Chapter 1

 

Julia

 

“Are we going to Provoc?” I asked as we all piled into the cab.

“Oh, my God I love Provocateur,” Teddy said in his usual flamboyant draw.

“Yeah, it’s the only place to be seen right now,” Sarah added. “I’ve got to find a hot stockbroker to give me some tips.”

“Why do they need to be hot?” I teased.

“Technically they don’t, but if I’m going to pretend to be interested in the guy so I can get free financial advice, I’d prefer if they were hot.”

“You know you make enough money to actually pay for stock advice. You could date whoever you want,” I said.

I was finishing my makeup while we rode in the cab. Teddy was perpetually relegated to the front seat while Sarah, Kendra and I sat in the back. He hated that we always made him sit up there but as our only male friend who came out with us, he sucked it up and sat up there.

Going out dancing at the clubs in New York was one of my favorite things to do. This evening it was particularly exciting because I’d just landed a huge client for our hotel chain and Teddy, who was also my supervisor at work, offered to pay the alcohol tab for the evening. There was no way we were going to turn that down; drinking in New York was expensive business.

“I’m not paying someone to give me advice when these guys will give it for free. Plus, when have you known me to ever actually date someone? I’m not looking for that sort of commitment,” Sarah added.

“Right, who would want to have a guy for more than one night?” Kendra chimed in.

“I’m not opposed to more than one night. I just don’t like these clingy guys who want to come over all the time and start getting mushy. Short term is all I have time for.”

Sarah was perpetually single. She managed the marketing at King Hotels and was damn good at her job. The key was her ability to make anyone feel like they were wanted in both personal and professional environments. Sarah had the ability to walk into a meeting full of CEO’s and have the whole lot of them eating out of her hands in a matter of minutes. I envied her ability to connect in that way.

“Let’s remember this celebration is for Julia,” Teddy added. “Thank you for making me look so good to my bosses,” he laughed with his distinctive high-pitched cackle that made all of us smile too. Teddy was the first boss I had out of college and I was so lucky to have him. He was funny, supportive, and refreshing compared to what I’d heard about the hotel sales industry while I was in school.

“I’m just in it for the money,” I teased.

“You’ll get a huge commission check, girl. I’m telling you, this one is going to rattle your cage when it hits your account.”

“I can’t wait. I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with the baby thing.”

“What? No!” Sarah blasted from the other side of the vehicle. “You are way too young. Come on Julia, you’re only twenty-five. This is something people my age do, not people your age.”

Sarah was forty years old and totally right. Women her age in New York were deciding to have babies on their own, but I didn’t want to wait until I was forty to have a baby. I’d always dreamed of a big family and nowadays blending families just wasn’t as big of a deal as it was in the past. If I had a baby now, I still expected that somewhere down the road I could have more children once I met the man of my dreams. But the cruel reality was that might be way down the road and I just didn’t want to wait.

“You know how I feel about it,” Kendra said under her breath.

Kendra didn’t like the idea at all. She and I were similar in age, she was only two years older than me but she didn’t have a problem waiting to start her family. I’d always planned to have my family young and in this day and age, I just didn’t need to wait for a husband in order to get started. Kendra and I had come to an agreement that I was going to do this and she was going to be supportive, even though she didn’t fully agree with my plan.

“I’m all for it,” Teddy said. “You know we offer maternity leave, and you can even work from home if you decide to.”

“I think I’ll just take a couple of weeks and then work from home. But hell, I haven’t gotten pregnant yet so who knows. I did make an appointment with that fertility clinic near the office. It had a six-month waiting list and my appointment should be coming up soon.”

“Did you pick a Daddy yet?” Sarah laughed. “Tall, dark, and handsome with an Ivy League degree?”

“Yeah, something like that. Anyways I don’t want to make this all about me,” I said as we pulled up to the club. I’d actually spent an exhaustive amount of time reviewing sperm donor profiles. I’d spent so much time looking at profiles and changing my mind about what I wanted that when I finally came across the perfect profile I still wasn’t sure that was what I really wanted to settle on.

Picking a man based on his identifiable features and education wasn’t exactly a romantic way to have a child. I’d chosen the hair color, eye color, and height as if this person was some doll I was ordering to fit predefined criteria. In real life, finding a mate was so much more involved yet in some aspect it was easier because you knew you loved the person. When you were in love I imagined that the specific looks of your partner wouldn’t be an issue.

“Girl, tonight is all about you and if you’re going to be having a baby soon then you should be partying like a rock star tonight!” Teddy said as we all climbed out of the cab.

Teddy knew the bouncer and we quickly made our way past the long line and into the club. He liked partying more than anyone I knew at King Hotels. It always surprised me that he managed to make it to work on time even after staying up until three or four in the morning on some nights. I definitely couldn’t party that hard or that often. Once a week was about all I could handle and only on Saturdays so I could still sleep in and recover all day on Sundays.

