Sweet Romance14 min read
"I got pregnant by my boss — and it changed everything"
ButterPicks11 views
I found out I was pregnant three months after a drunken business dinner with Lucas Ward.
"I can't believe this happened," I said to myself the first time. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum and felt the tight, ridiculous drum of panic under my ribs. "This is all a mistake."
"I told you it was an accident," Lucas said that afternoon in his office, not looking up from the quarterly report he was tearing through. "We both drank. We both forgot."
I remember the tiny, stubborn part of me that wanted to keep it secret. We had been friends since high school and then colleagues through university. I had sat beside him in class. I had watched him grow from an audacious kid into the hard-edged CEO he was now. When he invited me to be his assistant after my graduate program, I said yes because I believed in him. Because I wanted to help.
"You're my chief assistant," he told me once, waving a page like it was a tiny flag. "Why do you make me look bad?"
"I do everything," I wanted to shout. "I sleep three hours, I fix board messes, I listen to women weep into coffee cups at midnight, and you call it easy money." But I didn't say any of that. I held my breath, watched his pen roll between his fingers, and kept my voice small.
"I want to quit," I finally heard myself say.
Lucas dropped the report like a stone on the table. "Why?"
"I… I'm tired," I said. "I need a break."
He smirked. "I'll give you the month off. Two weeks. Ten days. Twenty days."
I closed my eyes. The words built in my throat and then spilled out. "I'm pregnant."
The pen fell from his fingers and bounced on the floor. "What?"
"You heard me," I said. "I found out three days ago. I went to the clinic." I had kept it all close, because some part of me was still ashamed. "I thought—I thought I'd tell you first because we're friends."
Lucas turned pale, like the color had been drained out of the office and pooled at his shoes. His jaw tightened in a way I had seen when he was under pressure in a boardroom. He glanced at the city view, then back at me.
"When?" he asked. The voice was low, steady, dangerous.
"Three months," I said.
"You knew and didn't say?" His fingers beat on the table. "You can't just—"
"I didn't want to make things complicated," I said. "I thought it was an accident, I wanted to handle it quietly. But now—"
He sharpened. "You want to quit?"
"Yes."
He paused, then an expression slid across his face that I had caught before: a brief, fragile thing like someone remembering a joke. Then he got a hold of himself. "I can give you leave."
"No," I said right away. "Not leave. I can't keep hiding this. I—" I surprised myself with the honesty that spilled out. "I'll have the baby. I was thinking—maybe we can..."
He stiffened. "You mean… carry them and then leave?"
"Not necessarily," I said, and then laughed at my own fear. "I was thinking… you know those novels: marry and then fall in love? I don't want to run. I just…"
He stopped me with a look. "You have my attention. We'll go to the doctor. We'll decide then."
A week later his office smelled of antiseptic and cold coffee. We sat shoulder to shoulder in the ultrasound room and watched the grainy screen. A small creature wavered and then another next to it—two tiny shapes, perfect little M&M's on the fuzzy black.
"It's twins," the doctor said as if delivering a verdict from an ancient book. "Three months. Everything looks fine."
Lucas's hand found mine. "They look… healthy," he whispered.
I leaned my head on his shoulder and felt his breath warm against my ear. For the first time since the news, my chest unclenched.
"Are you sure about all this?" he asked later, voice slow. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to."
"I don't want to run," I said. "If you don't want to marry me, we can co-parent. We can sign paper that says nothing, we can raise them together. I don't want the drama."
He considered me like that—like a puzzle he was half-curious about and mostly protective of. "I can promise this," he said finally. "I'll make sure you and the children are cared for. No tricks. No shame. But I won't promise any speeches or fairy tales."
"That's more than most men," I said, and because my mouth has always been braver than my heart, I added, "You're an awful liar, Lucas Ward. You always pretend you don't care. But you do."
He didn't answer, only watched me with an unreadable silhouette of something very small and human in his eyes.
