Admit You Need Me: A Secret Pregnancy Romance (Irresistible Billionaires Book 4)

by Ajme Williams

  The cabin was quite spacious. Even with the area of the living room that Maggie had staged for the photoshoot that I wasn’t sure was happening anymore, there was still plenty of room. The room was warm since the fireplace has been going and whoever owned this place had made sure they had plenty of entertainment options. The television was massive, and on the console underneath was a DVD player and a couple of gaming consoles too. Large shelves on either side of the television were filled with books, DVDs, comics, and CDs.

  I turned the television on.

  “Any requests?” I asked.

  “What have they got?”

  Not as much as I thought, turned out. It seems like the internet wasn't working so streaming was out of the question.

  “It doesn't look like we can get connected.”

  “How about a DVD?” Maggie asked. She went to the shelf and surveyed the collection. It turned out; the DVD collection was pretty limited. She gathered them into one hand and picked the first one off the pile.

  “It's a Christmas movie.”

  I shook my head. “I don't think we need more snow. What else is there?”

  She laughed and put the DVD Back down on the Shelf.

  “This looks like a movie from the 40s. Romance if I had to guess,” she said, holding up the second one. Neither of us were feeling that one, so she moved on to the last two. An animated kids’ movie and a horror movie.

  “I haven't watched the kid’s movie since I was a kid, and I don't want to change that,” I said. She conceded and put the kids' movie back on the shelf leaving us with the horror movie.

  “Are you good watching this?” I asked her before putting it into the player.

  “It’s not like we have many options. How bad could it be?”

  We sat down and pressed play. This trip was just full of surprises, wasn't it?

  I was sitting on a couch with a woman about to watch a movie at home. I couldn't remember the last time that I did that. Women didn't come to my home to watch movies, let's put it that way. Last time Maggie was at my home, she was naked seconds after we walked in.

  She was different though, that was what we had established. We were friends, or at least friends of friends, which meant that we did stuff like this together. The other kind of person I would do stuff like this with was a girlfriend, and she definitely wasn't that. She had taken up way too much of my mental real estate lately though, more than any other woman, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

  The movie was okay, pretty standard, predictable, the type that you could walk away from, and come back in fifteen minutes having not missed out on much as far as the plot. The lights were on and everything, but Maggie didn't seem to be enjoying it very much. She reacted to a couple of predictable jump-scares, which was kind of amusing, but it seems like she was actually scared. It was funny and kind of cute. I could put my arm around her if I wanted to, right? Yes, a very friendly arm, I could do that.

  I put my arm on the back of the couch and then slid it down to her shoulders and she didn't recoil. I didn’t know why she was freaking out, it wasn’t that scary, but at the same time, I wasn’t complaining about the contact. She was cute, and she smelled good, and since we were never crossing the sexual line again, I wasn’t going to turn her away if she wanted a little bit of a cuddle. The scarier this movie got, the closer we did.

  It was one of those predictable ghost movies, where malevolent spirits went after people and they died in mysterious, gory ways. It didn’t do much for me, but Maggie was freaking out. On the screen, another member of the ensemble cast was about to get whacked, when suddenly, the lights went out. Maggie jumped and screamed. I held onto her.

  “Relax, it’s just the power. The storm must’ve knocked the lights out.”

  “Don’t say that like it’s a perfectly normal thing,” she said.

  “It’s fine. Remember in the garage? We have some candles and lanterns. It’s all right. I’ll go grab something.” I got up to head to the garage, and she jumped up after me.

  “Oh no, you’re not leaving me alone here.” It was dark so she couldn’t see me grinning at that. I wasn’t going to stop the woman no matter where she wanted to follow me. We got to the garage, accident-free and I used the light from my phone to uncover a couple of lanterns, a flashlight, and some candles.

  We went back to the living room and I put the lanterns down to light them up. I looked around the living room in the dark. The cabin in the woods with the electricity out should have been scarier, but this place wasn’t that kind of cabin. It had its rustic fittings, like a mounted deer head on the wall and the various woodsy pieces of decor, but it also had Wi-Fi and hot running water. We would be perfectly comfortable throughout the night.

  I looked over at the fireplace.

  “I think we still have gas, which means we still have heat.” The bedroom that I used upstairs had a fireplace too and I had heated the room up. I wondered whether the other four rooms had fireplaces too. I decided to go and check.

  “Wait a minute, where are you going?” Maggie said, hustling after me.

  “I wanted to check the rooms upstairs for heat. I remember the room I was in had a fireplace, but I’m not sure about the other ones.” She followed me along like a puppy and I didn’t stop her. It was pretty cute and I didn’t mind the company. I checked the rooms one by one, there were four of them but just as I guessed, the room that I had picked, which turned out to be the master bedroom was the only one with a fireplace in it.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “The other rooms are going to be stone cold. I should go back downstairs.”

  “Go back downstairs? For what?”

