Read HIS: An Alpha Billionaire Romance (Part Three) for Free Online

it was even something I should have done. But when he tugged me closer to him and deepened the kiss, I was grateful that being near him made me forget my fears and act on whims like that.
    He let me go a moment later, and I caught Constance watching us. Disapproval radiated from her eyes. I withered under her gaze, the wonder and excitement of Nicolas’ kiss dying on my lips.
    “I should take Cole upstairs,” I said, slipping him from her arms and leaving the room, my heart pounding as if I’d just got caught drinking wine behind the rectory or something.
    I didn’t understand Constance’s problem with Nicolas. But I planned to find out.

Chapter 7
     
    Everything was all fun and games in the middle of the afternoon when I was well rested. It wasn’t as much fun at three o’clock in the morning when Cole seemed incapable of getting his fill at my breast.
    I was sitting with him in the rocking chair in the nursery—Nicolas finished the nursery and it was just as light and beautiful as he had promised it would be—the breast pump attached to my other breast to simulate the action of nursing two babies. Vivienne was still too tiny to nurse, but they used my breast milk to feed her through her feeding tube. And, hopefully, she would be home in another week or two, so I would have to be used to feeding two babies at once.
    But that didn’t make this all fun and games in the middle of the night.
    “You should have woke me,” Nicolas said, slipping into the room.
    “No reason for both of us to be exhausted.”
    “But there is. It took more than just one person to make this perfect little boy,” he said, running his hand slowly over Cole’s head.
    “Yeah, it took four,” I said, so exhausted I wasn’t really thinking about what I was saying.
    Nicolas laughed.
    It was a little surreal, sitting there with my t-shirt pulled up over my breasts, revealing not only both breasts—one with a baby attached, the other with a machine—but my stretchmark-covered, flabby belly sticking out above my boy shorts. He seemed to only have eyes for the baby at the moment, and I was too exhausted to really care what else he might see. I’d been using the treadmill in his home gym upstairs since coming home from the hospital, failing miserably at reaching the four miles per hour I was once able to jog. But with Cole home, there didn’t seem to be time to do more than eat and sleep on his schedule. So, personal fitness was once again on the back burner.
    I closed my eyes and must have drifted to sleep because the next thing I knew, Nicolas was carefully disconnecting the breast pump.
    “Do you put this in the bags right away?”
    I nodded, gesturing to the stack of disposable bottle bags that were sitting on top of the mini-fridge. Nicolas unscrewed the top from the pump’s bottle and poured the milk into a bag before tying it off and putting it inside the fridge with three other bags I’d pumped throughout the day. Either he or Adam would take it to the hospital in the morning for Vivienne.
    “Dr. Farley said you can probably try to nurse Vivienne next week,” Nicolas said.
    “Really? Are her lungs strong enough for that?”
    “He said she will probably continue to need oxygen for a while after she’s released, but he wants her to come home as soon as possible, and that means she has to be nursing at least part of the time.”
    Cole was finally drifting off to sleep. I stroked his check gently before tugging my nipple from his mouth. He stayed asleep, so I carried him to the crib, unconscious of the fact that my t-shirt was still tugged up above my chest.
    “Do you think she’s ready?”
    Nicolas leaned against the mini-fridge and studied me, his eyes slowly drifting down the length of my body. He cleared his throat, his eyes dropping to the floor.
    “Do I…what?”
    “Do you think Vivienne’s ready to come home?”
    “I want her to, and the doctor thinks she’s ready.”
    “I just don’t want to push things. If