We signed an agreement that said nothing about marriage. I took leave. The office sent flowers and sobbing assistants. Jordan Said leaned on my shoulder and whispered, "Give him hell or give him babies, Juniper."
"Maybe both," I told her and laughed. "I am tired of being what everyone assumes."
Living with Lucas was a chaotic kindness. One night the light in my kitchen burnt out and I climbed on a chair to change it. He came in mid-fumble, saw me on the chair, and in a half second of clumsy instinct, grabbed my waist and steadied me.
"Don't fall," he said.
I felt the kick like an answer in that second, the little life inside me sharp and immediate.
"Do you feel that?" I told him.
He rested his hand against my abdomen. "They do," he said soft, like it was a confession.
We had stolen small tendernesses. He would bring me late-night meals when I couldn't stomach the fancy nutritionist's attempt. He would stand outside the bedroom door when I paced in the dark, humming old songs because silence made me think too much. He began to smile at me the way he once smiled at his childhood friends: rare, genuine, jaw-soft.
"You're impossible," I said once when he fixed a blown fuse and then sat with me as if it was the most natural thing he'd ever done.
"You're impossible," he repeated, softer, like he was learning the word for his new feeling.
I began to notice the way people at the office looked when he walked by with me. "He never does that for anyone else," whispered Lila Bender when she caught us laughing in the corridor.
"Isn't he infuriating?" I said.
"You look different," she said, not meaning it in the easy way of colleagues. "He looks different with you."
I tried to ignore it. Old habits die hard. I had always been his "good friend"—the one he called when the system crashed or the tabloid rumor needed firefighting. I had held the umbrella while he walked through storms that were not mine. But now my belly grew and so did the map of my desires; the map had one place on it that kept drawing my eyes: him.
One afternoon, at the clinic steps, I saw her.
Hera Gustafsson slid down the escalator like she had been born to rehearsed entrances. Black hair cascading, an expression that was at once polite and predatory. She looked at Lucas with a familiarity that made my stomach turn inside out.
"She looks the same," I whispered.
Lucas caught my eye. He smiled faintly and made a tiny mouth-motion—"Good girl,"—like an old private joke.
Hera stopped briefly, glanced at my belly, and then at Lucas. "No need to trouble yourself," she said, with a silk lilt. "I'll see you later."
When she left, I felt my chest hollow. The old, small appliance of jealousy turned on in my breasts. I remembered that her name had once been slotted into Lucas's youth like a prophecy. He had loved her; he had learned a lesson. He'd shown me the hurt once when a box of shameful photographs had arrived for him—evidence of her promiscuous life. He'd been red-eyed and furious and then he'd vowed never again.
"Do you still…?" I asked him one evening, kitchen lights low, two bowls of simple soup cooling on the counter.
He put down his spoon. "She came to ask for a favor," he said. "Business, not personal."
"She asked for your help and you didn't throw her out the door?" I was sharper than I meant to be.
"I told her no," he said. "But part of our job is to help people who are useful to the company. That doesn't mean my heart is involved."
His calm was a blade sometimes. And yet he also told me, almost offhand, "I want to marry you."
Later, in the hospital recovery room, he said it differently. "Juniper, will you marry me?"
He held my hand like a boy ready to promise a secret.
"Are you proposing?" I asked, bewildered.
"I'm asking," he said. "I will be your husband if you want me. I will try to be what a family needs."
I wanted to be stubborn. I wanted to refuse so he would have to admit he wanted me. Then I looked at the two tiny bundles beside the bed and felt fever calm. "Yes," I said. "Let's try."
The wedding was small. Denali Belov—his brother—was present. Denali is Denali: tall as the law of gravity, face carved like an architect's rule, and voice that could level meetings. He did not smile. He did not like surprises. He had watched his family fortunes rise on iron and penalty, and he carried power like a coat.
