The man who I had now accepted would never be mine. Because although I’d thought that there might be something between us during that week in the house on the beach, the few days we’d spent in these suites had convinced me that I’d been wrong.
Romantic tension? Yes. Him acting on it or looking like he was even sort of thinking about acting on it? That’d be a big fat no.
Not that I’d given him a lot of chances. I’d been as cold as ice the entire time… or at least as cold as moderately cold water. No heat here. Nothing that even looked like flirting.
Still. I knew Damon Parker well enough to know that he always went after what he wanted. And the fact that he hadn’t jumped at any of the chances we’d had over the past couple of days could only mean one thing: he wasn’t interested in taking this any further than he already had.
I was getting more and more convinced that he’d forgotten about what had happened in that villa on the beach entirely. Either forgotten it, or already decided that it hadn’t meant anything to him in the first place.
Yes, I’d come to that conclusion already. Yes, I’d already figured the whole thing out when we left the house and he didn’t say one single syllable about what had happened between us there. Yes, I’d arrived at this hotel with the full knowledge that I should put my emotions away, build up some walls again, and protect myself. Get ready for my move to Australia and the new job. Forget about Damon altogether, if I could. I’d decided on the first stupid day here that I needed to keep him at a distance because it was the only way to make sure I got out of this unscathed.
I’d known all of that. But I’d also never been all that good at protecting myself.
Which was why the news that the lockdown was finally over was so terrific. Because it meant we could get out of here. Have our meeting with the governor—finally—and then fly home. And from there…
“Packing. Selling what I don’t want to bring with me. And moving,” I said to myself, shutting my calendar with a snap and getting ready to go tell Damon the good news.
Then I frowned and tipped my head. A moment later, my hands went right back to my calendar and I threw it open, desperate to find the right page. Once I got there, I scanned through the dates, my finger running along as quickly as my eyes did.
They jerked to a stop on the day I’d just marked as the day we would have a meeting with Mahoyu. It was today. This afternoon, to be precise.
And it was two days after I should have started my period.
Look, I’m one of those lucky girls who is never, ever late. Even when I’m sick, or stressed, my period comes on the twenty-eighth day, regular as freaking clockwork. And I’ve known that since I first started hosting this monthly visitor—because if there’s one thing any surfer chick knows, it’s that you’ve got to be prepared if you want to get into a bathing suit when it’s that time of the month.
I’d never gone a single day past when I’d expected it. It was one of the things I’d come to count on in life. And now, I was two days late. I hadn’t noticed because I’d been so stressed out about the situation—hello, volcano erupting within earshot of where we were staying—and the thing with Damon—hello, boss who sleeps with me but then acts like nothing has changed between us, and then makes it even worse by romancing me on the beach in Saipan—to really pay attention to the dates.
I’d also fallen into that classic mistake of not really keeping track of the days, because we were essentially on a vacation. Or if not on a vacation, then at least on a tropical island.
Other than the one we generally lived on.
I just hadn’t even thought to check. My work days always included at least an hour with my calendar in hand, but that was when we were in the office and I was having to track not only my appointments but Damon’s as well, and make sure that we both made them and didn’t double-book. Being locked in a hotel suite on said tropical island hadn’t exactly given me a lot of opportunity to make appointments.
Which meant I’d lost track of the date—and what should have happened two days ago.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, my finger running quickly back through the previous dates as I tried to locate the one I was thinking of. And there it was. Not that long ago—but definitely long enough for things to have changed dramatically in my body. Dramatically enough that my period hadn’t arrived on time.
There was only one reason for that to have happened. And there was only one person who had shared that one reason with me in the past several months.
I looked up at the wall, my gaze going hazy as my brain scrambled to take this all in and come up with a fix. Some sort of solution. Something that somehow saved me from the trouble I could already feel barreling right at me.
* * *
An hour later, I was back in my room, pacing back and forth in the bathroom as four pregnancy tests ran concurrently on the bathroom counter. Yes, it meant I’d had to buy four separate tests at a foreign market, where I’d had to ask for help because I didn’t recognize half the things on the shelves.
And yes, I’d then come back to the suite and practiced some extreme acrobatics to make sure I peed on all of them.
Since I know you’re asking—I can feel you doubting me—I absolutely had to do it. Because I didn’t want any mistakes right now. I wanted to know for sure what was going on—and how much I had to worry.
I glanced at my watch, saw that it had only been two minutes, and went to stand by the little sticks lined up on the counter anyhow, watching them with my heart in my throat.
“Please be negative, please be negative,” I chanted. “Please let my period be off because of travel or stress or a lack of food or a sudden sex life or anything—anything—other than actual pregnancy.”
I almost never asked the universe for anything. I’d always been a firm believer in fixing your own problems, figuring your own issues out, and walking your own path rather than counting on fate or luck or what have you.
