“She came to the house. She let herself in; she had a key.”
“Because I gave it to her.”
“She could have burgled the place. What were you thinking?”
My temper flared. “What did you say to her?” I asked.
“I simply stated the facts. I let her know that she was completely out of her depth trying to needle her way into your life. Men like you did not associate with women like her, at least not in any serious way and I sent her packing, which is exactly what I am going to do now.”
I had lived through this my whole life. My mother had never stopped meddling in my life. I allowed it because, at the beginning at least, I wanted her to feel like I was there for her. She was a widow after my father died and far as I knew, she never dated. It was just us. I didn’t want her to be alone so I almost took my father’s role as her emotional support system. It never got that serious in the beginning but now she was actually fucking with my family, my future child and the woman I loved. I could be a good son without letting her walk all over me.
“You’re out of your mind,” I told her.
“You’re wasting your time with a woman who will never amount to anything close to what you do.”
“You’re a meddling bitch,” I spat.
She looked like she was about to pass out.
“What the hell did she do to you? What has she got you smoking? What’s she been telling you to make you act like this?”
“You’re wrong about her, mother and you’re wrong about me. I wish I was good enough for her. I try every day to be the man that she deserves.”
“Don’t be a fool. She is nothing. She is no one. She’s wasting your time. It’s stupid to continue entertaining her. It’s time to get serious. Stop having fun with this girl and marry someone reasonable.”
“I am a fool. I’ve let you meddle in my life for too long. At first, I didn’t want to disappoint you after dad died. Now, I just want my life back.”
“Charles!”
“I’m done, mother. I love you but I can’t let you do this to me anymore.”
She was rattled. I didn’t want to disappoint her, but this was the only way I was getting to her. This was a step too far. She couldn’t come into my life and tell me the woman I loved, who was carrying my baby that she wasn’t worthy of doing so.
“I can’t let you make a mistake like this. What would your father think?”
“He would have loved Brenna because I love her, mum. And it's not a mistake, it’s my future. Brenna’s pregnant. We’re having a baby.”
She froze.
“You’re what?”
“She’s having my child and I’m marrying her, mother. I’m not asking for your approval or even your opinion. It’s happening.”
“I forbid it, Charles. That tramp will not become part of our family.”
I took a deep breath. “That tramp is carrying your grandchild. You can accept that or never get to be a part of their life.”
“You would never do that to me.”
“You’re asking me to pick, mother. I don’t want to do it but if you make me… it isn’t going to be you.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, clutching her temples. “You can’t do this to me.”
“I’m not doing anything to you, mother. I’m starting a family with the woman I love, like a normal man. This is exactly what you wanted. A decent mother would be happy for me.”
She burst into tears. I felt a tug in my heart. I didn’t want it to come to this but I didn’t see any other way she would understand. This was the last straw. I walked up and led her to the door.
“You can’t do this to me,” she said, blubbering.
I sighed, already exhausted. Apologizing would be so much easier but it would just take us right back where we started. Brenna was my life now. If my mother’s prejudice made any kind of sense then I would listen to her, but it didn’t.
“It’s your move now, mum. You can be a grandmother to mine and Brenna’s child if you’re ready to accept her. You lose us if you can’t.”
She looked at me through tears. “Charles, please,” she said.
“Good night mother.” I closed the door, remembering to lock it this time. I leaned back, letting out a breath that felt like it took fifty pounds off of me. That was it. We weren’t having that discussion again. She could be a grandmother, or she could reject my new family. I swallowed. She hadn’t always been this bad. Before my dad died, she was more… normal. She didn’t have nearly as many airs about her. She came from money so she was as spoiled as anyone with that kind of background was, but she hadn’t been nearly as judgmental or classist as she was now.
After he died, it was like she felt she had to overcompensate for no longer being married to a man as powerful and established as he had been. She felt she needed to seem as good or even better than she had been when she was married to him. She felt like she needed to have the perfect image and that included the perfect match for me. She took it too far and now we were here. I had said my piece, even if it meant never talking to my mother again. I was never debating Brenna’s place in my life again.
I took the stairs three at a time, heading up to Brenna’s room. Why didn’t she tell me what had happened between her and my mother? I would have done something. I would have protected her. I had no idea that they had had a confrontation seven years ago. So many things made sense now.
I knocked at her door.
“Brenna?”
Nothing. I knocked again.
“Brenna, it's me. Let me in, I want to talk to you.”
Still nothing. I paused and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked.
“Brenna?” I said, entering the room. It was empty. I checked the bathroom and the closet but she wasn’t there. I checked my room, the guest rooms, the upper floor, and the terrace, everywhere. By the time I got back down to the living room, I was panicking.
“Brenna? Brenna!” I checked my office and the kitchen. Nothing.
Shit, she was gone. She was running. It was too much for her and she was hiding. I cursed, going back upstairs, running through all the places she could possibly be. I already checked the upstairs but I needed to get something.
