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Tension tightened in the pit of her stomach at the concern in her twin’s voice. She had been putting Liv off for two weeks now.
She pushed herself up on the bed and leaned against the metallic headboard. “I’m fine. Is everything okay with you and Alex?”
“We’re fine. I’m just...” Liv’s uncharacteristic hesitation hung heavily between them. “God, Kim—is it true? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
Kim swallowed, fear fisting her chest. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve made front page headlines. Not just the scandal rags, like I did, but even the business channels on television.”
“What?”
“It says you’re pregnant. Are you?”
Diego.
Kim closed her eyes and breathed huge gulps of air. Obviously her refusal to have anything to do with him, her refusal even to answer his calls, meant Diego had begun playing dirty.
“Yes.”
“When were you going to tell me? Are you...? I mean, are you okay with this? Does Diego know? What are you planning to do?”
They were all perfectly valid questions. Kim had just shoved them down forcefully.
“I’m perfectly fine, Liv. I don’t have the time right now to process what it means. Once this upcoming milestone for my company has passed I’ll make a list of the things I need to do.” She closed her eyes, fighting for composure. “I’ll even have a few sessions with Mommy Mary.”
“Who is Mommy Mary?”
“The expert on all things maternal on my team.”
“On what?”
“On what I need to learn to be the perfect mother. It’s not like we had a good example, is it?”
“And until then you’re just going to put it on the back burner?”
What else was she supposed to do? Focus on the relentlessly clammy feeling in her stomach every time her thoughts turned to the baby growing in her womb?
The stark contrast between the terrifying emptiness she felt and her newly pregnant CFO’s glorious joy was already a constant distressing reminder that something vital was missing in her own genetic make-up.
“I can’t botch this opportunity for my company by losing my focus.”
“I don’t know what to...” Olivia’s tone rang with the same growing exasperation Kim had sensed in their recent conversations. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
Kim tucked her knees close as Liv hung up. She wanted to reach out to Liv. Liv’s love came with no conditions, no judgment.
But Kim—she had always been the strong one. She had had to be in order to protect first her mother and then Liv from their father’s wrath.
She couldn’t confide her fears in anyone. Least of all to her twin, to whom loving and caring and nurturing came so easily.
Whereas Kim had trained herself so hard to not care, not to let herself be touched by emotions. She’d had to after she had learned what her mother had planned...
Only had she accomplished it so well—just as she had everything else in life—that she felt nothing even for the child growing in her womb?
Because even after a week all she felt was utter panic at the thought of the baby. She had spent a fortune buying almost a dozen more pregnancy test kits, hoping that it had been a false positive. And every time the word “pregnant” had appeared her stomach had sunk a little lower.
Or was it because of the man who had fathered her baby? Could her anger for Diego be clouding everything else? Was this how their mother had felt? Beneath her fear of their father, had she felt nothing for her children?
Without crawling out of bed, she pulled her reading glasses on and powered up her iPad. Her heart thumped loudly. She clicked on to one of her favorite websites—one she could count on to provide news objectively.
It was the first time she wasn’t in the news being lauded for one of her accomplishments.
The article, for all its flaming header, didn’t spend time speculating on the answer to either of the questions it posed. But suddenly she wished it did. Because the speculation it did enter into was much more harmful than if they had spawned stuff about her personal life.
The article highlighted the way any woman—especially one who was pregnant and with her personal life in shambles—could expect to expand her company and do it successfully.
Should investors be worried about pouring their money into a company whose CEO’s first priority might not be the company itself? One who has been involved in not one but two major scandals? Could this pregnancy herald the death of the innovative startup The Daily Help and its brilliant CEO Kimberly Stanton’s illustrious career?
She shoved the tablet away and got out of bed, her mind whirling with panic. She ran a hand over her nape, too restless to stay still. It might have been written by Kim herself, for it highlighted every little one of her insecurities— everything she had made a list of herself.
For so long she had poured everything she had into first starting her company and then into making it a financial success. She had never stopped to wonder—never had a moment of doubt when it came to her career.
She opened the calendar on her phone. Her day was full of follow-up meetings with five different investors. By the end of the day she intended to start working on putting the plans she had outlined about the expansion of her company into full gear.
She couldn’t focus on any other outcome—couldn’t waste her mental energies speculating and in turn proving the contentious article right.
Only then would she deal with Diego. There was no way anyone else would have known or leaked the news to the media. She had confided in only one person.
Wasn’t this what Diego had intended all along? She was a fool if she’d thought even for a moment that he wanted anything but her ruin.
* * *
Kim clicked End on her Skype call and leaned back in her chair. Her day had only gotten worse since Liv’s phone call. That had been her fifth and last unsuccessful investor meeting. Not one investor was ready to wire in funds.
Whereas the invoices for the new office space she had leased, for the three new state-of-the-art servers she had ordered, for the premium health insurance she had promised her staff this year mocked her and the vast sum of numbers on the papers in front of her was giving her a headache.
She leaned her head back and rubbed the muscles knotting her neck. Her vision for her company, her team’s livelihood, both were at stake because she had weakened.
Hadn’t she learned more than once how much she could lose if she let herself feel?
The number of things she needed to deal with was piling up. Panic breathed through her, crushing her lungs and making a mockery of the focus that she was so much lauded for. She forced large gulps of air into her lungs.
Breathe in...out...in...out... She repeated it for a few minutes, running her fingers over the award plaques she kept next to her table, searching for something to tune out the panic.
Pull yourself together, Kim. There are people counting on you.
It was the same stern speech she had given herself at thirteen, when she had discovered her mother’s packed bag one night. And the note to her father that had knocked the breath from her.
She had survived that night. She could survive anything.
She had to go on as before—for her company’s sake and for her own sake. If she lost her company she had nothing. She was nothing.
