He Came Knocking with a Baby in Tow Chapter 03
Kids get tired fast. After crying in my arms, he fell asleep not long after.
That night, I couldn’t sleep at all.
My thoughts drifted back to years ago.
When I met Lucas, I was a junior in fashion design at NYU.
I’d run myself ragged for tiny little roles, showing up to casting after casting.
Back then, my agent tried to show me a shortcut.
He said a famous photographer had taken a liking to me, he could make me famous, and asked if I was interested.
There’s no free lunch. Everyone knew what the catch was.
But I was young back then, full of pride, so of course I said no.
That’s when I got blackballed in the industry. They wouldn’t let me join school projects, wouldn’t let me do outside shows, and blocked my recommendation letters.
But that fifty-thousand-dollar contract penalty? With my family’s situation, even if we sold every last thing we owned, we couldn’t have scraped together that kind of money.
They’d cut off all my options. If I didn’t agree, I’d just rot there. To them, my youth was worthless.
Then I met Lucas.
At the time, I was working part-time at a coffee shop, a total mess.
He handed me a tissue and asked: “If you can’t keep going, come with me. I can give you everything you want.”
I turned him down anyway. He just smiled and put a business card in my palm.
“If you change your mind, you can find me. At least I’m younger than those other guys, and easier on the eyes, right? You wouldn’t be losing anything.”
The turning point came when my mom got hit by a car. Her leg was so bad they had to amputate it. The family’s breadwinner was gone.
I was crying my eyes out in the hospital stairwell, broken.
Then I ran into Lucas again.
He sat quietly next to me and lit a cigarette.
“Eva, that little pride of yours isn’t worth much.”
Yeah. That little pride of mine wasn’t worth much.
In the end, I went with Lucas.
But not to be his lover—we got a fake marriage.
I’d just turned twenty-one, and student loans were crushing me.
Lucas said he needed a wife to get his family off his back about getting married, and I needed money to pay off my debts.
“It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he said. “We get divorced after a year. I’ll pay off all your loans and give you enough money to finish school.”
I agreed.
We had a tiny wedding in a chapel in Las Vegas.
No guests, no wedding dress, just two cheap rings and an old priest.
That night, Lucas took me to a little motel.
I thought he’d ask me to do my “wife duties,” but he just tucked the covers in around me and said: “Go to sleep. I won’t touch you.”
I froze.
He smiled, that smile looking so soft in the dim light: “I told you, it’s just mutually beneficial.”
That night, I slept like a log.
After that, Lucas was like a different person.
He wasn’t that flirty stranger who’d hit on me at the coffee shop anymore. He was a gentle, thoughtful “husband.”
He’d make me coffee when I was up late doing homework, comfort me when I was stressed about shows, and stay by my bed all night when I was sick.
When things got intense between us, I once asked Lucas why he’d chosen me.
He laughed carelessly and didn’t even try to hide it: “I was attracted to your looks, plain and simple.”
“I’m a possessive guy. If I see something I want, I have to have it.”
Simple as that. He saw something, he took it.
And I knew it too. The heir to the Harrington family, he was from a whole different world than me.
Mutually beneficial, no right or wrong, so I used his connections to climb as fast as I could.
When love got confusing, I even dared to dream that maybe one day I’d be good enough to stand next to him.
But everything changed the day I found out I was pregnant.
I ran to tell Lucas, over the moon.
But his eyebrows furrowed tight.
He said: “Eva, I can’t give you a title.”
“If you want to have the baby, have it. I’ll take responsibility for the kid. If you don’t want it, you can get an abortion.”
One sentence, and I felt like I’d been thrown into an ice cave.
I even thought about getting an abortion for a second, but blood is blood. It’s weird like that. I just couldn’t do it.
Later I had the baby, and Lucas’s mom came to see me.
She told me straight out: Lucas’s future didn’t have a place for me.
The smartest thing I could do was take what she offered and leave.
She sent my mom to the best rehab center in the world, gave me a blank check, and a letter of recommendation to the top modeling agency in Milan.
That was a circle I’d have killed to get into.
Instead of gambling on a future that didn’t exist, that success right in front of me was too hard to say no to.
But I didn’t agree right away.
I didn’t want my kid to grow up without a dad.
The final blow was when Lucas got engaged.
He never hid it from me. I asked him: “What am I supposed to do then?”
That night he thought about it all night but never gave me an answer.
But I knew his answer anyway.
I can love money, but my line in the sand was that I wasn’t gonna be some mistress on the side.
So I broke up with him, took everything Mrs. Harrington had offered me, and cut off all ties with Lucas.
Back then, Lucas confronted me: “Whatever you want, I can give it to you.”
“Why do you have to do this?”
I smiled and told him: “You can’t give me what I want. I don’t want to be the other woman.”
He bowed his head, quiet.
Thinking, I fell asleep.
The next morning, I heard the kid’s voice…
