CEO'S Secret Baby: A Standalone Surprise Pregnancy Romance - Iona Rose (which ebook reader .txt) 📗

I settled the blanket around her. “I was careful. Right?” I looked her in the eyes and she stared right back. My breath came in a heady strained rush. I rose to my feet, and returned to the couch with a tub of caramelized ice cream in hand for my day at home.

I continued re-watching Sex and the City, completely aware of where the episodes were heading towards. By the time I was halfway through the tub, the eighth episode of the second season came into play… where Carrie suspected she was pregnant.

Right then, the storm that had been slowly gathering inside of me began to brew. By the end of the episode, I rose to my feet, retrieved the bag and headed off to the bathroom.

“You were safe,” I assured myself as I sat on the toilet bowl. “You used condoms and took your birth control pills- religiously.”

The words of assurance however didn’t carry as much weight as I hoped for.

“Just get this over with,” I told myself, and slipped the white stick underneath my urine stream.

I kept my eyes shut as I pulled it away.

The minutes ticked by… and I did all I could to gather the courage to look.

Eventually, I did.

I looked at the stick to see the line that it revealed… and my whole world stopped.

Half an hour later, I hadn’t moved a single inch from the bathroom and my legs had long fallen asleep. I rose on the numb limbs, and almost crumbled to the floor in a different kind of pain. I was immobile for too long as I waited for the blood to rush back into my legs, and it filled my eyes with tears.

However, I didn’t let them fall. I returned to the living room and called Tracy.

She went quiet too, just as I had and then asked a simple question, “Are you sure?”

“There were two blue lines,” was my response.

“How about you go for another test, perhaps it was an error. These things break all the time. Plus, you were safe weren’t you? You took your pills.”

“I did and we used condoms,” I said, but again, there was that twinge in my heart that suggested that maybe… just maybe I had gotten carried away and missed one or two or maybe the condom split. We had so much sex, that I honestly couldn’t be sure.

Either way, I accepted her skepticism and held onto the sliver of hope that maybe, I had indeed purchased a broken stick.

I ended the call, grabbed my keys and was out of the house in no time.

Carter

By late afternoon, I had more than half of the departments’ files and reports in my hand, and it was my intention to go through all of them but first I headed straight to those of the marketing teams.

From what I had found out so far, Leah was in the second marketing team.

A quick perusal later, and I had found her.

Leah Francine Peters.

At the top of the page was her photograph, and in it she was clearly a couple of years younger. The fullness present in her cheeks now were absent then, the challenges of getting her degree in marketing from Bloomington, and then subsequently joining the thorny path to find a job, no doubt taking their toll.

Regardless, she seemed happy. Her gaze looked a bit tired, but nothing about her could accommodate the phrase-dull.

I leaned back into my chair, my gaze lost on the woman I had made such a huge jump for. My head could still not find any logic in what I had embarked on, and so my nerves were taut with the fear that she would reject me. That what we had experienced with each other in the previous month was an inconsequential history that needed to be left where we had both promised ourselves we would leave it- in the past.

I couldn't wait anymore.

I needed to find out, if I could bring her onto the same page with me, otherwise I was going to lose it. Nothing else in the moment seemed more important, and until we were resolved… I wouldn’t be able to do much else.

I got up from my desk, my armor of information in hand, and headed down the elevator two floors below.

She belonged to Henry Simmon’s team, but he wasn’t the one whom I'd be visiting first. The elevator dinged my arrival to the creative floor, and I took in the sprawling floor area of cubicles and secluded meeting rooms by the sides. Some of the senior staff I had met with earlier stopped to greet me while the others looked on curiously.

Some recognized me from the introductory message I had sent via the company’s email server earlier that morning, on which my photograph had been attached. They rose to their feet in greeting.

Thankfully, I got through the area fast enough, aware of the layout of every part of the company. I quickly found my way to Devon Hane’s office of Marketing Team 2. He was the youngest manager in the company at thirty-five, but I could tell as I walked in that the skepticism about me, who owned the company at just thirty-three, was a tune that I’d have sung behind my back until they decided that my skills were deserving of my achievements.

They were currently in the midst of developing a campaign to rebrand a home restoration company, whose account the company had been in charge of for about four years. I listened as he spoke to me about the current state of the account and the direction of their campaign, before eventually taking my leave.

Leah’s boss, Henry Simmons was next in line, but as I headed down the corridor to his office, I glanced at her desk just by the copy room… empty.

It brought a frown to my face. Was she not at work today? Was there something wrong or was she just temporarily away from her desk?

Her boss received me into his office, a heavy set man