Her Billionaires: Boxed Set (The Complete Collection, Books 1-4)

by Kent, Julia

“The right thing?” She peered at Josie, wondering if she was implying what Laura thought she was implying.

  “I mean get the care you need. Whichever way you choose. Early treatment is best no matter what.”

  Whoosh. Laura sighed deeply. Whew. “For a minute there, I thought you were saying I should get an abortion.”

  “Not my decision to make, or to influence.” Josie shook her head, her vehemence a little unsettling. What if Laura needed to bounce ideas off her bestie? Isn’t that what BFFs were for? Another round of nausea made her close her eyes and breathe slowly, deeply, as if she were getting through a contraction.

  Staying perfectly still, Laura took in Josie’s response, her body a bit more grounded after the breaths. No judgment. “Right,” was all she could think to say.

  Josie’s face was neutral as she picked up the pink box and began opening it. “This one doesn’t need first-morning urine, so you could do it right now, if you want.”

  Oh, God. A cold wave of everything washed over her. This was real. Her entire fate was in the hands of a thin stream of pee and a little plastic stick with chemicals on it that would measure her future in the form of one, or two, pink lines. The floor seemed really close, the walls closing in on her. Josie’s face went from the look of a professionally neutral nurse to that of a concerned friend.

  “Breathe. Just breathe.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Laura gasped, hands white-knuckling the back of a chair, her kitchen screamingly pink. Now she understood Dylan’s reaction to all the color—it really was dramatic, wasn’t it? Viewing her life through an outside lens had become the new norm.

  And now through the lens of baby.

  Laura reached for her water and took a sip. “OK. But you have to be the one to read it and tell me what it says.”

  “No problem.” The concern that had crept into Josie’s eyes freaked Laura out. This was, most likely, the most mature conversation they had ever had in their entire friendship. Somber. Deliberate.

  Bring back flaky Josie, please.

  “Here. Just fill the cup and I’ll handle the dipstick.”

  “That’s what she said,” Laura joked. Josie cracked a toothy smile. She looked at the little cup. Seriously? Her entire life rested in what the pee told them? Josie was now the Pee Whisperer?

  Dissembling. “Laura?” Josie asked, nudging her gently to the bathroom.

  Memorable pees came to mind. Straddling a Big Gulp as she raced down the Pike to make it on time to a concert. Peeing on a Bush in 2000 on election night (her mom’s idea). Peeing in a trough at the outdoor amphitheater while visiting cousins in Ohio.

  Peeing for a stick that would determine her fate? This was #1 on that list now.

  What an honor.

  Filling the cup was easy, some of the stream missing and hitting her wrist, warm and cloying, Her own urine never bothered her but right now, everything bothered her, stomach a barometer of stress and hormones. Hormones that could be detected by the reactions the chemicals in the little cloth-line end of the pregnancy test’s stick. Urine-filled cup in hand, she emerged and shoved the warm container in Josie’s hand.

  “Thanks.” Josie made a flowery production of dipping the stick, waiting the appropriate amount of time, then setting it on the table.

  “Do, do, do, do,” she hummed. The music to Jeopardy, the little ditty they play while the contestants wager as much as possible to win final jeopardy—where some people bet everything and fail, and others bet everything and succeed in ways that exceed their wildest dreams.

  No final jeopardy for Laura, though. The only way out was through.

  Through pee.

  “How long does this take?”

  “Three minutes.” Josie stared at the stick as if it were a chess opponent in check. Laura forced herself to go and wash her face, then brush and floss. That should kill three minutes, right? She wandered back into the kitchen to find Josie frozen in place, face serious and scowling. She looked like a chihuahua doing an impression of Grumpy Cat.

  “How much more?”

  “Fifty seconds.”

  Laura let herself remember Mike’s hands, those gentle, enormous fingers that laced so effortlessly, so eagerly, with hers when they walked together. Dylan’s eyelashes. The scent of both when they—

  “How much longer?” Laura asked, her foot bouncing a mile a minute as she sat down at the kitchen table, legs crossed, her fingers drumming on the top.