My red sequined mini dress had been sitting in my closet for months just waiting for this night on the town. The fall weather was warm enough to handle the hurried rush into the club and not freeze my butt off.

We followed Teddy to a reserved couch he had near the main dance floor. He was never the sort who wanted to sit off in the VIP area or in a back corner. If we were coming to Provoc then we were going to be seen. It was fun to be friends with someone who was so outgoing because I certainly wasn’t that way. I could fake my way through a sales meeting or even a night on the town, but the truth was that I always preferred an evening on my couch watching movies.

Ordering bottle service was a requirement for most clubs if you wanted your own assigned area and this club was no different. Teddy had pre-ordered mixers, red bull, bottles of water, and Grey Goose for our group and the waitress brought it over to us as soon as we sat down. There was something so exhilarating about being with Teddy when he was splurging like this; it wasn’t at all what our night was like when we paid for our own drinks and Kendra and Sarah knew it.

“Thank you, Teddy, for making this night amazing,” I toasted as soon as we had all put together our drinks.

“Cheers,” everyone said and tapped our glasses together.

“Let’s make a pass around the club,” Sarah ordered as she pulled me up from the couch. “I need to get my sights on a few options.”

“Okay.”

Being Sarah’s sidekick was normal for me. I didn’t have trouble with finding decent men to talk to for the evening but my issue was making any sort of connection that would last longer than just one night. The men in New York were more finicky than the women. Not many of them wanted a real relationship and instead were typically looking to get laid as quickly as possible and then drop the girl. I’d seen it so many times that I totally understood Sarah’s outlook on casual dating, I just wasn’t sure I could manage that much longer. I really did want to find someone who I could have more with and was willing to wait it out and find them somewhere down the road.

“Him?” Sarah asked as she pointed to a very young looking guy standing with a group of women.

“The one holding court with the bevy of twenty-somethings?”

“Yeah, I think he looks like a stockbroker. What do you think?”

“Maybe, but that’s a large group of ladies to fight off. Are you really up for that?” I laughed.

“No problem,” she pulled me with her toward the group. “Let’s do a server-distraction,” she laughed.

I had no chance to make a run for it. No chance to stop the madness before it began. This was going down whether I agreed with it or not. Sarah slipped me a hundred dollar bill and pushed me right into the middle of the group before I could protest at all.

“Hey, we’d like a bottle of Grey Goose. Keep the change,” I said and handed the sexy looking guy in a suit the hundred dollars that Sarah had given me. This move worked for Sarah a lot and she had only recently started making me do the initial contact. I’d agreed the first time and then been roped into doing it ever since. I walked away right after handing him the money and joined Sarah a few feet away.

Just as planned, the guy quickly caught up to me and handed me back the money. “I’m not a server here,” he said with an annoying look on his face.

“Oh, my gosh, Julia he seriously doesn’t even look like the servers. Wow, I’m so sorry,” Sarah said and I slipped her the hundred dollars as I got ready to walk away and leave her to her man hunting.

“It’s okay, I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm.”

“Now that I’ve gotten you away from the girls, how do you feel about buying a real woman a drink?” I heard Sarah say as I gave her a glance and headed back toward our table.

When I rejoined the table there was a group of guys talking Kendra up and Teddy just rolled his eyes at the commotion. Kendra was a goddess, that was the best way I could describe how she looked in her tight black mini dress. Her ebony skin glowed and her long black hair was curled and looking especially lovely that night.

Often I’d found that men just couldn’t resist hitting on her when we were out. It usually felt like she was the primary target of affection and I was a secondary target. Not that I didn’t look amazing in my red dress, but she just had that sexual vibe that radiated off of her. My vibe said something a bit different, or at least that was what I chalked it up to when the men picked her over me.

“Our server disappeared, I need some cranberry juice,” Teddy said. “Want to walk with me to the bar?”

“Yep,” I laughed as I looked at the three men talking to Kendra.

If I had wanted any of them I easily could have joined the conversation, but I wasn’t feeling the vibe from them. I was looking for a fun guy to bring home for the night, but just for the night. With my newly found commitment to becoming a mother, I definitely didn’t want to get involved in more than a short fling.

“No gay guys here at all tonight.”

“Teddy, I bet there are more than you think. You’ve got to get out there and socialize. Sitting with the three of us might be clouding your gaydar.”

“I know, but it’s not that easy to pick up dudes here. This is a sausage fest for hetero women.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be walking around with me then,” I laughed. “You look straight as a board.”

We both knew that was a complete lie. Teddy had on a decorative purple button up shirt and some fantastic Versace shoes; he was dressed to impress. As we waited for our turn at the bar I glanced up at a tall guy standing to my right. He was a remarkable-looking man, beautiful really. He towered over me, even with my Jimmy Choos on. I was staring at him as he looked over and caught me right in the act. He looked familiar although I wasn’t exactly sure until he started to talk.

