Billionaire Romance12 min read
"You're Carrying My Child" — So I Married Him
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“Phoenix, do you remember me?”
I said it before the elevator doors closed, and his face went still like a statue.
He did not smile. He did not reach for my hand. He looked at me like I belonged to a past he had outlawed.
“You have no right to bear my child,” he said. His voice was calm and cold. The kind of cold that shuts doors.
My heart hit my ribs. Three years ago he whispered in my ear that he wanted a daughter. Three years ago we promised nonsense on old stairs. Three years ago I left.
“I know what you mean,” I said. I smiled a smile that did not reach my eyes. “But I am back. I didn’t come to ask for scraps.”
He watched me and tightened his jaw.
“You should leave,” he said.
“I already left,” I said. “And I came back.”
He stepped past me without another word. The door slammed. I touched the little paper in my pocket—the test result—and my fingers trembled.
“Dad,” I whispered into my phone later. “How is he? Is the operation done?”
Victor Aguirre’s voice was rough with sleep and worry. “Nolan lost a leg, Katelynn. Molly is not here yet. Your mother collapsed this morning. The company is bleeding cash.”
I sat on the sofa in Phoenix Hughes’s suite with the city lights behind me. The silk blouse I wore made me feel thinner. My family—my real family—needed money. They needed a miracle.
“I’ll make them stop bleeding,” I told my father. “I’ll make Phoenix help.”
“You? Phoenix?” Dad sounded like he was half laughing and half crying.
“I’ll make him marry me.”
A week later I did exactly what I said I would.
“Congratulations,” Phoenix said when I handed him the report in the parking lot of his company. “Your plan is thorough.”
“You never liked surprises,” I said. “No point hiding it.” I breathed in and did the thing I had rehearsed in my head a hundred times. “I’m pregnant. Four weeks.”
He did not look shocked. He looked like a man hearing a report that was true but unpleasant.
“You planned this,” he said.
“Planned or not, the result is the same,” I answered. I felt like glass, but I kept my voice steady. “Help my family. Marry me. That’s all I ask.”
He laughed once, low and empty. “Katelynn, do you know what my family will say? This is the kind of scandal that ruins lines.”
“I know,” I said. “But the only way your name stays clean is if you marry me. You keep your honor. I get the money to save my home. Both of us win.”
Phoenix’s face did not move for a long time. Then, slowly, he nodded.
“Fine,” he said. “As you wish.”
I walked away holding two red books in my hand two days later—our marriage license—and the world blurred around me with heat and relief.
“Will you call this a wedding?” I asked when he handed me the key to the estate he said I should live in.
Phoenix shrugged. “You will be wife. Do not cause trouble.”
“Okay,” I said. I kissed the corner of the paper like a talisman. “I’ll be a good wife.”
The driver took me to the villa. It was a beautiful place, bigger than my dreams. It had a rooftop garden and a kitchen that would have made my university professors jealous.
I put my hand to my belly and lied to myself and to him and to the small soft voice inside my chest.
He left three days later for “work.” He always left. He was a general’s son who made his name in uniform and then turned to city towers and contracts. He had power and an armor.
We lived under one roof and slowly learned new rules.
“You don’t have to cook,” he said the first night, his fingers wrapped around a cup of tea like it was a weapon.
“I know,” I said. I wanted him to see I was useful. “But I can make simple food.”
He watched me in that way he watched everything—sharp, careful.
“You will gain weight,” he said suddenly. “You will not lose it. You will eat three times a day. I will control your meals.”
“Three times,” I repeated. “Noted.”
He left again. The house stayed bright and empty. I learned to move through it like a spy. I was careful to hide the fakery inside me—the test in my pocket, the plan that would buy my family time.
Then he came back.
He came back on a night when I had made tomato and egg noodles—simple, messy, my heart on a small wooden spoon. He stood on the balcony with a cigarette that I knew he did not use before. Smoke curled around him, and for a moment he looked lost.
“You smoke now?” I asked.
“Business dinners,” he said. He put out the cigarette like a lie. He came in and sat down.
