Chapter 4

Appealed

Ethan Miller

It was my twenty-fifth birthday, and I was more than ready to get both shitfaced and laid.

The guys knew what I wanted, and I was confidant they were planning the perfect night. I’d left it up to them, and I was waiting for a text telling me where and when to meet them.

With some very rare idol time on my hands, I decided to start the party a little early. It was a Saturday night after all, well almost, and I did have several bottles of premium brandy left to me by my grandfather just waiting to be drunk.

I wanted to get drunk and fucked, and not just because I felt the need to celebrate turning one year older, but rather because I wanted to forget about her.

It was only four in the afternoon, but I poured three fingers of brandy in the glass beside the bottle and downed it. Then I poured another three fingers. It was wasteful of me to drink the rare beverage in this manner, but I needed it. Before I knew it, a third of the bottle was gone.

Shit.

All it did was make me think about her more.

Then again, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her for so many reasons.

First of all, I’d lost the biggest case of my short career to her. Secondly, I hadn’t had sex with anyone but my own fist for the last three months—not since that one hot night with her. And finally, and the coupe the grâce, I’d tried to call her at least a dozen times since the trial ended two months ago, but she had yet to return any of my calls.

So fuck her.

Fuck her tight little ass.

Fuck her sweet pussy.

And fuck her hot mouth.

Yeah, fuck her, and fuck her good.

The word fuck was echoing in my head when my phone beeped with a text. I thought it was the guys telling me where to hook up with them, but a quick glance told me it wasn’t. It was her. It was Fiona. Fiona Hargrave. Instantly, my heart started to beat faster, and I blamed it on the alcohol.

I wanted to delete the message without reading it and I wanted to speed-read it at the same time.

I did neither.

Instead, I thumbed it open and slowly read each word, and when I was done, I read it again. There were five simples words to her message, “Can you meet me, now?”

I typed out, “No.”

I erased it.

I found the picture of a middle finger and selected it, but then I backspaced and got rid of it.

In the end, I answered with a simple, “Where?”

When she gave me the address of her apartment, I had to say, I was surprised, and maybe a little too excited by the slight twitch of my cock.

Not even forty-five minutes had passed when an Uber dropped me off at her place. In the jeans and t-shirt I had been wearing when she texted me, I knocked on her door. Feeling more than a little buzzed from the brandy, I thought about greeting her with a fuck you, but then the door opened, and I felt like the air was sucked out of the room—I couldn’t breathe.

She was so beautiful.

Wearing yoga pants and a thin t-shirt that I could see through if I looked hard enough, I had to blink a couple of times. The sight made me want to rub my thumbs over her nipples. Her blonde hair was down and I had the craziest urge to run my fingers through it. And her lips. Her lips were so full and red, and all I wanted to do was kiss them, so I did.

Fiona, surprisingly enough, allowed me to latch on, that was until she tasted the brandy on my tongue, and then she pushed me back. “Are you drunk?”

I shook my head. “Buzzed, but it’s my birthday, so don’t give me shit about it.”

She looked taken aback. “I had no idea, Happy Birthday.”

I grinned at her. “Want to celebrate by blowing me?”

“Ethan, be serious. I need to talk to you.”

“I am being serious. I can’t forget that night. I want to do it again, and again, and again.”

Taking my hand, she led me through her apartment and into her kitchen, where she started a pot of coffee. While it was brewing, she talked about her life, her job, her friends.

It was strange, her letting me in in a way she hadn’t that night. I wanted to sober up, and fast, so I could talk to her smartly, reasonably, normally. I realized then that I not only wanted to fuck her, I wanted to get to know her.

It was after six by the time she asked me to go in the living room with her, and by then I was completely sober.

Just as we sat on the sofa, my phone beeped with a text. I knew it was the guys, but I ignored it. “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

She positioned herself to face me and then pulled her legs up on the sofa to sit cross-legged. “I’m not sure how to tell you this.”

I placed one ankle over my knee and braced myself. She had a boyfriend. She never wanted to see me again. She wished she’d never fucked me. The list was never ending, and I knew by the time I left here, I would be more than ready for what the guys had planned. “How about you just say it,” I suggested, a little harshly.

That, of all things, made her smile. And fuck if that smile didn’t turn me inside out. “You can be a real cocky bastard, can’t you, Ethan.”

It wasn’t a question, and it didn’t require an answer, but I gave her one. “And you can be quite a cold-hearted bitch, can’t you, Fiona.”

Right then a few tears started to leak from her eyes.

Boy, talk about being brought to heel. What the hell was going on? “I’m sorry, Fiona, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just, I’ve been calling you, asking you out, leaving you messages, and you haven’t called me back.”

She pressed her fingertips to her cheeks to wipe away the tears and then she shook her head. “I know, and I wanted to call you back, but first I had to come to terms with my situation, and then figure out how to tell you about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m pregnant, Ethan, and the baby is yours.”

The room went dark, my body went numb, and my mind blank. For a moment I wondered if I had fainted. Had a seizure. Fucking died. The condom. The old condom that wasn’t expired, didn’t work.

“You don’t have to be involved in the baby’s life if you don’t want to, but I thought you should at least know.”

Her voice.

That voice.

Those words.

They brought me back from whatever place I had momentarily gone. Blinking through the haze, I opened my mouth to speak. Closed it. Opened it again. “You’re having my baby?”

Her laugh wasn’t really a laugh. “Yes, I’m three months pregnant, and I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you, but it was a shock.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yeah, a shock. I’d say so.”

“Did you hear me though, Ethan? You can walk away right now if you don’t want to be a part of this, and I won’t judge you. I know this wasn’t anything you had planned in your life, not right now, anyway.”

All of my senses started to fire and I found myself glancing down at her belly, noticing a slight protrusion I hadn’t noticed before. My baby. My baby was in that perfect body of hers. “Yeah, this is a shock, but Fiona, I am not walking away. I would never do that.”

“Well, I have my first doctor’s appointment a week from Monday if you want to come.”

My eyes were still on her belly. “Yeah, yeah, I do. Can I touch him or her?”

She glanced down and then she reached for my hand. “Yes, sure.”

With my hand on her belly, we stared at each other. The rise and fall of her chest just as exaggerated as mine. “Fiona,” I said.”

“Yes, Ethan,” she answered softly.

“Will you spend my birthday with me? Let me take you out to dinner?”

Her smile, that smile again, it was small, but it was there. “Are you sure you want to spend your birthday with me? You probably have some big plans with your friends, and with how early I have been falling asleep lately, it’s not guaranteed you’ll get lucky.”

Yeah, I was sure.

In fact, I was sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life her.

And I knew I would.