“Can I come in?” he asked. I was inside, holding the door open and he was on my doorstep.
“I’m really tired and I just want to be alone. If you have something to tell me, just say it now.”
“I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through. I really want to be there for you. I just want what’s best for you.”
“Thanks for all your help, but we aren’t together and we have no relationship of any kind. You don’t owe me any of this, and I’m not asking. I can take care of myself.”
“I know that. You’re so strong, you’ve always been. It’s really hard to go through pregnancy alone though and it’s even harder raising a baby alone.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped.
Paul shuffled his feet a little bit. “I know that you do.”
“Then what?”
“It’s just, you shouldn’t have to do this alone. Don’t you want help? Do you want someone to be there to help you out? To run to the store when you have cravings? To rub your feet or go to doctor’s appointments with you? You don’t want to be alone in the delivery room, do you?”
In a perfect world, none of this was happening. In an even more perfect world though, this was happening exactly the way I wanted it to, with Toby excited and happy at my side. With him supporting me through the pregnancy, running to the store to get all my cravings, or even doing something ridiculous, like hiring a chef especially to cater to me. I did want someone alongside me, but it wasn’t Paul. His offer was sweet, but it wasn’t what I wanted. The man I did want at my side had made it clear that he couldn’t do it.
“I hope this isn’t you making me an offer.”
“It is, Maggie and I am dead serious. I want to be there for you. You deserve someone there while you’re going through all this.”
I was shaking my head. “How can you say something like that given the way our relationship ended last time?”
“I’m different now.”
“That might be the case Paul, that I would be a fool if I believed you.”
“What do I have to do to prove it to you?” Paul asked.
“I’m not at all in the right place for any kind of relationship, Paul and it would be wrong to ask you to hold out for me. I don’t want you to do that. If you want to do anything for me, just give me the space to sort myself out.”
“You’re not asking me for anything that I don’t already want to do for you.”
“Paul,” I said, taking a deep breath because I didn’t remember him being this persistent in the past. Maybe he was right and he had changed, but he was still annoying. “Look, just give me some room okay? You’ve been following me around and you keep popping up on me which is kind of scary, and it’s suffocating too. I feel like if I really wanted to see you, I could make that happen myself. I don’t appreciate the intrusion.”
For the first time, I saw a little bit of the old man that I used to know in his eyes. His frustration at not getting what he wanted shone through and he appeared visibly annoyed with me.
“I just wanted to be close to you.” He spoke his words through gritted teeth, and his body language was tense. I was getting on his nerves because I wasn’t giving him what he wanted. In the past, he would’ve scared me and I would’ve relented, but now, I didn’t care.
“Well, you’re going about it the wrong way. I told you what I need. Now, I’m tired and I want to get to sleep. I’ll see you when I see you. Goodbye Paul.” I closed the door and locked it instead of waiting for his response. A crazy thought crossed my mind as I checked the handle, pulling the door to make sure it was locked, even though I had just locked it. Imagine opening the door tomorrow morning and finding him curled up on the doorstep like a dog.
I shook the thought off because it was bone-chilling.
He said that he’d changed, but I had no reason to believe him. He was back in my life trying to demonstrate that he was a different man to me, but he was being a little bit too insistent. If it made sense, he was being too eager, too emotionally available. It felt like the love-bombing all over again. I had a feeling that he had some sort of agenda and he wanted something out of me.
Things were different now and he didn’t have the upper hand, I knew I was right to be cautious. He didn’t have a right to barge into my life and demand access to me again. That just wasn’t for him anymore, and he would spend a very long time proving himself before I even got comfortable enough to consider him again.
25
Toby
It’s complicated… what the fuck was that supposed to mean.
If I had to ask that, then maybe she had a good reason for staying away. It was fucking obvious what that meant. I didn’t need her to explain it, because I had seen it.
She walked out of the house and into another man’s arms. No wonder she was in such a hurry, the guy was out there waiting for her. I didn’t know she was seeing anybody else. It was kind of funny because usually, I was the one on the other side of this conversation. Women I was seeing asked me why I was with other people. She wasn’t cheating on me but I had to admit, it did suck that she had managed to move on so fast yet here I was still thinking about her.
Didn’t that technically mean she was cheating on that guy with me?
I stared out the window out at the city. For days I had been thinking about that stupid birthday party. For days. Where was she? What was she doing? Why was she and everything she was doing a hundred percent more interesting than my job right now?
It’s fucking complicated. Why didn’t she just tell me the truth? Instead of being vague and evasive, why didn’t she just tell me there was something else? Did she think that I couldn’t take it? I felt my fists clench.
I could take it. I could’ve taken it if she had told me, but since I knew she was lying, I didn’t like that. We could’ve handled this like adults. It didn’t have to be that serious. We were just two people who used to be involved with each other, and now we were not. No hard feelings. All just water underneath the bridge.
Yeah, how many times did I have to tell myself that before I believed it?
