Ripe: A Stepbrother Pregnancy Romance (23 page)

It wasn’t that big of a stretch to say that Elise was happier than she’d been in a long time. She was taking daily walks along the water, reading more than just magazines, and she’d even started a private blog in order to get some of her thoughts off of her chest. That’s why it came as a major shock to her when, about a month after moving in with Jesse, she came down with the worst stomach flu she’d experienced in years.

Jesse returned home from work one morning after pulling an all-nighter to find Elise curled up next to the toilet sweating bullets. She’d been up vomiting all night, and she was struggling to catch her breath from all the heaving.

“Elise,” Jesse whispered, kneeling down beside her. “You okay?”

Elise shook her head, but her tongue was heavy and she felt entirely unable to speak. After struggling to pull herself to her feet, she wobbled over to the sink to rinse out her mouth before trudging from the bathroom into the kitchen, where she forced herself to start making breakfast for Isaiah.

“Let me do it,” Jesse ordered. “All I want you to do is get some rest.”

“Yeah, but you must be exhausted,” Elise managed to say, but her voice came out raspy and she didn’t sound at all like herself. “Don’t you need to get to bed?”

“Nah, I’m fine, just go lay down,” Jesse said, taking the packet of oatmeal from her hands and pointing towards the stairs.

Elise wasn’t capable of arguing with him even if she wanted to. Her mouth tasted vile, and in a matter of seconds, another lump had surfaced in her throat. She was going to vomit…
again.

After empting her stomach for what felt like the hundredth time, Elise exited the bathroom and started towards her room. When she passed Jesse near the end of the hall, she was surprised when he reached out to spin her in the other direction.

“Your bed might as well be made of lumps,” Jesse explained, leading her towards his room. “I’m not letting you sleep on it like this.”

“What?” Elise argued. “It’s not that bad!”

“Well I think it is, so humor me here, would you? Besides, there’s a bathroom attached to my room. It’ll make it easier for you if you get the urge to throw up again.”

Elise didn’t have the energy to continue protesting. She relented, allowing Jesse to lead her into his bed. As she laid her head against his pillows, the smell of him immediately wafted up into her nostrils, sparking to life memories she thought she’d long since forgotten. In no time at all, her eyes drifted shut, and she was transferred back to all the times she’d spent in this very spot throughout her youth.

Chapter Thirty-Six

After a careful examination of her needs, Elise got Isaiah ready for a morning shopping trip despite his nonstop begging to go swimming instead.

“Good morning,” Jesse said as he entered the kitchen. He stretched his muscular arms and yawned as he poured himself a mug of coffee.

Isaiah laughed and pointed a small finger at his father’s hair, which was sticking up in every direction. Elise followed his gaze, sucking in a sharp breath when she realized Jesse was shirtless. It’d been quite some time since she’d seen his body, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d failed to put on a shirt on purpose.

When Jesse noticed Elise staring, she pretended to be distracted with Isaiah. “Uh, we’re going to the grocery store,” she said without looking at him. “Did you need anything?”

“Yeah, hang on,” Jesse said before disappearing upstairs.

A few minutes later, he returned in a pair of jeans and a form fitting t-shirt that hugged his biceps. “Do you have a second to make a list?” he questioned as he ruffled through his wallet. “If not, I could always text you what I need.”

“I’m not in any rush,” Elise said, feeling more than a little relieved that he was now fully clothed. “Just tell me what you need and I’ll write it down.”

Jesse proceeded to list off the few things he needed, and when he was finally finished, he held out a thick wad of money.

Elise looked down at it and raised an eyebrow. It was at least three times more than what she needed to pay for his items. “I don’t think I’ll be needing this much,” she said, attempting to hand most of it back to him.

“Yeah but what about the rest of the stuff?”

“I’ve got money,” Elise said, sounding happy to be telling the truth. Her severance check had just come in from Stone, and though it wasn’t much, it was certainly sufficient enough for her to pitch in with groceries.

“Yeah, but…” Jesse hesitated as he looked down at Isaiah, then back over at Elise. “Look, would you mind if I talked to you in the living room for a minute?”

Elise nodded, handing Isaiah a breakfast bar to occupy him. She became immediately nervous when she walked into the other room to find Jesse pacing. She couldn’t think of anything that would warrant such an activity, unless it was bad news, that is.

“I think we need to talk about me paying you some kind of child support,” Jesse spoke up before Elise could ask him what was wrong, turning around to face her.

“No way. You’re already letting us stay here rent-free. That’s payment enough.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been thinking about it, and I really think we should work out a more formal agreement. I can’t stand the fact that you and Isaiah struggled for so many years while I was out of the picture. I want to make it up to you.”

“How do you mean?”

“I want to have my attorney draw up a contract between the two of us. I’ll agree to cover all the housing expenses, groceries, and all the bills, so long as you agree to continue living here.”

“Yeah, but for how long?”

The way Elise framed her question didn’t sit well with Jesse. “Why?” he asked her, knitting his eyebrows together in thought. “You aren’t already thinking about leaving, are you?”

