the rest of the guys at the station. You should hear how they badger me on how to take care of you when you’re not here.”

  “I have at least another four months left before this little kicker is ready to come out, so you can tell the guys to stop treating me as if I will pop any second, okay? Demetri has already assigned me to the desk until I start my maternity leave, so you all have to stop worrying.” I locked my car and started to cross the parking lot toward the entrance of the supermarket.

  “I still don’t like that you want to wait until the last two weeks to go on your maternity leave. You heard Sue. She said you should start it when you’re eight months along. Why won’t you listen to her?”

  I sighed as I picked out my cart. “Because I will go crazy if I go a month without anything to do. I’d rather be stuck behind a desk for another two weeks. But why are we talking about this again? It’s at least three months before this becomes an issue.”

  “I’m not only your father, Jenn. I am also your boss and Demetri needs to start looking for someone who can take your position while you’re away. He’s asked me if I know someone in a different department because that would be so much easier than hiring someone new. I was thinking Felix Cato in Narcotics. He’s been asking for a transfer for years.”

  I felt pure anger when I thought of the arrogant prick that never missed a chance to belittle women in front of me. He didn’t think women could handle jobs in law enforcement, and he’d been after my job ever since I started.

  He would have a field day if he found out he would replace me because I was going on maternity leave.

  “As long as you make it known to him that it’s only temporarily, then I am fine with it! That chauvinistic dickhead has been after me for years, and it will be over my dead body that he will get full time in Homicide just because I’m having a baby. When I come back, he can crawl back to Narcotics on all four for all I care.” I huffed and reached for my grocery list in my back pocket as I started to cruise through the aisles.

  I heard Dad laugh in my ear and after he had given me his word that Cato would know that it wasn’t full time, we hung up, and I looked down at my list so that I could organize my shopping.

  I already knew that several items would fall into my cart even though they weren’t on the list, but as any other woman who had been pregnant, I wasn’t about to deny my body the cravings it had since it was my baby that caused them.

  I had been so relieved during the ultrasound when it was revealed that I was only having one.

  I would already be a single mom, and I believed one would prove to be more than enough.

  Later on, Sue asked me if I wanted to know the sex of the baby, but I had decided that I wanted it to be a surprise, so currently, she was the only one who knew what I was having and even though Dad bugged her about it, she refused to tell him because she thought that I should be the next one to find out.

  He would just have to wait until after the birth.

  Another reason for why I wanted to keep the sex a surprise was because then I could decorate the baby’s room with unisex colors and toys. I knew that when I would enter the baby store, the first thing that the helpful employee would ask was what sex my baby was, and I detested that question.

  It shouldn’t matter what sex it is.

  Just the fact that those stores were separated by color, or rather gender, was disgusting: all pinks and whites and frilly things for girls, while the boys’ side had the dark blues and greens.

  If I had a girl, and she later on decided that she wanted to dress in those tulle and satin things, then of course she could, but until she could express her own opinion, I wouldn’t influence her by what I thought would look cute.

  The same would apply if it were a boy.

  The neutral colors were what I would aim for.

  I had hired a professional painter that would paint the walls so that they would look like a realistic forest with a lake peeking through the trees in the distance. It was a huge job and would take months, and so that was why he was already coming next week.

  Nothing could be more neutral than nature’s own art, and it would also be incredibly beautiful.

  I was almost done with my shopping when I got stuck by the candy shelves with a huge craving for chocolate. I had no way to find out if it was the baby that wanted it or if it was all me. All I knew was that I wanted it.

  I wasn’t paying any attention to my surroundings, so when I got the feeling that someone was looking at me, I shook it away. I was at a supermarket after all. Lots of people were probably looking at me.

  I suddenly heard a commotion farther down the aisle, and my attention was automatically drawn there.

  A woman close to her fifties was spitting and hissing at a man for having walked into her cart. She was very dramatic with big hand gestures, and even though the scene was entertaining, I was staring intensely at the man.

  And he was looking at me as well.