After the ceremony Denali sat across from me in Lucas's father study and said, "This family does not tolerate chaos."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means," Denali said, "that a child's place is within a sanctioned home. If you and Lucas cannot provide that, then the company and family will make a different choice."
"You're asking me to leave my child," I said.
"I'm asking you to respect the family's name," he answered. "If you cannot—if you want to live a life that complicates heirship and public image—then P·R will not be a place you can stay."
I felt my breath leave me like a sigh of an old house. Lucas tried to speak, but Denali's eyes cut him off.
"Don't," Denali said. "You don't know how to manage him."
That night, I sat in my dressing room and looked at the small ring on my finger. I had wanted a certain promise of softness when I had said "yes." The family had wanted order.
Weeks passed. I learned the rhythm of being mother and wife in public; in private things were softer. Lucas learned to be a father in ways that left his head askew with wonder. He learned lullabies, he learned to hold both babies with an awkward tenderness. He would wake me in the night to show me their tiny breathing and then, like a boy proud of a toy, grin until his mouth made crescents.
But Denali's shadow was long. He kept finding ways to make demands: "You will not be in the family's public forums," he told me. "This is for the company's image."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," he said simply, "a family must be trusted." He tapped the mahogany table once like a ruler hitting a desktop.
"You mean because you don't trust me." I could hardly stop the bitterness. "You trust everyone else?"
He looked at me like I was a child building a sandcastle in front of a flood. "The world is not fair, Juniper. You must accept the terms."
I refused. I had given up a career out of a strange mix of love and fear. I would not give up my children. I would not vanish.
"Then you will leave," Denali said.
"No," I answered.
The disagreement escalated in private into exchanges at the company, at family dinners, at public events. Denali's voice became a low machine: private calls, directives, a slow pressure that squeezed Lucas in boardrooms. Lucas, who loved his brother and feared him, became brittle.
The first real public crack came at an annual shareholders' dinner. It was meant to be a polished evening of champagne and light music. The room shimmered with lamps and suits. Denali stood at the podium and gave a speech about legacy and clarity. He looked every part the unassailable man—until Juniper Dudley stepped up to the microphone on a whim.
"I have something to say," I announced.
Lucas's jaw tightened. "Juniper—"
"No," I said. "This is for everyone."
Denali's smile didn't change, but I could see it thin. Around the room, people murmured. Cameras leaned in. Lila whispered in my ear, "What are you doing?"
"I'm tired of being the quiet one," I said. "I'm tired of empty apologies and quiet erasures. People deserve to see the truth."
"Juniper—" Lucas hissed.
I took a breath, put my hands on the microphone, and looked at Denali as if I could peel off whatever mask he wore. "You have told me," I said loud enough for the chandeliers to echo, "that the family's name can't be complicated by me. That I must leave. That the children cannot be raised in our family unless we accept certain, what? Old customs?"
The room was hush. People leaned forward as if gravity itself had slowed.
Denali's face changed minutely. He looked shocked for a second, then annoyed, then slowly his jaw set. "This is not the place—"
"Please," I said, and the stake of my voice surprised even me. "You demanded a spotless image and then quietly ordered payments to women who came and went. You demanded loyalty and then kept hidden friendships with people who used the company's money as if it were candy."
A rustle passed through the crowd. Someone in the front row gasped. Lila's hand was a warm weight on my back.
Denali's color shifted. For the first time since I had known him, his expression betrayed confusion. He looked at me like a man who had been shown a mirror he thought had been polished only for himself.
"You're lying," he said finally. "You have no proof."
I smiled. "We have emails. We have receipts. We have witnesses."
"Who authorized—" Denali began, voice thin.
"That will be answered," I said. "But do you know what's worse? The hypocrisy. You ask me to vanish. You ask us to be small so your image can be whole. You instruct us to be unseen while you continue to use the family as your playground. Tonight, I ask you to account for your choices."
The room was full now. Phones were out. Camera flashes popped like distant fireworks. Lucas plant his palms on the table like a man bracing for a fight.
