by Cee Smith
After taking all of my vitals, Dr. Reynolds took a couple vials of blood and did a simple physical before letting us know we could have a seat—his hand waving in the direction of the club chairs on the other end of the room. Dominic stepped forward, holding out his hand to help me down from the table. I tugged my arm away once I was righted and followed him over to the chairs.
We sat for a while, me looking out the window and him reading a book that was sitting on the edge of the coffee table. I tried taking a peek at what he was reading, but all I could see was the thickness of the book and the sienna brown color of the cover. I was grateful for the respite. Curling up in the chair, I almost dozed off while waiting for Dr. Reynolds to complete his tests.
A cackle erupted from Dr. Reynolds, which sliced through the silence like a mandolin, jolting Dominic and me from our quiet corners. What started out as a laugh turned into an all out chortle-fest, and we watched, baffled by the absurdity of a doctor cradling his stomach in laughter.
When he finally turned to face us, he wiped invisible tears from his eyes before walking over to the chair I sat in.
“What the hell? Care to share?” Dominic asked gruffly as he rose from his spot in the adjacent chair.
“You are a real gem, aren’t you?” Dr. Reynolds said, rubbing the top of the chair at my back. I turned to face him, disturbed by where he was going with his outburst.
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but I’d appreciate it if you got to the point.”
“Well you’re off the hook, Hailey. In your state, you’re hardly the best donor.”
“What is this? What are you getting at?” Dominic said. His impatience mirrored my own. I was tired of Dr. Reynolds beating around the bush. Clearly he knew something we didn’t, and he was teasing little bits of information here and there, dangling the proverbial carrot, and I was growing tired of his games. Dominic was probably used to his unusual behavior, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to be around him any longer than I had to.
“She’s pregnant,” he said with a slight laugh.
The only sound that punctuated the air was the soft chuckles of Dr. Reynolds. Dominic and I stood stunned in silence by the doctor’s words. Pregnant? I couldn’t be pregnant. I was on the shot. My fingers started counting back to my last OB/GYN visit, seeing if the dates were correct. Pregnant? That would explain the sickness, but no.
I was in shock, not wanting to believe the truth of the doctor’s words. Dominic’s liver problems weren’t even on my radar anymore. At the moment, I didn’t care what this meant for him.
“How could this happen? You saw her file. She was on the shot.”
“So she was. It’s rare, but not impossible. Well, congratulations! You’re going to be a dad.”
“I don’t know what you’re so fucking happy about. No surgery means no money. I don’t believe it. It’s not possible. I want proof. I want an ultrasound.” Dominic wavered from anger to disbelieving in a flash. I heard their voices, but the words didn’t make sense. Everything was happening too fast. Pregnant? I had barely finished school. I was just starting my life. There was no way I could take care of a baby.
I was glad Dr. Reynolds was there to keep Dominic occupied, because I couldn’t even risk looking at him right now. I didn’t know how to feel about the news of a baby. My lips turned up, and I felt a laugh work its way up my throat, but I clamped my lips tight. Sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed, I laugh at the most inappropriate things. That was definitely one of those moments.
Before I knew it, Dominic was rushing to my chair and pulling me up and walking me back over to the exam table. I rushed alongside him still swept up in the news of carrying a baby.
A baby. I was supposed to be happily married and already living out in the suburbs before I planned to have a baby. This definitely wasn’t in the plan that Dominic made when he took me.
What kind of father will he be? I shook my head of those thoughts. There was no way I could think of having a baby with this monster. I cradled my stomach as I sat on the exam table, wondering if the baby would be a monster like him.
I shifted my pants and underwear, exposing my lower stomach and felt Dominic’s eyes latch on to the little bit of flesh revealed. His breathing was deep and heavy, easily heard from where he sat. I tried to focus my attention to everything that Dr. Reynolds was doing. He squirted some cold lubricant across my lower stomach and pulled a wand with a curved tip up to my skin.
“I imagine you’re less than eight weeks, so you won’t be able to see much,” he said, moving the wand across my abdomen.
It was there in the basement of my abductor’s home that I heard my baby’s heartbeat for the first time. It felt so surreal. It was a slight thump mixed with a swooshing sound, like a sound heard underwater.
“Show me.”
Dominic leaned over the table to see the monitor. I watched his pinched face loosen and smooth. It almost looked like he was happy, but that couldn’t have been right.
“There.” Dr. Reynolds pointed to what looked like a black hole in a cloud of white. It didn’t look like anything really—maybe if you squinted you could make out something fuzzy within the hole—but there was nothing that overtly said there was a baby in there.
“Leave us,” Dominic said.
“But we need to discuss the next steps.”
“And we will. Later.”
I watched as Dr. Reynolds took off his gloves and put some items in his bag before leaving the room.
I didn’t know how to interact with Dominic. I was too absorbed in my own emotions to think or care how he felt about this discovery.
“Well this explains your sickness.”
“Dominic—”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“What? This changes everything. How do you expect me to stay your prisoner and have your baby? Or, do you expect to hold both of us hostage? I’ll force abort before I bring a baby into the world just to be held prisoner by you.”