We hadn’t quite gotten to the point where we spent every night together but often enough, we spent the night in each others’ rooms. I walked to my nightstand and opened it. The velvet-covered ring box was still there, right where it had been for the past few weeks. I didn’t usually keep anything in there so I was never scared that Brenna would find it looking for something else.
I was making it happen tonight. She wasn’t running from me again. I’d never push her away. It was the two of us from here on out.
28
Brenna
I always knew that this place was small, but goddamnit.
I looked around the apartment. How was it that it looked even smaller now than it did when it had all of mine and my mother's belongings in it? It felt so empty. My mother hadn’t actually been living here for several weeks now. I had Charlie to thank for that.
She was living comfortably at a posh recovery center. She had around-the-clock care and was receiving treatment from countries leading oncologists, all on Charlie’s dime. Not even in ten lifetimes would I have been able to afford to send her there. I talked to her every day, and she seemed to be getting better. She was responding to the treatment and because there were other patients there, she was making friends and had a community so she wasn’t as lonely.
Yet another thing I had to thank Charles Hampton for giving me. My eyes started to well up. I had just left the house. Sitting there on the armchair in my old apartment and the only thing I could think about was him. What had life even been like before I knew him? Not just meeting him again this second time around, I meant since the first time. Working at Dana point beach and having a massive crush on the cute lifeguard.
That summer completely changed my life. Charlie had transformed my life in so many way
s. My hand went to my stomach. That was what it was, the pregnancy hormones. That was why I was crying, not the fact that my child was going to grow up with split parents. People made it work all the time, but I wanted Charlie. Our relationship was over before it even got a real chance to start, because he cared more about what his mother and his peers thought than about me.
We were just too different. My world and his world would never meet. There was just no overlap. He was lucky that his mother was so meddlesome, in fact. It was better that he found out I was the wrong choice right now instead of everything blowing up when we had a baby to raise. We would be at one of his fancy functions and it would not take even two seconds for him to realize that I was more of an embarrassment than an asset. I couldn’t hang off his arm and look nice, schmoozing with strangers. I had not gone to the same schools that they had, had the same upbringing, made the same money. They would clock me in a second, and I would just make him look bad.
Enough of that, and he would be calling his mother up again to set him up with an oil heiress or something who he actually had something in common with. It was better this way. He could go ahead and hurry up, go live the life that he was born to live. And me? I would live the life that I was born to live too.
The buzzer rang, scaring me half to death. It for sure was not my mother, and I hadn’t ordered a pizza or anything. I stood up and answered the intercom.
“Yeah?”
“Oh my God, Brenna, you’re here. Please, let me up.” I almost started crying again. He sounded so earnest, so desperate. I believed that he was worried and he wanted to see me. I believed that he loved me. I loved him. That wasn’t the point though. Love just wasn’t going to be enough in this case. It was like that sometimes. In some cases, other forces were stronger. I would never be the picture-perfect wife that a man like him needed at his side. Sooner or later, no matter how much he loved me, he would realize that I was only slowing him down. At that point, no amount of love, no baby, nothing would be able to bridge that gap.
“I am buzzing you in.”
I paced small circles waiting for him. This was it, the breakup speech. It was cliché, but he had to know that it was me and not him. I wished that I could be that person for him, but I just couldn’t. His mother was right and he needed to stop fighting her. One day, when he and his perfect wife were raising their perfect child, grooming him or her to be a perfect heir or heiress, he would probably thank her. I would move on quietly. I didn’t want anything from him. In no time, I would just be another woman from his past, just like it had been before we met up again.
All I wanted was one thing. The baby.
In my defense, I never planned on becoming one of those surrogates who went back on her contract and kept the baby. This has started as a surrogacy agreement, but it was something very different now. Now, we were just a couple that hadn’t worked out but happened to have a baby on the way. The baby, however, unlike most babies was tied up in a contract. It was probably going to take forever to get out of it. It was going to be a nightmare.
What the hell was I thinking? Going up against a billionaire? That was basically a guaranteed loss, but I was banking on the love that Charlie and I shared, whatever was left of it at that point, to give us an amicable breakup. Hopefully, since his child was involved he wouldn’t completely ruin me in court. Not completely, just a little. I could probably take just a little, as long as I got to have my child. They were innocent in all this. The baby was going to be the purest, and truest thing that came out of this relationship, and I did not, I was not going to lose them.
I was already a mother. I loved this baby even though we hadn’t met yet. Charlie wouldn’t take them away from me. I could deal with split custody. I could deal with anything that wasn’t total isolation from me and my side of the family. My side of the family was basically just me and my mother. I didn’t want to deprive her of the chance to meet her first and probably only grandchild.
Mom would have to find out about this whole mess now. She knew some things. It was kind of hard to come up with an explanation for the care center without outing Charlie as my boyfriend who had money. Now he was going to be my ex who had money. She didn’t know about the baby yet and she didn’t know how our relationship started as a surrogacy arrangement. That was going to be fun to reveal to her.
