Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (115 page)

She got dressed in a pair of sweats and a
t-shirt, threw on her flip-flops and headed for the door.

Unfortunately, Danielle was up and about,
rummaging in the fridge as she left her room.
 
“Hey, what’s going on?” Danielle asked,
straightening and looking at her with a strange expression.
 
“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Oh, I just realized…I need to…I forgot I
need to grab something from Duane Read.”

Danielle looked at her.
 
“Nicole.
 
What’s going on?”

Nicole wished she didn’t always have such
a “readable” face.
 
Everyone always
could tell what she was thinking and feeling, when something was wrong.
 
It was annoying to never have the
ability to hide anything from anyone.
 
“Nothing’s going on,” she lied.
 
“Just running out for two seconds.
 
You need anything?”

“We need to talk when you get back,”
Danielle said.

“About what?”

“You know what.
 
About Kane Wright.
 
You can’t go through with this
escapade.”

“I need to run to the pharm—to the
store.
 
And then I need to get ready
for work,” she said.
 
“We’ll talk
when I get home later.”

“Nicole, I’m serious!”

“Sorry, got to run!” Nicole called,
heading out the door.

The nearest Duane Read was only three
blocks away, so she was there in under five minutes, careening through the
isles like a madwoman, grabbing three different pregnancy tests and running to
the counter.

The man behind the register rang up her
purchases with a look of satisfaction on his face, as if he was thinking,
“good, another New York Sex in the City slut gets her comeuppance.”
 

Maybe she was just being paranoid and he
was merely remembering a funny joke someone had told him, but it didn’t feel
that way.
 
She felt judged.

But Nicole didn’t have time to be upset
about what the guy at Duane Read thought of her.
 
She took her little bag of pregnancy
tests and ran the whole way back to her apartment building, then took the
stairs two at a time until she reached her door.

Inside, Danielle waited, ready to pounce
like a concerned puma.
 
“Nicole, you
need to tell me what’s going on,” she said.
 
“You can’t do this again.”

“Do what again?” Nicole asked, brushing
past her and moving toward the bathroom.

“You can’t just shut me out when you
don’t need me, and then dump all of your problems on me when it’s convenient
for you.
 
It’s not fair.”

That slowed Nicole down.
 
She was gripping the plastic bag that
held the answers to a burning question, gripping it so tightly her knuckles
were white.
 
“I’m sorry if I’ve been
a bad friend.
 
I don’t want to be,
and I really do appreciate everything you’ve done for me—I’m grateful,
Danielle.
 
But right now—“

“Right we are going to sit down and talk
about Kane Wright.
 
You can’t go
through with this trip to the Caymans.
 
What if he rapes you?”

Nicole couldn’t help but laugh.
 
“That’s the least of my concerns,
honestly.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Danielle said,
pointing at her.
 
“He wants you,
he’s doing anything he can to get you alone with him somewhere far away from
any witnesses.”

“I think he’s just a very rich man used
to getting what he wants.”

“Exactly.
 
What if he decides he wants to have sex
with you one night?”

It was a valid point.
 
“I don’t know.
 
My instincts tell me he’s not that kind
of guy.
 
Yes, he’s sneaky and
entitled and I don’t like him much as a person.
 
But rapist?
 
I just don’t see it.”

“Well maybe you don’t, but I’m putting my
foot down this time, Nic.
 
You’ve
gotten me involved now.
 
I need you
to call Kane and tell him you’re backing out on the deal.”

“I think he’s already made arrangements
to pay off all your debt,” Nicole said.
 
“So even if I back out, he’ll have paid close to a hundred thousand
dollars on your behalf.
 
We’re going
to owe him either way.”

“Maybe I’ll call him and deal with it
myself.”

“Look, Danielle, I don’t have time to
argue.
 
I’m sorry for dragging you
into this—seriously, I am.
 
But I need to get ready for work.”

Danielle glanced down at the bag.

For a moment, Nicole was sure she’d seen
through the plastic and realized that Nicole had come back to the apartment
with a bunch of pregnancy tests.
 
But then she realized she was just being paranoid.

“Okay, do whatever you want Nicole.
 
I’m just getting really tired of you
treating me like an afterthought.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you.”

“I’ve heard that one before.”

Nicole didn’t know what else to say.
 
Danielle was right, of course, but
Nicole had bigger problems.
 
Like
finding out for sure if her fears were unfounded or if she was going to be
having a major life crisis.

She got to the bathroom and closed the
door, even locking it behind her.

She’d never had to take a pregnancy test
before.
 
This was the first
time.
 
There had been a lot of
firsts since she’d started working at Jameson International.
 
Most of the firsts had been things she’d
never imagined herself going through and this was certainly one of those
instances.

Nicole sat down on the toilet and opened
the first pregnancy test kit.
 
Pulling out the directions, she read them carefully—even though
she knew they were so simple a seventh grader could follow them (and she
supposed in this day and age, many did).

She was heartened to read that “early
morning urine” contained the highest concentration of hCG and so would make for
the best sample.
 