“No…but I do need to know what your long term expectations of me are. In fact, now that I think about it, we probably should have discussed them before I moved in.”

“I don’t have any expectations of you,” Jesse said, glancing briefly into the kitchen to make sure Isaiah wasn’t listening.

“So, if I found a job tomorrow and decided to move out, you wouldn’t have a problem with that? I mean…wouldn’t that go against this contract you’re wanting to draw up?”

Jesse didn’t say anything for a long while, and it didn’t take long for Elise to notice that he was agitated. “Jesse,” she prompted him. “I didn’t say that I was
going
to do that. I was just speaking hypothetically. You’re the one who brought up a contract, not me. I’m just wondering about the clauses.”

“Fine,” Jesse spoke up. “Hypothetically, then—what if I were to ask you to agree to stay here until Isaiah was in middle school. Would you do it?”

Elise stared at him in disbelief. He couldn’t be serious. “Jesse, he’s about to start the first grade! That’s well over five years!”

“So?”

Elise was at a loss for words, but deep down, she knew what she
really
wanted to bring up. The issue of dating hadn’t come up between them yet, but it was only a matter of time before it did. Elise didn’t think there was a man on earth that would want to court her while she was living with the father of her child, and she was pretty sure no woman would be comfortable with Jesse being in the same situation.

“So…I don’t know what your dating situation is at the moment,” Elise spoke up, deciding to finally breach the subject that’d been weighing so heavily on her mind. “But what if one of us were to meet someone? You know as well as I do that we won’t be able to keep this going when that happens.”

Jesse clenched his jaw, averting his gaze out the window. “I guess I was under the impression that all of this was more important than that to you,” he spoke up after while. “I thought this was about giving Isaiah stability, a sense of family…”

“Wait a minute,” Elise interrupted. Now it was her turn to be upset. “You’re not actually insinuating that Isaiah’s life before you was unstable, are you?”

“Oh come on, Elise, don’t put words in my mouth.” Jesse sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Look, I think we’re both getting way off topic here. I just…I like having you both here, okay? It’s the happiest I’ve been in years. I just don’t want to wake up one day to find out that you’re gone, that’s all.”

“Oh, you mean like I did?” Elise bit back. “Look, we have to be realistic here, Jesse. Do you honestly think this is going to continue working when other people come into the picture?”

Jesse didn’t want to so much as
think
about Elise with other men, let alone discuss it. “Can’t we just handle that when the time comes?”

Elise sighed. This was a recipe for disaster and she knew it, but upon looking at Jesse, she could tell that he didn’t have it in him to keep talking about this. Lucky for him, Isaiah wandered into the living room right at that moment, putting a prompt end to their conversation.

Of course, that wasn’t to say it was over for good…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

On the days that Jesse worked the graveyard shift, the late evenings became Elise’s favorite time. After putting Isaiah to bed, she was left with the entire house and all its luxuries all to herself.

Elise sat down at the kitchen table with her laptop and browsed the Internet for a while before applying for two scholarships she qualified for at the university nearby. She wasn’t overly hopeful that it would amount to anything, but the notion of being able to go back to school excited her all the same.

“What’re you up to?”

Elise was so startled by the deep baritone of Jesse’s voice that she almost fell out of her chair. She’d been so engrossed in what she was doing that she hadn’t heard him come home from work.

“Just…nothing.” Elise waved her hand in the air and changed the subject. “Aren’t you home a little early?” she questioned, glancing at the time on her computer.

“I’m on my dinner break,” Jesse explained. The look on his face made it clear that he was trying to decipher what Elise was doing, but she’d long since exited out of each tab.

“Ah,” Elise said, standing up. “Well, I’d better get to bed. I’ve been waking up Isaiah earlier and earlier to prepare him for school.”

“Actually, you can sleep in tomorrow if you want,” Jesse offered. “I told Isaiah I’d take the day off and spend it with him on the beach. The weather’s supposed to be nice.”

Elise reluctantly agreed. The next morning, she awoke with a start, and just as promised, Jesse had left a note saying that he and Isaiah had taken off to their favorite spot about a mile up the coast.

When they returned home a few hours later, Elise was cooking an early dinner. When she heard Jesse react to the aroma in the kitchen, she immediately felt guilty for not thinking to make enough for him.

“I can make more if you want,” she offered, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

“Nah, it’s cool,” Jesse said, shaking his head. He tried his best to conceal a yawn, but it escaped anyway. “I’m gonna go take a nap, but…uh…did you have any plans later?”

“No, why?” Elise questioned. “Are you going out?”

“Nah, I was just going to see if you wanted to go out and do something...”

Elise looked over at Isaiah. “I don’t know,” she said with a note of hesitation in her tone. “He's pretty cranky...”

Jesse looked slightly disappointed but he nodded all the same, turning to make his way upstairs. Elise associated his peculiar behavior with the fact that he was probably exhausted after being with Isaiah all day, and she let it go at that.

After feeding Isaiah the pasta she’d prepared for him, Elise called the Dean’s office at the university, wanting to verify that she wouldn’t miss the fall deadline if she put her application in the mail that day.