Page 32 of His Captor

Simon rolled his eyes at me. I laughed at his fussiness.

“No, seriously! It’s a great company, even if it is new,” I said. “It was another company before, or maybe the boss was part of another company and started a new one, I’m not exactly clear on that.”

“Maybe you should be,” Simon suggested.

“I’ll look into it once I don’t have something else occupying my mind,” I said. “Like proving that I’m an asset to a new company so that they keep me on and I have a job when I become a single papa in about a month. It’s a little bit distracting to know you’re about to be responsible for a new human.”

“Okay, I get it,” Simon said, holding up his hands in defense, the end of his sandwich in one of them. “You’ve had a lot on your mind lately.”

“You bet I do.”

The truth was that I’d floundered for a couple months after the Goulding Group fired me. Almost no one wanted to hire a pregnant omega, despite the laws protecting us. Thank God Papa and Dad had agreed to pay for the rent on my new apartment and to help me furnish it with baby things. It was going to be hella hard to raise a baby on my own, and for a while there, I’d been depressed.

So depressed that I’d spent nights doing internet searches for Ace. The only problem was that all I knew was his first name. When I made a new account on the Dark Fantasies Club app, his had been deleted. When I searched for the apartment building where we’d played, by images only, because I hadn’t gotten the address, and finally found it, I’d discovered it was owned by a company, and a lot of their business information was unavailable for some reason.

But then I’d stumbled across the listing for Canton Enterprises, a start-up tech company specializing in security and surveillance equipment. They were starting from the ground up and needed an office manager to help set everything up. Security and surveillance reminded me just enough of Ace and his sex toy tech stuff that I applied for the job.

A fabulous Chief Operations Officer, a beta named Rachel Fielding, had interviewed me, we’d clicked on the spot, andas of three and a half weeks ago, I was employed by Canton Enterprises.

That was the whole “putting my life back together” part of the last eight months.

I finished the last of my sandwich, sucked on my large soda until the straw made slurping sounds at the bottom of the cup, then sat back with a contented sigh. “Well, I need to get back to work,” I said. “The boss arrives at the office today, and Rachel wants all hands on deck to greet him when he shows up.”

“I should get back to work, too,” Simon said, gathering up the strewn bits and pieces of our lunch and stuffing them into the paper bag from the café we’d bought from. “I don’t have anything half as interesting as meeting my boss to do—m”

“Because Dad and Papa are your bosses,” I interjected.

“—but there’s always paperwork.”

“What about signing up for the Dark Fantasies Club?” I teased him.

Simon blushed brightly, which had my jaw dropping with excitement.

“Youhavesigned up, haven’t you!”

Simon grumbled for a few seconds before saying, “I might have created an anonymous account, but only so I can look around. I’m not going to do anything with it.”

I laughed, so proud of my big brother, then spent several embarrassing seconds shifting myself around until I could push my fat ass up off the bench.

Okay, I wasn’t fat, I was pregnant. And despite café food for lunches, I was doing all the things a heavily pregnant omega was supposed to do. I got as much exercise as I could, half of which came from Simon and I meeting for lunches every day, since Canton Enterprises had opened their office only two blocks from our parents’ legal office, where Simon worked, but I kept fit in other ways, too. Most of my size came from the baby growinginside me. I knew from ultrasounds he was a boy, but even though you weren’t supposed to be able to tell in utero, I was certain Junior was also an alpha. He was already too aggressive not to be.

“Gah! He always has to kick my bladder when I stand up,” I complained, holding still and gripping my belly for a moment so I didn’t accidentally pee down my leg.

“What did the doctor say at your last appointment?” Simon asked as the two of us headed out of the park. He walked, I waddled.

I shrugged. “Everything is as it should be. Junior is healthy and strong. I could have him right now and everything would be fine, but the doctor doesn’t think I’ll go into labor early.”

“What, like you didn’t think you’d go into heat early?” Simon teased me.

I stopped, making a comically terrified face.

“Wait! I think I feel something. Contractions. This is it, Simon!” I grabbed his arm in a death grip. “You’re going to have to deliver this baby! You’re going to have to deliver him single-handedly, right here on the street corner!”

Simon was not amused by my acting. A couple of the businessmen and women waiting to cross the street with us weren’t amused either. They inched away from me, like they might be called on to deliver a baby in the street themselves.

When I started laughing, Simon shook his head. “You’re such a bastard,” he said, though he was smiling and his eyes were bright. “You’re about to be a papa, you’re going to have an impressionable new life to take care of, and you’re still acting like a fool.”

“I’m having a baby, Simon,” I said with a wry, sideways grin as we crossed the street. “Not a lobotomy. I’m always going to be the same Hayden I’ve always been.”

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