Denali took a step back. For the first time his posture faltered. "I—" he began.
"You funded a spoiled life for a certain 'artist' while you denied hospital care to a small clinic worker who was our contractor." My voice didn't shake. "You took money from P·R's charity budget for personal use. You insisted our family be untouched while your ledger was a mess. People should know."
A tremor ran through the attendees. A director in the second row dropped his wine glass; it shattered like a punctuation mark.
Denali's face went through stages: pride, confusion, fury, denial. He tried to laugh it off. "This is slander," he said, voice brittle. "Someone set you up."
"Someone gave me the truth," I said. "And I'm offering it in public. Because your threats were public and your hypocrisy is public. You told me to go away. I'm here to make sure you can't do that to anyone else."
"You'll ruin everything," he whispered.
"Or you'll be held to account," I answered. "The board deserves the truth. The shareholders deserve the truth. The people you've wronged deserve the truth."
"He can't be allowed to—" murmured someone.
The room split into clumps of whispers like a wounded animal. A journalist in the corner had already typed three lines. Lucas looked at his brother as if he had never really looked at him before—no mingled respect, no fear that softened into deference—just a man who had choices like everyone else and had chosen wrongly.
Denali's breathing quickened. "You will regret this," he hissed.
"Maybe," I said. "But I won't regret standing here."
The first round of reactions was sharp: some people stiffened as if protecting a sacred object, others leaned forward for scandal. Phones angled like sentry posts. A handful of board members looked puzzled and angry. Lucas's face had gone ashen.
Denali's reaction transformed from anger to panic as two of the company's senior accountants, people I had whispered with in corridors late at night, stood up.
"What about the reports?" one demanded. "We found transfers."
A woman with a nameplate read "Cillian Rogers"—I had only ever known him as the mild-mannered operations director—stood and said, "Denali, the funds were misapplied. We have records."
The room erupted.
Denali's expression cracked. He moved like a man trying to keep a dam from breaking. "This is manipulation," he shouted. "They're forged!"
"Get the audit, then," an older shareholder said. "We will. We have the right."
He looked at Lucas then, as if for support. The cameras caught the tremor in his voice. "Lucas—"
Lucas looked at him and then at me, and something in his face unlatched. He had been blunt before, but this time he stepped forward.
"Denali," Lucas said, "if you did this, you paid for things you shouldn't have. If you hid it, we'll fix it. But you don't get to make others invisible."
Denali's mouth opened and closed. His throat bobbed. He looked small.
The witnesses spilled their evidence: emails sent at three in the morning, transfers with coded notes, phone records. Each revelation was a slow, stinging lash. Denali's expressions ran the gamut: first denial, then fury, then a brittle charm that barely held, then a sharp attempt at counter-accusation.
"You're all colluding," he snarled. "This is a setup. You will pay."
"No," said Lila firmly. "You will answer."
The crowd closed in. People recorded, commented, whispered. Some applauded my courage, some recoiled at the unpleasant airing of family laundry. The media rep on site found a place to stand. A board member, pale, demanded an immediate independent audit.
Denali's face finally broke. He dropped to a chair and put his head in his hands like a child. "This will ruin us," he muttered.
"You started it," I said. "You started by deciding you were above standards."
For a moment he looked at me, truly looked. The fury drained like paint being washed from stone. His lips trembled. Then something like regret flashed across him, so fast it might have been imagined, and then the old dignified mask reappeared.
"You're making a mistake," he said, very small.
The crowd answered with the only kind of judgment the modern world respects: witness. Phones flashed and people whispered and slid into new opinions. A director who had once feared him now shook his head in dismay. "We'll convene an emergency board," someone said.
Denali sat up slowly. He tried to rally, to call security, to call in favors, but the room had changed. The old armor of power had corroded where others could see it.