  “Thirty seconds,” Josie answered. “Twenty less than the last time you asked.”

  “Shut up.” To her surprise, the smart ass went quiet. Damn well she better. This was no time for jokes. Josie’s fingernails caught Laura’s eye. Each was a rotation of a positive and negative pregnancy test. She inhaled sharply.

  “Jesus, Josie, your fingernails! Have some compassion!” Did she seriously go out and have the hot dogs changed to this?

  “I thought they were cute.” Josie shot Laura a sideways glance and rolled her eyes. “Someone’s lost her sense of humor completely. Besides, the hot dogs made you puke, so I just changed them.”

  “Yeah, well, I must have puked up my sense of humor along with my lunch. If it means so much to you, go find it in the toilet.”

  Ding! The oven timer beeped and Josie met her eyes, both of them scared shitless, Laura moreso. It was her life in the balance, after all, and while her best friend could be the most empathic person on the planet, she couldn’t give birth for her.

  Laura covered her eyes. “You look. I can’t.”

  “Okay.” Silence.

  “Josie?” Laura could feel the sandpaper in her voice, could hear her unacknowledged truth, knew exactly what Josie was about to say but needed her to say it. To make it real. Her stomach roiled and that full-body flush—not the good kind— flooded her senses again. She willed herself to take deep breaths. Three of them, to be exact, before Josie finally said:

  “It’s positive.”

  “It—what?” She snatched the stick away from Josie and forced herself to look. Pregnant. Belly swelling, hands growing, her face and skin felt like a sheet of someone else’s cells. Something was growing in her. And it wasn’t an infection or a crush or an idea or anything else she’d fostered or cultured or spawned.

  It was spawn.

  She knew that was one of the options. Hell, there were only two. Either she was pregnant, or she wasn’t. No third choice here. No threesome to deal with. This was binary, baby.

  And, apparently, it was baby all the way.

  “Oh, holy mother of god fucking shit damn whodathunkit?” Sprinting for the bathroom, she hit the toilet at just the right moment, projectile vomiting straight in the bowl, the water splashing up in ricochet as if to slap her out of her panic.

  “I’ll make some peppermint tea,” she heard Josie shout, her voice weak and uncertain. “No—ginger. Ginger is good for morning sickness.”

  Ah, God. This was real.

  She was pregnant. Pregnant! Her best friend was talking about morning sickness strategies. That meant this would happen again! Being sick day in and day out for weeks meant that this wasn’t going away. Wasn’t transient.

  Some might even say it was kind of permanent.

  Heaving into the bowl, the contents of her stomach scrambled to evacuate, to flee the situation, to get as far away from Knocked Up Girl as possible.

  If she could, she would, too. Except she couldn’t.

  Because she was the mommy.

  Puke. Hurl. Blargh.

  Pregnant. She was pregnant. Mommy. Someone would call her Mommy soon. At twenty-nine, she felt old enough. Inside, she felt seventeen sometimes, though. Could she really do this? How would the whole single mother thing work? Planner-brain kicked in. Look over maternity leave plan. Learn about onsite child care center. Call home and let them know she was—

  Pregnant by two men? Oh, that would go over soooo well with her devout Catholic mom. And if Dad were still alive, he’d have loved to have played with his grandchild. So
many details, and she—

  Blargh.

  Hot and sweaty, her face inches from discolored toilet water, her stomach wouldn’t settle down.

  Tap tap tap. “Laura? You need anything?”

  “A time machine,” she answered weakly. “I have something to undo.”

  A soft laugh. “I’ll leave some fresh water for you to drink right here. I hate to say this, but I have to get to work.” Pause. “Call me later?”

  “Sure.” Pressing her cheek against the underside of the toilet bowl brought conflicting relief. Who prayed to the porcelain gods without having gotten drunk the night before? Pregnancy debased her already.

  “I’ll come back after my shift and bring some ginger beer and stuff to help your stomach.” Click click click went Josie’s shoes, then the soft sound of the front door closing. Alone. When did life get so complicated? The cold toilet felt like a mother’s loving touch, which made Laura laugh at how this was all unfolding.

