All Chapters of PREGNANT BY THE CEO: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

My sixteen-year-old daughter had written her own statement, and she was right, it was time. I sat there, with my heart thudding unevenly, trying to figure out if I was protecting her or just terrified of letting go.I picked up the document with hands that felt heavier than they should. Isla sat across from me, completely still, the kind of stillness that came when she had already decided something and was patiently waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Marcus lingered in the doorway, like a silent shadow. No one spoke. I read the document. Then I read it again, slower this time.One page, twelve sentences. Her voice was precise, direct, stripped of every careful layer the rest of us wrapped around the truth. She hadn’t written a press statement. She had simply written what was true.She wrote about growing up without a father she never knew. No performance of tragedy, just fact, the way she treated most facts: with a clear-eyed honesty that didn’t need sentiment to hold its weigh

He was thinking about giving up his family empire, and he was telling me about it in an empty venue on a Saturday morning. I was either the right person to tell or the reason he was considering it. I needed to know which, I needed it like air.I asked him directly. No careful cushioning, no soft edges. The question mattered too much for anything else.“Which is it?” I said. “Am I the right person to tell because you trust me? Or am I the reason you’re considering it?”He looked at me. He didn’t rush. That was one of the things I had come to know about him, he never rushed the truth. He sat with the question, turning it over fully before he spoke. The pause wasn’t hesitation. It was respect.“Both,” he said.I waited, heart steady but loud in my chest.“And that’s not a bad thing,” he added, his voice low and certain. He held my gaze with that quiet steadiness that meant he was all in. “You’re not a factor I’m balancing. You’re not something I’m running toward or away from.” A breath.

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

“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

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. "