  “It’s either I take the couch downstairs or we share the bedroom.” I didn’t mean for it to sound like a threat. The truth of the matter was, of course, I would’ve loved to share the bedroom, the bed with her. Sleep would have been the last thing on my mind if I did, but I’d do my best to control myself. I wasn’t coming on to her, we had made a deal. I was just laying out the options we had that offered the most comfort to both of us. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by suggesting that we share a room but I needed her to know that we had only two options.

  “Is that it?” she asked. “I can go downstairs. It’s not a problem.”

  “I’m not letting you do that.” I didn’t wait for her to argue with me. Instead, I walked into the bedroom and put the lantern on the ground close to the bed. After that, I went past the bedroom and set a couple of candles next to the sink, lighting them. The light coming from there wouldn’t be very strong, but she seemed freaked out by the dark and the scary movie that we just watched, so it was something. Besides that, in the bathroom, nothing was flammable just in case the candles got knocked over. We didn’t need another disaster on top of the one we were trying to survive already.

  The thought that she was so scared from the movie and the lights going out that she wouldn’t want to be alone tonight crossed my mind, but I quickly pushed it away. This was not the right time to play knight in shining armor. It was like the circumstances just wanted us to fuck. We were stuck together in the middle of nowhere with no idea when we would be able to get out. She was scared, and the lights had just gone out. The thought of keeping her warm tonight was driving me to distraction. I was glad that the lights were so low.

  I walked back out into the bedroom. She was standing awkwardly next to the bed.

  “I meant what I said about sleeping downstairs. You are a lot taller than me and the couch might be uncomfortable.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll live. Do you need anything before I leave?”

  She shook her head. The way my mind was racing with thoughts about her, it was good that I was going to be putting some distance between us tonight. I didn’t need to make it harder for me to act like a gentleman. I could have asked to share the bed and it sound like a legitimate claim but my motives would be lustful more than practical.

  “Okay then, go to sleep
. Hopefully tomorrow, a lot of the snow will be gone.” I walked out and closed the door behind me. Deep breath. You did it.

  On my way downstairs, I grabbed the comforter and pillow off one of the beds in one of the other bedrooms. I tried to remember the last time I voluntarily slept on a couch and came up blank. The couch was pretty roomy, but of course, I would’ve picked sleeping in a bed over this. Even better than sleeping in a bed was sleeping in the bed that Maggie was also sleeping in.

  I didn’t bother with any lights in the living room beside the fireplace. I set up my bed and took off a couple of layers to get comfortable. Hopefully, tonight wouldn’t be a long one. I lay back on the pillow and got comfortable. Looking up at the ceiling, I wondered which of the upper rooms was directly above me.

  She was right upstairs and she felt so fucking far away. The other way the night could have gone if we hadn’t decided we were just friends of friends ran through my mind and I thought about rubbing one out. It almost felt dirty to think about that while she was so close.

  I closed my eyes. Soon enough it would be morning, and this would be over.

  8

  Maggie

  It was so quiet. It was the kind of quiet that sounded loud after a while. Even though I knew I was alone, it was hard not to feel like there was something or somebody in the room with me. This was technically a cabin in the woods no matter how nice it was on the inside and nothing good ever happened at a cabin in the woods. We were in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for miles but who knew how many other people right outside also thought there was no one around for miles.

  If I was a homicidal maniac who snuck up on unsuspecting victims who had come to the woods seeking solitude, I’d pick myself as a victim. I wasn’t particularly fast, I didn’t know how to fight and it was dark so even if I survived, I wouldn’t be able to identify the assailant.

  I blamed the stupid horror movie.

  I stared up at the ceiling, at the shadows that the multiple light sources cast. The room was fairly big, big enough to fit the king-sized bed as well as storage but because of the fireplace, it was nice and warm. I thought I’d would be out like a light after the day that we had had, but I couldn’t go to sleep for the life of me.

  I hated horror movies. First of all, I had never come across one that was well done, but that was beside the point. I avoided them completely, as a rule. The thing was, my ex, Paul, loved them. He watched them almost exclusively. While we were together, he wanted to watch a lot of them with me. I could only say no so many times before I had to finally concede. In the beginning, it wasn’t that bad and relationships were about compromise or whatever, but then he got weird about them.

  Upon reflection, I should’ve stuck to my guns in some way, drawn a firm boundary because I knew now that he used them to mess with me. He would find the absolute worst of the worst and make me sit through them with him. Everything from Hollywood movies, to little independent films, and foreign films, to what was most accurately described as snuff movies. It bothered me to this day whether any of the violence I watched was real and not simulated.

  He loved gore which should have been a red flag at the time. People threw the word psychopath around too much but I would use it earnestly with him. Some people liked horror movies, it wasn’t that deep, but he really liked horror movies. When he managed to break me down enough to watch one with him, he would grab me and hold me close, so close it was uncomfortable. He would run his hands over my tits or stick one down my panties as we watched. He would whisper to me, talk about what was happening on the screen, and worse. It made me sick. I’d try to get free but he’d make me beg. Turn it into a gross game where he finally let me go when he got bored of playing.

  It was incredible what distance and a little bit of knowledge did for you. He was not normal. I said that, but of course, there were tons of people like him. He was a sadist at the least and a narcissistic abuser at the worst.

