Bearing My Boss's Baby (An MPreg Romance) Page 5

  Clearly the moment wasn't prepared to wait for Claude's convenience. "I'm not at home, sorry," he said, louder this time.

  "Well, where are you?" his mom said, sounding unconcerned. "We'll come pick you up there!"

  Claude briefly considered claiming to be out of town, before admitting to himself that that would only mean even more explanations that he didn't want to make. "Downtown," he said finally. "I'll text you where to pick me up."

  "Okay!" his mom yelled back, and Claude could hear her telling his dad to pull over so they could recalculate their route before she hung up.

  He couldn't tell her the apartment address: that was definitely out. He'd have to build up to that revelation carefully. He sent them a nearby intersection instead, one with a coffee shop on it, figuring that that sounded neutral enough. Now he just had to get there—and to figure out exactly what he was going to say to them.

  By the time the car pulled up at Claude's parents' favorite restaurant, he still had hardly heard a word of anything they'd said to him. He'd hugged them when they picked him up at the corner, and sat in the back of the car as they told him all their news in one big burst, but his brain had been working away this whole time trying to find a good way to broach the topic of the baby and coming up entirely blank.

  When they finally sat down, menus in hand, and turned to him as if to say, "What's your news, son?", Claude broke instantly.

  "So, I moved recently," he started.

  His mom beamed at him. "Finally!" she said, fully heartfelt. "That apartment was a dump. Where are you living now? Why didn't you tell us? We could have helped out!"

  "I got movers," Claude protested. "I was fine."

  His dad reached out and swatted his shoulder affectionately. "We're so proud of you. Moving up in your career like that!"

  Not exactly. Kind of the opposite in fact. But that was more worry than Claude wanted to inflict on his parents. "And there's something else—" he started, but at that point the waiter came over, and he subsided into silence again.

  Unfortunately for him, his mom was on the alert for any piece of news about his life that he might decide to reveal. The second the waiter had left their table, she was looking at Claude expectantly. "Some other piece of news, dear? Is that what you were saying?"

  "Um." Claude swallowed past the lump forming in his throat. "Yes. I, uh, didn't just move." He looked at both of them a little desperately, hoping they would step in to prevent him from having to deliver his little speech. Nothing happened. "I moved in with Kevin."

  "Kevin?" his dad said.

  "My partner," Claude rushed to add before they could start searching their minds for his name. It was true in a sense, anyway.

  "Oh!" His mom looked a little shocked. "That seems awfully sudden, hon."

  "Well," Claude stretched the word to breaking point. "We've known each other a while. And..." He trailed off again.

  "And?" his mother prompted, her napkin twisted in her hands.

  "And, I'm pregnant," Claude said with a gulp, and let her fall on his neck, awash in loud, happy tears.

  His announcement did nothing to stop the flood of questions, but Claude felt easier now, knowing that the big one was out there in the open. They stopped asking him about Kevin at least, and it was easier to let them make the assumption that he and Kevin were madly in love than to explain the awkward and painful reality.

  They were both happy for him, even if his dad was less demonstrative about it than his mom, and that was what ultimately mattered. Actually explaining his situation could come later. Much later. If his parents were this distracted by the prospect of a grandchild, imagine how distractible they'd be with the actual living version right in front of them. Their excitement made the baby realer in Claude's mind, much more so than the charts from the doctor with the tiny pictures of the various stages of fetal development.

  The baby was too small still to feel, but Claude found himself putting his hand over his belly anyway, imagining the life within. His mom cooed audibly.

  "How did we not notice you were pregnant before?" she said, leaning tenderly against her husband. "You're glowing. Just look at you."

  Claude blushed. "Mom!" he muttered. "Don't be like that."

  She waved him off. "It's very important! Of course we're happy!" The waiter came up behind her with a tray of water glasses and she turned to him, her smile a million miles wide. "I'm going to be a grandmother!"

