“No offense, Georgie. I figured he’d use his super strength and rip your romper,” Barry replied.
Georgie gasped. “Rip my romper!”
“You guys had a whole sexy Western vibe going. I said Jordan would go all macho cowboy, but the Belgian Waffle Princess said you’d put the kibosh on that,” Barry added with a hint of trepidation.
“Where did the Belgian Waffle Princess come from? I thought she was in Belgium,” Georgie replied as this conversation went from weird to Bonkersville.
Throughout their stint as CityBeat contributors, they’d interacted with a few of the other CityBeat bloggers. While they’d never met the Belgian Waffle Princess blogger, she’d always sent them kind messages.
Barry cleared his throat. “No, she’s in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She only blogs about Belgian waffles. We were having a video conference with her when the alarm tripped,” Barry added.
Romper ripping bets and a Sheboygan Waffle Princess?
This crazy train had gone far enough.
“Okay, everyone,” he said, addressing the empty room. “The romper is intact. Barry, you owe the princess five bucks. Do you want us to come to you, or do you guys want to join us in here?”
An electric hum cut through the room.
“What is that?” Georgie asked, looking from side to side.
“Surprise, surprise!” Hector crooned as the far wall retracted, exposing a crowd of CityBeat employees.
Jordan slid off the bull, then helped Georgie down.
“You put in a moving wall?” she exclaimed.
“Electric retractable dividers! Aren’t they fabulous?” Hector added with a charismatic wave of his hands.
“My husband decided that instead of moving offices, we double the size of our workspace and use both,” Bobby said with a hint of amusement.
Hector rubbed his hands together like a flamboyant mad scientist. “We also needed more room for the bull. Do you want me to turn it on? We can test if a romper holds up to ten seconds on Tank.”
“Tank?” Georgie repeated, her complexion growing pale.
“Hector named the bull,” Bobby answered.
Hector clapped the ass of the mechanical beast. “Then, after the romper research, we can share all the amazing things we want to have you lovebirds involved with to promote the More Than Just a Number blog and brand. Colorado loves you two, and our team has big ideas about incorporating a whole explore the great outdoors angle. What are your thoughts on free-climbing and paragliding?” Hector added with a wicked glint in his eyes.
Oh shit! This was not good.
Georgie’s gaze bounced from Hector to the bull. “Could Jordan and I have a word with you and Bobby, privately?”
He looked at his wife. Thanks to the naughty cowboy ravages the rancher’s daughter role-play, they hadn’t played out what they’d wanted to accomplish in this meeting.
Was she about to drop the pregnancy bomb?
What impact would that have on their standing with CityBeat?
Would they have to hit the pause button?
There was no way in hell he was about to watch his pregnant wife strap into a glider and swoop off a cliff or dangle from a rope thousands of feet above the ground.
He took Georgie’s hand, looked from Hector to Bobby, then held his wife’s gaze.
The moment of truth had arrived.
5
Georgie
“Is everything okay?” Bobby asked, pushing his glasses to the bridge of his nose.
Georgie tightened her grip on Jordan’s hand. “Yes, everything is…fine.”
As fine as one can be after discovering an eight-week-old blueberry-sized human had set up camp in your uterus and learned that a hoard of people had just watched them perform act one of the first act of the Naughty Rancher’s Daughter.
Concern marred Hector’s expression as he lowered his voice and spoke to the marketing and PR employees. The group headed back to the other side of the office when Barry looked over his shoulder and caught her gaze.
“Barry, would you mind staying as well?” she asked.
Barry had been with them from the beginning. The easygoing producer had been by their side during the Battle of the Blogs, and like Hector and Bobby, he’d become like family.
“Sure, Georgie,” the man said, pressing a button on the wall that activated the retractable divider to close.
Hector paced in front of them. “It’s the whole outdoors angle, isn’t it? You think it will be like that awful boot camp the Denver Wedding Frau made you attend before you got married where you had to bring your own pooper scooper.”
“Shit shovel,” she and Jordan said in unison as a chill traveled down her spine.
That implement from hell would haunt them forever.
Bobby gave them a sympathetic grin. “We promise that there won’t be any camping involved. The team thought it would be great for you to branch out and highlight some of the attractions the state has to offer, and the Colorado office of tourism also reached out to us. They’d love to have you as ambassadors. And it’s not all extreme sports. They’d mentioned having you visit some of the city’s small breweries, and they even suggested a trip to the Western slope to check out Colorado’s vineyards and budding wine industry. The sky’s the limit!”
While partaking in wine tastings and extreme sports to showcase the state would be an incredible opportunity, it didn’t exactly fit into the parameters of a safe pregnancy.
“That all sounds great,” she answered warily, sharing a look with her husband.
“Interesting ideas,” he added, but the concern in his eyes signaled his unease.
Hector gestured to a pair of sofas, and they settled themselves.
“I feel a but coming on,” the man said, catching Bobby’s eye.
This was the moment she’d been dreading since the first pair of pink lines appeared on the pregnancy test this morning. The moment she’d realized the plans she and Jordan had made had to be scrapped.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t want her baby. She did. Sweet blueberry pineapple surprise, she did!
The minute that alien peanut showed up on the screen, she knew it was meant to be. What she didn’t have the answer to was what happens next, followed quickly by a sense of panic, not knowing the first thing about raising a child.
She loved her mom, but the woman had her quirks when it came to parenting. When she was a girl, Lorraine Vanderdinkle’s idea of mother-daughter bonding had been to spend the weekend in a hotel ballroom, wearing enough rouge to make a newscaster cringe and jamming high heels onto her little feet so she could parade on stage in a beauty pageant.
She didn’t want to be that kind of mother. She wanted to shower her child with books and days spent staring at the sky, searching for cloud-shaped animals. She wanted to sing songs and finger paint. With Jordan on one side and her on the other, she’d imagined swinging their little one between them as they enjoyed a meandering walk.
But what if her child wanted to be in beauty pageants?
Would she be like her mother and deny the wish because it wasn’t in line with her taste?
While they were on their honeymoon, between bouts of mind-blowing sex, they’d planned their future.
Their love story unfolded over a handful of months. Their honeymoon in Fiji had been their first real vacation. Lying in the shade of a cluster of leafy palm trees, they’d listened to the ocean’s calming melody as they’d laughed and dreamed, talking of the future and the adventures to come.