Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mason
G o back. Go back. Go back right now and get him.
I grimaced and gripped my steering wheel hard, fighting to ignore the inner voice that screamed at me.
GO BACK!
“I’m not going back!” I shouted at the windshield.
The guy stopped at the light in the car in front of me as we waited to turn onto the highway must have thought I was yelling at him for some reason. He glared at me in his rear view mirror and gave me the finger.
I huffed through my nose and ignored him. As soon as the light turned green, he hit the gas and zipped onto the highway, like he had something to prove to me. I just drove on, gritting my teeth and breathing hard.
Go back! Stop him from getting on that plane. Stop him from disappearing from your life.
But I couldn’t go back. The voice inside me was unreliable. This wasn’t some movie where I could run through the airport terminal, shouting Billy’s name and flattening myself dramatically against a glass wall somewhere before he turned around, saw me, and came running into my arms.
My insides lurched at the emotion that came with that image. I would have done it if I thought it would work.
Billy was already gone. The second he’d stepped into the airport terminal, I’d lost him. All I knew was his first name. I didn’t know what flight he was on, what city he was flying to, or who he was, really.
I just knew that I would never be the same without him.
By the time I made it back to the play apartment, I tried to force myself to laugh. I was being a sentimental fool. I knew omega heat hormones were strong and that they affected alphas, too, but this was ridiculous.
The apartment really was a mess. Billy and I had been so into each other, so into heat-fucking, that I hadn’t done any of the tidying up as the scene went along that I usually did with omega playmates. The whole place smelled, too…like sex and Billy. It made me groan, lean back against the door, and breathe it all in for a second.
I only let myself have a minute. It was over, done. Billy was long gone. I needed to clean up, put myself back together, and think about things that really mattered.
Like Colin’s flood of calls and texts that I’d ignored for the past few days. From what I gathered as I’d read and listened to the messages he’d left me while Billy was still in his heat, things had gone well at the party for Victory Holdings. At least, well from Colin’s perspective. He was furious with me for not attending, but I’d never promised I would.
I scowled as I stripped the sheets off the bed and made a pile in the living room. I didn’t want to do business with Victory Holdings. Colin might have wooed them and won them, but I had the right, as developer of the tech they wanted to buy, to shut down any deal with them.
It was Billy who had finally tipped me over from being suspicious of Victory to flat-out wanting nothing to do with them. The moment he’d pointed out that the gadgets I’d tested on him felt like sex toys to him, and that the magnetic cuffs bruised and chafed his wrists, I’d had visions of the things I’d invented being used in sex trafficking and other nefarious dealings.
If I was going to continue developing my tech, I would make damn certain the only people who bought it were the police or the military, or someone else with definitively charitable aims. Did I think either entity was entirely innocent and wouldn’t use my inventions to hurt people? No, not at all. But I trusted them more than I trusted the thugs Colin had apparently been drinking scotch with on Saturday night.
I hated throwing the sheets and towels into the supposedly public laundry room in my apartment building. I didn’t want them to come out smelling mountain-fresh, I wanted to keep smelling Billy. I’d lost track of the number of times I’d sniffed him and breathed him in while he’d been asleep between heat waves.
I didn’t want to clean up the dishes and cutlery left in the sink in my kitchen. Billy’s mouth had touched those things, and I still craved that mouth. Kissing him after that breeding orgasm had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever done.
“Cut it out, Mace,” I growled at myself as I loaded the dishwasher, then slammed it shut a little too hard. “You’re soaked in hormones. The feelings are exaggerated. It was the omega’s heat, not any great love story.”
I huffed as the dishwasher started to run, then moved to wipe down the counters and the tables.
I kept cleaning, kept moving, trying not to let myself think, for another hour. I scrubbed the entire apartment, vacuumed, switched the laundry from washer to dryer. My phone rang a few times, but every time I ran to it, hoping Billy was calling me, it turned out to be Colin.
I didn’t answer. I was in the wrong mood to deal with Colin’s anger that I wasn’t at work.
I did come up with one brilliant idea after dismissing one of Colin’s messages. I pulled up the Dark Fantasies Club app, accessing Billy’s profile. Just seeing his smiling face in his pics had my heart beating faster. It wasn’t the pics I was after, though.
“Barrington?” I asked aloud when I saw the region his profile listed as his home territory.
Barrington was all the way over on the East Coast. It was a huge city, too. One of the largest in the country. Any hope I had that I’d be able to find Billy by showing up in his home town and asking around withered. “Billy” was such a generic name, and no surname was listed, as per Dark Fantasies Club protocol. For all I knew, Billy went by William in his everyday life. That might not even be his real name.
Again, the hopeless feeling that I’d lost the most wonderful omega I’d ever met sank down on me. I’d blown it. My one chance to maybe keep Billy in my life was gone.
I finished with my play apartment then drove into town to the apartment I actually lived in. It should have felt good to be around my normal things, to shower again and to change into work clothes. It was mid-afternoon at that point—Billy’s flight wouldn’t leave for another few hours—but I decided to make an appearance at the office anyhow.
