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Even still, I can picture his strong arms holding our baby, and how small it would look against his commanding figure. If it’s possible to get baby fever when you’re already pregnant, I have it by just thinking about Jasha holding our baby.
It’s not about him. That’s what I tell myself. It’s just hormones. I don’t want him to be part of my baby’s life.
But what if he wanted to?
Could I deny my baby a father because of his occupation? That hardly seems fair, but then again, what Jasha’s doing isn’t fair either, picking through my phone as though I’m the criminal. He should be ashamed of himself, but I know he’s incapable of such feelings.
I watch his vivid green eyes flicker back and forth from the screen to me as he swipes through my photos.
Up until this point, I imagined Jasha as an impenetrable fortress, emotions neatly tucked away behind the cold cement walls surround his heart. But as he scrolls through my phone, there’s a flicker of something – doubt, maybe even vulnerability – on his face.
My eyes remain fixed on him as he slows his scroll, and then stops entirely. His face is unreadable, and then his pupils double in size. He turns the phone to me, showing the positive pregnancy test. “This is it, right?”
I nod. “And it’s yours. I haven’t been with anyone else.”
“Good,” he says to my surprise. “I mean, good that you haven’t been with anyone else. I don’t think you should be sleeping around. Not attractive.”
I let out a bitter laugh. I thought for a second that he was happy to be father. “You’re a real piece of work, Jasha. I hope you know that.”
He shrugs, continuing to scroll through my phone. “Huh, for someone who doesn’t sleep around, you sure have a lot of pictures of your tits on here. Who are you sending these to?” He turns the phone to me, showing a picture I took months before I even met him, where I’m standing in front of the mirror in just a pair of panties.
I’m not sure what would be worse – a lie to make him jealous, or the truth that will allow him to laugh at me again.
I pick the jealous lie. I’m not interested in being ridiculed for taking progress pictures of my attempted weight loss. It didn’t work, anyway. I feel like I’m destined to be a little soft around the edges.
“Hmm,” I say, leaning forward and pretending to study the picture. “I don’t remember who I sent that one to. It wasn’t you.”
He jerks the phone back to him so hard that it nearly flies out of his grip. “Who was it? Someone you were with before? Maybe it’s his baby.”
“Hey, maybe you’re right,” I reply in an airy sort of voice, like I couldn’t care less whose baby I’m carrying.
Jasha’s face turns the color of a beetroot, and he waves the phone around in his hand like he’s trying to shake my questionable past out of it. “No, you had sex with me, and then a couple months later, you’re pregnant. My sperm would obliterate any man’s feeble attempt to impregnate you. Definitely mine. No doubt in my mind. That’s a Bratva baby in your belly, and you’d better be prepared for it.”
I’m taken aback by how viciously he’s now insisting the baby is his. I didn’t realize how jealous of a man he was until now. He’s always so calm, so uncaring, but I think I’ve found his weakness.
Well, one of them. His other one seems to be my tits.
“I’m glad you found what you were looking for,” I say, watching a thick vein pulse in his neck with morbid interest.
“I found more than I was looking for,” he mumbles, his deep voice reverberating through me. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“For starters, you could stop treating me like a suspect and start treating me like the mother of your child. I think I deserve that kind of respect from now on,” I say, trying to sound confident.
He narrows his eyes. “Unless this is another trick.” He looks down at my phone again, opening the map application and checking that we’re still on route.
“I told you that I fixed it,” I say.
I closed the app and locks the phone, looking back up at me. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,darling. We’re going to take you to Texas like I initially had planned, but you’re staying at the house with me until I figure this all out.”
“Sounds an awful lot like kidnapping.”
“It is,” he replies without blinking. “You’re my captive.”
“If you said it a little differently, it might be sexy,” I joke, trying to lift some of the tension from the room. I’m afraid his head might explode if I don’t, and I’m not keen on cleaning up that kind of mess.
Jasha gives me a look like he doesn’t appreciate my joke, but his lip twitches up a bit before he forces it back down into a scowl. “You can play pretend however you want, but you are a captive, and you will not be going anywhere until I figure this out.”
“Didn’t really have anywhere to go, anyway,” I mutter, shaking my head. “Just aimlessly driving trains around the country.”