Thank god for
small favors.
 
Hopefully, she would
at least be assured of an accurate test right now.

Her heart was beating faster and faster
as she held the strip in her hand.
 
She needed a cup to pee into, which she hadn’t thought of, and didn’t
want to go into the kitchen to get one.
 
Facing Danielle’s wrath yet again wasn’t something she was looking to do
at this particular moment.

But luckily they had some spare plastic
cups under the bathroom sink.
 
“You
can do this,” she told herself, grabbing the cub and then pulling down her
sweatpants and holding the cup under her.

She peed into it, just enough to make
sure she could cover the stick the way she needed to, and then finished peeing
into the toilet.

Her hands were shaking as she sat and
dipped the test strip into the urine.
 
She counted to three and then took the strip out and laid it across a
folded up piece of toilet paper on top of the sink to let it dry.

The instructions had said that she could
get results in as soon as forty seconds, but the entire time of three minutes
should be allowed for full results.

So Nicole got up and stared at the strip
lying on the sink and watched it.
 
It was sort of like watching paint dry, she decided, only a whole lot
more interesting.
 
Her entire life
was going to change depending on the results.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t truly
thought about whether or not she wanted a child.
 
Obviously it would be crazy to have a
baby in the current situation, but what if Red was still in the picture?
 

They’d talked about having kids and
Nicole knew she wanted to start a family someday, preferably when she was young
enough to have two or three children without worrying about her age and
reproductive capabilities.

As she was thinking about all of this, as
her mind spun round and round the different what ifs and possibilities, her
eyes suddenly registered what was happening to the test strip.
 
First the one line appeared, which she
knew could mean a negative.
 
But
then quickly thereafter, the second line began appearing, as if by magic.

Nicole swooned a little, watching the
tiny purplish line slowly (but faster than she’d ever expected) appearing on
the little stick.
 

“Oh my god,” she whispered.
 
“Oh my god.”

She was pregnant.

Nicole didn’t know what to do next.
 

She sat on the toilet and held the
pregnancy strip in her hand and marveled at how such a tiny, flimsy little
thing could have such an enormous, earth-shattering impact on her future.

No
matter what happens from here on, I’ll never be able to say I’ve never been
pregnant.
 
I’m pregnant with Red
Jameson’s baby.
 

Even thinking the words didn’t make it
seem real.
 
The realness of it only
served to make it more…unreal.

That was the word that should be used to
describe her life now, Nicole thought.
 
If someone made a movie about her or wrote a book, it would be called
Unreal: The Nicole Masters Story.

She smiled a little at her crazy, jumbled
thoughts, but then the smile died when she again stared at the test strip.
 
Okay, possible false positive? She
wondered.

Time
to try again.

She ripped open the second test (a
totally different brand) and also dipped that in the cup of urine.

Minutes later, it too had come up
positive.

And not long after, she did the third one
(because everyone knew three times is a charm and three strikes your out, etc.
etc.).

They all said the same thing.
 
Nicole Masters was incontrovertibly
pregnant, and now she needed to figure out what to do next.

***

Nicole wasn’t sure exactly when she’d
decided that she needed to talk to Red.
 
Everything was happening so fast.
 
And yet, at other moments, time seemed to have slowed to a crawl and the
seconds were like hours.

She removed all evidence of her pregnancy
from the bathroom, threw it all in a trash bag and then dumped that trash bag
into the bottom of another bag full of garbage that Danielle would be very
unlikely to sift through (unless she was secretly working for the FBI or
something).

With that piece done, Nicole took out her
phone and sat in the living room, staring at Red’s cell number.

Danielle had already gone off to work, so
she had the apartment to herself.
 
Nicole sure as heck wasn’t going to the office today.
 
No, today was a day she definitely needed
some “me time.”
 
Time to figure out
how the hell she was going to deal with this issue, time to decide whether she
could manage this on her own or whether Red might actually step up to the plate
and help her to work through things.

But she was scared.
 
She was scared first and foremost that
Red had already moved on, put her in the past.
 
Maybe he hadn’t really loved her the way
she’d loved him—he certainly hadn’t played the part of a loving fiancé
when he’d dumped her unceremoniously after his brother’s visit to his mansion.

Nicole didn’t believe that was the real
Red who’d dumped her, who’d told her that he was protecting her from
himself.
 
Nicole thought that Red
had been overcome by fear and self-doubt and self-loathing.
 
He truly believed that she would be
better off without him in her life.

Still, there was an echo of doubt
reverberating in her mind.
 
Maybe it
was her mother’s voice, so sure of the fact that Red Jameson was nothing but a
scoundrel, the worst kind of man you could meet—an undependable man.
 

Would Red even want to know that she was
pregnant? She wondered.

Finally she forced herself to dial his
number.

And her call went right to voicemail.

The mailbox was full, so she couldn’t
even leave a message.
 
After so much
tension had built up inside her, struggling about even making this call, she
was crushed to realize that Red’s phone was basically a nonworking number now.