HAPTER ONE
“I’m sorry, I just don’t think this is going to work out. Not anymore.”
Of all the ways Cheyenne Renaud expected her evening to start, that was not one of them. In fact, it hadn’t even really occurred to her that it might be a possibility. The words hardly even seemed to be real words, and she had to stare blankly at him for a few moments before they made sense.
Her jaw worked silently for a second before she managed, “I’m sorry, what?” As far as comebacks went, it wasn’t exactly her best work. Twenty-seven years old, and she felt like she was floundering around like a high school student again, as if the rug had been ripped out from beneath her feet. How humiliating
But maybe it was time to rewind a little bit, if only to see where everything went wrong.
*
Harold Carmichael was a wealthy man, and a busy one on top of that. Considering that, no one could really blame him for having exacting standards, though that meant he had a reputation for going through personal assistants as quickly as someone might go through their socks. It seemed as if every time he hired a new one, he was finding a reason to fire them just as quickly.
Sensibly, Cheyenne was not particularly optimistic when she got the job. But even so, it would be at least a few good paychecks before she had to find other work.
She never expected the job to stick for longer than a few weeks. She certainly didn’t expect it to stick for months. But the two of them, against all odds, got along well. He was charming, he seemed to find something about her endearing, and his thought patterns meshed well enough with her own that working together fell into a surprisingly easy pattern.
And at first, everything was exactly as one might expect it to be. Safe but comfortable, with everything perfectly inside its box.
It was at a charity banquet held in his primary office building every year that everything changed.
Cheyenne was looking lovely with her smooth, tanned skin contrasting nicely against the shimmering gold of her halter top gown, auburn curls piled on top of her head with a pair of elaborate combs, and honey brown eyes standing out like a pair of beacons with her gold makeup.
And Harry didn’t exactly look too shabby himself, skin the color of dark roast coffee offset by the dark purple of his shirt beneath his black jacket, black hair smoothed back, and dark brown eyes intense. He was a tall, broad man, but Cheyenne had never found him particularly imposing. And that evening was no different, at least in that sense.
In every other sense, however…
‘Just a few drinks’ turned into ‘a few drinks too many’ in both of their cases, and the world seemed to blur at the edges until they found themselves locked in the men’s bathroom. Cheyenne’s dress had been hastily unzipped, removed, and tossed over the top of one of the stalls. Her panties were dangling from one foot, caught on the heel of her shoe as she sat on the edge of one of the sinks, and she had slipped her arms out of her bra, so Harry could push it down, baring her breasts so he could lavish attention on them with his hands and his mouth. His mouth was hot as he kissed her neck and her chest and her breasts, and it seemed like all she could do to hold onto his shoulders.
Harry was still almost completely dressed, and for some odd reason, that seemed to make the situation feel even more illicit and slightly forbidden than it was. He had yanked his belt off and tossed it over the top of the stall with Cheyenne’s gown, but other than that, he was still clothed from head to toe.
Cheyenne’s back arched as his hands found her hips and tightened, and he closed his lips around one of her nipples, teasing at it with his teeth before dragging his tongue over it, until it was as hard as a pebble, and he shifted his attention to the other nipple.
Cheyenne hardly even noticed when one of his hands started moving lower until there were fingers pressing between the lips of her sex, rubbing at her clit and her vulva until she knew she was dripping, and she was glad her panties were already off or else they would have been soaked. Her back arched enough that her ass nearly left the edge of the sink, and she swore she was going to come right there, at least until Harry abruptly stopped and pulled his hands away, and she made an indistinct noise of protest at him, though her tune changed quickly.
She watched as Harry finally unzipped his pants, pushing them and his briefs down just far enough to let his erection spring free, sighing in relief as he did. And she nearly squealed in surprise when he picked her up off of her perch on the edge of the sink, though he didn’t go far, stopping once Cheyenne’s back met the wall. The tile was a shock of cold against her heated skin, and for a split second, everything seemed perfectly crystal clear before the haze of alcohol settled over everything again.
She wrapped her legs around Harry’s waist and curled her arms around the back of his neck and shoulders, and he held her up with his hands beneath her ass and thighs as if she weighed nothing. It was exhilarating, knowing how much larger and stronger he was compared to her, and she clung to him all the tighter until her nails were digging into the fabric of his jacket.
