All By Herself (A BWWM Pregnancy Romance Book 1) Read online

  Edward sneered as he went thought the pages. But his grin faded as he read through it. He angrily flung it across the table. “What is this nonsense? Get out before I have you arrested.”

  Zoe had quietly distributed copies to the other members. “That’s not what I’m reading, Edward,” said one. “I think control has passed to your son and daughter.”

  “You back-stabbing piece of shit!” screamed Edward. He face was crimson with rage. “Do you think I’m going to let you come in here and take over this company?”

  Michael smiled. It was the same sardonic smile that Edward was fond of using. “I’m afraid you have no choice, Dad.”

  Edward was not a man to go quietly, but they all enjoyed the spectacle of him being unceremoniously thrown out of the company that he had wielded as a weapon. There was no protest from the other board members who were clearly glad to see him go.

  ***

  Later as Michael and Zoe toasted their victory over dinner, Zoe snuggled closed to him and whispered, “You know, we are going to have a son.”

  Michael kissed her. “Thank you. You gave me back my sister, my job and you’ve made me a proud father. You have made me the luckiest man on earth.”

  Zoe smiled. “Well, you have made me the happiest woman too, Michael. Now how about we skip dinner and get to dessert?” Laughing, she took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

  THANKS FOR READING!

  Authors Personal Message:

  Hey beautiful!

  I really hope you enjoyed my novel and I would really love if you could give me a rating on the store!

  Thanks in advance and check the next page for a special bonus book that I included for you. :)

  BABY BUDDIES

  A BWWM PREGNANCY ROMANCE By..

  TASHA BLUE

  Summary

  Anaya and Owen have been best friends for years. And from time to time, when they are both single and lonely they end up having sex. After all, why can't best buddies also be “f**k buddies”?

  However, this time their night of passion has resulted in Anaya becoming pregnant and with her biological clock ticking she is determined to keep it.

  Now, the best buddies are about to become “baby buddies” but could they possibly become anything more then that?

  Not if Anaya's on-off boyfriend has anything to do with it...

  Chapter1

  The young woman sat at her desk, her chin in her hand, her mind wandering through thoughts and hopes. It was partway through her workday and the buzz from her morning coffee had long since left her. She’d been working so much and so hard that her mind had taken its own break, and she had begun to reminisce, taking her back to earlier days when all her dreams were just on the horizon.

  When Anaya was young, she had dreamt of being a supermodel, but she never quite grew tall enough and her wild black hair could never seem to be tamed. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that turned heads as she walked down the street, but the kind that people who met her even once somehow still couldn’t get out of their minds. She may not have been six feet tall with high cheekbones and killer legs, but she had a smile that stayed with you and soft eyes that had a particular charm that was difficult to forget.

  After realizing she would never make it on the catwalk, Anaya began to channel her love for fashion in a new way. As a young woman, she went to college to learn fashion design and spent her early twenties mastering every type of stitch and learning about how the direction of the threads in a piece of cloth could affect the pleat. She was a talented designer, but her talent had never gotten her very far. When her designs were on paper and then stitched out and brought to life, Anaya would find herself left with a beautiful dress or skirt, but nobody to wear it but herself.

  She’d tried to establish herself as a designer and get a job at a fashion company or magazine, but her portfolio was always cast aside and she found that being a success in the fashion world was more a case of whom you knew than what you knew. After several years of trying in vain to make a living from her designs, Anaya had reached a point where she had no choice but to take any job she could, just to get by. That’s how she found herself at the age of twenty-eight working as a receptionist for an underground fashion magazine that nobody ever heard about, watching other designers showcase their works in the glossy pages and taking phone calls from people stating that leather was murder.

  She was interrupted from her thoughts by her colleague, Hannah, slamming a pile of papers down on the reception desk in irritation and blowing a strand of hair out of her frazzled face with an angry huff.

  Anaya smiled. She could guess the problem. “The date didn’t go well?” she guessed.

  “That’s an understatement,” Hannah said scathingly. “I’ve been talking to this guy online for weeks and I’d expected him to be charming and handsome and witty, but he was simply an utter moron.”

  “He was different in real life?” Anaya asked with interest. It had been a long time since she herself had dated anyone new, and she always enjoyed Hannah’s horror stories from the precarious world of online dating to make her glad she was no longer in the game.

  “First off, his photo was about a decade old,” Hannah told her. She leaned over the desk on her elbows to chat with Anaya and the receptionist got the feeling that her colleague had been waiting all day to let off steam.

  “Second,” she added, “all of that flirting and charm must have been copied and pasted from some cheap, chat-up line website, because he had all the personality of a boiled egg.”

  Anaya laughed at her description. “Well, perhaps you should stop searching for ‘the one’ and just wait for it to happen in its own time.”

  “I wish,” Hannah said longingly. “My college years were over long before yours and I never met my Jakob there and what do you do once college is over? I just get up and go to work day after day after day. I have neither the time nor the inclination to sit around in bars in skimpy dresses trying to attract attention and even if I did, I’m too old to be any competition for those pretty young things with their false eyelashes and super high heels. There’s certainly nobody around these offices who is going to sweep me off my feet.”