Who was that man? It was too dark to tell. Besides Easton and Missy and the rest of their friends, I didn’t know any of the people in Maggie’s life.
If I really wanted to find out, I could, I thought. It would take no time, just a couple hundred or couple thousand dollars to a private eye and I’d have my answers probably by the end of the day if I wanted them.
What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t want the information if that was what it was going to take to get it.
I heard a knock on my door, and then whoever was on the other side didn’t bother waiting for my reply, they opened it.
“Go away, I’m working,” I said without turning around. I heard his footsteps as he walked into the room.
“I asked earlier whether you wanted to join me for lunch today. You never got back to me.”
“I figured you would probably want to meet with Missy,” I said.
“If I wanted to meet with Missy, I would’ve asked her.” I turned around and faced him.
Easton was my closest friend. I never throughout our history of friendship had felt jealous of him. We had been on such a similar trajectory until just recently, so I had never had a reason to. When everything in his life started happening with Missy, I didn’t think I would ever want the same thing with a woman, but now, he was expecting a baby with his fiancée and I was… I was letting a woman who was supposed to be a one-night stand completely ruin my life.
It wasn’t the type of jealousy that made me resent him, it was the kind that made me want the same thing. It made me wonder whether Maggie could be for me what Missy was to him. It made me think that having a long-term partner, even a wife wouldn’t be that bad. It might be what I wanted in the first place but was too scared to ask for.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“I know you aren’t, but you probably haven’t eaten anything since yesterday,” Easton
said. He knew me so well; I shouldn’t have been shocked that he could read me so easily. Nothing had been going right. I couldn’t sleep, so I probably looked like shit. My appetite was completely shot too, I knew I had lost some weight. My pants were fitting different, and I had lost some strength at the gym too.
“It’s fine, I’ll get something on the way home.”
He sighed. “I feel like I shouldn’t ask you what’s up since you haven’t said anything already, but whatever it is, it doesn’t look like being here is making it better.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I mean why don’t you just take the day off? Take a couple days off. Get over whatever is bugging you, and then come back when you’re ready?”
I could’ve argued. I could have lied to him but Easton wasn’t someone I had to protect my pride from. He knew something was bugging me and he wasn’t going to make me ask him for time off.
“That obvious, huh?” I said.
“I don’t want to be presumptuous, but does Maggie have anything to do with this?”
“More than I ever wanted her to,” I said.
“Just take some time off. I’m pretty sure I’ve been there before. It’ll pass but only if you face it first.”
He left and I thought about his offer. I seldom took time off work. In this case, though I was here but I really wasn’t. My focus, desires, everything else were somewhere else. I wasn’t getting anything done here so might as well leave.
There was another knock at my door. I yelled for them to come in. It was my secretary. She waved a stack of envelopes in her hand.
“Mail for you,” she said pleasantly. I frowned and walked over, taking it from her. The envelope on top had my name on it but no address. I picked it up and checked both sides.
“What’s this? Where’d you get these?” I asked. It couldn’t have come like that through the mail.
“It was with the rest of the letters so,” she trailed off and shrugged. It was above her pay grade to know that detail, so it didn’t bother me that she didn’t. I thanked her and she walked out. I ripped it open first because I wanted to know what it was before I threw it out. Inside was a single sheet of paper. My frown deepened. I pulled it out and unfolded it.
The words ‘medical’ and ‘Maggie Weismann’ caught my eye. Test results.
I read the form and my breath caught.
The results were positive. It was a pregnancy test.
Time stopped for a second. My mind went back to a couple of days ago. I knew that you couldn’t get results from a pregnancy test that fast. If she was pregnant, she had been pregnant for a while now. There was no way that I knew the results of her pregnancy test and she didn’t. She knew that she was pregnant and has been for a while, but she didn’t say anything to me.
Why would she do that? Was it because it wasn’t mine? I knew that there was another guy. Still, I felt like it would’ve been nice to know. What if there was a scam going on here? The thought crossed my mind and I felt guilty for thinking that way about Maggie, but it was beyond clear by now that I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.
I had a lot of money and I knew that was why I got as many women as I did. It might’ve been why I got Maggie. What if she was trying to get money out of me, blackmail me some way? Honestly, if it was money that she wanted, she should’ve said the word and I would’ve given her some.
Wait a minute, what the hell was I thinking? I just got some test results from an unmarked envelope and I was taking them seriously. Those test results were reporting something I could have confirmed with Maggie just days ago, but she didn’t mention anything. Who was I going to believe?
I went to my desk and picked up my phone.
Call her.
No, don’t call her.
No, call her. Why not? Let her tell you herself whether she’s pregnant or not.
What were the chances that she was going to give me the truth or even pickup? There was no way that she sent it. This felt like a secret. I felt like if Maggie was pregnant, Missy would know, and therefore Easton would know and the news would get to me somehow but it hadn’t. She had not sent the letter.