I wanted him to see me as wife. I wanted him to forgive three years of silence. I wanted him to remember who I was when I was a child—wild, noisy, the kind of girl who fed men chicken wings with her hands.
“You should not smoke,” I said. “The child—”
He glanced at me and something in his face cracked open. “Stop.”
I did. I did everything he asked. I ate what he said. I let the nanny come. I let the house fill with quiet people who served me on his schedule.
“Do you fear me?” he asked one night as he lifted his chin to the moon.
“Fear? Maybe,” I said. “Respect? More.”
He laughed. It was a small sound that surprised me. “Fine. Good.”
We built a schedule. He was strict. He was careful. The more he controlled my days, the more I learned the edges of him, the deep reasons for his walls.
“You want nothing from me but the child and my name,” he said once, eyes like weathered steel.
“That and your ledger,” I said. “And your help.”
He hit my wrist with his thumb and looked at me like someone trying to read fine print. “I will not let you be hurt in my space,” he said. “Not by business, not by people.”
“Good,” I answered. “I will not be a trouble.”
He looked at me then like he had seen some small wound on my face for the first time. “You are thin,” he said. “You look like you could break.”
“I can’t break,” I told him. “We have no right to break now.”
The months after the marriage were strange. Phoenix kept his distance physically. He refused one kind of closeness and offered another: fierce protection. He closed my father’s debt. He set people to fix the company. He had my sister Molly’s medical bills handled. He did things without looking at me, and in the doing, he made me safe.
“You said you loved me once, on a rooftop,” I told him one day in the dark.
He did not answer. He watched the skyline and spoke in a voice low and certain. “I loved the idea of you then. I hate that idea. I will not fall again for the same mistake.”
“Name the mistake,” I said.
He stared at me, and for the first time, his coolness cracked. “You left me,” he said. “You left when I needed you. You made me wait and burn.”
“I left because I had to,” I said. I wanted to say more. I did not. “I thought I was saving you.”
“You don’t get to save me,” he said. “I save myself.”
We lived like that—two people with old weather in their hands.
Then Emmeline Colon appeared.
She waited for us the way a fox waits by a henhouse. She smiled too wide and put her hand on Phoenix like she had always known him. “Phoenix, are you well?” she asked in a public lunch that was supposed to be about business.
I felt the old knives open inside me—jealousy, fear, the kind of anger that used to keep me awake. I stood. I should have stayed down. I should have been small. But the dinner room was filled with people. They watched.
“You will excuse us,” Phoenix said. “Katelynn and I were just leaving.”
Emmeline laughed like wine poured too fast. “Oh, I thought you two were—” She lifted her glass and turned her head to the table. “I didn’t mean to offend.”
“You offended by staying,” Phoenix said simply. He rose. His hand pressed the back of my wrist.
Emmeline blinked. Then she went for sarcasm.
“You mean the woman who came back and stole his time?” she said. Heads turned. Tears sprang hot at the backs of my eyes.
“Enough,” Phoenix said. It was a small thing, and then it became not small. He walked toward Emmeline and opened his mouth with cold, clean words.
“You will leave now,” he told her. “Both you and your father will leave. If you stay, I will tell the board everything about your deals. You will not take my home or my wife’s name.”
Emmeline’s face changed. People around the table breathed out. She stumbled with charm and then anger.
“You threaten me?” she hissed.
“I said leave,” Phoenix said. “People like you do not get to decide that you will pull a company under because you feel slighted. You leave.”
She stood. She tried to push past him. My hand flew to my chest. The room went sharp. Phoenix stepped forward like a man unhooking a storm and put his hand between her and me.
“Out,” he said.
Emmeline’s eyes went wide and very human. She left. People watched. Then they watched the man who had protected me walk back to the chair and sit like he never moved at all.
“You could have done that earlier,” I said, breathless.
He put his palm on my knee. “I always believed you could handle it.”
“You sent me to the table to be embarrassed,” I said.
“You handled it,” he said. “You did not break. That is what I like.”
He looked at me like a man speaking in a code I had almost forgotten. It made the heat move behind my ribs.