  The waiter, though his eyes were wide and startled, handled it admirably. "Congratulations," he said, looking around the table as though to offer the sentiment generally, continuing to hand out the glasses of water with smooth indifference.

  Claude's mom turned back to him as the waiter departed. "I can't believe it, dear! Can you?"

  "What can I say?" Claude said, smiling at her. He hardly could. As his parents started to fondly argue over who they thought the baby would most resemble, he fell back into himself, hiding behind his glass of water as his thoughts ran riot.

  It was too easy to imagine a baby that resembled Kevin. It was harder to imagine their little family ever feeling like this, a circle of warmth and love, and that cut Claude right down to the bone.

  Chapter 12

  Kevin

  Kevin looked up from his tablet, chancing another glance at the couch on the other side of the living room where Claude lay, his ankles crossed carelessly on the arm of the couch, his head buried deep in his phone. It was easier to look at Claude like this, covert glances over the top of his tablet. Over dinner, it seemed too intrusive, as though Kevin was staring. He was staring, of course. He couldn't help himself. Claude looked so much healthier now than he had a few weeks ago, no longer drawn and pale with the rigors of morning sickness. He'd eaten a real dinner too, full of all the things that Kevin had frantically researched in his office when he was supposed to be working—calcium, iron, anything that doctors had ever said a pregnant person should eat, plus some more things that people had implied might be a good idea.

  As a plan, it seemed to be working, though compared to the crackers and soup that Claude had been choking down, almost anything would have been an improvement. Plus, Claude didn't seem to have noticed that Kevin was trying to feed him up, or if he had, he didn't seem to mind.

  Kevin looked back at his tablet, at the article he'd been pretending to read for the last twenty minutes. His chest felt warm. It had been a good dinner too. Good like this evening, just the two of them, everything relaxed and easy. It wasn't as if the two of them had ever had problems chatting—even when Kevin had technically been Claude's boss, they'd talked about movies or news in the downtime at work, or when they were on a business trip somewhere. But things had been a touch more strained since they moved in together. Kevin wasn't a total workaholic—at least, not all the time—but these last few weeks it seemed to be the only thing on his mind, ready to leap to the tip of his tongue when he found himself searching for conversational topics. Kevin didn't want to be like that, to seem as though he was trying to hurry Claude back to work when he hadn't even had the baby yet.

  It was great that Claude was getting some time off. He deserved it, after all the hard work he'd put into the business and all the hassle that Kevin had forced him to put up with. So it would be better if it could be time off without any kind of work stress at all. He wanted Claude to feel at home, not as if he was just on the world's longest business trip, and he thought he was managing to pull that off. Or maybe that was just what he hoped.

  But Claude looked happy enough right now, a faint smile playing across the corner of his mouth as he looked at his phone.

  The only thing that would make this whole situation really truly perfect is if Claude would just tell Kevin what he needed, for both himself and the baby. Kevin had understood it when Claude looked too sickly to make his own cups of tea, let alone leave the apartment, but now he was better and he seemed happy to go along with whatever Kevin suggested. Those had been the mildest suggestions too, subtle reminders tha
t Kevin was willing to open an account with whatever baby store Claude wanted, anytime Claude wanted to. The baby had to need things, right?

  Kevin had done the research and the baby definitely needed things. It had felt a little silly to be researching, but Kevin hadn't made it where he was in life by not being prepared. Besides, who would he ask?

  His late mother would have been there for him with anything he wanted to ask, but he'd never thought to ask her about children before she'd passed, certain that those decisions were still far away in his future. His father had been long estranged before his mother's death, and all he'd ever known about parenting was to throw money at it in silence from far away. Kevin wanted more than that for his and Claude's baby. He wanted to be there, to do all the things he hardly remembered from his childhood before his father had decided that he wasn't interested in family life any more. That was why Claude had to live here, to make sure that Kevin couldn't fail them the way his father had failed.

  "Hey," Claude said, turning slightly in Kevin's direction, his big eyes with their dark fringe of lashes staring straight into Kevin's most secret soul.