And I had totally quit my job already too.
Whatever. I would get through it. I always did.
The doorbell rang. My hands shook as I answered it. Charlie walked in.
“I thought it would be more of a fight to get you to let me up,” he said. I swear I went over what I wanted to say to him. The words completely died in my throat.
“Yeah… sure,” I stammered, closing the door. I didn’t usually get nervous around him. The last time I could remember it happening was our first night having sex when he took my virginity. We were probably tied for nervousness then. I held back a laugh.
“Why did you follow me here?”
“I wanted to see whether you were okay and to give you an apology. My mother was completely out of line saying what she said about you.”
“Yeah, she was,” I said.
“I can’t blame you for leaving.”
“Is that all you came to do?” I asked, crossing my arms. I tried to collect the pieces of the speech that I had prepared to give him. Seeing him had scrambled my brain.
“I wasn’t upfront with you about who I was and the kind of money my family had. That was selfish of me. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want anyone to know about the title. They’d treat me differently and I just wanted to be me. Just Charlie.”
“Would have been a good way to get friends,” I quipped.
“Friends who only wanted to be around you when they needed connections or wanted to ride the private jet?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You have a private jet?”
“I was planning on telling you. I swear.”
“When?”
“Actually, I had it all planned out.” He paused and sunk his hands into his pockets looking sheepish. He looked so much like the boy from seven years ago I almost cried again. “I was planning on telling you when I finally asked you to marry me.”
My brain shorted. “When you what?”
He laughed a little. “When I proposed. I was going to ask you to marry me, seriously. I even got a ring. This one.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets and in one of them was a velvet-covered box.
“Can I see it?” I asked.
He showed me, after getting down on one knee first. My eyes almost fell out of my head. Nestled in the velvet was a silver band ring with a massive white princess cut diamond set in it. It was so beautiful it didn’t look real. Right on cue again, tears.
“Charlie, what the hell?”
“I don’t want to live without you. I told my mother that and I’m telling you now. She’s been trying to set me up for years and it has never worked because I wanted you. Only you Brenna, always you. If you’ll have me, I want to make you my wife.”
I didn’t know what to say. No, I knew what to say; yes. Of course, yes! I loved him, of course, I wanted to be his wife; I was just speechless. I nodded, the words escaping me. I watched through tears as he slid the ring onto my finger. He stood and cupped my face gently, kissing me. Right then, I felt a fluttering in my belly. I gasped.
“What?” he asked. I touched my stomach. It felt like carbonation in a can of soda. Something definitely present and making itself known.
“The baby. I felt them move,” I said. He touched my stomach.
“I don’t know if you can feel it.” We waited for it to happen again. “The doctor said I’d be able to feel them before you could,” I said.
“Later then,” he said.
“Later. I mean, I’m not going anywhere.”
“You better not.” He kissed me again. “I love you, Brenna.”
“I love you, Charlie.” I felt so full and light at the same time. This was it. No more do
ubt, no more worrying about where we went from here. It was going to be the two of us… three of us.
We made our way to my old bedroom. He started taking his clothes off but I stopped him.
“Let me do it,” I told him. He stood still and let me undress him. I felt the heat in his eyes as he watched me pull each piece of clothing off his body. I wanted to enjoy this.
His underwear was last. I pulled them down over his thighs and he kicked them to the side. He immediately reached for me.
“Wait. Not yet.” I backed up until I was sitting on the bed.
“Your turn, babe,” he said. I shook my head, sitting on the bed watching him. I could practically see the frustration radiating off of him.
“Don’t move.” I maintained eye contact as I slowly peeled my clothes off one piece at a time. I started with my sweater and headed south. I popped the hook of my bra, freeing my breasts and saw Charlie’s hand grip his cock.
I was already turned on by giving him a show, but seeing his physical reaction to me stripping in front of him was doing things to me. By the time I got my panties off, they were soaked. Charlie noticed.
“You're killing me, babe,” he said. He was killing me. My body was priming myself for what was to come; Charlie’s raw strength and desire unleashed full force on my body. I loved the way he felt inside me, around me, on top of me. Everything he said he felt for me, he expressed physically when we fucked.
I sat on the bed and scooted all the way back so that I was against the wall. I spread my legs. Charlie's jaw clenched. I let my hand move over my neck, skim over my breasts, abdomen, on its way down to my pussy. I alternated sinking two fingers inside me and massaging my clit.
“You are so beautiful, babe,” Charlie said. I felt beautiful when he looked at me. I was confident in my body and knew the effect that I could have on some men, but with Charlie, I felt like I was some kind of rare jewel that he worshipped because it was the only one of its kind.
My orgasm started to build in my core. Charlie and I consumed each other through our eyes, each touching ourselves where we could not touch each other. It was so erotic, so dirty. Why was it even hotter than having actual sex in a way?
Admit You Miss Me: A Surrogate Pregnancy Romance (Irresistible Billionaires Book 1) Page 17