  It’s always complicated.

  And she was utterly alone.

  A hand fluttered to her belly.

  No.

  Not quite.

  Chapter Six

  Three months later

  “I can’t believe you still haven’t told them!” Josie hissed from the corner of her mouth as she sat next to Laura in the waiting room of the nurse-midwife’s office. Half the pregnant women seemed to be called to the midwife side, and half to the obstetrician side. Josie was so out of place there, like a toothpick in a sea of Teletubbies.

  Laura compared her growing belly to those she saw. At nineteen weeks, she was almost halfway there. That first trip to the doctor three months ago had yielded a complete shocker: she was seven weeks along. One missed period and bam! She was nearly one-sixth through the pregnancy without knowing it. All the prenatal vitamins and pregnancy yoga and morning sickness remedies helped her to get here, but Josie was harping on the one, pesky little detail she couldn’t deny her way out of for much longer.

  The past twelve weeks had been a blur, and now she was about to meet her baby via ultrasound, go home with a picture of an alien baby that people would pretend was beautiful, and here she sat after drinking a liter of fluid, her panties moist from a bladder that gave up control right around the time her shoes stopped fitting. A light breeze could make her pee at this point. A sneeze would unleash a tsunami.

  “Am I as big as her?” she whispered quietly, surreptitiously pointing to a woman who looked ready to drop any day. The shirt she wore looked like something a tent rental company made for her. She violated the laws of physics when she stood.

  “Close,” Josie guessed. Her face reddened and she tsked. “Quit changing the subject! When are you telling Dylan and Mike?”

  “Soon. After this,” she replied, pointing vaguely toward the midwife’s office. Today she would have her first ultrasound and, she hoped, learn the baby’s sex. She squirmed horribly, and not from Josie’s nagging. Her bladder was rapidly in need of its own, separate bladder. A kegel would help, but damn if she could isolate and squeeze anything down there right now.

  “You’ve been putting it off for three months, Laura! And you always say ’soon’ but it’s never ’soon.’”

  “It’s complicated.” Laura threw her a glare to stop a truck. If she said it...

  “So we’re inducing next week, when I hit thirty-eight weeks,” she heard the enormously pregnant woman say. A creeping dread seeped through her skin. Or was it a hot flash? She honestly couldn’t tell the difference any more. Holy shit! That woman was twice as far along as Laura? How could they be close to—

  “Laura Michaels?” A medical assistant appeared, chart in hand. The drill was simple for her normal appointments; go on in to the bathroom, pee, dip the sticks in, and if anything came back irregular, report it to the midwife. Then sit in the waiting area again until called.

  For an ultrasound, though, she went back through the maze of medical equipment and desks to a tiny room with an exam table crammed in. The platform seemed unusually high. Climb? Dude, she could barely wipe herself these days, the stretch a, well...stretch. Climb?

  “Climb on up,” the male technician directed, his voice pleasant and his demeanor kind.

  “With this exploding bladder, I’ll squirt like a firehose if I lift my leg.”

  Josie laughed. The tech seemed amused. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.” All these baby people kept saying that to her. If it was supposed to put her at ease it did, but also left an unsettled feeling, as if her birth experience weren’t unique, as if everything she was going through and that seemed so special were just...ordinary. Being ordinary didn’t trouble her, in general, but the sensations and blossoming of this new life within her were so special, so life-altering, that she wished everyone around her would give just a little more “wow!” when they interacted with her.

  Or, maybe, what she really wished was that she had a partner to go through all of this with her. Resting her hand on her belly, she wondered when she’d feel the baby move. Hopelessly eager, every pocket of gas, tweaked muscle, you name it—she braced and held her breath, hoping...

  And wasn’t that something she should share with the baby’s father?

  Fathers, an evil voice whispered in her mind.

  Somehow she managed, with Josie’s help, to get up on that torture table. Reclining on her back pushed her womb against her bladder, making her instantly homicidal.

  “Oh, man, can’t I pee? Please?”

