Maybe it hadn’t been real. Maybe for him it had just been another night with another woman.
But the baby was real. The baby was very, very real.
Natalie’s hand drifted to her still‑flat stomach, a protective gesture she’d been making unconsciously for days.
Two months.
It had been two months since that night. Two months since the most incredible and terrifying experience of her twenty‑six years on this planet.
She’d been so stupid. So recklessly, beautifully stupid.
Her best friend Charlotte had dragged her to that charity gala, insisting she needed to get out more and stop being a hermit.
“You translate French contracts in your grandma’s Brooklyn apartment and talk to no one but your laptop,” Charlotte had complained. “You need champagne, music, and bad decisions.”
Natalie had protested that she didn’t belong in that world of champagne towers and thousand‑dollar dresses. She was a freelance translator who worked from her grandmother’s tiny rent‑controlled place, surviving on instant ramen and the occasional splurge at the Thai place down the street.
But Charlotte came from money—real Upper East Side money—and she’d bought Natalie a dress. Elegant, simple, borrowed. She’d refused to take no for an answer.
“You’re brilliant and gorgeous, and you spend too much time alone with French legal documents,” Charlotte had said. “Live a little.”
So Natalie had lived.
And look where it got her.
The moment Carter Sullivan’s eyes had met hers across that glittering Manhattan ballroom, something had shifted in the air. He’d been surrounded by important‑looking people, tall and commanding in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. But when he looked at her, everyone else had simply disappeared.
He’d crossed the room like a man on a mission, and when he’d smiled—God, when he’d smiled—Natalie had forgotten how to breathe.
They’d talked for hours about everything and nothing. He’d made her laugh so hard she’d snorted champagne, which should have been mortifying, but instead had made him laugh even harder.
The chemistry between them had been like a living thing, crackling and urgent and impossible to ignore.
When he’d leaned down and whispered, “Come with me,” she hadn’t hesitated.
The hotel room had been beautiful, the kind of luxury New York hotel that made her anxiety spike for approximately ten seconds before his mouth had found hers and thinking became impossible.
He’d been gentle and focused, attentive in ways she hadn’t known existed outside the kind of romances people talk about more discreetly online. He’d taken his time, listening to every nervous breath, every hesitant yes, treating her heart as carefully as her body.
It had been her first time, and he’d held her afterward when she’d unexpectedly cried—not from pain, but from the overwhelming intimacy of it all.
They’d stayed awake until dawn, bodies tangled in silk sheets, sharing secrets and dreams and kisses that tasted like promises.
And then his phone had rung.
She’d watched his face transform from soft and open to hard and terrified in the space of a heartbeat.
His father was in the hospital. Critical condition.