  Startled, Kevin forced his eyes back down towards his tablet before looking up into Claude's steady gaze. How obvious had his staring been? Worse, how obvious had his thoughts been? "Yeah?" he croaked.

  "Did you know that someone's trying to make an electric racecar?" Claude asked.

  Trying to parse the smooth ease of Claude's casual conversation from within the swirling maelstrom of his emotions could have knocked Kevin off his feet, if he hadn't already been sitting down. "No?" he said tentatively, after a moment that seemed to stretch out way too long between them. "How's that going for them?"

  "Not great," Claude allowed, a grin spreading over his face. "They're really enthusiastic though!" He laughed. "Which is good, because wow, the racing establishment is not impressed."

  In spite of himself, Kevin found himself grinning back. "How not impressed?"

  Claude's eyes flashed amusement at him. "Listen to this," he said, and began to read aloud, grinning up at Kevin between sentences like he was making sure Kevin understood just how hilariously petty they were being.

  "To be honest," Kevin said when Claude had trailed off in a burst of giggles, "that makes me think the electric car guys are way further along than anything they said themselves. Someone's running scared here."

  "I know, right?" Claude's teeth, bared in a smile, gleamed in the light.

  "You want to send that article to me?" Kevin said.

  Claude nodded. "Yeah, for sure." His gaze flicked down to his phone again, and Kevin's tablet pinged at him a moment later.

  He ignored it. "What do you think it's like to drive?" he said instead.

  Claude shrugged. "No idea. Supposedly it's just the same, right? Or at least that's the goal."

  "So they say." Kevin wrinkled his nose slightly. "But you just don't get that same oomph from these electric engines. Someone rented one for me the last time I was out in San Francisco..." He rolled his eyes. "Not impressed."

  "I couldn't say," Claude replied, leaning back on the armrest as he considered Kevin. "You sure that wasn't just you though?"

  "What, I wasn't driving it right?"

  Claude laughed. "You said it, not me."

  "It's a car," Kevin grumbled. "They should all be the same."

  "Supposedly, they are now," Claude said. "If you'd actually read the article..." His voice trailed off in another burst of giggles.

  "I'm getting to it," Kevin protested, even as he put his tablet aside to lean forward in Claude's direction. "I'm just saying, they'd have had to make some pretty big changes to get it anywhere close."

  "And they have, apparently," Claude reminded him, looking just a little big smug. It was kind of a good look on him. He started explaining, even though Kevin had the article now, and could have looked it up for himself. Kevin didn't remind him, leaning his chin on his hand as he watched Claude talk, his phone almost forgotten now as his gestures grew bigger and bigger with every point that he made.

  From there the conversation slipped into other topics and Kevin's tablet lay forgotten right up until the moment that he yawned. Only once, but that seemed to be enough for Claude who snatched up his phone immediately, exclaiming over the time like he hadn't noticed it passing any more than Kevin had.

  "I should get some sleep," he said, scrunching up his face ruefully. "And I don't even have to be at an office in the morning." His quick grin took the sting out of his joke.

  "Guess that's true," Kevin said slowly. He'd have been happy to sacrifice a little bit of sleep for more of this conversation, the kind of ease between him and Claude that he'd felt too rarely since Claude had moved into his apartment.

  Claude sat up, rising slowly from the couch. Kevin would have rushed to help him, but he'd learned over the past few weeks that Claude would rather he did not. He fiddled with his tablet instead, trying to occupy his hands. "Have a good night," he said as Claude started to leave.

  "You too." Claude flashed him another glowing smile as he took off down the hallway towards his room.

  That was the problem with these good moments. Everything was just too cozily domestic, the kind of situation that made Kevin forget that, ultimately, Claude was going to go back to his own room and leave Kevin to sleep alone. A hit of unwelcome reality that didn't sully the memory of Claude's grinning face, but still seemed to send Kevin back into the well of his own emotions.

