Nine Months to Bear By Nicole Fox - 64

64

The office door slams against the wall as I burst through. Olivia’s there, standing at the windows with her back to me. Her spine is straight, shoulders squared, arms wrapped around herself.

“Olivia…” I clear my throat. “Where’s Mikayla?”

She doesn’t turn around. “She left. Didn’t say where she was going.”

My pulse is a slow, thudding pain in my chest. Mikayla never leaves her post without permission.

“Are you okay? Did she⁠—”

“Am I okay?” Olivia laughs bitterly. She still won’t look at me. “You know, Stefan, that’s a very, very interesting question.”

What the fuck? Something’s wrong. Beyond Mikayla, beyond the danger we rushed here to prevent. The air in the room feels different. It’s crackling in a way that gives me pause. Like a live wire whipping around, ready to electrocute one or both of us.

“Olivia, we need to talk about⁠—”

She spins around and my words die. Her face is pale except for two spots of color high on her cheeks.

But it’s her eyes that stop me cold. Those amber eyes that usually look at me with warmth, with desire, with something I’ve been too chickenshit to name—now, they burn like vats of acid about to be thrown in my face.

She crosses to my desk in three quick steps. Reaches into the bottom drawer, withdraws a notebook, and slams it down.

My notebook. The one with her name on it.

She throws open the cover. I see my own handwriting, the lists, the acquisition documents. Everything is there, clear as day, undeniable.

“Yes or no.”

“Olivia—”

“Yes. Or. No.” She enunciates each word like she’s explaining something to a child. Or an idiot. “Did you write this? That’s all I want to know.”

I take a step toward her. She backs up immediately.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Stefan.” Her eyes are as cold as hell frozen over. “Don’t come near me; just answer the question. Yes or no.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It’s exactly that simple.” She flips to one of the pages. Her hand shakes but her voice stays steady as she reads. “‘Mother issues. Bleeding heart. Desperate enough to accept terms.’ You wrote this. Yes or no?”

I close my eyes. “Yes.”

She flinches like I hit her.

“But,” I start to say, “that was before⁠—”

“Before what? Before you fucked me? Before you got me pregnant? Or before you made me believe that you… that you…” She stops and presses her lips together hard.

“Before I knew you.” I risk another step forward. “Yes, there was a plan. I wrote those things. But I⁠—”

She laughs to cut me off, harsh and hurt. “Why buy the cow when she’s giving you the milk for free, right?”

“That’s not⁠—”

“The acquisition agreement is dated yesterday, Stefan. Fucking yesterday! ”

Fuck me. I forgot about updating the date on the revision. “That’s just a formality. The document was drafted weeks ago⁠—”

“Oh, so you’ve been planning this for weeks? That makes it so much better,” she drawls with venomous sarcasm.

“I haven’t been planning anything. Not anymore.” I move closer. She moves back, maintaining the distance between us like it’s a bomb-strewn no-man’s-land. “Things changed.”

“Stop.” She holds up a quivering hand and wrenches her eyes away. “Just stop. I can’t… I can’t listen to more lies.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You’ve been lying since the moment we met!” She gestures at the journal. “‘Sexual attraction obvious. Can be leveraged.’” Her eyes close as a wave of pain wracks her. “Is that what this morning was? Leverage?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

“I don’t know anything anymore.” She wraps her arms around herself again, like she needs the warmth. “I thought I knew you. I thought we were… I thought this was real.”

“It is real, Olivia.”

“Which part? The business acquisition or the baby trap?”

“You think I trapped you?”

“I think you’re a man who plans twenty moves ahead.” She meets my eyes finally, and the pain there guts me. “You saw a desperate woman with a failing business and mommy issues, and you thought you’d found the perfect way to get everything you wanted.”

I cross the remaining distance between us before she can retreat again. I don’t touch her—she looks like she might shatter if I do, or if not that, then stab me with the nearest pen—but I need her to hear this.

“The plan existed. Yes. But I haven’t thought about it in weeks. Not since⁠—”

Since that first night at your apartment. Since you signed the contract while coming apart on your kitchen counter. Since I realized I was fucked.

“Since I started falling for you.”

She stares at me for a long moment. Something comes across her face—hope, maybe, or just the ghost of it—before it’s gone again, leaving no trace behind.

“No.” She shakes her head. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to make pretty, heartfelt speeches when I’ve seen the evidence in black and white. In your own fucking handwriting.”

She turns away from me.

“Tell me about the acquisition. The real timeline.”

“It doesn’t matter⁠—”

“It matters to me!” she interrupts. “I want to know how you were going to do it.”

I run a hand through my hair and exhale. This is going exactly how I knew it would go if she ever found out.

“How long ago did it start, Stefan?”

“Six months.”

She goes very still. “Six months. Before you ever met me.”

“Yes.”

“And the baby? Was that always part of it, too?”

“The baby was… It was… A way to make things make sense. Legitimacy.”

“So I was your cover.” The words fall out of her mouth like she’s testing them, seeing how they taste and spitting them away in sheer disgust. “A clean, respectable medical practice to wash your dirty money through, and a pretty baby mama to make it all look nice for the tabloids.”

“No—”

“God, it’s perfect, isn’t it? Honestly, I’m impressed.” She takes a step back, nodding to herself like puzzle pieces are clicking into place. “A fertility clinic. All those cash payments from desperate couples, wire transfers from overseas clients. Who’s going to question large deposits at a place that deals with international surrogacy? It’s such a nice, heart-warming business, you know? Nobody will look too close. Nobody will suspect a fucking thing.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Then what is it about, Stefan?” she cries. “Because I’m looking at these documents and all I see is a parasite. A way to get the baby you need as legacy insurance while you use my life’s work as a fucking front. Until you’ve sucked it all dry and you can just throw me away and move onto the next.”

