Page 185 of Boss of the Year
I barely made it to the bathroom before I was violently sick.
“Mimi?” Joni’s voice came through the door with a soft knock. “Are you okay?”
I sat on the bathroom floor, my head spinning. God, everything ached. My heart, yes, but the rest of me too. My breasts, my lower back, my stomach. Maybe I was getting sick because usually PMS wasn’t quite this bad for me…
Sweat broke out on my forehead as the realization dawned.
When was my last period? I’d been so caught up in the emotional chaos of the last month or so—Lucas, the heartbreak, fleeing to Paris, moving back to New York—that I hadn’t been paying attention to my body’s rhythms.
My cycle had finished a few days into our stay in Brazil.
And I hadn’t had it again in the last four…no, five weeks.
Maybe even six now.
Oh,God.
“I’m fine,” I called, though my voice sounded anything but confident. “But, um, Joni? I need you to run to the drugstore for me. I’m going to need a pregnancy test.”
37
INTERLUDE
Lucas stared up at the familiar facade of Prideview, unable to ignore the bitterness that choked his throat when he looked at the palatial facade. Turrets. The place had turrets, for fuck’s sake, alongside the stone towers and beams that comprised its faux-Tudor architecture. Just what kinds of arrows were his ancestors planning to shoot from up there? Couldn’t they see the place made them look more like slimy Prince Johns than Robin Hoods?
Then again, they were crooks, all of them. Robber barons who legitimately believed that the laws of nature and survival of the fittest determined their supremacy simply because they were willing to ruin others to satisfy their own means and fill their coffers. For a long time, Lucas had bought into that ethos—if not explicitly, then at least by ignoring it. Maybe he’d convinced himself that he made up for the uglier sides of his job by making sure his personal staff was paid a living wage or that he remembered their names.
What a pathetic, self-important prick he was.
After all, what did names and base pay for a few matter to the hundred, if not thousands of lives he had ruined over twentyyears with every takeover, every tax break, every heartless backroom deal?
It was easy to be heartless when you couldn’t see the faces of the people you ruined.
But now they all had the same face. A face with milk-white skin, emerald-colored eyes, rose-petal lips, framed with hair the color of night.
Every night, he dreamed of their faces, and the voices of the people he ruined funneled into one refrain:How many lives would you steal to get your way?
It was like he heard all their voices funneled into that one simple question.
At one time, the answer would have been simple: as many as it took.
But now, he had another that had been bellowing in his chest since the moment he left that hotel room with the knowledge that he’d ruined his only chance at happiness in the process.
No more.
Never again.
Not a single one.
The big front doors swung open, but instead of Henry, the butler, Daniel appeared.
Another life he’d stolen. Or at least condemned just two weeks earlier.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
To Lucas’s shock, his brother looked reasonably well. Maybe the honeymoon went better than he thought. It had taken a fifth and a half of vodka to even get Daniel down the aisle to marry the senator’s daughter, and the rest of that second bottle to get him on the plane to the Grenadines so Lucas had assumed Daniel would spend the next two weeks in a coma while his new bride began her fourth month of pregnancy.
Now, however, Daniel looked bright, chipper, and, more importantly, happy.
