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CHAPTER 31: GROUNDWORK
publish date:
2026-05-07 13:02:24
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PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 69- I KNOW
Sixteen years of everything, and it came down to a sixteen-year-old girl deciding who she was in two words. I had never been more proud of her.Saturday's dinner was exactly what he said it would be.A restaurant I had never been to — his choice.It was good. Warm and unhurried, somewhere that felt chosen rather than convenient. He wore a jacket. He stood when I arrived.He always did that.I had stopped pretending I didn't notice.We talked for three hours straight, and for the first time in longer than I could track, none of it was about the year. Not Victor, not Diana, not legal proceedings or the accumulated wreckage of everything that had come before. We talked about his plans for the company now that it was genuinely his. About a book I had read and what I thought of the ending. About a film argument Isla had apparently been conducting with him by text for four days and showed no intention of dropping."She's winning," I said."Not yet." He said it with particular confidence. "
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 68- DECLARED
I drove home and found Sebastian at my kitchen table helping Isla with something and I thought: yes. That's exactly what it is.He was genuinely confused by the textbook. Isla was explaining something for the second time with the patient precision she reserved for things she thought deserved real effort, and he was frowning at the page like it had personally offended him."You're doing the second step before the first," she said."Show me again," he said.She showed him. He got it wrong again. She stared at him."You're doing that on purpose.""I absolutely am not." Pure innocence. Completely false."Sebastian.""It's a genuinely difficult problem.""It's not, though.""For some of us," he said — and she laughed. Fast, unguarded and real, the kind that escaped before she could decide whether to let it, the kind I had spent sixteen years being the only person who could reliably produce.I stayed in the doorway with my coat still on and let the moment be what it was.Sixteen years witho
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 67- NO RETURN ADDRESS
“It's a start.” Those two words carried everything I still couldn’t say aloud. He knew it, and I knew he knew it. And for now, we were both okay with the weight of what remained unspoken.He answered with a single word: “Good.”No pressure or rush to turn the start into something bigger before it was ready. Just “good”, spoken in that quiet, certain way of his that needed nothing more.I set my phone down and made breakfast, my hands steadier than they had any right to be.Things didn’t leap forward in grand declarations. They built, quietly, in small accumulations that felt dangerously real.Tuesday dinners became a rhythm. Not planned, not labeled—just something that kept happening because one of us would suggest it and the other would say yes. By the third week, Isla no longer treated his arrival like an occasion. She treated it like a Tuesday. When that shift settled in, I had to pause at the kitchen counter, gripping the edge for a second while something tight and hopeful twis
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 66- CHOOSING
He was staying, and he was building, and hoping I’d want to be around him, and I sat there in the room I built from nothing, thinking that after everything we’d been through, we were finally speaking the same language.I had I’m around. Always. Nothing else. Not because I was pulling back—I was past that, or at least I was trying like hell to be—but because it was nearly midnight, I just ran a gala that lost its catering four hours before the doors opened, and I was sitting there in an emptying venue on nothing but adrenaline, exhaustion, and the heavy, bone-deep weight of a day that had asked for everything I had left to give. Something that big didn’t deserve a decision thrown together in a room like this at an hour like this.He heard it. I could see it land in him, quiet and careful, the way he let it settle without trying to grab for more than the moment was ready to offer. His shoulders eased just a fraction, like some tight thing inside him had finally been given permission t
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 65- THE FINAL PAGE
Sebastian moved across the room toward me with clear purpose, like a man who had already decided exactly whose side he was on and was ready to stand there no matter what happened next.He reached me without any rush. That was how Sebastian always moved through a space—he never performed urgency or drama. He walked with the steady confidence of someone who knew where he wanted to be, and the room seemed to shift around him instead of the other way around. When he stopped beside me at the edge of the gala, he first looked over at Victor for a long moment, then turned his eyes to me."Are you alright?" he asked, his voice low and genuine."Yes," I said, and this time I truly meant it. Not the careful, managed answer I usually gave, but the real one. I was standing in a room I built from nothing, and Victor Hale was there on the edge of it, looking smaller and more diminished than I had ever seen him before. He tried to stop all of this from happening, but here it was—more complete an
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 64- I MADE THIS
Someone tried to pull my catering four hours before my biggest event. I had a contact list, an emergency plan, and zero intention of letting it break me."Priya," I said, voice tight. "Phone out."She already had it in her hand.I called my secondary catering contact—a smaller firm I worked with twice before, sharp on execution. The kind of owner who answered on Saturday mornings because he knew events didn’t wait for Monday. He picked up on the third ring."Ms. Reed.""I have a situation," I said, the words steady but my pulse hammering. "Gala tonight. The primary vendor pulled this morning. Can you cover it?"A short pause. I could almost hear him weighing risk against loyalty."Guest count?" he asked."Two-eighty confirmed. Possibly three hundred.""Menu?""Sending it now. Some items will need adjusting based on what you can source in—" I glanced at my watch, stomach twisting—"three and a half hours."He didn’t deflect. I heard the quiet calculation in the silence, a professional d
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 11: THE ENVELOPE
Victor Hale had just tried to buy me out of the room the same way he bought his son a bride. The man had exactly one move, and he had just shown it to me.I want to go back twenty minutes.I had been heading for the lobby exit, folder under my arm, mind already on the drive back, when Victor appear
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 10: CRACKS IN THE WALL
Sixteen years old and sharp in a way that missed nothing, Isla had stood at that window and watched Sebastian outside our building. The moment that truth settled in, something inside me tightened. The clock on my secret, the one I had kept locked away for sixteen years had started ticking, loud an
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 9: FIVE MINUTES TOO LATE
Sebastian stood outside my building like something pulled straight out of a life I had already buried. The moment I saw him, my stomach dropped, a sharp, instinctive reaction I couldn’t control no matter how much time had passed. I gave myself exactly three seconds, just enough to take in the deta
PREGNANT BY THE CEO CHAPTER 8: THE MAN WAITING OUTSIDE
I told myself I was only calling Ethan for the truth. The white peonies still sitting on my desk like they owned the place told me I was full of shit.He answered on the second ring, like he’d been staring at his phone, waiting for this exact moment.“Ms. Reed,” he said, calm as ever.“You said yo
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