The Billionaire's One-Night Secret

A mistake

I stared at the little plastic stick for so long the two lines started to blur together.

Two lines. I checked the box again like it might have changed its mind in the last ten seconds, like maybe I'd read the instructions wrong, but no, two lines meant what two lines always meant, and my whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the tile floor under my feet.

"Okay," I said out loud, to nobody, because apparently I talk to empty bathrooms now. "Okay. Okay, okay, okay."

It took me three days to work up the nerve to find him. Camille helped, mostly out of guilt, since technically this whole disaster started with her text message and one wrong digit. She still worked at the hotel. She still had access to things she probably shouldn't have had access to. It wasn't hard to find out where Lawrence Blackwell's office was once she started looking, and honestly, the man wasn't exactly hiding. His name was on the building.

I told myself the whole elevator ride up that I wasn't nervous. I was lying to myself the entire time.

His assistant tried to stop me at the desk, some very polished woman who looked at my coat like it had personally offended her, but I didn't have it in me to wait politely in a lobby chair for an appointment that would probably never come. I walked past her before she could finish the sentence, "You can't just," and pushed open his office door myself.

He looked up from his desk, annoyed, already halfway to calling security, and then he actually looked at me, and something shifted on his face. Recognition, maybe. Or just confusion trying to place where he'd seen me before.

"You," he said slowly.

"Me," I agreed, my heart absolutely hammering. "I know this is unexpected."

"I don't even know your name." He said flatly, like an accusation, like it was somehow my fault he'd never asked.

"Violet," I said. "Not that it matters right now."

He leaned back in his chair, studying me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something between suspicion and exhaustion. "If you're here about the money, I already paid you generously for that night."

Heat crawled up my neck. "I'm not here about the money."

"Then what."

I made myself say it, even though every part of me wanted to bolt back out the door. "I'm pregnant. It's yours."

For a second he didn't say anything at all. He just stared at me, and I watched something close off behind his eyes, some door slamming shut before I even had a chance to explain myself.

"Right," he said, and his voice had gone cold, careful, the voice of a man choosing his next words like he was defusing something. "Let me guess. You and whoever drugged me that night thought this would be a good follow up play."

"What?" I actually laughed, one disbelieving sound. "You think I set you up?"

"I think," he said, standing now, pacing behind his desk, "that I was drugged by someone at that dinner, that I still don't know who, and that a woman I've never met before shows up in my private suite the same night and now, conveniently, months later, tells me she's pregnant. Forgive me if I don't immediately believe this is a coincidence."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell him about the eleven days, about my mother's surgery, about the check I still hadn't cashed sitting in a drawer at home like something radioactive, but the look on his face told me none of it would land. He'd already decided who I was before I walked in the door.

He pulled out his checkbook. Again. Like that was just his answer to everything, like money was a universal apology he never had to actually mean.

"I'm engaged," he said, writing without looking at me. "Evelyn and I have a wedding in four months. This," he gestured vaguely at me, at my stomach, at the whole disaster standing in his office, "cannot exist. I'll pay for the procedure and whatever recovery you need. Handle it quietly."

He slid the check across the desk exactly the way he had the first time, like he was returning a favor, like this was routine for him. I looked down at it and felt something in my chest c***k clean in half.

"You don't even want to know if it's true," I whispered.

"I don't have time to find out," he said. "I have a company to run and a wedding to plan. This isn't personal, Violet. It's just not something I can afford."

Not personal. Like I was a line item. Like the two of us hadn't spent one entire night pretending, at least for a few hours, that we were something real to each other.

I picked up the check with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking, folded it into my bag next to the one I still hadn't touched, and walked out of his office without another word, because there was nothing left to say to a man who had already made up his mind about who I was.

I didn't know yet that my own father was about to do the exact same thing.