She picked up her cell phone and dialed Alex’s number. He was someone with whom she had always tossed around ideas for her business, someone she absolutely trusted. And someone she had been avoiding for the past month...
But she needed objective, unbiased advice, and Alex was the only one who would give it to her. She would exhaust every possibility if it meant she could go on with the plan for expanding her company.
* * *
Diego cursed, cold fury singing through his blood as he stared at the live webcast on his tablet. Reporters were camped with cameras and news crews in front of Kim’s apartment complex in Manhattan.
He rapped on the partitioning glass and barked her address at his chauffeur.
His gaze turning back to the screen again, he frowned at a sudden roar in the ruckus. And cursed again with no satisfaction as he recognized the tall figure. Her ex had arrived. Diego could almost peek into how the press’s mind would work.
The news about her pregnancy on top of the scandal last month, when her twin had been found with Kim’s ex—the press would come to only one conclusion.
That the unborn child—his child—was Alexander King’s.
This was not what he had intended when he’d had his head of security leak the news of her pregnancy to the media.
He stared at the tall figure of Alexander King as he walked into the complex without faltering, despite the reporters swarming around him. Acrid jealousy burned through him. He slammed his laptop shut, closed his eyes and sought the image of Eduardo’s frail body.
Which was enough to soak up the dark thoughts and send some much-needed reason into his head.
He had done this before—let his obsession consume his sense of right or wrong. He had let it blind him to the fact that Eduardo had needed his help, and instead he’d turned on him.
He couldn’t do that again. This was not about what Kim could drive him to. It was about what was right for their child.
* * *
Kim took a sip of her water as Alex finished a call. She had emailed him her proposal and set up the appointment. Now she wished she had waited for the weekend. Stupid of her not to expect how much the media would make of Alex visiting her alone on a Friday evening at her apartment.
She had never been more ashamed of herself. It had taken everything in her to ask Alex for his help but she had no other options. A flush overtaking her, she plucked up the daily statistics report her website manager had sent her.
Based on the turnover of her company in the last quarter, and on her expansion proposal, investing in her company was a sound opportunity for any shrewd businessman. Except for the scandal she had brought on herself.
Their daily numbers, the number of questions that came into their portal and the website hits, had spiked well above average today.
But she knew, as was pointed out by the breakdown in front of her, that this was because twenty percent of the questions had been about her pregnancy, whether she was married and—worst of them all—whether she was married to the father of her baby.
She needed to make a statement soon.
Tucking his phone into his pocket, Alex turned toward her. “I’m sorry, Kim. You know how much I trust your business savvy. But, as brilliant as your plan and forecast is, I can’t invest in it right now.”
Her stomach turning, Kim nodded. It was exactly as she had expected: the worst.
She blinked back tears as he wrapped an arm around her. “With everything going on out there right now I just... As much as I hate to admit it, my association with your company in the current climate would only damage your credibility.”
Kim nodded, the comfort he offered making her spectacular failure even harder to bear. “I know. And I’m so sorry for putting you and Liv through this—for everything. If I could I would go back to that day and do everything differently.” She smiled and corrected herself. “Well, except for the part where I left you with Liv.”
He laughed, and her mounting panic was blunted by the sheer joy in that sound. “You don’t have to go through this alone, Kim. You should come and stay with—”
“She’s not alone to deal with this. And I would think twice, if I were you, before touching my wife again.”
Kim jerked around so quickly that her neck muscles groaned.
Diego stood leaning against the door of her apartment, a dark, thundering presence, and he looked at them with such obvious loathing that her mouth dried up.
Next to her, Alex stayed as calm as ever as he turned around. Just like her, he knew who was behind the leak to the media. But, gentleman that he was, he hadn’t asked her one personal question.
The very antithesis of the man smoldering with anger at the door.
Mortification heating her cheeks, she met Diego’s gaze. “Don’t do this, Diego. Don’t make me regret ever knowing you.”
He shrugged, the movement stretching the handmade grey silk tight over his muscular frame. “Don’t you already? Aren’t you going to introduce your husband to your ex, querida?”
Alex moved at her side, reaching Diego before she could blink. Her breath hitched in her throat as they both looked at each other.
“Call me anytime, and for any kind of help, Kim,” Alex said.
Without another word he strolled out, closing the door behind him. The silence pulling at her stressed nerves, Kim walked past the sitting area to her kitchen, the open layout giving her an unobstructed view of Diego. She pulled a bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass.
Diego leaned against the pillar that cut off the kitchen from the lounge. She raised the glass to her mouth and took a sip. His continued scrutiny prickled her skin. Every time she laid eyes on him she felt as if she was one step closer to a slippery slope.
“What is this? A lesson in caveman behavior?”
“I don’t understand your relationship with that man.”
She blinked at his soft tone. “Don’t turn this around on me. Were you going to beat your chest and drag me to your side by my hair if he hadn’t left?”
He smiled, his gaze moving to her hair. He flexed his fingers threateningly. “I’ve never done that before...but if anyone can push me to it, it’s you.”
Her mouth open, she just stared at him.
“You like throwing my background in my face, don’t you? I’m not ashamed that my life began on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, that I used my fists for survival.”
She glared at him, insulted by his very suggestion. “It’s got nothing to do with your background and everything to do with how you are acting now.”
“True. This one’s my fault. I should have expected you to go to him for help.”
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.
Calling her a few names, maybe challenging her word about the paternity of the baby as the whole world was hotly speculating—sure. But this? No. His continuing trust in her word threw her, kept her off-balance.
Or was that what he truly intended?
The doubts assailing her, the real possibility of her company falling apart, filled her veins with ice. “As you have made it your mission to destroy my life, I went crawling for help to the man whom I deceived dreadfully by sleeping with you. Satisfied?”
* * *