  “Just a few minutes,” the tech said, then explained the procedure. She hiked up her maternity shirt, a cute print from the Gap. Shopping for maternity clothing had turned out to be liberating, because the designers expected you to have breasts and a belly! Her shirt was covered with hippie swirls of pinks and turquoises, with lots of white thrown in. The panel on her maternity jeans was a pale blue, stretchy jersey added where the zipper and button normally would be.

  She wanted to wear these clothes forever.

  Maybe you will, if you can’t lose the baby fat, that same voice said. Gah.

  The cold gel made her kegels clench, helping keep in her urine but adding a sensory overload to that general region. The ultrasound wand the tech used went on the gel and soon she could see her little peanut, all bones and beating heart, floating upside down in an an enormous sea of black.

  “There’s the baby,” the tech said in a neutral voice, taking measurements. From the start, Laura had decided to have a low-technology birth, so this was the first ultrasound. Meeting her baby visually brought tears to her eyes, her heart swelling, and even Josie was overcome with emotion.

  “Oh, Laura,” she whispered, voice choked. She squeezed her shoulder.

  Her child. That womb pressing hard against all that water, making her eyes cross and her ribs ache, contained a little growing human being that was going to come out in twenty-one weeks and be her little, precious baby.

  “Boy or girl?” Leave it to Josie to get to the point.

  The tech laughed, obviously accustomed to the question. “First off, do you want to know?”

  “Yes!” the women answered in unison.

  “Then give me a few minutes to do the required measurements, and then I’ll try to see. No guarantees—it’s all about whether the fetus is in the right position, and what we can see with the machine.” Laura nodded and Josie seemed already to know that. The room was so tiny that Josie had to jockey for space with the tech. And it was getting warmer in here. Plus, she felt like an overstretched balloon that would burst if anyone breathed hard.

  Loving warmth coursed through her. Baby. Her body, which she’d despised most of her life for its inadequacies, for letting her down time and again with men, was now ripe with purpose and growing a human being. How could she hate it right now? It was building, layer by layer, system by system, a whole ’nother human who would be part of the next generation.

  She was a goddess!

  Finally done with measurements, the tech stopped, frowned, and said,
“Excuse me. I’ll be right back.” The click of the closing door felt like a death sentence, the air sucked out of the room as Laura’s entire body switched into panic mode.

  “That can’t be good? Why would he leave? Do you see anything?” Oh, God, no. Just no. Nothing could be wrong, right? She hadn’t planned for anything to be wrong.

  Josie peered at the screen. She shrugged. Non-chalant and cool, she made a questioning face and replied, “I don’t see anything obvious, but I’m not an ultrasound tech.” Her hand on Laura’s felt reassuring. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Maybe all your talk about peeing made him need to go.”

  “Don’t make me laugh or I’ll give you a golden shower, Josie.”

  “Now you’re turning me on.” The laugh did make her nearly pee, giving her a few fleeting seconds of amusement, shifting away from worry. A knock, then her midwife came in, followed by the tech.

  Fuck.

  “Sherri? What are you doing here. They said this was just a routine screening and I wouldn’t see you.” What she wanted to say was Go away! Nothing’s wrong Nothing can be wrong so go away and let me not hear what you’re about to say! but something in her knew that wasn’t the case. She gripped Josie’s hand like she was drowning.

  Josie gripped back.

  Sherri’s eyes were kind but guarded, wrinkles forming everywhere as she smiled. Somewhere in her sixties, she had a relaxed, natural look to her, with dark brown eyes, tanned skin and long, gray hair braided in a thick rope that stretched over her ass. Today she wore a loose, flowing jacket over a tank top and a long skirt, an outfit not unlike many in Laura’s closet.

  “The tech just asked me to take a quick look at something.” Her voice was smooth and practiced. Josie nodded, eyes on Laura, her professional nurse face in overdrive. They were all hiding something from Laura, and she did not like this one bit. Sherri introduced herself to Josie and they shook hands in a perfunctory way.

  The midwife and tech put their heads together and murmured medical terms Laura strained to hear. She really was about to explode, her vagina starting to pulsate—and not the good kind of pulsating.