“Don’t you ever say anything like that again! I would never hit you in this condition, but don’t push me.”
I was surprised that he was so angry by my words. He didn’t really seem like a family-oriented guy, but clearly I had struck a chord. A few beats passed before he continued, “I guess it was bound to happen at some point.”
“Wait. Did you plan this? Do you want me to have your baby?”
His words made me think that this wasn’t necessarily an accident. If I wasn’t on birth control and he was healthy, would he have tried to get me pregnant?
“Obviously, I didn’t plan it like this, Hailey. I meant what I said about this being your life now. I imagined at some point, yes, you would be the mother of my children.”
“You sound fucking crazy. Do you know how fucking crazy you sound right now? I can’t believe…I don’t even know what to say to you.”
I felt like I was starting to lose it. I just wanted to go back to sleep and wake up to a whole new day—one where I wouldn’t be sick or have to meet with Dr. Reynolds or find out the monster that had stolen my heart had impregnated me.
Luckily, there was a knock at the door that interrupted us. Dominic opened it wide enough to allow me a brief glimpse of a hefty build that could only be Scout. Their voices were low, and I couldn’t quite make out what was being said, but then Dominic’s head whipped back to me, and I felt like I should cower beneath his glare. I wanted to press myself into the wall and disappear.
I caught a few words as they finished talking, but not enough to piece together the gist of the conversation. Dominic ended by telling Scout he would be up in a second and then turned, rushing towards me in long strides that had me backing up until I bumped the back of the chair.
“What did you do?” he shouted in my face. When he was within arm’s distance, he snatched up my arms and gave me a shake until my head lolled on my shoulders.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I yanked my arms out of his hold and stood up t
aller as I squared off against his assaulting eyes.
“I’m sure you thought you were being clever, but I know it was you, and now we’ll both pay for your mistake. Go upstairs! You’ve caused enough trouble for one day.”
“You act like I got myself pregnant. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were probably patting yourself on the back for a job well done.”
With his hand still encasing my upper arm, he gave me a jerk as he rushed us over to the door. My feet tripped a little as Dominic pushed me back out into the hallway, and I glared at the door he closed between us before making my way back upstairs, where I paced back and forth about what he thought I did.
Sampson.
I had been following the situation with Sampson a little closer after our meeting at the ball. When Robert reached out to me to let me know that he hadn’t heard a peep from Sampson, it put me on alert. For months he had been haggling us about partnering up, and then all of a sudden, radio silence. Something wasn’t right.
There was a very slim possibility that he had met someone at the ball who he felt could take him to the next level, but I knew from sources that he hadn’t approached anyone else since he first contacted me about the deal, four months ago.
Scout was given orders to keep a close watch on Sampson and alert me if any flags went up. When he knocked on the door, interrupting my scheduled time with Dr. Reynolds and Hailey, I knew that whatever information he had found wouldn’t be good. In all the time Scout had worked for me, he almost never interrupted my appointments with Dr. Reynolds. Apparently, the software installed on Sampson’s personal computer had a hit while searching Hailey’s name. I looked back at Hailey—always the inquisitive one; her neck was craned trying to see around the cracked door.
Somehow, Hailey had tipped Sampson off. I wasn’t sure when she’d done it, but sometime at the ball, she had gotten through to him. With just one Google search, he would find out all he needed to know about Hailey. After her disappearance, news stations across the globe had run articles about the blonde American girl who went missing in the Great Barrier Reef. Between whatever she said to Sampson and the bit of information he gleaned from the Internet, he would be able to put two and two together that I abducted Hailey. Sampson wasn’t the type to care that I had kidnapped a girl—no, that wasn’t out of bounds for a man like him—but he was desperate for this deal, and a desperate man was one who used everything in his arsenal to get what he wanted.
I would have to be careful in how I handled this situation with Sampson. There was too much at stake now. Sampson was from a country that had one of the highest cases of women being sold into sexual slavery, so it was common for him to see slaves, but seeing me with a woman who’d been reported missing played right into his hand. I was someone highly respected in my community—a community that didn’t mind what you did behind closed doors so long as it didn’t disrupt their lives. If this thing with Hailey went public, there’d be no end in sight for how much damage this would cause.
Sitting in my office, all I could think about was Hailey and her face when Dr. Reynolds said she was pregnant. Her eyes were bright, and her lips were parted. I felt myself stiffen as I thought of her laid out on the exam table with her belly slightly exposed. Just the sight of her skin made me hungry with need. It had been nearly a week since the ball, and I was aching, waking up with hard-ons that pulsed and throbbed, begging for release.
There was a hidden happiness that radiated from Hailey’s face. I was sure hearing she was pregnant was quite the surprise, but what surprised me most was that she wasn’t disgusted. She wasn’t angry. She didn’t hate me for what I’d done to her. In fact, she looked resilient, like a little warrior. My little warrior.