As soon as the elevators opened onto our floor, I knew everything was wrong.
“There you are, Mr. Canton,” Rachel, our indomitable beta office manager said, jumping up from her desk. “We were all so worried about you.”
I glanced over the open office with a frown. “I’m fine,” I said, uneasiness growing in me. “I took the morning off.”
Rachel walked with me back toward my and Colin’s corner offices. “I wish you’d texted me to let me know,” she said. “There’s a hell of a storm brewing around here, and I was seriously worried.”
I paused halfway to my office and looked at Rachel. “What storm?”
Rachel drew in a breath and glanced around at the expectant faces popping up from cube walls. “Something happened at the Victory Holdings party on Saturday. Mr. Gregory has been stomping around here all morning, acting like the company is about to either go under or be bought out.”
“Bought out?” My eyes widened as suspicion crept down my neck.
I didn’t want to do business with Victory Holdings. I’d asked Alex to look into ways to dissolve my and Colin’s partnership. But it hadn’t occurred to me that Colin might do the same thing so he could get his way. Take my tech and my research and get his way.
I started on toward the offices, walking faster. Rachel still kept up with me.
“I’ve had the whole IT team going through the cloud, setting up passwords and blocking access to sensitive information,” Rachel whispered.
I stopped again, wheeling back to her.
“You know we’re all loyal to you first and foremost,” she continued to whisper. “Mr. Gregory hasn’t discovered the extra measures in place yet, but he did go looking for some paper files earlier.”
“And?” I asked.
A clever spark came to her eyes. “Moved,” she said. “I’ve had the entire office shifting things around and packing up, just in case everything goes south in a hurry.”
I grinned. Rachel was fantastic. A good, fast-thinking office manager was worth their weight in gold.
“You deserve a promotion,” I told her as I walked on.
“I’d settle for having a job tomorrow, sir,” she said, staying where she was.
Rachel knew which way the wind was blowing. I did, too, if I were honest. I’d known well before Billy blasted into my life and filled me with a sense that there could be something better out there for me.
“Colin,” I spoke his name as if demanding an explanation as I stepped into his office.
Colin was shouting at someone on the phone, but he stopped mid-rant and said, “I’ll call you back.”
He ended his call and stood from his desk to glare at me.
“Where have you been?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you been answering your calls? Victory Holdings wants to buy us out, us and all our research and development. They’re offering an eight-figure buy-out deal. Eight figures , Mason!”
“I’m not selling out to Victory,” I said firmly, summoning my courage to do what I should have done along time ago. “There’s nothing to sell.”
“Of course there’s something to sell!” Colin shouted. “Everything we’ve been developing, everything we’ve?—”
“Everything I’ve been developing, you mean,” I cut him off before he could go too far. “You haven’t done shit for the last several years.”
“I’ve been out there busting my ass to position this business as one of the preeminent tech companies on the West Coast,” Colin argued.
I shook my head, surprisingly calm, despite Colin’s raging, now that I’d made the decision. “You’ve done nothing but try to sell my work and innovations to the mob.”
“The mob? What? Victory Holdings isn’t?—”
“I’m dissolving the company, Colin,” I went on. I was more confident than ever that Colin knew exactly who and what Victory Holdings was by the way he turned red and couldn’t meet my eyes.
His gaze snapped up to meet mine a second later, though. “You can’t dissolve the company,” he said a moment later, sweat starting to bead on his brow. “We have a legal agreement.”
“An agreement that my legal counsel is looking into right now,” I said.
I probably should have called Alex first to make certain he’d found me a way out. I trusted him, though. And I’d call him as soon as I packed up my office and sent the staff home.
“You cannot walk away from seventy-five million dollars like this,” Colin shouted. “Who cares where that money comes from. You’re never going to see that kind of cash again.”
“There’s more to the world than money,” I said, calmer still. “It’s over, Colin. You’ll get the appropriate amount of compensation when the business assets are divided. I suggest you use them wisely.”
“You can’t do this to me!” Colin shouted as I left his office and turned the corner into my own. He followed me, of course, as everyone in the office stood from their cubes to watch us. “You can’t stab me in the back like this.”
“I’m not stabbing you in the back or anywhere else,” I said. “Our partnership is over. We had a good run. You’ll still have a fortune to play with.” I saw the worried faces watching from the main office and called out loud enough to be heard, “All of our employees will be given an extremely generous severance package.”
That set a buzz off in the main office. Colin barely noticed it, though.
“I won’t let you do this to me,” he shouted. “It might be your research, but you signed an agreement. I have a right to profit from your tech. I’ll sue. I’ll hire the best lawyers. I’ll…I’ll make you pay if you do this.”
“You’re sounding like a child, Colin,” I said, looking around my office to see if there was anything I wanted to take with me. “Why don’t you go home to your wife and kids and?—”
“Gloria took the kids and left me last month,” Colin bellowed.
My brow flew up. I was suddenly struck by the terror of how I would feel if Billy had taken our kids and left.
But that was ridiculous. We weren’t together and we didn’t have kids.