  “There’s always Tony,” Anaya replied and the two women burst out giggling.

  Tony was the building’s janitor. He was an ancient man with a wandering eye who had a habit of hitting on every woman he saw. If his missing front tooth and receding hairline wasn’t enough to seal the deal, then there was always the scant possibility of his charming a woman with his heavy breathing.

  “Ew! Don’t even joke, Anaya.” Hannah laughed. “I’ve been on so many terrible first dates that soon Tony will be the only man left who hasn’t taken me to a cheap dinner at a terrible restaurant and then casually mention he’s staying in a motel that night.”

  “Trust me, Hannah, you’ll find a nice guy,” Anaya promised her. “It’ll be when you least expect it, too. Maybe give the online dating a break for a while and see if life surprises you.”

  “It’s easy for you to say when you have Jakob,” Hannah said wistfully. “He is one hot man.”

  Anaya smiled. Her relationship with her boyfriend was about the only thing to make her feel like her life wasn’t a complete failure, although Jakob was an unpredictable man. When they had first met in a college bar when Anaya had been twenty-one and Jakob twenty-five, she had been flattered by the attentions of the tall and handsome PhD student who had picked her out from the crowd.

  Jakob had been a different man then. He was intelligent, but had allowed this to make him arrogant and his desire for attention and recognition often drove him to behave childishly and selfishly. When they had both been students at college, Jakob had loved all the attention from his peers and professors and had lived life as though he were a campus celebrity. He had commanded attention with his confident smile and Nairobian accent and Anaya had been taken in by his charms just as much as any other girl. When he had chosen her out of all the young and beautif
ul things around him, it had made her feel special and wanted. Their college years had been spent in a whirlwind of successes. Anaya had stormed ahead in her classes and Jakob’s thesis was lauded by his peers. They had been happy and certain their future would always be full of such success and praise.

  “Yes, he’s handsome,” Anaya agreed. “Still, looks aren’t everything.”

  “It’s better than anything I’ve had going on,” Hannah teased seriously and grinned.

  Even then when they had been young and invincible, Jakob had had his flaws. He had a sense of entitlement that made him angry quickly when people didn’t pay attention to him and his ideas, and this had turned him into a man who always spoke loudly. For a young and naïve girl, this had been perceived as confidence and Anaya had been a little in awe of the way that Jakob had so easily made people look his way. She’d admired his tenacity and his ambition. She’d never met a man like him before who was so driven and determined. Back then, she’d found something very attractive in the way that he went through life with a goal in mind and stopped at nothing to realize his ambitions.

  When they had both been young and reaching for their dreams, it had felt as though they were on a quest together to build an incredible future and Jakob had felt like her partner in crime as they had overcome every obstacle around them to rise above their peers. Once college had ended, however, Jakob started to feel less like a partner and more like a competitor.

  Hannah looked at Anaya with an expression of mental agony. “This guy I saw last night would have made the cringe pages of our magazine. Seriously, Anaya, it was like he’d learned how to dress from a seventies boating journal. Plus, Jakob is so intelligent, isn’t he? I bet you can have a real conversation with a man like that.”

  “We used to talk all the time,” Anaya agreed. “We don’t have so much to say to each other now.”

  “What do you mean?” Hannah asked. “You’re both such ambitious people. You must have so much to say to each other.”

  Anaya sighed deeply and stood up, walking with Hannah over to the refreshment table in the corner of the room. She began to make coffee at the automatic machine in the lobby as she had a feeling this conversation was going to turn into a thirty minute gossip session.

  “Coffee?” she offered to make one for Hannah, who nodded gladly.

  “He’s not like that anymore,” she told Hannah. “You know, he always used to love telling me about his work. Of course, I didn’t understand a word he said most the time, but he used to enjoy trying to explain it to me. Now, it’s like he doesn’t have time for me at all. I try to take an interest, but he doesn’t want to sit and tell me about it sweetly like he used to. Now if I ask a question, he gets all huffy and impatient like it’s a huge inconvenience to explain his world to me, like I’m an irritating child tugging at his sleeve. I don’t ask any more, which means I don’t understand a word he’s saying, which means he gets frustrated when I can’t pat him on the head and tell him he’s doing great.”

  The shock of the real world had struck the couple in different ways. Jakob had expected his academic successes to make him just as much of a celebrity in the outside world, but outside of the academic environment of the university, people simply found him to be condescending and dull. Jakob found it difficult to simply relax and enjoy conversation. If the discussion wasn’t highbrow and topical and if Jakob couldn’t take control of the debate, then he simply wasn’t interested and he had a habit of casting people aside when they bored him.

  At college, his brilliant mind had excused this kind of habit and it had been easy for Jakob to find like minds in the classrooms and lecture halls, but in the working world, people simply didn’t have time for a know-it-all and Jakob didn’t like taking orders. He’d gone from job to job, always leaving after six months or so because he claimed the management was incompetent or tyrannical and although Anaya had tried to gently suggest that maybe it was his attitude that was the problem, Jakob was insistent that the world simply resented his intelligence.