"I am sorry," he said finally, not to me but to the room. It sounded empty, like a man reading a script he had never written. "I will cooperate."
But the public had already seen his shaking hands. The cameras had already captured his bruise of panic. Investors texted. An editor in the front row clicked "record." The world tilted.
Denali's face crumpled as his hubris collapsed into a very human ruin. He tried to bargain, to charm, to deny, to blame, but the facts lined up like soldiers. People hissed. Some applauded. Someone laughed like a pistol shot. A woman who had been defrauded stood and spat words that landed like stones. The crowd swelled. The press took their notes.
At the end Denali stood alone, a man who had ordered the world and now was being ordered back. He could not do what he had done before—shrink others and expect them to vanish. The room watched him shrink.
Lucas came to my side. He didn't hug Denali. He didn't need to. He took my hand.
"Thank you," I whispered.
He squeezed my fingers once. "You were brave," he said.
Denali would later be stripped of certain authorities. He would be required to step down pending a full investigation. The public punishment had been humiliating, precise, and thorough. He lost not only face but the quiet control he had always wielded in private. He was left with the knowledge that his castle had a window and the world had climbed up to peer in.
After that, things changed.
Lucas did not retreat. He sat with me in hospital rooms, practiced baby swaddles with tremulous hands, learned lullabies, and answered board calls with one hand while holding our child with the other.
"You're still the worst liar," I told him one afternoon when he left a voice mail that was unexpectedly soft.
He smiled. "I lied to make myself brave."
"You weren't brave enough earlier," I teased.
He looked at me and then at the children, and there was a steadiness I had never seen. "I will be brave now."
Our life was full of small, ordinary things that kept us afloat: midnight feedings, diaper changes, Lucas's clumsy attempts to braid hair for family photos, Jordan's voice on my phone offering recipes and gossip. There were arguments, too—about work, about the public eye, about where the children would go to school. But there were also quiet mornings when Lucas would make coffee and stand on my side of the counter and kiss my forehead in a way that made it hard to breathe.
"Do you ever think about that high school field," he asked one evening when the children were asleep. "When I counted your sit-ups for you?"
"I hated you then," I said.
"You cried in PE," he said fondly. "I remember pretending to be mean so you'd stop worrying."
"I remember you counting to thirty," I said.
"3, 7, 8, 12, 14, 18, 23, 30," he recited, grinning.
We laughed. I felt small and immense at once.
In the end, I kept my job title somewhere in the company but moved into a role that allowed me to be present. Denali's punishment had been public; it had been necessary. He had been cruel and the world had tested him and he had failed to pass. That public reckoning changed everything for us—the family had shifted, the company had realigned, and Lucas had learned to draw lines where his brother used to cross them.
Sometimes, late at night when the house was asleep and the babies breathed like small, steady machines, Lucas would whisper, "Thank you for staying."
I would press my cheek to his back and breathe in the scent of him and the room. "You gave me babies," I would tell him. "You gave us a life."
He would squeeze my hand, steady and warm, and the world felt, for a moment, like a small safe harbor.
I never forgot Denali's face on that night—the way power looks when it crumbles. I never forgot how the room had watched, like a public jury. I never forgot the way Lucas looked at me afterward, as if the small, stubborn truth I had spoken had been the key to something larger. We had been battered on the edges by negotiations and reputations. We had also, surprisingly, been found by one another.
"Are you happy?" he asked me once, as he fed one child and I bounced the other.
I looked at the two tiny faces, at Lucas's surprised tenderness, at the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck. "I am," I said. "I'm real glad I didn't run."
He smiled like he had done since we were teenagers, leaning close. "Good," he said. "Because I like this version of us."
We kept living the messy, beautiful middle of our story. We were not perfect. We would make mistakes. But we had learned one priceless thing: when power is used to hide, it can be exposed in public. And when two people choose one another—awkwardly, loudly, with diapers and taxes and midnight cries—they can build a life that even a Belov cannot erase.
The End
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