I want to grab her, shake her, make her understand. But she looks like she might bolt if I move wrong. “The clinic was never about money laundering.”

“Oh, sure, of course not. Maybe it was just a way to put your boot on my throat and make sure I did what you wanted me to do. Tell me, was the baby part of that bit, too?”

“What?”

“The baby, Stefan. Our baby.” Her hand hovers over her stomach but doesn’t quite touch. “Was getting me pregnant part of the control plan? Lock me down, make sure I couldn’t walk away?”

“Jesus Christ, Olivia. No.”

“Because it’s brilliant if you think about it. Knock up the desperate clinic owner. Now, she needs you for financial support. For protection. She can’t exactly testify against the father of her child, can she?”

“Stop.”

“Plus, you get your heir. Your legacy. All wrapped up in one convenient package.”

“Stop this!” I slap my hand on the desk.

She jumps but doesn’t back down. “Why? Am I getting too close to the truth?”

“You’re so far from the truth you can’t even see it anymore.”

“Then enlighten me. Tell me which part of this—” She jabs a finger at the journal. “—is the lie. I’m all fucking ears, Stefan.”

“All of it. None of it. I don’t know.” I rake my hands through my hair, over my face. My skin is itchy and burning and the words that can salvage this whole fucking mess just won’t come to me. “It’s complicated.”

“It’s really not. Either you planned to use me or you didn’t.”

“I planned to use your clinic. Not you. Never you.”

“Oh, what a distinction. You only wanted to destroy my professional life, not my personal one. How noble.”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“Guess what? You still don’t. I’m more than…” She bends down to read. “… more than ‘ bleeding heart tendencies and a clean reputation (mostly).’” She shakes her head in disgust. “Every time you touched me, were you thinking about this? When you were inside me this morning, telling me we could be together, was the future just looking so goddamn rosy for you and your little schemes?”

“No, Olivia,” I say quietly. “That was real.”

“How am I supposed to believe that?” She’s not shouting anymore. Her voice has gone quiet, defeated. That’s worse. God, that’s so much worse. “How am I supposed to believe anything you say when I have proof that you’ve been lying since day one?”

“Because you know me.”

“I thought I did. But the man I know wouldn’t…” She trails off, looks out the window again. “The man I thought I knew wouldn’t do this.” She closes the journal and taps one nail on the cover. “This is you. This is who you really are. This is who you always have been—and I’m just the stupid girl who believed otherwise.”

She hugs herself and steps back from the journal, eyeing it warily like there are more pages in there that she just isn’t strong enough to read.

“We’re done,” she says quietly. “Whatever this fucked-up thing was or wasn’t, it’s over now.”

I step between her and the exit. “You can’t leave.”

“Watch me.”

“Olivia, you’re not safe out there.”

She laughs hollowly. “Right. Of course. Now comes the part where you tell me I need your protection.”

“You do,” I insist in a frustrated growl. “There are people⁠—”

“People who want to hurt me because of you?” She scoffs. “Is that what you’re going with?”

“It’s the truth.”

She purses her lips as she glares at me. “You wouldn’t know the truth if it punched you in your perfect face.”

“Mikayla can’t be trusted. She’s been working with Zakharov. Feeding him information about us, about you.”

“What convenient timing for this shocking revelation.”

“Taras just told me. That’s why we rushed here. To make sure you were safe.”

“You say that like you give a fuck.”

“Because I do! You think Zakharov won’t use you to get to me? You think he cares that you’re pregnant?” I advance toward her. “He knows about the baby, Olivia. Mikayla knows, which means he knows. You walk out that door, you’re a target.”

“I’m already a target. I have been since the moment you decided to destroy my life.”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“From what? From who?” Her voice rises to a fever pitch. “From them? From you?”

“Yes. From all of it.”

“You can’t protect me from something you caused!”

“I can fucking try!”

“No.” She shakes her head. “You don’t get to create the problem and then position yourself as the solution.”

“Call it whatever you want. You’re not leaving.”

“You can’t keep me here.”

“I can. I will.”

“For how long? Forever?”

“For as long as it takes to eliminate the threat.”

She steps closer, and I can see tears gathering in her eyes but not falling. Not yet. “You want to know what the real threat is? It’s not Zakharov or Mikayla or whoever else is on your enemy list this week. It’s you .” Her throat bobs as she swallows. “You’re the threat, Stefan. You’ve been the threat this whole time.”

I feel a strange pain crawling up my throat. “I would never hurt you.”

The tears spill over now, streaming down her cheeks. “You’ve done nothing but hurt me. My clinic, my body, my future… There’s nothing left that you haven’t ruined.”

The pain expands, heats up, grows fangs. It’s hard to talk. It’s hard to breathe. What the hell is happening to me?

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. I can’t look at my clinic without thinking about your money. I can’t touch my stomach without thinking about your plan. I can’t even…” She stops, swallows hard. “I can’t even remember anymore what it felt like to be happy without wondering if you were just pulling strings to make me feel that way.”

“Please,” I say, loathing how desperate I sound. “Just stay. Let me protect you and the baby. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

She looks at me with those amber eyes, still shiny with tears. “You have already hurt me, Stefan. You have hurt me in ways I didn’t know I could be hurt.” Her voice drops to almost a whisper. “Who’s going to protect me from you?”

I have no answer. No defense. No pretty words to make this better.

Because she’s right.

I am the danger. I am the threat. I am the thing she needs protection from.

And we both know it.