The CEO reluctant bride

Chapter3

CHAPTER THREE: The Proposal

POV: Judith

I spent three days trying to figure out how to tell Benjamin about the baby before deciding I could not tell him at all, not yet, not when my mother was dying and Mirabel needed surgery and everything was already falling apart. The morning sickness hit me hard, but I hid it well, kept crackers in my desk drawer and made excuses about a stomach bug when anyone asked why I looked so pale.

Mom was getting worse every day and the hospice nurse said we should prepare ourselves for the end, that it could happen any time now, and Mirabel cried herself to sleep every night in the chair beside Mom's hospital bed. I wanted to be strong for them, but I was drowning in problems I could not solve and secrets I could not tell, and some nights I lay awake wondering if it would be easier to just give up and let the universe win.

Then Benjamin called me into his office on a Thursday afternoon and my heart jumped into my throat because I thought somehow he knew about the baby, but when I walked in, his face was all business, and he gestured for me to sit down. His father was forcing him to marry within six months or lose his position as CEO, he said, without any emotion in his voice. He needed a wife who would not expect love or demand anything beyond the terms of a simple contract.

He offered me one million dollars to marry him for one year, enough money to save Mirabel and make Mom's last days comfortable, and all I had to do was pretend to be his wife in public and stay out of his way in private. My mouth went dry as he laid out the terms as like he was discussing a business merger instead of asking me to marry him, and when he asked if I accepted, I heard myself say yes before my brain caught up with my mouth.

We signed the papers in his lawyer's office three days later with two witnesses I had never met, and I wore a simple white dress I bought on sale because Benjamin said we needed wedding photos for his parents. The ceremony took less than ten minutes, and he kissed me briefly when the lawyer pronounced us married, but his lips were cold and distant and nothing like the night we spent together in his office.

His parents hosted a reception at their mansion that same evening, and he met his mother, Patricia, for the first time. A thin woman with sharp eyes who looked at me like I was something dirty she had stepped in. She pulled me aside while Benjamin was talking to business associates and told me in a voice like poisoned honey that she knew exactly what I was, a gold-digging nobody who had trapped her son with pregnancy or blackmail or whatever scheme girls like me used on men like him.

I wanted to defend myself, but the words stuck in my throat because part of what she said was true: I was nobody from nowhere, and I was pregnant even if she did not know it yet, and maybe I was exactly the kind of person she thought I was. Benjamin's father, Solomon, barely acknowledged my existence except to tell Benjamin loudly that he expected grandchildren within the year to secure the family legacy, and I felt the baby flutter in my belly like it heard him and was already afraid.

The reception dragged on for hours with fake smiles and people whispering behind their hands about Benjamin's mysterious sudden marriage. A woman in a red dress walked in, and the whole room went silent. She was beautiful in a dangerous way with dark hair and darker eyes, and when she walked straight up to Benjamin and kissed him on the mouth, I knew without being told that this was Andrea, his ex-fiancee who had betrayed him.

She told him loud enough for everyone to hear that he was making a terrible mistake marrying some secretary when he belonged with someone of his own class, someone who understood the weight of the Morgan name and the responsibilities that came with it. Benjamin's face went hard as stone, and he told her quietly to leave, but she just laughed and turned to me instead, looking me up and down like I was an insect she might crush under her expensive shoe.

You have no idea what you have gotten yourself into, she said with a smile that did not reach her eyes. Benjamin Morgan destroys everything he touches and you will be no exception. Then she left as dramatically as she arrived, and the party continued like nothing had happened, but I could not shake the feeling that she was right, that I had made a deal with someone who would break me without even meaning to.

That night, Benjamin drove us to his penthouse in silence and showed me to a bedroom that was not his, made it clear without saying the words that we would be living separate lives under the same roof. I unpacked my small suitcase in the enormous room that was bigger than my entire apartment and lay down on the bed that felt like sleeping on a cloud. A

I put my hand on my still-flat stomach and whispered to the baby that I would protect it no matter what, even from its own father if I had to.