We began to trust each other in small ways—a look across a meeting when I needed time; a text before a hostile director called me; a hand at my small of the back when the nights were thin and empty.
Months passed. I never told him the truth. I never said the real word about the test stuck in my safe. I watched the baby bump that was not there on me every month in the mirror and practiced the little lines I would use if someone found out. I learned to fold truth like paper to fit into the small space my life now had.
Then one winter night, when the heater hummed and the villa was warm, I came home from an exhausting board meeting and found Phoenix in the kitchen with a bowl of cold tomato noodles.
“You saved it,” I said.
He looked at me. He had been reading something on his tablet. He smiled, a small half-moon. “You made it,” he said. “I kept it.”
“You kept my ugly food?” I laughed, the sound raw.
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to waste it.”
He sat opposite me and began to eat it with careful, perfect bites. He closed his eyes after the first forkful like someone returning to an old, small joy.
“I like it,” he admitted.
“You lied about everything,” I said suddenly. “You said you didn’t want me. You said you had no interest.”
His fork paused. He looked at me. “I said that because I was angry,” he said. “I was scared that if I let myself want, I would lose you again.”
“You could have said you were scared,” I said.
“I did not know how,” he said. “I will tell you now.” He leaned forward like the man he used to be the days we were kids—sudden and open. “I came close to losing you. I told a lie to keep my pride. I’m sorry.”
“I lied too,” I said. I held up my hands like an offering. “I am not pregnant.”
Silence fell between us like a heavy curtain. My voice felt small in the room.
He did not look surprised. He only nodded once. “So you used the child as a shield.”
“I used what I had,” I said. My throat hurt. “My family needed a chance. I thought marriage was the smallest price.”
He pressed his fork into the bowl and made a line in the noodles like drawing a map. “Why lie?”
“Because I was afraid you would refuse,” I said. “Because you were a fortress and I had only a paper sword.”
He stared at me and for the first time I saw the man behind the armor. He looked like a man with a choice to make.
“You could have told me,” he said. “I would have fixed it anyway.”
“You would have?” I asked, lips thin.
He put the bowl down. He reached across the table and took both my hands.
“I would have fought,” he said. “I would have fought like hell. I would have done what needed to be done without a lie.”
All the plans I had laid out—the paper contracts, the meetings, the two small bills I kept under my mattress—collapsed and rewrote themselves in that moment. My hands trembled inside his.
“You used me as a ladder,” he said quietly. “You climbed up, and you planned to leave when the work was done.”
“I thought I would,” I confessed. “It was safer to think so.”
He pressed his thumb to the back of my hand like a promise. “You are not leaving.”
“I might,” I said. “You married me to keep face. You said I would be invisible in the news. You told me to leave my pride at the door.”
“You were always visible,” he said simply. “You just were not always visible to me.”
I looked at him. Phoenix Hughes—the man who had turned away, the man who had come back with a bowl of my poor noodles and eaten like it was a treasure—looked at me and smiled a small, private smile.
“Then stay,” he said. “We will fix the company honestly. We will call them back. We will make it right.”
I laughed then, a sound that was more like crying. “You sound like a hero in a movie.”
He shook his head. “I sound like a man who is tired of losing things he loves. Stay.”
We stayed.
There were storms. There were board meetings where my voice shook and Phoenix sat like a statue until he could not stand it any longer and rose to speak. There were nights when I would wake with panic and he would be at the door, hand at the knob, because he could not sleep while I did.
Emmeline tried again. She used rumors, then money, then a smear campaign. She hired men to write stories, to dig at the past. One morning her father, Sebastien Danielsson, called the press and said false things.
Phoenix went to the press room like a general to a battlefield.
“You will stop this now,” he told them. His words were short. They were like iron being thrown down. He showed them evidence of Emmeline’s shady deals, of conflicts, of bribed men. The room grew thin and quiet.
When the cameras turned to me, I stepped forward.
“You will not use my past to ruin my future,” I told the room. “My family made mistakes and we paid. Phoenix saved my company. He did what I could not. We are married. That is private. Use your pens for other things.”
