Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 167
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 162520 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 813(@200wpm)___ 650(@250wpm)___ 542(@300wpm)
Tell him. No, not today. He’ll ask, Who’s the dad? And the truth is, I don’t know whose sperm defied the condom and rebelliously fertilized my egg. I’m luckily in a period of my life where there are only two possibilities.
Thank God.
It could have been worse, I’ve been telling myself. I’ve been sleeping around since I was a teenager. Sex is an energy release. It’s the purge of adrenaline after a job. It’s necessary in my life, like coffee in the morning or dessert after dinner.
I know the risks, but I’ve always used protection.
It could have been worse.
My two possibilities aren’t even bad. I just hate that this will change the status quo. I’m not ready for it to. Which is why only Phoebe knows, and it will remain purely an only Phoebe situation until I gather the mental fortitude to include the others.
Anyway, I only learned that I’m incubating a human a week ago. It’s sunk in about as well as a pool floatie. If not for the nausea and my nipples being so sore that shower water feels like a form of archaic torture, I would demand the doctor to run the test again.
Eight weeks.
I’m only eight weeks pregnant. I have time. As long as I stop losing sense of it, that is.
Hurrying around, I peek under pillows, detangling the fluffy comforter. No phone appears.
My mind whirls in too many directions. So…I fell back to sleep while Oliver read to me then. I didn’t intend to sleep this late, but he must’ve wanted me to. Which is good. I need sleep. I’ve been trying to sleep more, in fact. Insomnia is a beast I’ve needed help to beat, and it still rears its horned head every single night.
The name of my new personal game: Do Not Lose This Baby. I can’t think about whether I’ll even be a good mom when I’m terrified I might cause this baby’s demise before it’s even born. Lately I’ve felt like a wrecking ball inside my own body. Like I cause more harm than good, and I want to prove to myself that I won’t harm this baby.
I snatch my phone deep under the sheets, and my eyes widen at a missed message from Addison Tinrock. My mom. Just not in the biological sense. “Shit, shit.”
“What shit?” Oliver asks while I shove my phone in his chest and beeline for the closet.
My pulse is going haywire as I fling aside grungy shirts and cargo pants. “Today is Saturday, April 21, 2012.”
Oliver flips my phone in his hand like a pancake. “Is there something significant about the date? Other than the obvious.”
“The obvious?” Why do I have so many cargo pants? I need a dress. Uh, not that dress. Too see-through. Very nightclub in Miami, which is the last place I wore it.
“The obvious: it being two weeks since your little brother decided that poison was a practical tool to pull like it’s the fifteenth century and we’re the Borgias.” He catches my gaze, and his smile peeks out. “Down with the queen. Off with her head.”
Claudia Koning Waterford is…deceased.
Jake’s mom.
By Trevor Tinrock’s doing. My nineteen-year-old brother—he went off-script. It was unplanned. A mistake…well, okay, it was premeditated by Trev, but for the rest of us, it was unintended. Claudia was our mark, but Phoebe should’ve pulled the rope via blackmail.
We never had the opportunity to cage Claudia in her own misdeeds.
Two weeks have passed, and everything is messier since Jake didn’t inherit the entire Koning fortune and all assets, but rather, Claudia’s will detailed a complicated split between her firstborn and thirdborn son.
Trent (asshole) and Jake (not an asshole…very sweet, actually).
All we wanted was for Jake to become sole heir. He needed to obtain everything. Then he’d pay us out.
But it’s not impossible to salvage the scattered pieces of the Koning job. It’s still alive.
I tear a simple black dress off the hanger. Prada—one of the last designer dresses I kept and didn’t sell on the internet for cash, just to pay rent. “It’s not the obvious,” I say quickly to Oliver while I shimmy out of my strappy sports bra.
He comes over and helps tug the dress down over my head. “Then what?”
I fix my platinum-blonde hair out of my face while he zips the fabric at my hip. I try not to concentrate on the tingling sensation as his knuckles brush my bare flesh, the zipper ascending with his hand. “Um”—I breathe out—“Phebs and I made lunch plans with the godmothers.”
Surprise coats his eyes. “That’s big.”
“I know.” Heat bathes my face again. This time with nerves. The lunch is the first big olive branch we’ve extended to our moms since they confessed their lies in the storm shelter. Both Phoebe’s brothers and mine knew we’d been toying with the idea of mending broken fences with the godmothers.