She could feel his cock pressing against her leg, and for a moment he held her up with just one arm, and she clung to him like a lifeline as he used his other hand to line his cock up with her entrance. She drew in a breath, sharp and wavering slightly, as she felt the head of his cock press against her entrance, and then he had both hands beneath her legs yet again. He pressed his hips forward and drew her closer in one movement, and the head of his cock breached her entrance. With one swift thrust, the rest of his cock was sheathed within her. Her head fell back as she moaned, until she could feel it bumping against the wall behind her.
It wasn’t a particularly graceful coupling, as Harry had to keep adjusting his hold on her and Cheyenne kept bumping her head against the wall and her grip on his jacket kept slipping. Truth be told, Cheyenne was surprised that his cock didn’t simply slip out of her at any point. Or at least, in retrospect, when she looked back at the moment later on, she would be slightly surprised about that. Just then, though, her thoughts were a little too occupied to contemplate such inconsequential matters.
Granted, it wasn’t a particularly long coupling either. Alcohol was great for making arguably bad decisions, but it wasn’t so great for the stamina, and Cheyenne had already been approaching the peak when Harry started sliding his pants down. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long before Cheyenne was coming, her back arching away from the wall and her legs and her arms tightening around him. His rhythm slowed slightly as her passage tightened around him, but he kept thrusting, each thrust slow but firm enough to bump her back against the wall, until his rhythm began to falter. When he came only a few moments after her, it was with a low, slow sigh and another handful of thrusts.
There wasn’t any time to appreciate the afterglow, though.
Once Cheyenne’s feet were back on the floor, she wiped herself off with a wet paper towel for lack of any other options, before she pulled her panties back up, slipped her arms back through the straps of her bra, and dropped her breasts back into the cups. Considering Harry barely even removed any clothes, he was already situated again by the time Cheyenne was standing in her underwear.
She got dressed again in silence, and afterwards they both gave the other a careful once over, just to make sure all of their clothing was straight and where it was supposed to be, and that it didn’t look like either of them had just had sex against a bathroom wall. Satisfied, they both nodded once and turned towards the door. Almost sheepishly, they crept out of the bathroom and rejoined the banquet, hoping that no one had noticed Harry’s absence.
*
“So, what does all this make us?” Cheyenne wondered later that night, following Harry into his house. She was considerably soberer than she had been at the banquet, though everything still sort of wobbled a bit from one side to the other.
Harry didn’t really have an answer immediately. Instead, he simply asked, “Would you like to stay the night?” And Cheyenne saw no reason not to.
And in truth, they never really did define what they were. Not for a while, at least. But gradually, more and more of Cheyenne’s things were moving into Harry’s house, and soon enough she felt no need to renew the monthly lease on her apartment once it was up.
It wasn’t exactly clear on when they decided they were dating. Instead, they simply separately decided to tell people that was what was happening when it seemed like undeniable truth. It was a reasonably loose agreement, but they were content with it.
And for a while, things were good. Harry’s mouth could get ahead of his brain on occasion, and Cheyenne’s sense of humor could turn a bit caustic from time to time, but on the whole, they were happy. They still meshed well together, like a pair of puzzle pieces lining up just right. And there were no shortages of ways to bond. Harry had billions of dollars, and they were both imaginative. Date night was never dull when it could be in another country without much prior planning. The world was their oyster, and they were both looking forward to making as much of it as they could.
Maybe it was inevitable, then, that it didn’t stay quite so perfect. Not that either of them had expected real perfection, but Cheyenne at least had expected more time before everything began to go south.
*
It was Harry’s idea to get a new personal assistant. Not because Cheyenne wasn’t doing a good job, but because it struck him as rather unprofessional to be dating his personal assistant, and it didn’t seem inconceivable that there might be some kind of conflict of interest at some point down the line.
“What, you think I can’t keep my job and my relationship separate?” Cheyenne asked, and for the most part the question was playful, but there was some honesty within it as well. It wasn’t as if she was going to start rearranging his calendar or shredding his paperwork the instant he annoyed her, after all.
“More worried that I can’t keep it separate,” he returned wryly, and if nothing else, it helped sooth Cheyenne’s ego a bit. And she said she was just fine with him hiring a new personal assistant. As it was, it wasn’t as if Harry was going to stop supporting her. She wouldn’t need the job anymore. So, for a little while, she really was fine with it, even if seeing another woman swanning around, doing her job rankled at her just a little bit.
*
It didn’t take long before Cheyenne was no longer okay with it.