  I learned that was a thing because someone left a magazine on the subway that had a feature story about a relationship that was eerily similar to mine. It was about a low-level female celebrity who was coming clean about a relationship she was in that left her broke, desperate, and in search of justice. The guy played the part of an international playboy but was really a conman who got into relationships with women and abused them, all while stealing their money and ruining their self-esteem.

  Paul hadn’t taken money from me, not in any significant amount but he had taken time, my confidence, and my ability to trust in myself before I finally got the guts to leave. The man in the article did all the things Paul did to me.

  First, he love-bombed the woman, made irrational grand gestures way too soon in the relationship that suckered her into believing he had good intentions. He lied to her, controlled her, asked her to do horrible, degrading things and then accused her of not loving him when she refused.

  Paul seemed too good to be true when we met and that should have been my signal that he was indeed too good to be true. I didn’t suspect a thing and I still wasn’t done blaming myself. Maybe it was my age, or perhaps I was just stupid. He was telling me that he loved me just three weeks in and I believed him like a dummy. He presented himself as pure and lovely and I fell for it. I built him up in my mind as a man who loved me and wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, so when he did start lying and manipulating me, I didn’t see it for what it was.

  He played me against my friends so that one day, I no longer had any and he was my last remaining source of support and company. He would say horrible things to me and ask me to do horrible things too. Disgusting, degrading things that he said would turn him on. When I would refuse, he would get at me for not doing my part to please him in our relationship. He would threaten me, saying that if I wasn’t willing to do certain things for him, he’d find someone who would.

  He did, of course. He would cheat and then claim that it was my fault. He would say that all my refusal to do what he wanted forced him to seek pleasure elsewhere and I was so broken down that I would apologize. There had been more women than I cared to truly find out about but I had evidence of at least three. He liked to pay for sex too, which wouldn’t have been an issue if he was single, but he wasn’t. He actually told me once that he’d rather ‘fuck whores’ in his own words than me since they were working for a paycheck and actually cared about getting him off.

  I didn’t know where I’d be without the article. It finally pushed me over the edge. I planned my escape. Thankfully, I still had control of my finances. I wrote him a letter one day and put the locket he bought me for our first anniversary into the envelope with it. I wasn’t sure why but it reminded me of him and I didn’t want that. In another way, I wanted to eliminate the possibility of him coming after me and using it as a reason. With that, I packed everything and left, moving two boroughs away.

  It was the hardest thing I ever did. It was sick but when you were abused like that, you started to believe the person who was telling you that you were worthless. You became comfortable being treated poorly and you got scared of leaving, not only because they might retaliate, but also because at least with your abuser, there was some certainty. The fear of the unknown was too big sometimes.

  It took a long time to get back on my feet, emotionally, that is, not in the other way. I settled into my new life as well as I could have all things considered but emotionally, I hadn’t let another man in since. Hadn’t even considered it. Love just wasn’t in the cards for me, as much as I wanted it. Tonight, watching the movie had been too much. It took me right back to our old apartment, Paul’s hands all over me while someone was being hacked to death on the screen.

  The room felt so empty that my imagination was filling it up for me. The flames from the fireplace and candles flickered which made me feel like someone was in there with me. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to be alone. My partner was a grouchy one night stand from several weeks ago who I was pretty sure hated me a little bit but I knew I wouldn�
�t get any sleep this way. Even if I ended up sitting up all night, I didn’t want to do it up here alone.

  I got up and wrapped the covers around me. I was still fully dressed since I felt more secure that way even though it wasn’t that comfortable. Toby had left a flashlight so I took it and went downstairs. There were a couple of armchairs and a loveseat in the living room, I’d just camp out on one of those.

  Once I was down there, I felt an immediate sense of relief. Just the knowledge that I wasn’t alone anymore was comforting. I was trying to be quiet, but it didn’t work. As soon as I was in the living room, Toby sat upright, scaring the daylights out of me. I jumped back, almost falling over in my blanket cocoon.

  “Maggie? What are you doing here?”

  I composed myself and got ready to give the speech that I was scared of the dark and I wanted some company tonight. I felt like a four-year-old who went to their parents' room in the middle of the night because they were scared.

  “I don’t want to be up there alone.”

  “Why? Did something happen?”

  “No, nothing. I think it was just a movie. I’m still a little bit spooked.” There was enough light from the fireplace to read his expression, but it seemed pretty blank. I didn’t think that I cared that he might judge me, but it turned out that I did. I was willing to put my pride away for tonight though. I was not going to survive the night alone.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Sorry to wake you. I just wanted to sleep down here.” He looked around the room at the remaining bed options. A loveseat, and a couple of armchairs.

  “Maggie, you’re not going to sleep down here on one of those.”

  “It’s not a big deal. It’s one night.”

  He shook his head, determined. I noticed that his jacket was gone and the muscular lines of his body were very apparent through his shirt. Even while scared, stuck on a mountain in a blizzard while flashing back to my awful last relationship, I was still horny. Gross.