CHERISH (The Billionaire's Rules, Book 12) (4 page)

“Yeah,” she said.
 
“Just…feeling a bit queasy.
 
I think it’s all that food and the car
being stuffy…”

“Sure,” Cullen said.
 
“We’ll be home in a few and then you can
get in the bath and just relax.
 
Seeing Becca, meeting with Peg—it’s a lot in one day.”

“Not to mention having your arch rival
show up at dinner,” she remarked.

“He’s hardly a rival.
 
A rival would imply that he’s actually
competitive, but—“

Suddenly, Ivy was getting sick in the
car.

“Shit,” Cullen said, pulling quickly
over.
 

Ivy opened the door and vomited onto the
road.
 
She’d been so surprised by it
that the first bit of sickness had landed on the floor of the car.
 

It was disgusting.
 
The smell.

The taste.
 
The look of everything
splattering.

She heaved again and again, as Cullen
rubbed her back and soothed her.

Her guts felt like they were being turned
inside and out and her eyes were feeling like she’d popped blood vessels.

And then, thankfully, the bout of nausea
seemed to pass.
 

“I’m so sorry—I ruined your car,”
she said.
 
“And I’m disgusting.”

“I don’t care about the car and you’re
far from disgusting.
 
You just ate
some food that didn’t agree with you.”

She pictured the calamari and made a
face.
 
“Don’t remind me of that
food.”

“Come on, let’s get you home,” Cullen
said softly.

As the continued driving back, Ivy kept
her eyes closed.
 
“I hope you didn’t
get any of whatever I have.
 
We both
ate all the same food.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” he joked.

As they arrived home, Ivy was hit with
another wave of terrible nausea and she ran to the bathroom, just barely making
it to the toilet in time to get sick all over again.

This time was even more painful.

She didn’t have as much food to get out
of her system, and by the end she was throwing up bile.

Cullen’s expression was concerned as he
felt her forehead.
 
“You don’t feel
feverish,” he said.

“I’m sick,” she moaned, as Cullen took
her in his arms.
 

“You’ll be fine.
 
We just need to get you to bed.”

She nodded, compliant and weak.

A few minutes later, she was in bed, just
hoping and praying to fall asleep and wake up feeling better.

Cullen brought a bucket into the room,
and gave her some water and caressed her hair.
 

“Thanks for taking care of me,” she
murmured.

“You just rest,” he said.
 
“Okay?”

“Okay,” she replied.

And then, a few minutes later, it was
happening all over again.
 
She
grabbed the bucket from beside the bed and began throwing up.

This time, it was absolutely awful.
 
She felt like crying, it hurt so bad,
and nothing much was coming up.

“Ivy, I think we should bring you to the
ER,” Cullen told her when she was done being sick.
 
“I’m worried you have food
poisoning.
 
The best thing is to
push some meds and intravenous fluids.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital and
have Xavier Montrose poking and prodding me,” she whined.

Cullen chuckled.
 
“Xavier Montrose will not be working in
the ER tonight,” he said.

“Good,” she mumbled, sliding out of bed.

Cullen helped her get dressed and then
they went back to the car and headed to the ER.

***

The doctor who was examining her was a
friend of Cullen’s, of course.

They were all friends of Cullen’s.
 
Her name was Doctor Roxanne Tilly, and
she was in her mid-fifties, with friendly brown eyes and a light demeanor.

She took Ivy’s vitals and asked her
exactly what had happened at the restaurant, when she’d begun feeling nauseous,
if she’d had diarrhea and other slightly embarrassing personal questions.

“She’s not running a fever,” Dr. Tilly
remarked.
 
“Blood pressure’s normal,
so far everything checks out.
 
Could
be a slight case of food poisoning, although it came on pretty fast.”

Cullen folded his arms and nodded,
looking worried.
 
“Maybe just push
some fluids?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Dr. Tilly said, apparently not
sold on the idea just yet.
 
“And
your period,” the doctor said.
 
She
gave Ivy a look.

Ivy blinked.
 
“My period?” she asked, as if such a
word didn’t even exist in her vocabulary.

“Have you menstruated—are you
late?”

Ivy blinked some more, thinking.
 
“Well, I can be somewhat erratic,” she
said.
 
“And I don’t always keep
track the best…”

Cullen gave a subtle shake of his
head.
 
“I think it’s clearly a case
of food poisoning, here.”

Dr. Tilly smiled broadly.
 
“We’re in no rush,” she said.
 
“You can take a second to think about
it.
 
When do you think you were
supposed to get your period?”

Ivy swallowed nervously.
 
Her hands twisted together.
 
“Ummm…I think maybe about a week or two
ago?”

Cullen looked up at the ceiling and made
an unidentifiable noise.

“Great,” the doctor said, chipper as
ever.
 
“So we’ll just do a quick
pregnancy test, blood and urine.
 
Might as well do some blood work, in any case.”

“Oh, sure.
 
Yeah.
 
Might as well.”
 
Ivy looked over at Cullen and he was
watching her with no clear expression on his face.

