His caution cut into me like a blade between my ribs. What mother would choose this willingly? What woman walks into a sterile room and asks them to take the only piece of him she has left?
But the him I had been mourning did not exist.
Since the day they told me Julian Moretti was dead, the compound had been wrapped in grief so thick no one looked twice at me. I had told no one about the pregnancy. Not Don Hale, not the household, not the Family doctor. The secret had belonged only to me and to the ghost I thought I was carrying it for.
He did not know. While he had been living under his dead brother's name, standing at my sister's side, sitting across from her at Sunday dinner and watching her laugh, a child had been growing inside me. His blood. His heir.
If he wanted to chase the woman he loved badly enough to erase his own name from the world, then this child was mine alone. He would never hear of it.
"I'm certain. Schedule the procedure."