Kissing The New CEO

Chapter 2

Stella's POV

"Derek is dead, Mads." I murmured.

"And Julian..... my life is over."

She sighs and drops the remote. "I know. It's all over the news."

"But, Julian, why, exactly?"

I freeze. I hadn't meant to say that part out loud.

"Nothing. Forget it."

"Stella." She turns to face me fully now. "What did you do?"

I pull my blanket tighter and force the words out. "The night of the party. I slept with Julian."

Maddie's mouth drops open. "You what—"

"We were both drunk. It didn't mean anything." My voice shakes. "And if his father had lived and found out, I'd have been thrown out with nothing. Now Derek's dead, and Julian's about to be my boss."

"Okay, but he's not going to fire you over a mistake you both made—"

"You don't know him," I snapped. "He's cold. Controlling. He's spent years treating me like I was trash. Now he has something to hold over me.

My mind drags back to that night.

"Stella, my chest feels tight. I need to go home," Derek said. His breathing sounded heavy.

I was on my third drink and felt brave enough to say no.

"Do I have to leave now?" I whined. "I'll follow you in an hour."

That should have been my first warning sign.

"No more than an hour, Stella." He left without a fight.

And that's when I started talking to Julian.

"Didn't you bring a date?" I asked once Derek was gone.

"Why does it matter to you?" he shot back.

He was just as drunk as I was, and for the first time he didn't look like the cold man I knew.

"You're too good-looking to waste like this," I slurred, waving a hand at him.

I thought he'd shut it down. Instead he said, "And who should get lucky, then?"

"Maybe we'll find out tonight," I said.

"So let me get this straight," Mads says slowly, pulling me back to now. "The man who fired half the interns in one afternoon because someone brought the wrong coffee order to a meeting and said your report sounded like it was written by a child?"

"Mads—"

"... is the same man you slept with the night his father died?"

"Yes," I say to Mads now, snapping back to the present.

"That man."

"Stella....." She stares at me like I've grown a second head.

Just then my phone buzzed.

An unknown number. I answer hesitantly.

"Miss Cooper. Glad I finally reached you." Julian's voice. Calm. He doesn't need to raise it to be heard.

My stomach drops. This is it. This is the call where he tells me he's done pretending that night didn't happen.

"Mr. Castle." My mouth goes dry.

"I'm sending a car for you. It'll be outside in twenty minutes."

I blink. "I— what? Why?"

"We need to talk. In person. Somewhere private."

My heart starts hammering. "Julian, if this is about—"

"It's about Drake," he cut in. "He knows. About that night. About us."

The floor tilted under me. "How—"

"Doesn't matter how. What matters is he's threatening to take it to the press." And he's not bluffing. He pauses, long enough that I hear him exhale on the other end.

"He wants the company, Stella. My shares. My seat at the table. Everything our father spent thirty years building, he wants me to hand it to him.

I almost laugh, except nothing about this is funny. "He wants to blackmail you out of your own company?"

"He wants to be CEO. He's wanted it since we were kids. He just never had leverage before." Julian's voice goes flat.

"Now he does."

"So what happens to me?" I managed to say in almost a whisper.

There's a long silence on the line.

"That," Julian says finally, is what we need to talk about.

I hear him start to hang up, then stop.

"And Stella."

"...Yes?"

"Wear something good." He pauses, and I swear I can hear the smirk in it. "Actually, don't bother picking anything you like too much."

"...Excuse me?"

"Sorry about the red dress. I might do the same to whatever you show up in today."

His voice drops, slower now. "Your beauty doesn't really leave me the patience to watch you undress."

~~~~~~~~~~

Julian's POV

The words are out before I even realize I've said them.

The phone still pressed to my ear, waiting for her to hang up.

"I didn't mean to say that, Stella" But the words stuck in my throat.

I meant it but I'm supposed to be telling her the company is on the verge of collapsing because of one drunken mistake neither of us can take back.

I didn't dare tell her the rest of it, the part where Drake has made it clear I don't get to keep both things I wanted, the seat my father spent thirty years building for me, and her.

"Give up the company, or Stella." He sounded like it was a business proposal.

The second she knows what's actually on the table, she'll do something noble and stupid like pulling herself out of the equation to make the decision easier for me.

"...Julian," she says quietly, "the car. Twenty minutes. You said."

"Yes,"

"I'll be ready."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The car brought her to my private office.

"She walked in wearing a dark green dress."

"Not red."

"Smart girl."

"You're here," I said, standing up.

"You said we needed to talk." Her voice was unusually quiet.

"Sit down, Stella."

She sat down, hands folded tight in her lap, bracing for bad news.

"Tell me about Drake," she said. "Tell me everything."

So I do. I tell her what he wants. My shares.

Her face goes pale. "He wants to ruin you. Because of me."

"He wants to ruin me," I corrected her.

"You're just the weapon he found lying around."

She flinched, and I regret it the second the words leave my mouth. That's not how I meant it.

"There's one way to kill his story before it starts," I say.

"What way?"

"Marry me."

"What?"

"A contract marriage. One year."

"It puts me in full control as CEO with no question from the board. It makes Drake's leverage worthless, you can't blackmail a man with a scandal about his own wife. And it protects you, your brother and mother. My name on your name means nobody in this city touches you again."

"You want to marry me?" she says, like the word doesn't fit in her mouth.

"Yeah, on paper. For one year. Then we walk away."

She's quiet for a long moment. Then she shakes her head.

"I can't."

"Stella—"

"It's been a month since he died," she said.

"A month since... that night. With you."

"I know."

"I think I'm pregnant."

The air in the room felt heavier now.

"I bought a test three days ago," she says. "I haven't taken it. I'm scared to. But I'm late, and I feel sick every morning, and I know my own body."

"Okay,"

"So I can't marry you. Not for a contract, not for anything." Her arms tighten around herself. "If this baby is your father's, I can't be your wife on paper while I'm carrying his child. I can't stand next to you at events pretending to be your fiancée, then wife, while this is inside me. It's sick. Even for me."

"Stella."

"I already have enough people calling me names in the papers. I won't hand them a worse headline than the one they already have."

I cannot...

"It's not his."

She blinks. "What?"

"The baby. If you're pregnant." I tried to keep my voice as calm as possible. It's not my father's.

"You don't know that. He and I were together for—"

"My father had a vasectomy eleven years ago.

After Drake was born." My step-mother made him do it. She

already knew by then he wasn't going to stop cheating, and she wasn't going to risk another one of his children showing up on her doorstep for her to raise.

The color drained from her face.

"He never told anyone," I go on. "Why would he? It kept his mistresses convinced they had power over him."

"That's not—" she starts, then stops, her hand pressed flat against her stomach. "That's not possible. He would have—"

"He wouldn't have." I step toward her, cupping her face in my palms

She stared at me.

"If it's not your father's..." she says slowly, ".. that means, Julian... I'm carrying your child?"