Chapter 73
I’d reached the point where I thought I’d simply be pregnant and miserable forever. According to the doctor, I still had a good three to four weeks before my due date, but I felt like I should have burst a month ago.
The greenery that usually filled the glass walls of the mansion had lost most of its leaves and held up bouquets of crooked fingers hooded in snow. Now that I’d made it this far on bed rest without any problems, I was getting even more antsy than usual. My energy levels, which had seemed nonexistent a few weeks back, seemed to have reached an all-time high, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone so long without even doing a plié let alone a turn or pose or step-step-step. Still, I was huge, swollen, bloated, certain if I laid down I’d simply start rolling away like a dead whale.
To add insult to misery, sleeping had become difficult. Baby Bean had grown into Baby Beast wrecking all the might of Godzilla on my poor internal organs and ribs. Sometimes he’d even land a heel on my cervix, which would put me in a world of pain. Then there was the heartburn, the fact that I could barely eat, despite feeling like I was starving, and don’t even talk to me about peeing. I could not drink a single drop and still have to go pee every fifteen minutes, because heaven forbid God place the bladder somewhere other than directly beneath the twenty-pound ball of incubating baby.
And I couldn’t walk without contracting anymore. Forget about stress. Whatever was in between my legs plugging up the baby maker hadn’t signed up for the double duty of moving AND holding in a baby, so more often than not, just walking to the kitchen made me breathless, which was the newest thing of them all. Before I could hike mountains without so much as getting a calf twitch.
On top of this hell, it was the holiday season, which meant Reuben, as a businessman, couldn’t put off overtime anymore, even if it ended up killing LeFevre (who had been threatening suicide for the past month anyway). It wasn’t that I missed him, per se, as he’d become unbearably clingy and took every chance he could to leave me breathless and naked on a flat surface. He wasn’t picky. I could use the break. But no Reuben also meant no amazing massages, and with every bit of me hurting, I wanted it sorely. He told me I could hire a massage service if I wanted to, but for some reason, over the past week, I’d grown even more anti-social than I usually did. The idea of leaving my house made my heart speed up, and the thought of meeting strangers made me cramp.
In short, I, Alaina Scharf, considered myself the most miserable person on earth.
And then I looked out the dining room window, where a snow-covered porch should have been, to see a man with ginger hair standing in the snow.
I spat out the cocoa I’d been about to drink. Baby Bean/Beast still demanded chocolate, even at his age.
I smacked my thighs for my pockets, or otherwise my phone, but I’d stupidly left it on the kitchen counter with the teapot. And I didn’t even have pockets. I was in a baggy, stretchy maxi dress because anything that wrapped about my body below my breasts had been driving me mad.
Joshua’s face had grown sharper. His eyes seemed hollow. In contrast, his smile, on seeing that I had noticed him, was bright. His letterman’s jacket had a powdering of snow across his shoulders.
He knocked on the window with a gray gloved hand.
“Alaina.”
I meant to pivot and run to the kitchen, to my phone, but for some unexplainable reason, I stiffened like a deer in the headlights. My eyes jumped all over him, from his head to his shoes hidden by the snow. I followed the track of footprints that went off the porch and wound back into the sleeping garden.
How had he gotten in? Reuben’s home security was unreal. I knew that firsthand since I’d had to learn to activate and deactivate it. Reuben had only amped it up over the past month or so by hiring full-on security personnel that patrolled the perimeter, though he never gave me an exact reason as to why he had suddenly thought to upgrade his already intense security. Now, facing an untouched, unharried Joshua in the snow, I began to wonder if this had anything to do with it.
In the time I’d seized up and thought all this, Joshua had somehow opened the glass door, unimpeded (it had been locked, it was always locked from the outside unless we were out there), and stepped in.
His smile reached his eyes, showing his teeth. “Alaina, sweetheart, you’ve grown so beautiful.”
I could have hung around and asked all the cliché questions of ‘how did you get in here?’ or ‘what the hell are you even doing here?’ or even, ‘are you insane?’ which would have been pointless as I now knew for sure he most definitely was.
But this isn’t a movie.
So I turned tail and ran as no nine-month preggy woman should. My dancer legs didn’t fail me, despite their neglect these past months, and I flew across the dining room and around the corner into the marble and chrome kitchen where my phone waited next to the silver teapot.
I’d just got the screen unlocked and Reuben’s speed dial pulled up with thick, snow-chilled, leather-covered arms grasped me right around the space where my baby bump and breasts failed to meet.
“Stop, he isn’t what you think he is. Please, stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Which was probably true as I’d already hammered the back of my heels into his boots, but seeing as I was barefoot and he was holding me high enough to not get any good leverage (how dare you fail me now, preggy weight! You had ONE JOB), I didn’t do much damage.
“VICTOR! VICTOR!” I screamed. It was the name of our home security, which was voice-activated and programmed to respond to its name.
But not happy beep responded.
I went to claws, digging my way past letterman jacket to skin, only to find myself dropped, spun, and pinned against the fridge by my wrists. He didn’t have to lean down much to pin me with my rotund belly sticking out so far.
The warm light in his face was gone.
“Damn it, woman, LISTEN TO ME!” He slammed my hands and wrists against the fridge hard enough to make something pop and burst with pain. “He’s in the mafia! Do you have any idea how much I had to do just to get here? Alaina, stop squirming and listen—”
“NO!”
“Then for our kid’s sake, just listen!”
“He’s not yours!”
His face darkened even more.
“To think I sacrificed everything for an ungrateful, gold-digging bitch like you,” he shifted so my wrists were in one of his hands so he could reach behind him. “You’re coming with me, whether you like it or not.”
Something long shone from what he pulled out from behind him. A needle, and not the nice kind you see in the doctor’s office.
When I finally fell still, he grinned, and it wasn’t a nice one.
“If you come with me willingly, I won’t use this.”
My eyes started to burn with frustrated tears. “It’s really not yours.”
“At this rate, I don’t even care. You are mine, Alaina, and you always will be. I took your first, and I’ll take your last, and that baby is going to stay with me.” He bared his teeth even as he turned me around to get my hands behind my back. I could feel the prick of the needle sliding past as he deftly slipped on handcuffs to my wrists. I wondered where’d he learned to do that.
“If I’d known you were this attracted to money, I would have told you about my real job from the get-go.” He shook the handcuffs till they were piercingly tight. I squawked against my will and tried kicking again, but he only pinned my thigh to the fridge with his knee. “But you were all ‘money’s evil’ and ‘I want to be barefoot and free in the mountains shit, you stupid little whore.”
“Kind of rich being called a whore by you,” I said from where my face had been smashed against a polished geode fridge magnet.
“She was one of my employees,” he snapped, and I felt the prick of the needle through my thin dress once more. “I run a companion service. It’s my job to get them over their first so they can learn the ropes. We can’t hire out virgins.”