“It’s busy tonight,” he said with a boyish grin.

I knew right away who he was. Mike Cooper, a friend of one of my older brothers and some sort of doctor, although I wasn’t sure what type of medicine he had gone into. For a minute I thought he might have recognized me.

“Yeah, it’s always wild here.”

“Do you come here often?” he asked and then laughed at his own line. “Wow, that was as generic as they come.”

“Actually, I don’t come here very often.”

Teddy moved up ahead of me in line and I saw Mike look at him and then at me. He seemed to realize we weren’t together rather quickly and continued his pursuit of me. Or perhaps he just didn’t care if I was with Teddy or not and was going to flirt with me anyways.

“That’s an amazing dress. Would you mind if I bought you a drink? I’m Mike, by the way.”

“Hi, Mike. I’m Julia,” I said in anticipation that he might actually realize who I was once I told him my name.

Mike and my brother Rob had been fairly close friends growing up. Rob was seven years older than me and I was very much a child when Mike had been to our home. The last time I remembered seeing him was when he came home for Christmas break during my Junior year in high school. I’d tried to find reasons to be in the same room as him and Rob and my other brothers but I was always relegated to leaving the room. I was pretty sure Mike Cooper didn’t even know I existed. And as I waited for him to recognize me, it was clear he did not.

“Well that’s a beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” Mike said as he shook my hand lightly. “How about I get you a drink and you come sit with me at my table for a little bit?”

“Still pretty generic,” I teased him.

“It is, but the problem is that I would really like to talk with you and we certainly can’t keep standing here in this mess of people.”

“I’m heading back to the couch,” Teddy busted right between the two of us. “Yeah, I’ll catch up to you later.” He winked at me and then looked at Mike. “Good catch.”

“Well, you have his approval so I guess I have no other choice but to say yes,” I shrugged and walked up to the bar beside Mike. I was about to tell him what I wanted to drink when he leaned into the bartender and placed the order himself.

I had no idea what he had told the man but we left the bar without our drinks. Mike slipped his hand down to hold mine and I followed him to the far back corner of the club where he had a private table.

Holding hands in a club like this wasn’t exactly the same as holding hand normally. It was a necessity to ensure you didn’t lose the person you were following. But, his hand was strong and firm while also being extremely soft. He didn’t act like the surgeons I’d met in clubs before; they typically had an attitude about them that was fairly distinctive. I wracked my brain trying to remember what type of doctor Mike had become, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what my brother had said. In all fairness, it had been several years since we had talked about Mike. When I first moved to New York Rob had brought up that his friend also lived there.

“Our drinks are on their way,” Mike said and held his hand out for me to slide into the small booth.

Mike sat down right beside me instead of across from me. At this point, it didn’t seem romantic; more a little pushy. If he really didn’t recognize who I was, then he was basically just sitting with a stranger and trying to get laid.

Guys in New York weren’t all jerks. I’d met plenty of decent guys, the problem was finding any decent guys who I also found attractive and had a connection with. In the twenty-first century women no longer had to settle for a man who was only half of what she was looking for and I just didn’t feel like dating around with men I knew weren’t a good match.

A few guys here and there seemed promising, but the spark fizzled quickly and I jumped back into concentrating on my career. So far, there was a definite spark with Mike, but nothing too outrageous and a lot of my emotions about him were probably just a girlhood crush that I still carried over.

“Oh my God, Julia, you need to come with me,” Kendra said as she approached the table and stood over the two of us.

“Kendra, this is Mike,” I said.

“Hi, Mike, I promise you can have her back in a minute, I need her.” She was insistent and reached for my hand to pull me out of the booth. Mike had no choice but to move out of the way.

He was polite and smiled at the interruption but he was clearly annoyed. Kendra wasn’t the type of grab me away from situations though so I was a little curious to see what was going on and why this was such an emergency.

“Ten minutes?” Mike asked Kendra and me with a playful raised eyebrow. “After that, I’m stealing her back.”

“Yes, ten minutes is good,” Kendra said and yanked me off into the crowd behind her.

“What was that all about? He’s super cute, you can’t really be this worried about me sitting with that guy?”

“No, nothing about him. It’s about Sarah, she um…” Kendra stopped dead in her tracks.

I looked around trying to figure out what was going on. There was a crowd of people around us and when I looked at the couch where we had all been sitting I saw what the emergency was.

“She’s not!” I yelled and my hand flew up to cover my eyes.

“Yeah, I’m sure the cops have already been called, or maybe they will let her finish?” Kendra shrugged.

