The Holiday Surprise
Alice Blakely
© Copyright 2017 by Alice Blakely - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Published by Sasha O’Hara, LLC
www.sashasworldofromance.com
Contents
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Chapter One
Jen
As I sat on the bus, staring up at the window as the city whipped by outside, it began to sink in.
I was riding away from the casino, the one downtown that I had begged Damien not to go to, repeatedly. The one that he had promised me he would never visit as long as the two of us were together. He had a problem, he’d told me when we’d met, and he knew that he had to get that problem under control if he wanted to be with me. And, me being stupid and in love, I took him at his word. I even thought it was romantic that he had offered to give up the one thing he really loved so he could be in a relationship with me, but at the same time, I was dumb enough to believe that it was really over. That he could walk away just like that. If I could go back in time and grab myself by the shoulders, I would. Because he didn’t walk away to be with me; no, he just pulled me into it.
I should have listened when people told me not to bother with a man that much older than me; he was thirty-five and I was twenty-two, and at least half a dozen people warned me that the reason guys like him prowled around young girls like me is because they knew we more likely to put up with their shit than women their own age were. And they were right, I guessed; I couldn’t imagine a woman ten years older than me falling for his bullshit quite as easily as I had.
So we dated, and it was good for a while. He would pick me up from my classes on campus in my car, and I would find it a little weird but mostly sweet in a well-intentioned kind of way. And then I caught on to the fact that he was gambling again; just a few dollars here and there, but enough that I noticed it, enough that he was neglecting me in order to go off and get it done. I confronted him, we talked about it, the whole thing seemed fixed up and we could move on. By now I was invested, stubborn, and walking away would have seemed like a failure no matter how obviously I could see that it was the right choice in retrospect. So I stuck around, sure that I was going to be the one to make him better. Yeah, he’d dated women before me, but none of them really understood him and his problems the way I did. I wanted to scream at myself just going through those words again in my head. How stupid did I sound? How naïve? And look where it had landed me, look at the thanks I’d gotten for being compassionate and giving a shit.
I had gotten the call from the casino earlier that day, when I was just about to head into another class; I hadn’t even been thinking about Damien’s gambling, because he seemed to have it handled. I hadn’t caught him at it in a long time, and I assumed that it was because he had stopped. Well, maybe that was the case, but he seemed determined to go back to gambling with a bang.
Mom had recently sent $25,000 to my account, the money she’d saved from hairdressing over the last several years; I couldn’t believe it when I checked my bank account and saw the cash waiting there for me. I called her up at once, assuming it was a mistake, but she assured me I hadn’t gotten anything wrong.
“I wanted you to have it,” She replied, in that soft-spoken way she had that made it constantly sound as though she was on the brink of tears. “I know you’ve been struggling to pay your tuition. I want you to get your education, honey. I want you to go on and take over the world.”
I didn’t cry often, but in that moment I felt myself begin to choke up. I swallowed heavily, relief and gratitude flooding my system so hard that I was having trouble putting either of them into words.
“Thank you, Mom,” I replied fervently. “Seriously. I can’t…I can’t even tell you how much this means to me.”
“Just go out and change the world with it, right?” She made me promise, and I managed a smile.
“Right,” I promised her. I checked my account again, and let out a stupid little whoop sitting there alone in my dorm room. I had been so sure that I was going to have to sacrifice at least one of my classes to pick up part-time work to cover tuition for next semester, but with this I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Not for a long time. The feeling was incredible, and I was so grateful to my mom that I made a mental note to go back home for the entire summer and do all the gardening work she needed, every single grocery run – anything to show her how much this meant to me. Both of us had struggled for money over the years, and now here she was, relieving my money troubles just because she could. It was more than I’d ever expected from her, and I would never stop being grateful.
And of course, I was so excited that I mentioned it to Damien. I remember his reaction; a little reserved, held back, as though he was thinking about something else. And, as it happened, he was.
When I got the call from the casino to say that someone had come in there with my credit card, I knew at once who it was. They didn’t even need to tell me his name for me to know. My stomach twisted up into a ball and I rushed down there, but by the time I arrived he was gone along with my twenty-five thousand dollars. I had only gotten it the week before, and had purchased a long-needed pair of new shoes with the promise of the security that money would bring me; standing in the casino, while the manager explained what had happened, I looked down at my new shoes and my head began to swim. No. This could be the case. It couldn’t be. Not when I had been so close to being free of all the financial worry that had plagued me these first two years at college.