I decided to go another way, calling someone else. Just minutes ago I brushed away the idea of calling a P.I. After a few seconds. the gruff male voice came down the line.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Calvin? It’s Anderson. Sorry, this is out of the blue, but I need you to look at something for me.”
Calvin Ford owned a security company and had done some work for us in the past. I rattled off the details that I knew about the letter and he asked me to send him a picture with my phone to see whether there were any obvious signs of it being a fake. I sent the picture.
“So? What do you think?”
“Things like these are an easy forgery. Do you have any suspicions?”
“It’s a woman I’ve been involved with and has direct contact with me, but this seems to have slipped her mind to let me know.”
“Is this a girlfriend?” he asked. I felt myself getting uncomfortable.
“No. She’s a friend of a friend’s wife.” Calvin was silent for a second. The two of us were not friends but I trusted the quality of his work. In addition to that as an investigator who handled personal cases sometimes, he kind of felt like a doctor. The kind of person you could reveal embarrassing information to without any fear of being judged.
“Does this woman have any reason to wish harm on you?”
Honestly, I could think of a few. I was not proud of the way that I had conducted myself with Maggie. It sounded like a weak excuse, but I usually wasn’t like this.
“We ended on bad terms. Maybe she wants to blackmail me, get some money out of me, that’s my fear with this” I said vaguely.
“It’s not really any of my business, but I feel like it is my job say; you are a guy with money and power and you should have fun with that, but those two things make you a target, remember that,” he said. I rolled my eyes because I did not appreciate the lecture even though he was right on the money. I always used condoms with women and when condoms weren’t available, I made sure I did not come inside them. Usually. The last time with Maggie had been in the heat of passion, I usually wasn’t that sloppy and with Maggie, usually wasn’t myself either.
Getting pregnant by a wealthy man was an almost cliché method to secure a livelihood for the women who couldn’t do it the hard way. I knew the risks associated with the lifestyle I led but I hadn’t been careful. Not enough and not with her. Maggie wasn’t like that, was she? No monetary cost was too high, but I didn’t like the thought of being taken advantage of.
I had to stop being so sentimental about her, I didn’t know the woman. I thanked Calvin for his advice.
“I know. I guess I haven’t been as careful as I should have been and now, I need you to trail her.”
“Not a problem. I can look into her background and watch her movements and have something for you.” I thanked him again. I didn’t like that it had come to this, but I felt like Maggie had forced my hand. Talking to her might have worked, but at the same time, I didn’t think so. We weren’t on good terms so why wouldn’t she lie, deflect, or just tell me what I wanted to hear instead of letting me know the truth? This was probably the only way.
I stared at my phone once I ended the call with Calvin.
How was this different from stalking?
Sometimes women lost it after I told them the terms of the relationships I wanted. After a few lays, they wanted to go on vacation or start calling me their boyfriend; asking me not to see other women and stuff. That was always off the table and I agreed to those terms with Maggie too but here we were. I wasn’t the kind of man that was easy to trick but finally, the tables had turned.
I wasn’t going to be the one physically doing it, but I wanted it done for the same reasons that a stalker would. I was so sure that calling her would be fruitless, but I hadn’t actually tried it. I knew enough to know
that she wouldn’t be happy to see me, but I didn’t need to see her, I just needed a conversation.
I slowed down because I was going too fast. I felt like I couldn’t trust myself and it was true, I couldn’t. I didn’t feel like myself when it came to Maggie. Everything moved too fast and nothing made sense. Whenever I felt like I had a handle on the situation, I would mess up again. Every time I told myself that was the end, it turned out to be another lie.
I picked up the phone and called her.
The phone rang a couple of times, but then she picked up. I was so shocked I almost didn’t say anything.
“Hello? Maggie?”
She was silent.
“Hello? Maggie? Can you hear me? It’s me. I wanted to…” I heard a click and then the line went dead.
What the hell? She picked up. I heard her pick up. Had she just hung up on me? She didn’t owe me shit, but something felt off. Even if she didn’t want to talk to me, I felt like she would tell me before hanging up. At least tell me to leave her alone or curse me out even.
No. After this weird letter showed up at my work, I had reason to be suspicious. Something strange was going on. I knew it, and I was going to find out what it was.
26
Maggie
“I’m gonna head out, is that okay?” I said.
“Of course, go ahead,” Missy said to me. “Wait, hold on a second.” I froze, putting my purse over my shoulder.
Every day now, I had been obsessing over whether it was obvious. I had been hiding my pregnancy from Missy. It was not because I thought she would have a negative reaction, it was more out of shame, to be honest. I felt that telling her that I was pregnant would lead to telling her who got me pregnant and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have just yet.
“Oh no, I swear I had something to tell you. I just forgot,” Missy said to me, frowning. I shook my head telling her that it didn’t matter.
“That’s okay, pregnancy brain, right?” I said. She smiled and told me she would text it to me when she remembered. I let myself out of her house.
Admit You Need Me: A Secret Pregnancy Romance (Irresistible Billionaires Book 4) Page 16