Todos los capítulos de My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Capítulo 301 - Capítulo 310

Aiden's POV The rehearsal dinner was at the same restaurant as the bridal dinner, a different room this time, smaller, with the long table seating immediate family and the wedding party and no one else. Forty people. Manageable. Mara's parents were at one end, her mother in the yellow dress she'd apparently been planning for months, her father carrying the quiet warmth of a man watching his daughter move into the next stage of her life and being completely at peace with it. Jeffery's side was smaller, my father-in-law and Mrs. Willow and Mara's best friend from her research team and a handful of others. I was at the table as a groomsman, which meant I was sitting next to Jeffery, which meant I had a clear view of him all evening, the kind of clear view you had of someone when you were sitting close enough to read the little things. He was doing well. Better than well. He had that quality he got when he was in the right place, that particular ease of a man who had stopped tens

Rosalie's POV The bridal suite was on the fourth floor of the hotel, a room with good light and a view of the water that Mara had insisted on when booking the venue, because Mara always specified the thing that mattered most and let everything else work itself out. We'd been in the suite since eight that morning. Mara's two sisters, the stylist, the florist dropping off the bouquets, Mara's mother for the first hour before she left to handle logistics downstairs. I was there for all of it, doing maid-of-honor things, mostly organizational and occasionally emotional, requiring the ability to keep track of several things at once. Mara was doing well that morning. Present and calm in that particular way of someone who had been thinking about this day for a long time and had made peace with all the decisions in advance, so the day itself could simply be the day. She laughed at things. She let her sisters fuss around her with the gracious patience of someone who understood that the fu

Then the third one came. Four minutes after the second. I knew the difference. I'd already experienced it twice. The first time was with Lucy. The second time was in a hospital with Jeffery beside me, Alessandro arriving on a Wednesday night. I knew what contractions felt like. I knew what Braxton Hicks felt like. I knew the precise quality of each. These weren't Braxton Hicks. I breathed through it. The ceremony continued. Mara was speaking now, her voice composed and direct, the voice she used for things she was completely certain about. The room was still. No one was looking at me. I was standing in my place with my flowers and my composed face, twenty-four weeks pregnant and having contractions four minutes apart at my brother's wedding. I looked at Aiden. He was already looking at me. He was watching my face. Not obviously. Not in a way the room could see. In the way he watched my face in rooms, that background monitoring that had become automatic, that precise

Mara was speaking. Her voice had that particular quality it took on when she wanted to say something exactly right, the precision of a scientist applied to emotion. Jeffery listened to her the way you listened to things you were going to carry for the rest of your life. I watched Rosie. The third contraction came four minutes after the second. I saw it on her face the instant it began, and I watched her breathe through it with the control of someone who had done this before and knew what the process required, doing it in the middle of a wedding ceremony with her face completely neutral for the room. She was extraordinary. I'd known that for years. I watched her again now, that precise quality of her, the ability to be in a situation and manage it completely while simultaneously being present for what was happening around her. She was twenty-four weeks pregnant and having contractions four minutes apart, and she was standing in her place as maid of honor at her brother's weddi

I nodded. The car moved forward. I looked at him across the seat. He was composed in the way I'd learned to read correctly over the years, not the old kind of composure, not that closed-off, self-sufficient composure of a man who handled everything alone and showed nothing. This was composure in action. The composure of someone dealing with the precise things that needed to be dealt with now, in order, with all the capability of someone who was afraid beneath that management and was putting the fear aside for later, when there would be room for it. "You were ready," I said. He looked at me. "I'm always ready for you." I would have told him that was a very good line under other circumstances. It was a very good line. It was also completely true, in that precise way the truest things were true, not performed, simply exact. I was genuinely afraid too. Not controlled fear. The real thing. Twenty-four weeks was early. Too early in the precise clinical sense I understood beca