Lorraine was an attractive young woman just a few months younger than Cheyenne. She was tall and pale, lean with an hourglass figure and a veritable waterfall of honey blonde hair that fell in waves down to her hips. She had wide, bright blue eyes and a small, upturned nose, and heart-shaped, pixyish features, and all in all she was adorable. She was bright and perky and upbeat, and Cheyenne couldn’t stand her in the slightest. Like a six-year-old with a bad attitude, Cheyenne wanted to roll Lorraine down a hill and chop off her hair with a pair of safety scissors. Not without cause, though. She wasn’t that petty. At least she didn't think she was.
It started with a few small things. Tiny things, really. A hand on Harry’s shoulder or arm that lingered a bit too long to be companionable. A few too many personal opinions and anecdotes to be considered entirely professional. A few offers to spend time together that seemed a bit too close to being dates to pass them off as benign or accidental, even if Harry never took her up on them.
It started in out-of-the-way corners, where Cheyenne only saw it happening if she stumbled over their conversation on accident. And then, it began to get more blatant, until it didn’t matter even if Cheyenne was standing two yards away, or if she had been carrying on a conversation with Harry just a moment before.
And to make matters worse, it seemed like Harry never noticed any of it, as if all of Lorraine’s antics were just part and parcel of her job as his personal assistant. Cheyenne swore it felt like someone was gaslighting her, as if everything she was watching Lorraine do wasn’t actually happening.
She tried to tell herself that she was just jealous. Maybe she was still a bit tender about losing her job, so she was tilting at windmills. She even tried enlisting her best friend’s help to convince herself that it really was most likely nothing.
Her best friend had the opposite effect.
“Sounds pretty skeevy to me,” Daphne stated blandly, her voice crackling slightly as a dead giveaway that she was on speaker phone. She was a short, curvy woman with naturally tanned skin and black hair in a smooth bob to frame her face, and her bright blue eyes always seemed to stand out. Somehow, her voice managed to sound exactly the way she looked. “I mean, if you’re really convinced it’s nothing or you’re just overreacting, then I’ll trust your judgment, but if you’re asking for my opinion, something there stinks.”
At the time, it had been exasperating. Cheyenne wanted someone to put her at ease, not make her worry even more.
Later, though, she was thankful for it, knowing that some had been on her side right from the very beginning. And knowing that at least one person had been thinking clearly from the get-go even when Cheyenne had been doubting the evidence she saw with her own two eyes and heard with her own two ears.
In that sense, Daphne was a blessing.
*
It wasn’t long before Cheyenne was snapping passive-aggressively at everything Lorraine said or did around her, and all the while, Lorraine just kept smiling beatifically and going about her job. And it wasn’t long before Harry was noticing that Cheyenne’s attitude had taken a turn for the sour, and gradually his patience began to run out.
It wasn’t long before both of them were snapping at each other like a pair of angry turtles, while Lorraine tutted and made soothing noises and promised that she “wouldn’t let Miss Renaud’s personal opinion get her down.”
Needless to say, none of that helped anything.
So maybe it was…inevitable, when everything crumbled apart like a drying sandcastle.
*
Harry sighed, slow and drawn out. “You heard me the first time, Chey. I don’t think it’s going to work out between us.”
“Is it because I don’t like your new PA?” she wondered, and the words came out more snappish than she wanted them to, but she supposed no one could blame her for being a bit uptight just then.
“It’s because of a lot of things,” Harry replied, and it already sounded like his patience was beginning to fray. “But yeah, the fact that you’ve been sort of an unrelenting bitch lately has a bit to do with it.”
Cheyenne recoiled as if she had been struck, and Harry sighed again, dragging a hand down his face. “That didn’t come out right,” he conceded, though it was more of a reluctant mumble.
“No,” Cheyenne replied, voice shaking slightly, “I think it came out exactly the way you wanted it to. I’ll be out of your hair by tonight.”
“Chey—”
She turned and stormed away before he could say anything else, and she had her clothing, her toiletries, and everything else thrown into suitcases within a couple hours. Daphne asked no questions when Cheyenne called and asked if she was still looking for a roommate, and she picked her up that evening without protest.
When Harry asked haltingly if they wanted any help packing Cheyenne’s stuff into the backseat and the trunk of Daphne’s car, Daphne laughed at him, and that, at least, made Cheyenne feel a little bit better.
She would be okay. She would hurt for…a while probably, but she would be alright. That much, she had faith in.
*
Daphne’s apartment seemed so tiny compared to Harry’s house, but it was quaint and comfortable all the same, and Cheyenne was hard pressed to point out the difference between one type of memory foam and the next, regardless of how much more one cost from the other. Cheyenne adapted quickly.