  It had been years since I saw him, and time had obviously changed him some, but I could never forget his pen
etrating eyes or the color of his hair.

  We were completely locked in each other’s gazes while the world continued to spin around us.

  Then, everything came crashing down.

  A jar of premade pasta sauce crashed onto the floor and the sound woke me from my shock.

  He was still staring at me, the surprise on his face evident, so at least I knew that he hadn’t deliberately been seeking me out, but old feelings, which caused inner stress, made it impossible for me to stay. I abandoned my cart and walked as fast as I could toward the exit.

  I should have known that he would follow me. He always followed me.

  He caught up to me on the parking lot, but he didn’t grab me, which I was very grateful for.

  “Jennifer,” he said, but the tone of his voice was confused as if he didn’t really know how to continue.

  I stopped in my tracks and took a deep breath. I couldn’t ignore him. I never could. “Hello, James,” I replied without turning around.

  My baby must have felt my stress levels rising because I got a firm kick against my hand, which I had placed on my stomach.

  I felt angry at myself then.

  Why was I running away like an animal in fear? I had nothing to fear. He had no control over me out here. We weren’t back at the academy.

  He had nothing.

  So, determined to show how strong I still was, I turned around to face him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked and the coldness in my voice could have frozen water.

  He laughed nervously and appeared as if he regretted following me now. “I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he said with discomfort.

  I frowned, feeling extremely suspicious. This man wasn’t the same James I had last seen, but I couldn’t trust anything he did. I already knew too well of his acting skills, and I had no idea what he hoped to accomplish by portraying this character when he’d already revealed his true self to me.

  “I live here,” I retorted angrily. “I was born and raised here. I have a legitimate reason to shop at this supermarket. Do you?” It all came out very harsh because even though I’d decided long ago that I wasn’t going to blame him for what was done to me, he was still a reminder, and I had zero trust in him.

  I didn’t like seeing him here because it made me nervous. What was his reason for being here, really?

  “I am here to do a job,” he admitted, but it looked as if he’d wanted to keep that a secret. If that was the case, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just make something up. He was very good with lies after all.

  And I did not like hearing his reason. If he was here to do a job, who was the poor person that was his target?

  I was just about to ask when I decided that I didn’t want to know.

  “So you’re still going strong. Is your aunt expanding or something?” I asked sarcastically and jumped in shock when he laughed again—a real laugh that sounded way too genuine.

  When I raised an eyebrow in question, he quieted down and just smiled at me instead. The image caused a memory to surface because it was that crooked smiled he’d given me that very first day we met.

  He’d been a different man in my eyes back then. I’d been so naïve, and I remembered how very attracted I was to him.

  He was still painfully good looking, even at the age of thirty-four, but I knew him better now than I did then.

  “I am just so glad to hear that you’re still yourself despite everything I did to you,” he replied to my silent question. “I would hate to find out I’d caused lingering damage to you, but you’re obviously doing very well.” He nodded toward my protruding stomach.

  I felt my anger rising at his presumption that I was completely fine, and I was just about to cause a scene right there in the parking lot, but before I had the chance, he continued.

  “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  It was such a normal, and kind of cliché, question, and so it took several seconds for me to answer.

  “No one,” I said, and it was the first time I told an outsider that my baby didn’t have a father.

  A confused expression crossed his face. “What?”

  I touched my stomach gently. “There’s no father. I will be a single mom because I had myself inseminated. I decided to do it myself because I am almost thirty-two, and I haven’t had a serious relationship since your buddy George. I can’t go on dates because I don’t trust men. I have already accepted that I will probably always be alone, but I wanted a baby, so I had myself inseminated.”

  The more I spewed out, the more uncomfortable James looked, and I liked seeing it.

  I said it all with complete calm, but I made it known to him that he had caused lingering damage. He didn’t deserve to live a life without guilt.

  “I will have to raise this child on my own, and even though I will hate telling my baby that they don’t have a father, it’s better this way than for me to be in a relationship were I can never truly relax.”