  Jakob’s dissatisfaction with life after college had been carried through into their relationship. Anaya had once felt like she was Jakob’s support and friend, but often now he made her feel more like an anchor. His relentless ambition began to grow a little tiring when it meant that time and time again he arrived at her apartment in a foul mood and didn’t take even a second to ask about her day before going off on a tirade about how the world didn’t respect him.

  “Wow, Anaya.” Hannah chuckled. “Here I am thinking that you’ve got this perfect relationship with this beautiful man, but it sounds like things aren’t going that well.”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Anaya backtracked. “I love him very much. It’s just that the spark goes sometimes, doesn’t it? It’s like that for everybody though.”

  Jakob and Anaya had moved in together in Anaya’s third year in college after Jakob had finished his PhD, and the cracks in their relationship had started showing almost immediately. It could have been moving in together too quickly that had caused their relationship to suffer, or it could simply have been Jakob’s anger that he hadn’t found his celebrity in the real world as soon as he’d expected that made them start to argue and bicker all the time, but either way, they’d soon decided it was best to live apart.

  This one step forwards and two steps back way of going through life had become the habit of their relationship. They had bought a cat together, but had fought over who would have it on which days, and in the end, the cat had been re-homed. They had arranged a romantic vacation to reconnect with each other, but Jakob had gotten drunk in the hotel bar the first night of the trip and flirted with the waitress. They had stayed up all night talking and then had a raging fight the very next day. Their relationship was fiery at the best of times, but Anaya told herself that this was because they were passionate and that she had to take the bad with the good when she chose to date an ambitious man.

  “I hope it’s not like that for everybody,” Hannah said firmly. “God knows I haven’t gone through all the trauma of a million awful first dates looking for ‘the one’ just to find that he stops being ‘the one’ a few years down the line. I want that lifelong love affair like you see in the movies. Wouldn’t that be nice?” she swooned with a romantic smile.

  Anaya laughed at Hannah’s hopeful expression and she nodded. “It would be wonderful,” she agreed. “You know, Jakob’s got a lot going on with work right now and things. Once he gets through it, I’m sure he’ll cheer up and we’ll reconnect with each other and it will be just like old times.”

  Jakob desperately needed to cheer up. He was always so angry and bitter about his place in the world. Anaya, on the other hand, had dealt with her disappointments with a little more grace than her on-again off-again boyfriend. Every time she had approached a potential employer with her designs and had been turned away, or never heard from them again as soon as she stepped out the door, it had broken her heart a little. Anaya had always dreamed of New York fashion week and Vogue and instead she could only afford to shop at chain stores and mimic the beautiful attires of the models she envied and she had never even left Wisconsin. Her dreams had been broken when she stepped out of college and found that having a creative mind and a good attitude simply wasn’t enough, but she dealt with the disappointment by reminding herself that she now had the ability to bring all her own creations to life and, even if she was never recognized by the great leaders of the fashion industry, this was its own joy.

  Through every disappointment and frustration she had retained her cheerful nature and optimism and pushed on. She and Jakob had very different manners of reaching for success. Jakob stormed ahead with aggression and tenacity while Anaya bided her time and laid her foundations with care. In that respect, she was a lot more like her best friend, Owen.

  Her friend Owen was the only person she could talk to when she felt down about her life. They’d been friends since childhood and he’d been the one to encourage her to apply fo
r college and follow her dreams when they were teens. The years they’d spent apart while he had been out of state studying veterinary medicine and she had stayed behind to study design had been some of the hardest of her life. Now they saw each other at least once a week and she would complain about Jakob’s latest misdemeanor and Owen would tell her about how he’d had to operate on yet another dog that had eaten one-too-many shoelaces.

  Her best friend was always the first person she’d call when Jakob was acting out of line, and he never failed to make her feel better. Owen knew her better than anyone else, after all. She remembered with fondness all the mischief and play of their youth. It had all begun with childish chatter over the fence that had separated their lawns and then grown into play dates. As they grew older, play dates became intense study sessions and as they got older still, study sessions had become being each other’s alibis in order to sneak out to a party together.

  As if reading her mind, Owen’s name was the next that Hannah mentioned. They had become so engrossed in their conversation by now that Hannah had come around behind the desk and drawn up a chair at Anaya’s side, crossing one leg over the other and picking up a cookie as if they were in some coffee shop rather than the reception of their work office.

  “What about that cute blonde guy you spend so much time with?” Hannah asked. “Owen, isn’t it? You two have always seemed close.”

  “We’re really close,” Anaya nodded. “We’ve just never looked at each other in that way.”

  “Why not?” Hannah pressed. “He seems to have his act together. He’s handsome and seems very sweet. You’re always telling me about all the nice things he does for you. For every bad thing you have to say about Jakob, you have a hundred nice things to say about Owen.”