A lifetime learning of being a businessman, he understood to not get his emotions get the better of him. He’ll be more likely to succeed with a cool head even though his heart was burning.
She’s having his baby.
He didn’t realize how hard she had hit his soft spot until he heard the news. To think that she was still legally married to another man puts him on edge. The way that man forced himself on her made him want to choke the life out of him.
“How’s your divorce coming, Ed?” he sat back in Eddie’s office.
“It’s coming … I still have time, right?” he said with a sour expression.
“Two more weeks, the tapes are safe with me.”
Eddie looked annoyed, he took a deep breath, “Why should I believe that you won’t be using those tapes to blackmail me in the future?”
Gabriel’s stare was cold, “Because I don’t want anything else from you, Ed … you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.”
“Do you know how much money I’m losing over this stupid divorce?”
“Roughly around 250 million dollars, I made my own estimation,” Gabriel responded casually.
Eddie hit his hand on his desk, “Fuck you, Gabriel! What the hell is in it for you, huh? What the hell does she have on you?”
Gabriel didn’t react, his face stayed stern and unreadable, “Two weeks, Ed, I want it done by then … bribe the judge or what have you, I want to see it done in two weeks … and I don’t appreciate you coming around my property and harassing my employees … so don’t ever do that again.” He stood up, he’d said what he needed to say.
“You like her, don’t you? You dragged yourself out here just to do this … I’ve checked your background, I got nothing … there’s only one thing that makes sense … you’ve been fucking my wife, Gabriel?”
He put both his hands on the desk and leaned closer to Ed, “Would you rather somebody else come here and know about your tapes?”
Eddie fell silent.
“I didn’t think so,” Gabriel said and walked away.
**********
He went back to his house after the short visit to Eddie’s office. He needed to cool down from his life’s abrupt change, and it’s all because of a woman.
His relationships with women have been nothing short of a disaster. To be born into the kind of fortune his family had and to have strived in expanding it, everybody wanted his money. The women were no exception.
One woman after the other, they all taught him the same thing, he was not as attractive as what his money could buy.
Every affection, every friendship and every relationship he ever had, he had bought them with a price. And it brought nothing for him, it didn’t fill him up the way he needed to be filled.
That was not the case with Jamie, she was different. But she wasn’t being honest with him about the baby. The one thing he had expected from her, to be the one person that could restore his faith in honesty, she failed him too. When most women he knew wouldn’t think twice to be married into his dynasty, she refused. What kind of trick does she have up her sleeves?
This baby was his, there’s no question about it. But he still needs a DNA test as proof, just in case Jamie denied him the right to his flesh and blood.
Flesh and blood, it might still look like that at the moment, in a few months it will come out to the world. A human being, a son or a daughter, a person that will call him ‘dad’, someone who will depend on him.
He’d like that. He was 44 years old, his lawyers have advised him to start a family but he never found someone he could trust.
He took a deep breath, he had just grown to like this woman he met in what seemed to be a fateful encounter. He had to make sure she’s trustworthy. He has 7 months to do it, because the child is his, whether she likes it or not.
“I’m gonna have all my meetings from Bhorma for the time being, any papers needs to be signed and any urgent matter that needs my approval will have to be done at The Peninsula … until further notice,” he said at the end of an online meeting with his CEO’s and lawyers. It was a sudden change of his usual behavior, and no one dared to ask why.
**********
The nausea had gotten worse, she could hardly smell anything that has a distinct scent. Her palette seemed to lose all sense of taste. Everything was bland and unexciting. The only thing she found worth putting in her mouth was ginger candies that she would never eat before she was pregnant.
She binged on romantic movies since she got back from the hospital as opposed to horror movies that she loved. She found herself in the brink of tears on every sentimental scene between the couples in the movies, and sobbed in the fight scenes.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she muttered to herself as she wiped her tears and cried some more.
Could it be that her love life was so terrible that she longed for fairy tales that only exist in movies? Being pregnant after a one night stand at 32 while in the middle of a divorce was in no sense of the word romantic at all. She pressed ‘next’ to play another movie, maybe she’ll find one that would make her feel better.
It was already the second night she was confined in her suite. She hadn’t heard anything from Gabriel nor she was going to reach him. Their last conversation at the hospital was enough to erase the memory of their surprise love making session the night before she fainted. The incident became completely irrelevant after the new revelation.
Food from the room service piled up in her room, the only thing she could force down through her mouth was the sweet dinner rolls that she spread with excessive amounts of butter. She stayed in her bed with a bathrobe because she was cold all the time. Clutching on a pillow and tucked under the blanket while binging on The Gilmore Girls.
That’s when her doorbell rang. She looked at the alarm clock by the bed, they were still delivering food at 11 PM, hot tea and snacks. She trotted to the door and opened it.
“What are you doing here?” her hostile tone greeted him.
“I need to talk to you,” Gabriel looked weary from lack of sleep.
She left him at the door, he never needed an invitation to walk into her space whenever he wanted to talk to her.
He stepped in, closed the door behind him. He looked around, the room was a mess. Food was still stacking up on the table, she was hardly eating.
“Have you been keeping yourself well nourished?” he lifted the lid of the main course, it was untouched.
“I couldn’t bring myself to put them in my mouth … I can’t stand the smell of most of anything.” But she could stand his smell, his smell was good to her senses.
He glanced at her as she climbed up the bed, “Did you eat anything at all?”
“Some bread … and ginger candies, that’s about anything I can eat.”
He didn’t look happy, “You have to try, that’s not enough.”
“Gabriel … please don’t tell me you’re here to check on my diet, I’m trying the best I can … I just can’t stand any of that food right now.”
He exhaled deeply, sat on the dining chair, “I need to know what’s your plan … now that you’re carrying my child?”
“I told you … I will raise it with Perry and you’re welcome to be involved if you want.”
Gabriel held it together, “Don’t you think that’ll be confusing?”
“It’ll grow up and understand the situation, it’s not gonna stay a baby forever, it’ll learn our ways.”
He clenched his teeth, “I will need you to sign a consent to have a DNA test for the baby when the time is right.”
“Urgh … you and your agreements, why does everyone have to agree with you all the time?”
“It’s to prove the baby is mine … legally, I want to give it its birthright, my name on the birth certificate … you want to raise it in your hippie lifestyle but it has the right of a legitimate father.”
“Maybe you just want to own everything, you want it written down in black and white … property of Gabriel Love …”
Gabriel closed his eyes and pressed his thumb on his eye, “I don’t need to do any of this if you … all you have to do is sign the consent letter, this is for the child’s own good.”
She knew what Gabriel meant, he didn’t have to do all that if she had agreed to marry him. He was giving her a choice. “Fine,” she pouted.