  He shook it off, rising from his own chair and heading in the opposite direction. Just because his perfect example of a blissfully domestic evening would have ended with him and Claude heading for bed together didn't mean it was going to happen. A healthy dose of reality was probably good for him anyway. Who knew what he would have done if he'd been allowed to delude himself any further about the relationship he wanted with Claude?

  Chapter 13

  Claude

  When Claude had considered what kind of furniture the baby should have, he'd thought fondly of the old baby furniture his parents had kept in the garage long after he was too old for it. It had been passed around to a couple of cousins in its time, but it always returned to his parents' garage eventually, the decals slowly fading in the dark but the sturdy wood holding firm. He wasn't sure that Kevin wanted hand-me-downs, so he'd kind of imagined buying the same sort of thing new. There was a limit to how much cribs could have changed in a decade and a half, right?

  No, the salespeople at this intimidatingly fancy store were at pains to tell him, cribs have changed a ton, and you definitely want the latest styles, right?

  Kevin seemed to be nodding right along, as though this was perfectly natural. Claude shot him a look. It was entirely unfair for him to pretend to be so comfortable buying stuff for babies. He definitely didn't have any other kids. He hardly had any family. This had to be his first time in a baby store too. Maybe being rich meant you didn't have to worry about whatever the salespeople were telling you—you just had to slap your credit card down and be done with it.

  He tried, once again, to pay attention to the soft drone of the clerk in front of them. Apparently this crib had safety features that were in some way different from the safety features of the crib next to it, which looked almost identical. Also it came in a slightly different range of pastels, which was apparently just as important as the safety features. How much trouble could a baby get into in a crib, right? It just slept there. And cried, he guessed. It wasn't like he had a totally rose-tinted view of infants. He knew that this one was going to be a lot of work.

  Raising a hand to his mouth, Claude tried to cover a yawn. Like a hawk, the saleswoman's head whipped around to stare at him, and he was about to apologize when her features melted into a look of pure concern and she said, "I'm so sorry. It's hard being on your feet this long, isn't it?" She raised a hand, and, almost instantly, a chair appeared. Claude found himself being made to sit down and offered a bewildering variety of drinks.

  Kevin l
ooked on, his mouth quirked up at the corner. Claude shot him a look around the salesclerk's shoulder. He smiled back, looking irritatingly pleased with himself.

  Claude wanted to tell him that he didn't need this chair. He was only bored by the amount of shopping they were doing, not tired to exhaustion by ten to fifteen minutes of being pregnant in a public place. He said nothing. He sipped at his lemonade.

  It wasn't just the crib. There seemed to be an equally long explanation of every piece of baby-related merchandise that the clerk brought forward for their consideration. Even baby clothes—something that Claude was pretty sure the baby was going to spit up on within seconds—entailed a long discussion of whether or not they knew the sex yet, plus a serious consideration of potential decorating themes. Claude wasn't sure the baby needed a theme. He suspected the theme that babies were most interested in was napping, or possibly screaming. Neither of those were among the options in the enormous tome that the clerk spread out in front of the two of them that seemed to list just about any possible interest a human could have—and, apparently, could theme their newborn's life around.

  "I have a bunch of stuff from my mom," Claude volunteered after a dizzying flip through the book of themes. "I don't want it to look out of place."

  "Of course!" Kevin said, as deferential to Claude's every cranky utterance as he had been throughout this whole process. He looked up at the salesclerk apologetically. "No themes for us, I think."

  Even without a theme, the stuff they ended up buying fit a more coherent decorating scheme than any room Claude had ever lived in in his life. It almost made him want to say, "No, you know what? Forget it," and walk out empty-handed.

  He stifled the urge. The baby would need things. Kevin wanted to buy those things here. Kevin might as well get to pick, because it was his money paying for all of them. Which was what Claude had wanted, after all, when he'd barged into Kevin's office and demanded that he support the baby. It would be unfair of Claude to start complaining about that now. He'd asked for it and now he should probably just shut up and take it.