The doctor took blood and than instructed
Ivy to go to the bathroom and pee in a cup.

As she went and peed in the cup, Ivy felt
like she’d have rather been violently sick again then to have to suffer this
indignation.

I’m
not pregnant.
 
That’s just
ridiculous.

Cullen
even said I have food poisoning.

She carried the cup back to the
examination room, and Dr. Tilly took it with a kind smile.
 
“I’ll be back shortly with the results
on this,” she said, patting Ivy’s shoulder.
 
“You can get dressed now.”

Ivy sighed, nodding her head.

She got dressed and Cullen was on his
phone, texting or surfing the web.

Ivy sat down on the examination table,
her legs swinging as she waited for the doctor to return with the results.
 
Occasionally, Ivy glanced over to see
him still on his phone.

“Something interesting on your phone?”
she asked.

He looked up, seeming surprised by her
question.
 
“No.
 
Just looking at some work stuff.”

“Come here,” she told him.
 
“I want you by my side.”

He walked over to where she was
sitting.
 
“You just have a slight
case of food poisoning,” Cullen insisted.

“I never said otherwise.
 
But what if—“

Cullen shook his head.
 
“I’m a doctor.
 
It’s obvious what this is.”

“You’re a brain surgeon, not a
gynecologist.”

He made a face.
 
“Point is, I know what’s going on here.”

Just as he said that, the door to the
examination room opened, and Dr. Tilly came inside with a smile on her
face.
 
“Well, I don’t think you have
food poisoning,” she said.

***

 
The ride home from the hospital was
surreal.

I’m
pregnant with Cullen Sharpe’s baby.

The word had repeated itself so much in
her mind that it had begun to lose all meaning.

Pregnant.

Pregnant.

I’m
having a baby.
 
A child.
 
Cullen’s baby.

Pregnant.

Ivy put her hand on her belly and rubbed,
as if even now she might be able to feel something…the beginnings of life.
 
A life that her and
Cullen had created together.

“I think I know when the baby was
conceived,” she said.

Cullen glanced at her.
 
“You do?”

“I think it was the day of Becca’s
surgery.
 
That night, rather.”
 
She smiled, thinking to herself that
even at the time, she’d sensed something was different about their lovemaking.

Cullen wasn’t exactly smiling from ear to
ear.
 
His hands gripped the steering
wheel and he had a strained expression on his face.
 
“Could’ve been,” he said, eventually.

“You seem upset,” Ivy said.
 
“Do you not want a baby?”

“Of course I do,” he said, but his tone
wasn’t convincing.

“If you don’t, we should probably discuss
it.”

“I just said that I do,” Cullen replied,
and his voice had that edge to it that Ivy associated with the old, bad times
between them.

She shut her mouth so hard she actually
bit her tongue.
 
It burned and
stung, and then, next thing she knew, her eyes were burning and stinging with
tears.
 
“Fuck it,” she muttered
angrily.

Cullen looked over at her.
 
“What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?” she scoffed.

“Nothing is wrong with me,” he announced.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

He shot her a look of fury.
 
“Don’t speak to me that way, Ivy.”

“Oh, just drive the car, Cullen.”
 
She waved her hand at him dismissively.

His knuckles went white as his hands
tightened around the wheel.

Not long after that, they both got out of
the car and walked into the house, not speaking, Ivy striding quickly ahead of
him.

She went into the house, as angry as she
could remember being in some time.

When she got upstairs, she went to the bathroom
and washed up.
 
When she came out, Cullen
was standing there, waiting for her.
 
“Stop it,” he said.

She stared at him.
 
“How can you do this?” she cried.

“Do what?” he asked.

“You’ve taken what should have been a
beautiful, happy moment for us and completely ruined it!”

He put his hands on his hips.
 
“Just because I’m not dancing around the
house, doesn’t mean I’m unhappy.”

“Stop lying to me.”
 
She pointed at him.
 
“If you don’t want to have a baby with
me—“

“I never said that,” he roared.
 
“Stop telling me how I feel, Ivy.”

“Well explain it, then,” she replied, not
backing down.

 
“I’m fucking scared, okay?
 
I’m scared that I’m going to screw this
baby up.
 
I’m not fit to be a
Dad.
 
My own father is in prison, in
case you haven’t noticed.”

Ivy stood there, looking into Cullen’s
pained eyes and knowing immediately that he was telling her the truth.
 
“Oh, Cullen,” she sighed.
 
“You don’t have to be scared.”

“I don’t exactly have a great role model
to work off,” Cullen said, walking to the bed and sitting on it.
 
He put his palms flat on the bed and
bowed his head.
 
“My childhood was a
goddamn disaster.
 
My adult years
were only slightly less disastrous.
 
Up until I met you, that is.”
 
He glanced at her and gave a little smile.

Ivy crossed over to the bed and sat down
next to him.
 
“I’m scared too, you
know.
 
It’s freaking scary to be a
parent.”

He nodded.
 
“Yeah, I suppose it is.”

“But we have each other,” she told
him.
 
“And you’re a good man.
 
A really good and kind man and I believe
in you completely.”