But right now? Right now, I was praying for a miracle.
Because I didn’t want to have to tell Damon. I already knew what I would do if I was pregnant. I’d have the kid and bring it up on my own, and I’d love the freaking heck out of it and give it everything it wanted and teach it to surf and snorkel and someday scuba and…
The window on the first stick started to change colors and I ducked quickly down toward it, suddenly holding my breath. God, I wasn’t ready. But I needed to know.
When the lines stopped creeping across the window, there were two of them, and I’d forgotten what that meant. What was I supposed to be hoping for again?
I yanked one of the four boxes out of the trashcan and feverishly scanned the back of it, looking for the graphic that had told me which version of that window I should be hoping for. Then I saw it. Two lines meant pregnant.
Oh God, no.
My gaze snapped to the second stick. Then the third. And then the fourth. And I gulped so loud I was sure Damon could have heard it in the next room.
Because they were all registering two lines. All four tests agreed that I was definitely pregnant.
With Damon Parker’s child.
Chapter 25
Aubrey
“Holy guacamole,” I whispered to myself, leaning against the wall for support as I tried to come to terms with the idea that I was going to have a baby. No, it wasn’t a graceful statement, or even one that accurately conveyed the seriousness of the moment, but it was legitimately the only thing I could think of to communicate how I was feeling.
A baby with Damon Parker. The man who had basically made an entire career out of not settling down for anything but his job—and who had spent most of this last week either jumping into bed with me or pretending like he’d never jumped into anything that might even remotely resemble a commitment.
This was just terrific. Any girl’s dream come true. Because bonus: I was also in love with the guy. And though I’d thought I was going to be able to move to Australia and forget all about him—or at least
put enough distance between us that it didn’t matter whether I remembered him—that wasn’t looking like such an option anymore.
Because hey, I might be on the verge of hating the guy, and I might be trying really hard to convince myself that I could, but I also wasn’t going to take his kid halfway around the globe.
Fair was fair. We’d created this kid together. That meant said kid needed to be in a place where we could both see it on a regular basis.
Was I jumping way ahead of myself here? Yes. Was I, realistically, only about two weeks pregnant, maybe a little more than that? Absolutely.
Did that change anything I was thinking? No. Because I was a planner, like it or not, and that meant that the moment I saw a problem—the moment I saw something that might need some sort of creative solution—I had to start thinking about what that solution might be.
And honestly, being pregnant was… a little bit more important than trying to figure out how to schedule two meetings into the same slot on a Friday.
This was going to require an even bigger plan than I usually came up with.
And it would start with telling Damon. It had to. No matter how badly he reacted, he had a right to know, as quickly as I could manage it.
He deserved to start a plan, too. No, his probably wouldn’t be as detailed as mine. Honestly, it would probably include a grand total of two things: One, figure out what he wanted to name the baby and two, have the glorious Janice set up a bank account to pay child support.
Janice. My lip curled at the thought of her—at the thought of her handling his affairs from now on—but I pulled myself sharply back from that particular cliff’s edge. That wasn’t my problem. Right now, my problem was figuring out how I was going to tell Damon what we’d done. What we’d… created.
And with that particular to-do list built out—without any points on how exactly it was going to happen—I straightened my spine, inhaled as much air as my lungs could hold, and swept the tests into the trash can.
They’d already delivered their version of the news. Now, it was time for me to deliver mine.
Chapter 26
Aubrey
“Damon, I need to talk to you,” I said, knowing I sounded insanely awkward—and that I’d walked into his suite like a freaking robot, all stiff joints and straightened limbs. I didn’t want to be here and didn’t know what I was going to say, and I was figuring it showed all over my face.
I knew I should be acting normal. Should be at least attempting to make this sound like good news. But I’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked. Like, not even a little bit. Because no matter how exciting this news might have been in another life, the truth was that right now, it was just…
Complicated.
It was taking a situation that had already been ridiculously complex and making it even worse. I’d been on the verge of leaving the boss that I’d slept with, and then I’d gone and slept with him again… and again. Even worse, I’d started to fall in love with him all over, and figured out that he wasn’t falling in love with me.
So finding out I was now also pregnant?
Yeah.
And it turned out I was incapable of acting natural—or excited—when my life had just become complicated with a capital C.
The assumption that I looked as awkward and unhappy as I felt was confirmed when Damon turned to me, took one look at my face, and lifted his eyebrows to halfway up his forehead.
“O-kay,” he said, drawing the word out. “Are you all right, Aubrey? Did something happen?”
I bit my lip. “Well, yeah. A lot of things, actually. But maybe we should start from the beginning. When things started happening. When they all… when everything happened.”