People clapped. I felt my cheeks burn.
Emmeline and her father were forced to resign from a few boards. They lost contracts they had bought with smiling hands. They left the city.
After that day, the dinners were softer. He sat closer. I stopped sleeping with one eye open for the first time in years.
“I will be open,” I said to him the night before the board reopened the accounts. “I will tell people the truth. I will not be the woman who uses a lie again.”
He nodded. “I will be honest too.”
We built truth together like bricks.
The company recovered. My brother Nolan learned to walk on a prosthetic leg with a stubborn grin. Molly found herself again, and she came home to a clean bed and laughing voices. My father stopped smoking at his porch. The bills paid themselves one by one.
One morning, when the roses on the rooftop were only just opening, I found a small envelope on the kitchen table. Inside, a folded scrap of paper with a small scribble: We will do this right. —P.
I laughed and then cried a little. I put the scrap in my pocket.
Months passed. I went to doctors for real checkups one afternoon because truth had taught me the value of clarity. The nurse smiled, the doctor checked. I was not pregnant then, but the test was clean, my body whole. I took care of it the way one keeps a fragile stone.
Phoenix stood in the doorway during the checkups and held my hand. When he could not come, he sent me flowers with small notes: Eat. Sleep. Call me.
One autumn evening, when the wind had the taste of rain, I made tomato and egg noodles again. He came in, eyes tired but soft, and without a word sat down. He ate slowly. He closed his eyes. He tasted home.
“What if one day I do have a child?” I asked between bites.
He looked at me and in his face I saw the man who would keep vigil at the hospital bed, who would sign forms, who would sit up all night.
“Then I will be the one crying if the child cries,” he said. “And I will tell them stories about a small girl that fed me chicken wings.”
I smiled. I wanted to tell him everything—about the nights I stayed in cheap beds to save money, about the plane tickets I burned, about the lie that began as armor and turned into a bridge.
“One thing,” I said. “If we ever hear someone say I used you, we will tell them the truth.”
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. It was a small, clean gesture.
“Always,” he said. “We will tell the truth.”
Years later, the villa smelled of soup and soap. The rooftop had a small wooden swing that creaked in the wind. There was a morning when a small fist curled on my chest in the light of dawn. A baby with dark lashes and my mouth made a small noise and opened her eyes.
Phoenix was awake before me. He had the baby in his arms like a man carrying a map to the rest of his life.
“You are smiling,” I said, breathless.
He looked at me as if he had just been born himself. “She is here,” he said. “We named her September.”
I laughed until I cried. He kissed my forehead, his mouth warm and dry.
“You used a lie to get here,” he said softly. “But the rest was real.”
“What if I had never lied?” I asked him.
He shrugged, careful and steady. “Then I would have made other plans. But now I will not let go.”
He stood and walked to the window, and for the first time he allowed the light to plate him like a promise. He looked back and smiled that private smile reserved only for me.
“Come to the garden,” he said. “Bring her. I will show her the sky.”
I picked up the baby in my arms. She smelled of milk and sun.
We walked to the rooftop where the cold bowl had once sat and where I had once made simple noodles. I set the child against my chest and lifted my head.
“You kept that bowl for me,” I said.
He wrapped a hand around my waist and then around the child in my arms.
“I kept it because you put yourself in the kitchen,” he said. “You returned.”
September blinked at the sky and then yawned. Phoenix lifted a small finger and traced a line on my palm.
“We learned how to tell the truth,” he said. “We learned how to protect what mattered. We learned how to keep the bowl.”
I looked at him and knew that sometimes survival asks us to carry small fakes for a time. Then truth and time stitch them into something stronger.
Phoenix bent and kissed my lips, soft and sure. “Stay,” he said again, this time without the harshness of fear. “Stay for good.”
I nodded. The baby stirred and made a sound like a laugh.
We had what we had fought for and what we had feared. We had each other, honest at last, and a messy bowl of tomato and egg noodles on the table to remind us we had learned to love in small, careful bites.
The End
— Thank you for reading —