“Go home, Colin,” I said, not unkindly. “It’s over.”
That wasn’t the end of it, of course. Colin marched into the main office and proceeded to bully Rachel and shout at everyone who even looked like they’d started packing up his desk. All that happened while I was packing up my own.
Then Colin went suspiciously quiet for a while, probably as he ran to his computer to access the research files. The way he started shouting on the other side of the wall from my office told me Rachels’ and the IT departments efforts had been a success.
While that was going on, I pulled out my phone and called Alex.
“I hope you found a way out of the agreement with Colin,” I said without preamble, “because shit has just hit the fan over here.”
“Why, of course I did,” Alex said with what I could tell was a smug smile. “Turns out that agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
I sagged to sit on the edge of my desk, limp with relief. “Thank God. And are there any non-compete clauses I need to be aware of? Can I set up another company to continue with development?”
“You can,” Alex said, a slight cringe in his voice. “But to be honest, I wouldn’t establish a new company in this same state. Just to be on the safe side.”
In a moment like a flash of lightning, everything in my life seemed to converge into one point.
“What about Barrington?” I asked.
“Barrington?” Alex sounded taken aback. “East Cost Barrington? Why?”
A second later, he sucked in a breath of understanding.
“Ohh. Didn’t Billy’s Dark Fantasies profile say he was from Barrington?”
I frowned and flushed with guilt, even though Alex couldn’t see me. “Nonsense,” I said. “Barrington is one of the biggest cities in the country. It’s closer to the capitol and the center of the military. If I’m going to start a new tech company to further develop this security technology, it makes sense to do it in an area closer to the people I’d like to eventually sell to.”
“Sure,” Alex said, disbelieving. “By the way, Billy’s second called and mentioned that Billy seemed a bit out of sorts after your play session ended. Is there something you want to tell me?”
I’d told Alex everything I wanted him to know when I’d called him after my shower, when Billy was making us breakfast.
“You know everything I need you to know,” I told him. “Yes, I had the time of my life with Billy, but he’s gone now. I have no way to find him again?—”
“Other than setting up another fantasy through the app,” Alex pointed out. “In Barrington.”
My heart caught in my chest. I could do that. I could set up another fantasy to find him again.
A second later, I shook my head. “Right now, I have to focus on my business folding up, Colin threatening to sue me, and establishing a new company. I need to find jobs for my current employees, too. At least, the ones who won’t want to move to Barrington with me.”
I hoped to God Rachel would be willing to uproot her life to move across the country with me to be my COO.
“I get it,” Alex said. “Let’s deal with first things first.”
Another wave of relief washed through me, even though Colin had gotten louder on the other side of the wall. This would work out. I could close up one business and start another in Barrington. And if I was lucky, I could find Billy.
Hayden
By the time my flight landed, I felt horrible. Beyond just sick, I felt like my insides had been yanked out, scrambled, and shoved back into me.
“You really don’t look good,” Simon said as I slumped into the passenger seat of his car once my suitcase was in the trunk. “Did you eat something bad on the plane?”
“No,” I groaned. “I’ve been feeling off since my heat ended this morning. Or, I guess it was yesterday morning now. Stupid red-eye.”
Simon eyed me sideways as he pulled away from the airport curb and maneuvered around cars to get us to the highway.
“What kind of off?” he asked in a serious voice.
I didn’t want to confess to everything. I didn’t want to tell him how emotional I was, or how desperately I missed Ace.
“ What kind of off? ” Simon asked again, more demanding.
“Exhausted,” I said, blowing out a breath. “Way too exhausted for this conversation.”
“Mmm hmm.” Simon kept his eyes on the road, but I could tell he had a lot more to say. He didn’t make me wait either. “When did your heat start?”
“Friday night,” I said, rubbing a hand over my middle. I felt warm and prickly in my core still. “No, maybe Friday afternoon.”
“What time did your first heat wave start?”
“Simon, I’m fine.”
He tore his eyes off the road to look at me sternly.
“I don’t know,” I said, irritated. “We were playing.”
That shut Simon up, but not for long.
“And when did it end?” he asked.
“Yesterday morning,” I said. “Late morning. In plenty of time for it to be a full, ordinary heat.”
But it hadn’t ended late yesterday morning. It had ended in the early hours, just after midnight, right after Ace and I had one hell of a breeding orgasm.
“Oh, God, no,” I said as the pieces started to fit into place.
Simon cleared his throat. “Did you take precautions?” he asked. “Are you on the pill? Did you use?—”
“No, Papa , okay? No,” I snapped. “I…I wasn’t supposed to go into heat for another two or three weeks.”
Simon pressed his lips firmly shut.
I hunched, crossing my arms and hugging myself.
Ten minutes of thick silence later, as Simon turned off the highway, he said, “Do you want to stop by a pharmacy and get a pregnancy test?” in a quiet voice.
I pinched my face. I pouted. I clenched my jaw and ground my teeth.
Then I let out a breath of defeat and said, “Yes.”
We bought two packs with two tests each.
I took all of them.
I was pregnant.