I had to think about how I was going to handle everything. The left side of my head pulsed with a headache that pricked the back of my eyes like an icepick separating my thoughts. There were too many variables in my life right now: an upset and pregnant Hailey, a rusty liver with no donor, and a scorned businessman.
The first thing I had to do was take care of Sampson. I couldn’t trust what a man of his nature would do, and I had to protect Hailey and the baby; they came first. Everything else could be figured out after that.
“Scout!” I yelled through the open door of my office.
Scout’s bulky frame slipped past the double doors and stood on the other side of my desk.
“Yessir?”
“I want four of your men guarding the house while we’re gone. We need to move Hailey to a safer location, and I’ll want you as well as two other men with us. How soon can you make this happen?”
“A few hours tops. Are you taking the cabin north of here?”
“Yes. I don’t want to go too far. Make sure everything is arranged, and let me know when you’re ready.”
Scout nodded his head twice and moved swiftly through the door, cell phone already in hand as he left the room.
***
I stood in the doorway of the closet looking into Hailey’s room. Seeing her in there reminded me of the plane ride before the ball. She hadn’t been in this room in weeks, and then with one wrong move, she had reverted to spending all her time cooped up, alone. I didn’t like that she used the room to distance herself from me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was to blame for everything that had happened to her since her abduction. The only difference between now and then was that I actually cared about how upset this was making her.
The plane incident seemed to be the turning point for us, or maybe it was the talk we had the days preceding? It seemed Hailey had a real knack for saying just the thing that would burrow into my mind and make me question everything. Hailey deserved an apology. She deserved a lot, but to say sorry would be empty if I didn’t do anything to change her situation.
I hated that she found out about the transplant the way she did, and after learning about her pregnancy, things just went from bad to fucking worse, and I could only hope that was the worst of it.
All of this was starting to fuck with my head, but when I looked at her body curled up on the bed, body hugging the pillow, with a book held between her little hands, all I wanted to do was curl up next to her. I wanted to feel her in my arms, on my lap, listening to her breathe as I read to her. I stepped forward, moved by my imagination that she would let something like that happen between us, but then I stopped.
A few weeks before then, she might have curled up against me and let me caress her with a gentle touch and soothing words, but the current Hailey would have rather stuck me with a branding rod just to watch my skin melt.
Pregnant. I couldn’t deny the jolt of electricity that sparked inside my veins when I heard those words. She was mine. Those words never felt as true as they did in that moment. Hailey was mine. That baby was mine. No matter what happened from that moment forward, nothing could change the truth of those words.
What I couldn’t say and what Hailey didn’t understand was that I had already lost everything I could ever lose in life; my parents’ disappearance gutted me. The man she saw now was a product of that loss. Up until I found Hailey, I was only obsessed with finding out the truth about my parents’ mysterious disappearance, but then with one picture of her face, I had found the one thing that dampened the pain of my loss—Hailey. The idea of a baby gave me hope that maybe I had more to live for than my own selfish reasons.
“Have you eaten anything since this afternoon?” Her body jumped at the sound of my voice. Placing her book down, she turned to look at me.
“Clema brought up some soup a bit ago.”
“Good. You should get some rest. We should be leaving here in a few hours.”
Her lips parted as if she was going to say something, but then she thought better of it. She hesitated a few minutes more before responding.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere not too far from here. Come on.”
I wanted to carry her, but her eyes stopped me when I took a step forward. Fixin
g the situation with Hailey was going to be a lot harder than just picking up and moving to a safer location.
The truth of the matter was I took her because I needed her, because if anything were to happen to her, I would be completely lost. I didn’t know her, but in a way she was a part of me long before I ever took her. This thing with Sampson just reminded me of all the reasons I needed to keep Hailey, because she wasn’t safe out there without me.
She followed me through the closet, passing the bags I had Clema pack for us. She curled up in bed, and I wondered what it would be like to see her round with my child—to see her carrying my baby, our baby, in her arms?
I felt like my chest cracked open, and all of these things that I had closed myself off to were pouring out—all of my worries, fears, doubts, needs, and hopes. She did that. She expunged all of these feelings from me, and like a woman who’d dropped her purse, I was left scrounging around the floor scooping up all these things I had spent so much time hiding.
There was no use chaining her up. With so much on my mind and very little time before Scout was ready for us to go, I wouldn’t be able to sleep before we needed to leave.
Hailey fell asleep quickly. I knew because moments later she rolled over like a cat seeking warmth and cuddled into my side. I let my arm fall around her and pulled her tightly against my chest, running my fingers through the hair that fell across my shoulder.
Why couldn’t she be this easygoing when she was awake? No matter how hard she tried to hide it, I knew she had feelings for me. She asked questions to get to know me—you wouldn’t do that for someone you had no interest in knowing. I watched her on the cameras; she looked lonely when I wasn’t around. Sometimes I would watch the before and after of my arrival, just to see how affected she was by my presence. And it was apparent I affected her. Her face would light up, her body would turn in whatever direction I was in the room. She looked open and responsive. She admitted she had started feeling something for me, but would she have said those words if it weren’t for her walking in on me and Dr. Reynolds’ conversation?
