His Nanny Mate (Moana and Edrick Morgan) novel Chapter 61

#Chapter 61: The Love of a Child

Moana

“It’s your baby!” I blurted out.

Edrick fell silent, his eyes wide with disbelief. Beside me, Selina gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. Even I was shocked by my own candidness.

“I– I’ll leave you two alone,” Selina muttered. I didn’t break my gaze from Edrick, but I heard the sound of her feet scurrying toward the door followed by the sound of the door closing.

Edrick was silent for the longest time before he finally spoke. “Is this true?” His voice was so low it was almost a whisper, a stark contrast from how angrily he was speaking to me before.

“Yes,” I replied, nodding solemnly. “It’s yours. Five weeks along — six, now, actually.”

Edrick went silent again. He seemed to be calculating. I just hoped that he trusted me enough to believe me. Finally, he nodded and I felt my heart rate go back down in relief. I watched as he sat down on the armchair across from my bed and sank down into it, holding his hand on his forehead as he stared at the floor.

Finally, he said something. “Are you going to keep it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess I want to, but I think that you should have a say in it, too.”

He nodded, then finally removed his hand from in front of his face and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at me with a somber expression. “It’s your choice,” he said. “If you want to keep it, then it’s up to you.”

I wanted to be relieved, but there was still the looming question of whether or not the baby would have a father in its life, as well as whether I would keep my job.

“Do you still want me out within the month?” I asked, my voice quivering slightly as I tried to calm my anxiety.

“Of course not,” Edrick said, much to my surprise. “Ella is too attached to you for me to send you away, and above all else, I want what’s best for her.”

I let out a small sigh of relief. “So you accept the baby as your own, then?”

Once again, Edrick was silent. The longer he didn’t speak, the more I felt as though my heart was going to pound out of my chest. My anxieties only increased when his face, which had softened temporarily when I told him about my pregnancy, suddenly hardened again. He stood and crossed over to the window, looking out over the city below.

“I accept the baby as my own,” he said finally. I let out another sigh of relief, but he wasn’t finished. “But not publicly. And I hope you understand that I will never marry you, so if all of this was some sort of twisted scheme to marry a rich man, then maybe you should abort the pregnancy after all and save the child the same heartache that–”

He stopped suddenly in the middle of his sentence. I furrowed my brow and c****d my head for a moment, wondering what he was going to say, but I was more concerned by how he mentioned that he would never marry me. Not only that, but he also seriously thought that I would come up with a twisted plan like that.

“I would never use a child for some sort of sick ulterior motive.” I said.

“Good.”