Sarah had taken her new boy toy to the couch we had reserved. She was riding him, screwing the hell out of the guy, right there in the middle of the club. At first, I wasn’t sure I actually believed my own eyes. Sarah was extremely sexually free, and she’d been known to have a voyeuristic side, but this was extreme even for her.

“Where’s Teddy?” I asked.

“There,” Kendra pointed to Teddy standing about ten feet away talking to a man wearing purple shoes. They actually looked like an adorable couple with their matching styles.

“Should I stop her?” I asked, hoping the answer was no.

“Yeah, because I sure as heck am not going over there. She’s going to get arrested. Why does she do this stuff?”

“I don’t know,” I replied and reluctantly made my way over toward the couch. I was almost there when three police officers came down the steps and moved in on Sarah and her new friend.

There was no big commotion. No yelling or any sort of scene at all. One of the officers just stood next to the couch and both Sarah and her man looked up at him. For a minute I wasn’t sure they were even going to stop having sex, but they did and as Sarah stood up and slid her dress back down, a few people clapped around the two of them.

Both Sarah and her guy were being handcuffed when I hurried over to see what I could do to help. I wasn’t a rule breaker like she was, I was terrified to even be by the police officers, but she looked calm as could be.

“Do you want me to call someone?” I asked.

“Yes. Teddy has the number for my attorney. Which precinct am I going to?” she asked the officer.

“Just around the corner,” he replied.

“Okay,” Sarah shrugged. “Just have him meet me there.”

The officers walked her away before I could clarify where she was going so I really hoped Teddy knew what was going on and how to help her. Teddy was in the middle of full-on flirting mode when I interrupted him. He hadn’t even realized what was going on at all.

“Sarah was just arrested for having sex right there on the couch! She said you have her attorney’s number. Can you call him and have him meet her? The police officers said they were taking her just around the corner.”

“Wait, was she having sex with the police officer?” Teddy laughed.

“No, this is serious.”

“Yes, I can handle it, just a second,” he turned back to his friend and basically ignored me.

I didn’t know what to do. Teddy was likely to totally ignore what was going on and not call her attorney until tomorrow if he and this guy hit it off. I waited impatiently off to the side as Teddy and his guy friend talked for what seemed like forever.

It was nearly twenty minutes before Teddy finally exchanged numbers with the guy and came over to me. By that time I was close to screaming at him I was so frustrated, but the one problem with being friends with your boss was that you couldn’t scream at them even when they were being a jerk.

“Teddy, come on. Just call her attorney already,” I said as Kendra found her way over to us. “Where were you?”

“I got caught up.”

“What is going on with the two of you? Our friend just got taken to jail; you really don’t have anything better to do than flirt with people? She needs our help,” I said in a panic.

Teddy laughed and Kendra just shrugged her shoulders. I was at my wits end with these two and about to just go over to the jail myself if one of them didn’t start helping our friend.

“She got arrested three weeks ago when we were out together,” Teddy said when he stopped laughing. “This happens to her more than you would think. Is this the first time you’ve been with her when it happened?”

“What? How have I never heard about it?”

“Maybe she didn’t want you to know what a pervert she is,” Kendra laughed.

“So what’s going to happen? Does she have to stay in jail for a long time?”

“No,” Teddy patted me on the back. “They will book her and she will pay a fine. Her lawyer will go down and either they will drop the charges or she will get a day in court. Then her lawyer negotiates a fine or community service and it’s all over with. It’s really not a big deal. Calm down.”

“Really?” I asked a little bewildered by what I was hearing.

“Yeah, she will be just fine. I’ll text her attorney. I’ve got his number. Go back to having fun. Where is that hot guy that was hitting on you at the bar?”

My heart stopped when I realized how long I’d been away from Mike. He probably thought I had totally ditched him. How embarrassing it would be to even go back over there at this point.

“We will figure it out,” Kendra said reassuringly as Teddy walked away texting on his phone. “Don’t worry. I’m sure he will still be over there.”

The two of us walked back to the table where we had left Mike. Instead of Mike, there was an equally handsome blonde haired guy sitting there with a woman. They were eating strawberries and drinking champagne, probably what Mike had ordered for me.

“Well, I ruined that.”

“He’s still around. Let’s go find him,” Kendra said.

“No, actually, I think I’m just going to go home. I’m exhausted and I don’t want to date right now anyway. I’m ready to just get pregnant and be a mom. How about I meet you back at home?”

“Sure, I’ll text you if I find someone to play with this evening and I’m not coming home. But are you sure? This was supposed to be your night to celebrate.”

“I know, but it really is just fine. I like being at home,” I laughed.

Kendra was looking at me when her eyes darted over my shoulder. I felt someone walk up behind me and knew it just had to be Mike. Kendra smiled so big that there was no other possible option. Kendra winked and then turned to walk away.

Slowly I turned around.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been ditched before the first drink,” he smiled down at me.