Granted, finding another job took a bit longer, and it wasn’t the sort of job she had envisioned for herself, but it was a paycheck. She refused to freeload off of Daphne for any longer than she needed to, and considering she would only be paying half of the rent, she supposed it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable amount of money.
Even so, being a receptionist wasn’t exactly what she had imagined for herself, regardless of how influential the business she was working for was. ‘Overqualified’ didn’t even begin to describe her situation.
Still, the work wasn’t bad, the hours were decent, and her coworkers were good people. She couldn’t complain about any of that.
She was slow to truly make friends with her coworkers, but that had always been the case with her, and she was generally more content to have a small group of friends than to collect friends at every corner. Even so, she did manage to start befriending them.
They were pleasant people on the whole. People Cheyenne could get lunch or coffee with without a care. And Gregg from the accounting department was cute. True, he didn’t have Harry’s looks, but he was cute in a boyish sort of way, and the way he smiled at Cheyenne whenever they saw each other was endearing.
It didn’t seem like it would turn into anything serious, but it was a good reminder that her romantic life had not actually ended just because things with Harry didn’t quite work out, and it was a reminder that she was sorely in need of at that point, even if she wasn’t quite ready to find someone new just then.
And hey, who was she to say what the future would hold? In time, Cheyenne would get over Harry, she would be ready to find other people, and maybe Gregg would still be cute and he would still smile at her like that whenever the time came. It was a comforting thought, at least, and Cheyenne felt no guilt in entertaining it. It was good to feel like she was moving on.
*
Cheyenne felt a bit foggy when she got out of bed one morning. Not quite ill, but more like the world was moving in slow motion, and everything was chugging to catch up to where it was supposed to be.
It didn’t really come as a shock when that feeling of not-quite-ill increased to definitely-ill, and she had to empty her stomach into the toilet. Daphne tapped on the door carefully from outside, her voice slightly muffled by the door as she asked, “You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” Cheyenne replied, voice wobbling slightly as she hauled herself back to her feet by leaning on the edge of the sink. She grabbed a paper cup from the stack in the medicine cabinet, filled it with water, and then gargled and spit, and she took the time to carefully brush her teeth until the taste went away.
She was already in the bathroom, so by that point she figured she may as well just get cleaned up and ready for the day.
She figured it was dumb luck that had her feeling more or less alright within a half an hour. As it was, her job was still too new for her to go taking days off willy-nilly, so despite Daphne’s fretful fussing, she tossed a bottle of anti-nausea medication into her purse, decided she would just have to eat lightly that day, and left the apartment just as she would on any other day.
By the end of the day, it seemed like Daphne’s fussing had been for naught, as the day passed without incident. By the time Cheyenne was getting back to the apartment, she was willing to simply assume that something she had eaten before bed the night before hadn’t quite agreed with her stomach.
*
Or at least that was what she thought, but then it kept happening. Sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes it was right before bed, but needing to make a mad dash to the bathroom to empty the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl became a daily occurrence.
She didn’t think it was related to stress or anything like that. After all, a break-up was hardly the most difficult thing she had ever lived through, living with Daphne was about as uncomplicated as living arrangements got as long as Cheyenne remembered not to leave her laundry on the floor for too long, and her job wasn’t what she would call stressful.
At the same time, she also refused to consider that maybe she was well and truly sick, because of all the things she needed at that point, that was nowhere on the list, and she did not have the time for it.
There was…one other possibility it could have been, but it was one she refused to put much thought into until her stomach issues had gone on for weeks and it was beginning to seem like that was the only option.
She wasn’t sure why she didn’t mention anything to Daphne about it. Instead, she simply left a few minutes early for work one morning and picked up a pregnancy test on the way there. It seemed like the sort of thing Daphne would get sort of crazy about, though, when Cheyenne thought about it, so it was probably best to just keep it quiet until she had something at least resembling an answer.
For most of the day, the pregnancy test simply sat in Cheyenne’s purse, practically burning a hole in the fabric of the bag. Until it was time for her lunch break, and she made her escape to the bathroom, locking herself in a stall.
When the test came back positive, she couldn’t quite say she was surprised. The possibility had been niggling at the back of her mind for a couple weeks at that point, even if she had been refusing to simply open her eyes and look at it. So, no, she couldn’t say she was surprised.
