A Night to Regret

The hotel room reeks of regret — champagne, musk, a faint wisp of jasmine from the candles burned down on the nightstand. Emma Larson: I am lying on a bed that is so much bigger than my own, tangled in sheets better than anything I own in my tiny Brooklyn apartment. I’ve got a headache, a gift from last night’s Knight Enterprises masquerade ball, where I let the music and the masks take me out of character. I blink up at the ceiling, gilded and blinding, trying to patch together the blur of it: a stranger’s hands on my waist, his breath hot against my neck, the way we were laughing like we’d known each other all our lives. My gold mask lies crumpled on the pillow beside me, where he should be. But the bed is empty, and there’s no sign of him except for the pain in my heart.

I straighten up, wincing as the room starts to spin. My dress, a shimmery thing I borrowed from Mia, is a puddle on the floor, my heels abandoned somewhere by the door. I’ve got to get to work. I’m an analyst in training, not some party girl who wakes up in strange hotels. I’ve spent three years working my ass off from nothing to being a waitress in a shitty small-town diner to sitting behind a desk at Knight Enterprises and I’m not going to let one stupid night take it all away. My phone buzzes: 6:58 a.m. Less than an hour to go to Manhattan. I snatch up my purse and something falls out — a plastic stick with two pink lines staring blankly back at me. A pregnancy test. My heart stops. It’s not mine. It can’t be. I don’t even know how I acquired it. But those lyrics don’t lie, and the truth slaps like a fist: I might be pregnant.

I push the test back into my bag, barely managing to hold onto it with my trembling hands. This must be a mistake, some sort of cruel mix-up at the pharmacy. I don’t want to hear this now — or ever. I drag myself to the bathroom and dress, pull on clothes, splash water on my face. The mirror reflects a chaos: smeared mascara, wild chestnut hair, eyes too wide with panic. I have to get out of here, to work, act like this never happened. But as I duck into the hallway, the memory of him — those slate gray eyes behind a black mask, that low, rumbling laugh — sticks to me like smoke.

The elevator that takes me up to the 42nd floor feels like it’s the walls are closing in. The headquarters of Knight Enterprises is all glass and steel, a towering monument to power that leaves me feeling small. My skirt’s wrinkled, my ponytail has all but fallen apart, but it’s time to pull it together. I’m good at this — at blending in, at keeping my head down, at proving I belong. The office is already bustling, phones ringing, keyboards clacking, analysts hollering about stock prices. I slide into my cubicle, hoping no one realizes I’m behind schedule. And my inbox is the trenches, crammed with emails about the gala last night, but all I’m thinking about is that exam burning a hole in my purse.

Then I hear him. Our CEO Liam Thomas is crossing the floor like he’s been chiselled from stone—sharp suit, sharper jaw, hair dark enough to look rakish, messy enough to suggest there’s something once in a while alive beneath the ice. He’s shouting out orders to some unlucky intern, his voice low, dictatorial, and it hits me like a shock wave. That voice. The same one from last night, the one who whispered my name in the darkness, who made me forget my name. My stomach twists. No way. Liam Knight doesn’t dance with shitheels like me. He’s a billionaire, a myth, the kind of man who possesses rooms, not hearts. But when his gray eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second, I could swear they look the same as those ones I confronted behind that mask.

“Larson.” His voice slices into my reverie, and suddenly he’s there beside my desk, looming over me. “Your Q2 analysis. I needed it yesterday.”

I swallow, and my mouth is desert dry. “It’s in your inbox, Mr. Knight.” Sent last night pre gala.” I sound steadier than I feel in my voice.

He squints, as though he’s appraising me. “It better be perfect. The board’s on my ass.” He leaves, and there’s something too familiar, too dangerous about the lingering cologne. My heart’s pounding, and not because of the near-death experience.

I make a valiant effort to concentrate at my screen, but my purse is squatting there like a grenade. I can’t ignore it anymore. I sneak to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall and pull out another test that I grabbed at a drugstore on the way here. It is torture to wait, each second like a wire sliding against a raw nerve. My legs collapse when the second plus sign comes up. I collapse, sliding down the wall with the cold tile keeping me centered and the truth settling over me more weightily than I can ever remember. I’m pregnant. With a stranger’s baby. And if that someone is Liam Knight, the cocky one-night stand I can’t keep my hands off of, my all-business world is about to come crumbling down around me. I’m not ready, but there’s no turning back. All I know is I’ve got to decide what to do next before this secret decides for me.