  James tried to look away from me, but I had him locked with my eyes, and I refused to let him go. When he then made the attempt to step away, I stepped closer to him and grabbed his shirt in both of my fists. “I am damaged. You caused that. I could trust Renée and George to act the way they did, but you played me. You had me fooled. I thought you were the man of my dreams, and I fell for you. It caused my fall to hurt even more when I got the truth because I had just decided that I could live with your possessive nature. I wanted you, I won’t deny that. Now I can’t ever be with a man because you broke me. I always suspect them to have an ulterior motive now, so you shouldn’t be glad.”

  I pushed him away from me, and he took a staggering step to regain his balance. It was obvious he had not expected what he got from me.

  I had absolutely no explanation for what I did next.

  Maybe it was my hormones, or my curiosity, but I suddenly found myself taking another step toward him so that had my stomach not been in the way, our bodies would have been flush against each other.

  I forcibly grabbed the back of his neck to pull him down to me and crashed my lips against his in a violent kiss.

  The passion I hadn’t felt since our last kiss flared up. I could feel my baby moving around as much as he could when the rush of my heated blood confused him. My skin was on fire, and I didn’t know if I wanted to get closer or run away when I felt him responding.

  He was kissing me back, and as the shock wore off, he relaxed into the kiss and automatically placed his hands on my hips.

  That was when I pulled away and forced his hands away from my body.

  I knew this wasn’t the end for us yet, but I wanted it to be on my terms this time, so while he still stood there with a dazed expression and labored breathing, I licked my lips and tasted him on my mouth.

  “Do you want to get out of here and get a cup of coffee?” I asked from out of nowhere, and when he slowly nodded, I turned on my heels and walked to my car with him following close behind.

  CHAPTER 23

  REASONABLE DOUBT

  There was a tense silence between us when we sat at the coffee shop with our beverages and pastries.

  We weren’t old acquaintances that had met to catch up and talk about old times. In fact, I couldn’t really put a word on what we were. We had no label.

  I didn’t know what to talk about with him even though I was the one who suggested coffee. All I knew when I proposed it was that it wasn’t the end. It wouldn’t make any sense that we would meet in a supermarket, have a cold chat, and then wish each other a good rest of our lives.

  It didn’t work that way between us.

  But we were unable to speak to each other. We couldn’t exactly ease our way into a conversation by talking about our jobs because what he did made me way too uncomfortable. We couldn’t talk about the past yet since it would only make everything explode too soon.

  It hadn’t exactly made it easier that I kissed him, either.

  So what did we talk about? My pregnancy, of
course. It was the last safe subject we had.

  “How far along are you?” he asked tentatively and broke off a part of the cookie he’d bought and brought it to his mouth. His lips closed around it, and he started to chew it slowly.

  The movements of his jaw made my insides tingle, and I knew that this time it was my hormones playing a prank on me. I wasn’t the girl who got turned on by someone eating a cookie, but here I was, slowly feeling my inner temperature rise.

  I opened my mouth to answer and to focus on something else than his mouth. “I am in the middle of my second trimester. Almost twenty-two weeks now.”

  “And that’s how much in months?” I couldn’t stop the smile that was evoked by that question. He smiled back apologetically. “Sorry. I don’t know anything about pregnancies. The word trimester doesn’t really tell me anything, and the time frame in weeks confuses me.”

  My smile developed into a laugh. Despite myself, I found myself thinking he was charming. I had to be on my toes, though. I had no idea why he acted so differently.

  “I’m in the middle of my fifth month.”

  “Do you know what you’re having yet?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to know before the birth, even though Sue offered to tell me several weeks ago.”

  “Is Sue your doctor?” He raised his cup of coffee and took a sip, but he grimaced, so I figured the coffee wasn’t very good. I was glad that I had my cup of tea in front of me.

  “She is also my stepmother,” I replied, and he looked at me in question.

  “Your stepmother?”

  “Mhm! Dad divorced Renée after what happened. I haven’t seen her since, and Dad remarried two years ago. I thought you would already know that since you’re so close to your aunt and all.”