The tears came either way. Quietly, though, and only for a few moments before she carefully dabbed her eyes dry with a wad of toilet paper and stepped out of the stall. She checked her reflection in the mirror on the wall, making sure her makeup wasn’t a complete horror show and that no one would be able to tell something was wrong just at a glance. She liked some of her coworkers well enough, true, but she didn’t know any of them well enough to be comfortable dropping that sort of bomb on any of them.
She supposed it was probably a good thing that her flirtation with Gregg hadn’t gone particularly far. It was good that it hadn’t extended beyond just flirting. She doubted he would really want it to continue any further once it became too apparent that she was pregnant for her to hide it.
And really, how was her boss going to react? Could she really expect her job to still be waiting for her if she had to go on maternity leave within less than a year of getting the job? True enough, she couldn’t officially be fired for it, but people could find all sorts of loopholes when they felt properly vindictive.
But those were all problems that she could think about later, when she felt a bit less out of sorts. Just then, she wasn’t really in any sort of state of mind to be making any big decisions.
She took a picture of the pregnancy test on her phone before wrapping the test up in paper towels and throwing it out.
She skipped most of her lunch break, instead returning to her desk in the lobby. She wasn’t really hungry after that.
The rest of the day seemed to drag on for a week.
*
Daphne worked similar hours to Cheyenne most days, but she also worked closer to the apartment, and so it was common for her to already be home by the time Cheyenne walked in the door. Which meant it took approximately no time at all for her to ask, “What’s wrong?” once Cheyenne walked in the door that evening.
Cheyenne took a slow, deep breath, and she stated simply, “I’m pregnant. We both know whose it is.”
Daphne stared at her for a long moment, wordless and gaping, before she simply stepped forward and engulfed Cheyenne in a hug. For a moment, they simply stood there in the middle of the kitchen, until they slowly leaned apart.
“Are you going to tell him?” Daphne asked slowly, scratching the back of her head as she started pacing around the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Cheyenne sighed, though the idea of just keeping it a secret was tempting. “I don’t want to be the sort of monster who hides that from someone. You know what I mean?”
“You’re a better woman than I am,” Daphne informed her wryly. “Want me to be there when you tell him?” she asked, and honestly, sometimes Cheyenne was convinced she had to have been a saint in a past life to have earned Daphne in her current life.
A knot of unease in her chest began to unravel, and she nodded quickly. “That would be great.”
*
Never before had Cheyenne agonized over a text message quite so much. She typed it and erased it what had to be twenty times before she finally decided to just keep it simple, and she sent Harry a message that read, ‘Can we meet up? We need to talk. It’s important.’ It seemed innocuous enough, she was pretty sure.
And then, she left her phone on the kitchen counter and went about her business around the apartment. She put away a load of dishes and started reloading the dishwasher. She poked through the fridge and started a new shopping list. She tossed a new load of laundry into the washing machine.
It seemed like an eon passed before her phone buzzed and the familiar chime that signaled a new text message went off, and she practically sprinted back into the kitchen and snatched her phone up.
She read Harry’s reply four times, and she could feel her expression twisting more and more with affronted outrage with each reread.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. It can’t be so important that you can’t just tell me like this.’
Well, alright then. If that was the game he wanted to play, then Cheyenne would play it. She attached the picture of the pregnancy test to her next message and carefully typed out, ‘Willing to talk to me now, jackass?’ before she hit send.
He changed his mind very quickly after that.
‘Meet me at that cafe tomorrow, around 2. You know which one.’
Cheyenne wrinkled her nose and texted back a simple, brief, ‘k.’ She did know which cafe he was talking about, and while she knew, logically, that it was just a good cafe and that Harry had favored it long before he met Cheyenne, it still felt like he was picking it simply to make her uncomfortable. They had spent a lot of time in that cafe together. On top of that, it seemed more than a little presumptuous. It was only sheer luck that she had the next day off. On any other day, she would need to get permission from her boss to leave early.
She showed the short string of texts to Daphne. Unsurprisingly, Daphne informed her that she would also be attending the meeting at the cafe, and Cheyenne was unexpectedly comforted by the knowledge. She didn’t think Harry would try anything untoward, but she also just did not particularly want to face him on her own. She would appreciate getting a bit of a boost when it came to moral support, and she wasn’t going to protest if Daphne was going to provide that boost.
There was just one detail remaining: she had to make sure she looked absolutely amazing when she walked through the front doors of that cafe tomorrow. Even a hair out of place would be absolutely inexcusable. Just as she expected, Daphne was happy to help make sure she looked incredible.