Page 1 of The Alpha's Sin
1
POPPY
“Don’t be pregnant…don’t be pregnant…don’t be pregnant,” I chant.
I’m sitting on the lid of the toilet, hunched nervously over the little plastic stick clutched in one hand. The directions said to wait for five minutes and then look, but I can’t put it down.
The first line—the one that tells you the test is working—has already popped up. I’m looking at the second little window, hoping like hell it remains clear. I guess I’m hoping if I stare at it, I can scare that little line away—keep it from appearing.
But I guess I’m not scary enough. Because here it is—sliding into view like bad news coming to surprise me. Only this is no surprise. Dirk flushed my birth control down the toilet weeks ago.
“We’re married now, babe,” he said, when I tried to stop him. “It’s time to start a family.”
“But you said I could go to nursing school first!” I protested. I had already done all my prerequisites and had been accepted to my school of choice—USF—back in Tampa. But Dirk had convinced me to come live in Virginia with him—to be near his family.
“There are plenty of nursing schools up there,” he’d assured me. “But if we’re going to start a life together, I need to be near my big brother. Plus, I have a job up there, waiting for me.”
I don’t have any family of my own. I never knew my dad and my mom died when I was nine. I was raised by my grandparents. Grandpa passed three years ago and I had lost my Grandma just about a month before I met Dirk. So I moved with him.
I know it sounds stupid—and it was—but I thought I was in love. I thought Dirk was too.
From the minute I met him, he showered me with compliments. He talked about how beautiful I was—how he loved “curvy girls”—and how I was the smartest, most amazing woman he’d ever met.
He gave me gifts too—chocolates because he knew I had a sweet tooth, earrings he saw that made him think of me, and flowers “just because you’re so beautiful, babe.”
He texted me all the time, talking about our life together and how happy we were going to be. And because I was vulnerable and still grieving the loss of my Grandma, I fell for it. I sold her house—I know, it was really stupid of me—and put the money in a joint bank account with Dirk.
“Part of it we’ll use for our wedding and part of it we’ll use to buy a place of our own once we get back to Virginia,” he promised me.
I believed him—I thought this man was completely, head-over-heels in love with me. And I was head-over-heels for him too. So we moved to Virginia…only we never bought a house. Dirk got us a crappy little apartment on the bad end of town.
“Just for now,” he promised me when I said that I didn’t feel safe going outside at night. “Just until we get married. Then we’ll start house-hunting.”
Again, I believed him. I told myself it was going to be fine—that the apartment was just for now. I got busy planning our wedding.
But it turned out that Dirk didn’t want “a big production” as he put it. In fact, it almost seemed like he went out of his way to make it cheap. He set the ceremony in an old, rundown Baptist church and booked their dim and dingy meeting hall for our reception.
“But we have plenty of money from selling Grandma’s house,” I protested, when I saw the hall.
Years of neglect had turned the white walls an off-yellow shade and there was grime in the corners and along the baseboards that no amount of scrubbing was going to get out. Seeing it made my stomach drop—and not in a good way.
“Nah, this is fine. This place has a lot of history,” Dirk said dismissively.
“But we can afford a nicer venue!” I argued. “We have enough to get something better than this, at least.”
Tampa, where I had moved from, was a growing real estate market. When it sold, my Grandma’s little bungalow had fetched just over five hundred thousand dollars because it was in an up-and-coming neighborhood that everyone wanted to live in. That was plenty enough to have a nice wedding, as far as I was concerned.
But Dirk wouldn’t listen.
“No—we need to save most of that for a house,” he told me. “If we have a less expensive wedding, we can have a nicer home to raise our family in.”
Again, I reluctantly agreed. I was disappointed, but I did want a nice house and everything is so expensive these days. So I let him have his way once again and we kept the wedding and reception at the old church.
The wedding wasn’t exactly the one I’d dreamed of as a little girl. I got a secondhand dress at a shop Dirk knew of because again, he didn’t want to “waste money that should go to buying our house.”
The dress was pretty enough, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. Neither were the flowers, which we got at a discount florist. As for the cake, we bought it at Wal-Mart. The DJ was a guy Dirk knew and so was the photographer—neither of them charged hardly anything because they owed him favors, or so he said. And sadly, the service we got from them reflected the price. The music was awful, and half of our wedding pictures were out of focus and blurry.
I wasn’t happy with any of these cost-cutting measures, but Dirk assured me over and over I’d be glad once we went to buy our house. He even drove me around town to look over several properties for sale—big, grand Colonial mansions with front porch columns that he said would be perfect for our new life together and all the kids we were going to have.
