Delivering His Package: A Secret Baby Romance by Jamie Knight (top novels to read txt) 📕

piece of the fabric. Then he handed it to me. “Breathe through this. We’ll get out.”

“Are you sure?” It was all I could ask. If Aiden were sure of it, I would trust him. I wanted to trust him.

“I’m sure I’ll try my darndest.”

Aiden carried me feet-first through the open door. I held the t-shirt over my mouth. The air still smelled like smoke, but at least it no longer felt like grit.

Aiden was calmly breathing through his nose. He was superhuman. Or at least he seemed superhuman.

Cradled in his arms, I saw the world sideways. He held me with one arm under the crook of my knees, the other arm under the small of my back. My head rested against his chest. I followed directions and held the piece of Aiden’s t-shirt against my nose and mouth.

He carried me into the hallway and toward the emergency exit around the corner. I didn’t even have to tell him where to go. Aiden was really superhuman. He didn’t even strain himself carrying me. I was no heavyweight, but I had been a good hundred-forty pounds before the pregnancy and more with the pregnancy weight. None of my previous boyfriends had tried to lift me up, much less carry me, much less effortlessly carry me out of a burning building.

“This man is the father of my child,” kept going through my mind. It was a fantastic feeling. Even if Aiden had only done me a one-time favor by impregnating me and another one-time favor by rescuing me from a burning building, even if I was never to see Aiden again, he was still the father of my baby. Aiden’s spirit, his generosity, his bravery would all continue in my life through the baby that he had fathered. Even if he was to be absent from my life.

Chapter Eight – Eleanor

Sunlight glimmered through a half-open door. Aiden was carrying me that way. He pushed me out from that exit door legs-first. Firefighters ran to the two of us. A cot came from nowhere, and they put it under me.

Aiden set me on the cot, then sat down on the ground. His face was sooty, coated with black and some kind of white chemical ash. He was, in fact, sweating hard and breathing hard, and his skin was flushed from the exhaustion and probably from the poisons he’d been breathing. Maybe Aiden wasn’t superhuman. Maybe he’d suffered when rescuing me just as a human would’ve suffered. But Aiden had apparently, somehow, run into that building, known where to go, found me, when nobody else had.

“You guys got out on your own?” a firefighter asked. He motioned for a paramedic to attend to my visibly burned hand.

“Yeah. I carried my coworker out,” Aiden answered. He raised his eyebrows slightly in my direction.

“You two work for UPS?” the firefighter asked, pointing with his eyes toward Aiden’s brown uniform. He must have forgotten what he was wearing when he claimed to be my coworker. And Halloween was still months away.

“Ah, no, um, I do, uh,” Aiden said, looking around nervously.

“You sound disoriented after being in the fire. It’s ok. I guess you work at UPS, and this woman works here in the library? And you were making a delivery when the fire happened?”

“Yeah,” Aiden said. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. Anyway, Aiden said it, and it seemed to be good enough for the fire department. The firefighter, sufficiently satisfied with the explanation, walked away, back to tallying the crowd of people who’d emerged from the library building.

Still lying on the cot, my hand now bandaged, I looked over at Aiden, who was still sitting on the pavement. “Were you really making a delivery?”

“No. Of course not. You guys always use USPS. You know that.” He grinned.

“So… how did you… I mean, you just showed up, like an angel, to rescue me?” I lay back on the cot, holding my stomach. Maybe Aiden would notice the visible pregnancy. Or maybe having just escaped from a fire wasn’t the time or place for discussing that.

“I was driving down 53rd, and I saw smoke from your building. I immediately thought of you, how you stay cooped up in that tiny room nobody knows about that’s not supposed to be used as an office. I thought of that right away, so I called in an emergency break to dispatch and came over here to find you. I knew the firefighters wouldn’t know to look in that room.”

“Claire had a day off today. She would’ve known where I was. But she was off today. And not like she could carry me —”

“Hey, don’t put down Claire. She’s a nice lady.” Aiden nodded. “She introduced us, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, she did, but—” I wanted to say that nothing came of it. That definitely wasn’t true. At least the pregnancy came of it.

“But…” Aiden sucked in his lower lip and shook his head. He looked into the dull New York sun. “But I wish you’d give us a second chance. I know I was a jerk that day you called—”

“Aiden.” I put my hands on my enlarged stomach again. “I’m pregnant. I’m really pregnant.”

“I am still not getting this.” Aiden didn’t seem to have caught the significance of where I was holding my hands. He didn’t know that I was showing him the very pregnancy I was talking about. “So, you wanted to know if I wanted kids…”

“Because I’m pregnant, yes,” I tried to sound as not-impatient as possible.

“So, you’re pregnant? Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. I’ve always wanted to have a baby.” I patted my round pregnant belly again.

“Oh my God!” Aiden stared at my pregnant belly.

“Yeah, first time seeing a pregnancy, Aiden?”

“No. But. You. I had no idea. You’re pregnant. You’re really pregnant.” He shook his head. He smiled, or smirked, or just opened his mouth in incomprehension.

“I’m really pregnant, Aiden.”

“For real, you’re pregnant?”

“For real, I’m pregnant.”

“Wow.”

“There’s more, Aiden. The other thing—”

“Twins?” he asked, mouth wide open. Anything would’ve been possible in