As I headed home on the bus, I went grimly through all the ways that this would ruin my life. No tuition next year, so kicked out of college. No way to pay my rent, so moving back home. Damien would be kicked to the curb – literally, if he ever so much as came near me again. But more than anything, I had let my mother down. That was what hurt the most, more than anything else – knowing that I had hurt her in ways that I knew I would struggle to fix. She never knew about Damien, but if I told her the story I knew she would chew me out for being so stupid and quite rightly so. I pressed my forehead to the glass and let out a long sigh. There had to be a way to fix this. I had to come up with one. I had to pay my next batch of tuition in a matter of months if I wanted to study again next year, and I had no idea how I was going to produce the money when the time came. Panic clasped it’s hands around my heart and I felt tears prick my eyes again, but this time out of grief. I tilted my head back, trying to force the tears to roll back into my face, and once the blur of my sadness retreated, I found my eyes focusing on a poster above me. I frowned at it for a moment; it wasn’t like the rest of the posters on the bus, the ones that told me to keep my music low and not to scream abuse at the bus drivers. I frowned at it for a moment as I read the words; I had never seen anything like that before in my life.
“All expenses paid. Surrogate wanted. Perfect for college students.”
A surrogate what? I squinted up at the ad, taken in by the “all expenses paid” part. Oh, shit, a surrogate, like a surrogate to carry a pregnancy! I paused for a moment, staring at the poster, going back and for
th in my head about whether or not this was a good idea. I mean, probably not, but I had proved that I was bad at good ideas anyway. I needed that money. I needed my mother to never find out how stupid I’d been or what I’d let happen to me. I squinted and took down the number, staring at it in my phone, and then tucked it back into my pocket. That would be a last resort, if I needed one. Which I prayed I never would. I sank back against the seat, letting myself get lost in my own sadness once more, and the bus trundled me back along to my apartment.
Chapter Two
Nathan
“Are you sure about this?” I turned to Sophia and she took my hand and squeezed.
“I’m certain about it,” she replied, and then turned her attention back to the door where we were waiting for this latest applicant to be our surrogate to arrive.
I still had my doubts. Of course I did; this whole thing seemed completely insane to me, and I wasn’t happy at the thought of handing out a big pile of cash to some college student to bribe her into carrying our baby just didn’t sit right with me, no matter how much Sophia wanted that baby.
I drummed my fingers on the top of my thigh and glanced at my watch. I was supposed to start a meeting in an hour, and I didn’t want to be kept waiting if I could avoid it. We already weren’t off to a good start if this girl couldn’t even make it here on time-
“Hi!” The door sprang open and the two of us looked up. We were in my office, and I guessed that the receptionist Tara had let this girl through. I wondered what Tara thought of her – what she thought she was here for. Sophia lifted her head and beamed at the girl as soon as she approached. I got to my feet and extended my hand.
“Nice to meet you,” I greeted her, and the girl took my hand and met my gaze steadily.
“You must be Nathan, right?” She nodded in my direction, and then held her hand out to Sophia. “And Sophia?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Sophia nodded with a tight smile. I knew she was nervous about this, but the least she could do would be to treat this woman who was here to help us change our lives with a little bit of politeness.
“I’m Jen,” the girl took her seat opposite us, dusting some snow off the top of her jacket. I didn’t even realize that it was snowing outside, but then, I supposed it was getting close to Christmas. The year had kind of gotten away with me, what with all the stresses of what was going on with Sophia and at work. It felt like I couldn’t get away from the badness that was swirling around right now.
But now Jen was here, and she finally seemed like the answer to all our problems. I had to admit, she was kind of cute, not that I was into that kind of thing; I was a grown-ass man and it would have been gross for me to try and throw my lot in with a college student. But ten years ago, when I’d been at college, I would have twisted an ankle chasing her around campus; thick wavy brown hair that fell down over her shoulders, dark eyes, and full, pink lips that I could practically feel against my own. Had college students always been this good-looking, or was this a recent development? I feel like I would have remembered if college students had always been just this damned cute.
“It’s good to meet you,” Sophia replied, and then she launched into all the questions that she had prepared for our potential surrogate. I sat back and let her go; it was the best thing I could do in the circumstances. She knew better than I did what she was looking for in our surrogate. I found my mind drifting over what was to come next, if this went well – if Sophia finally accepted this woman as our surrogate after all this time looking and waiting and fumbling our way through this process.
I had been a little reticent about getting a surrogate. And I knew why. Sophia was the one who wanted a baby, way more than I did, more than I ever would, I thought. I was happy with what we had at the moment and didn’t want to mess that up. Well, not happy with it, but it would do.