He threw up his hands at that like I’d somehow said the exactly wrong thing. “When everything happened? Aubrey, what’s wrong with you? Ever since we got to this island, you’ve been acting weird. One minute you’re joking with me and the next you’re acting like you want to bite my head off. You’re snarking under your breath about Janice—who you never had a problem with before—and saying you’re going to take another job when I haven’t done anything wrong and—”
“What?” I gasped. “You haven’t done anything wrong? Are you actually serious right now?”
But it looked like he was, in fact, serious, because he was staring at me like I was speaking Greek. Or maybe trying to teach him nuclear physics. As if I’d even know where to start.
“I am, as it happens. Are you?” he snapped.
He was standing up from his chair now, and I actually walked right up to him and shoved him in the chest, pushing him back down. Then I took several steps back so I wasn’t towering over him.
I wanted him to listen, but towering over him made me feel weird. And I didn’t think it was the best way to look reasonable. Or like I just wanted to talk.
“Serious as a heart attack,” I said quietly. “You took me to your house and slept with me, do you remember that? And then the next morning, you pretended like it hadn’t even happened. Instead of talking about it and making it right, you forced me to come on this trip with you and take care of this piece of business that just couldn’t wait.
“Since we got here, we’ve been locked in our hotel rooms together, and guess what? You took the opportunity to get friendly with me again. Again and again. And then, shocker, you act like it’s nothing. You act like we’ve just been sitting around playing checkers or something, rather than building a relationship on accident. And the worst part, the worst part, is that I don’t think you even care about that!”
I threw my hands up in the air, unable to contain myself. “While I’m over here getting pulled back and forth like a rope in a freaking tug-of-war, you’re just hopping about like this all the best thing in the entire world! Like no one’s heart is on the line! Like we can just move on after it all, and pretend that nothing ever happened!”
I was crying by the end of that little speech, and I didn’t even try to stop the tears that were running down my face, because I’d spent the last week doing everything I could not to tell him how I felt or how much he was hurting me, and now that I’d actually started, I found that I couldn’t stop. All of my emotions were going to come out right now, and as long as he was just going to sit there like a bump on a log, his mouth hanging open at the outburst, I was going to take the time to say every single thing I hadn’t said yet.
“Do you know why I wanted to have dinner with you back in Honolulu? Do you know what I wanted to say to you? Did it even ever occur to you to wonder what I tried to start saying that night in the limo, before you let your libido run away with you and decided that you should be in control of the situation? Did you ever even think that there might be something more here? That I might want something more than just to be thrown away like any other girl you’d taken out once and then forgotten about?”
My voice broke and I could feel the strength starting to ebb out of me, and suddenly I remembered the small life growing inside me. The small life that I now had to take care of.
My hand went to my belly, and I stifled the sob I’d been about to let free. I owed it to this baby to stay in control. I owed it to the little one to keep from getting too upset.
Even if it meant splitting from its father for good. Because as far as I was concerned, this had been Damon’s chance to say or do the right thing. This had been me laying my feelings out there and asking for him to at least acknowledge them. Maybe explain that he didn’t feel that way about me, or that he did. That he’d felt that way for some time, and that he’d just been waiting to hear whether I returned his affection before he said anything.
But he hadn’t. He’d gone after me instead—accused me of being crazy—and that right there had proved to me that he was too insensitive, too oblivious, to ever do the right thing by me or the baby.
And in the heat of the moment, with my temper riding high and my heart breaking on the spot, I thought that meant that I didn’t have to do the right thing, eithe
r.
“I’m pregnant, Damon, and it’s yours,” I said bluntly. “But you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to worry about anything. Because that job I told you about? It’s with Josh Brody. And I’m taking it. The moment we get home, I’m selling everything and moving to Australia. I’m going to work for someone else—someone who can’t hurt me like you can. So you won’t ever have to deal with me or my craziness again. I’ll take myself right out of your life for good.”
Chapter 27
Damon
I jumped back up to my feet, though if you’d asked me at the time, I couldn’t have told you why I did it. Part of it was that I didn’t like looking up at people because it made me feel like they were looming over me.
Part of it was that I was surprised.
And part of it was that the tears streaming down her cheeks made every single possessive caveman instinct inside me come alive and scream that I needed to go to her, take her in my arms, and make it all better, pronto.
No, I had no idea where those instincts were coming from. I’d definitely never had them before—or if I had, they’d been buried so deeply that I hadn’t been able to hear them. But right now, they were legitimately the only thing I could think about. Aubrey was hurting and I would have done anything I needed to just get it to stop. To wipe those tears off her face and fix whatever was wrong and make it all better.
I would have killed whoever made her feel like that.
And that was when what she’d said finally caught up to me and started falling into place. Someone that had slept with her and then pretended that it didn’t mean anything. Someone who seemed to have used her for one thing and then gone on with their day, not giving one single damn about having slept with her.
Someone who had then come on a trip with her, been trapped in an island villa, and started taking down their walls and building something real.
The Billionaire's Lockdown Baby Page 11