25. Chloe

CHAPTER 25

CHLOE

P aolo has left me alone in my room for the day while he runs around trying to get everything ready for his parents to come home. He’s clearly nervous. He keeps fretting and sticking his head in to check that I’m okay, running up and down the stairs as if there’s something he can do to make this go more smoothly. I hope he doesn’t blame himself too much if it doesn’t.

There’s only so much he can do. If his parents don’t want this to go well, then it won’t.

For his sake, I hope it does.

I slept in his bed all last night, cuddled up close to his body, breathing in his warm scent. I’ve missed it. Maybe it was a mistake for us to have made love like that, but nothing about it felt like a mistake.

As he’s said multiple times, technically I’m his wife. And in actuality, we’re adults. We can do whatever we want with our bodies.

And I really liked doing what we did last night. A thrill runs down my spine as I think of it.

A thrill that’s quickly followed by a rush of nausea up my throat. I clutch my stomach, trying not to gag. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just nervous. Maybe Paolo’s anxiousness is rubbing off on me. It doesn’t need to.

The idea of meeting his parents makes me feel sick enough already. Literally, it seems, this morning.

When we woke up, we made an action plan. We’re going to face this together. We’re going to pretend that we’ve known each other for months, and we’re going to stick to the truth as much as possible. We met in the bar where I worked. We hit it off. We had some fun. We got married. By choice.

That doesn’t exactly explain the month and a half where he didn’t speak to me, but we’ve agreed to pass that off as him being confined to his quarters here at home if anyone questions it.

No matter how many times we run through the cover story, though, I’m still terrified that it’s going to go wrong. I don’t know how they’ll see through it, but if they do, I don’t think my acting skills are good enough to come back from it.

The thing I’m sure they already know about is Paolo’s ridiculous fake passport scheme. They probably know that our marriage is basically a sham, but we’re not here to try and prove the legality of our wedding. I’m just here to support Paolo, to help show his parents that he’s not the boy he was when he left.

The goal of this dinner isn’t to try and show that his idea was good, or that his way back into the country was the proper one. The goal is to prove that I’m someone who chose to marry him of my own free will because I wanted to, and we like each other for reasons other than titles or money.

What can possibly go wrong?

There are only hours to go until the big event. That thought makes my stomach lurch again, and this time the sickness is too much.

Retching, I run to the bathroom, stumbling to the toilet, where I promptly eject the contents of my stomach.

This is so humiliating. In all the times I’ve been nervous before, I’ve never actually thrown up from it. I usually get shaky and a little sick, but nothing this bad.

Then again, maybe nothing I’ve ever been stressed about before has had so much riding on it. I’ve never had the power to ruin someone else’s life before.

Thinking about it, I woke up feeling sick, like my whole body was swollen and lethargic. I put it down to our night of fun, but now a horrible thought is tickling the back of my mind because there’s no way I’m old and inflexible enough to feel this achy after a few hours of sex.

So… what if the sickness has another cause?

My hands shaking, I try to think of the last time I had my period. I can’t quite place the date… but no matter, we’ve used protection every time.

And then horror rises in me as it dawns on me. That night, the night we consummated our marriage. We didn’t use protection.

I guess we consummated it the good old-fashioned way.

I throw up again.

There’s a knock on my door. “Hello?” calls Maria. “Chloe, are you in here?”

My only response is to retch. Maria rushes to the bathroom and stands in the doorway, watching me kneeling by the toilet. “Are you okay?” she asks, frantic. “Are you going to be okay for the dinner?”

Tears streaming down my face, I turn to look at her, shaking my head. With a broken voice, I sob, “I think I might be pregnant.”

Maria rushes over and envelops me in her arms, sitting on the bathroom floor with me, holding me tight. “Oh, sweetheart,” she says, “What happened?”

“Do you really need me to explain?” I scoff, my voice shaking with tears. “It happened the normal way.”

“I am old, not so stupid,” says Maria with a wry smile. “Tell me how it has happened.”

“I guess it must have been the night after we were married. It was a really good night… Oh, God! What am I going to tell Paolo? He won’t want this.”

Maria strokes my hair, gently squeezing my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that now. We’re not even certain that this is true. This could all just be the nerves of having to meet the king and the queen.”

“Please don’t remind me of that,” I whisper. This is all a nightmare enough as it is.

“Do you want the baby?” Maria asks.

“I want to know if it’s real,” I say covering my face with my hands. “And if it is real… I don’t know. Yes, of course, I want it if it’s real.”

“Come and lie down,” says Maria.

She helps me to my feet and guides me slowly to the bed. I close my eyes the second my head hits the pillow.

“I’ll be back soon,” she says. “I’ll bring some medication and a test. Everything’s going to be okay. Please try not to worry too much.”

In that second, I trust her implicitly.

When I open my eyes again, Maria’s back, and I realize I must have fallen asleep for a while.

“Are you ready to take the test?” she asks, smiling kindly as I sit up.

“No,” I say, holding out my hand for her to give it to me.

She hands the test to me without a word, and I head to the bathroom to pee on the stick. As if this couldn’t get more humiliating than it already is.

And then we wait.

Maria sits with me and holds my hand as we wait for the results, trying to distract me from the catastrophes I’m cooking up in my mind.

She sets a five-minute timer, and the second it goes off, she goes to the stick and snatches it up so I can’t see it. “Are you ready to know?”

“Just put me out of my misery.”

I close my eyes hard, clenching my fists. In my heart, I know the answer already.

Quietly, Maria says, “It’s positive.”

I can’t help but sob again. It’s not entirely a surprise, but it’s definitely not what I was expecting out of today.

“What am I going to tell Paolo?” I ask again. I can imagine the horror on his face now.

I can also imagine him with a baby in his arms, smiling. Playing with it. Being a good dad.

“We can worry about that later,” says Maria. “It is definitely his?”

I throw her the kind of look that makes it clear her joke is not funny right now, and she squeezes my shoulder in comfort.

“Let us worry about the king and the queen and the big dinner first. Let us pray to God that that goes smoothly, and once all of that stress is over, then we can tell Paolo.”

“Sounds good,” I say, even though all of this couldn’t sound any further from good.

“Do you want me to stay?” Maria asks. “Or would you prefer to be alone?”

“Please don’t leave me,” I say, too quickly. “I don’t think I can do this on my own.”

“Then I will stay.”

And she does. To my relief, she doesn’t talk any more about pregnancy or babies or anything like that. Instead, she tells me more stories about Paolo as a child, about all the stupid antics he got up to. It just about takes my mind off the whole thing.

At least it does so enough that by the time Paolo knocks on the door to tell me it’s showtime, I feel a little calmer.

Not completely, but enough to be able to face this.

After all, what choice do I have?