That was my entire life at the moment, to be honest. Not that I let myself think about it too much, because if I thought about it too much I started to get that panicky feeling in my chest that told me I needed to back the hell away from whatever I was thinking about and focus in on my breathing and the good stuff and everything that calmed me down.
I knew I was unhappy somewhere deep inside me. It had started as I’d been walking down the aisle to be with Sophia; it wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I actually thought she was sweet, and when I had proposed to her I had had this inkling that maybe we could actually build a happy a life together, that maybe I could really be content with her as my wife. Everything right in the business world, everything right at home. Even if it was just for show. But, five years later, I wasn’t sure that I could keep pretending much longer.
But Sophia wanted a baby and that was what mattered. That was all that mattered. Because what she wanted always came above what I wanted, that was just how it worked – I wondered sometimes if she actually knew how I felt, could sense me putting distance between the two of us and wanted to pin me down while she still could. We’d been trying to have one naturally for a while now and had had no luck, and despite the fact that the doctors had told us to give this time and be patient, she had insisted that we get a surrogate. I had a sneaking suspicion that part of it was so she didn’t have to ruin her body with pregnancy, but I wasn’t going to press to deeply into that. In fact, now I thought of it, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d had a real conversation with her; I generally hid out at the office as long as I could, and when I had to head back home to her she was usually either out with her friends or already asleep. For a married couple who had loved each other once, we acted more like strangers than we did a pair of people about to be parents.
Jen was doing well at answering all the questions, throwing back answers that Sophia seemed to find acceptable – she told her what she was studying, how she was planning to fit the pregnancy around her studies, whether or not she would be able to keep her mouth shut about who had actually parented this kid. In fact, this Jen woman was doing better at soothing all of my wife’s concerns that I had done. She was confident and intelligent and articulate and I had to admit that I was impressed with her. I looked over at Sophia, sneaking a look at her expression, and found that her face had lit up with something that looked a lot like relief. Jen wasn’t the first person we’d interviewed, but she was the first one who’d actually impressed me, and felt like she knew what this job entailed beyond just the twenty-five thousand we were offering for someone to take it on.
“And on to the issue of payment,” Sophia glanced down at her notes. Jen shifted her weight, crossed her arms across her chest, and nodded. It looked as though a little flush had appeared on her cheeks, but I wasn’t sure why, and ignored it.
“Would it be upfront?” Jen asked, and it was the first time her careful composure had broken in the whole time since she’d walked into the room with us. Sophia cocked an eyebrow.
“Half once the implant takes, and half once the baby is born,” she replied. “But if you’re just in this for the money…”
“No, of course not,” Jen protested, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Everyone who came in here was here for the money, and it irritated me that Sophia wanted to make like there was anything else going on, like this girl might have been doing this purely out of the goodness of her heart. God knows what she needed that kind of money for, but she needed it and was willing to work for it and that was all that should have concerned my wife.
“I really want to do this for you,” Jen leaned forward, her voice dropping with sincerity. “Look, I know there’s nothing I can say that’ll convince you to pick me, but I take care of myself, I’m reliable, and I’m discreet. I’ll do everything you need from me.”
I looked over at Sophia, and Sophia looked back at me with a smile breaking over her face, and I could tell that she had finally settled on someone she liked. I looked back over at Jen, at the way her hair fell around her face as her dark eyes darted between us, and figured that I could get on board with that.
Chapt
er Three
Jen
I hurried towards the doctor’s office, glancing at my watch. I was on time, but I always like to be a little early if when I can manage it. Especially when I was getting paid thousands for my time.
I still couldn’t believe they’d picked me, or that I was really doing this; I had crunched the numbers and I could make it work. My tummy would still be flat when I headed back to my mom’s for Christmas, and I would just have to make sure that she didn’t see me below the neck after then. I would have it over the summer, and would just tell anyone who asked that I was giving it up for adoption. I tugged the coat around my shoulders as the air conditioning hit me; why did they have that running? It was so damn cold outside that I was having trouble unbending my clenched fingers. I looked around for Sophia, but instead, found myself looking at Nathan once more. He was slumped in one of the seats against the wall, playing with his phone, but he looked up as soon as I walked in and jumped to his feet. He smiled widely, and I felt this little tingle run along my spine. I was just nervous, that was all.
“Hey,” he extended his hand out to me again, and I took it. “The doctor’s running a little late, he said he should be about a quarter-hour before he can see you.”
“Is Sophia here?” I asked, looking around, and he shook his head.
“No, she couldn’t make it,” He replied, something flickering across his face – maybe annoyance, maybe disappointment.
“Oh, that’s a shame,” I shrugged, taking a seat and pulling off my jacket. “So, how are you doing?”
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