Romantic Acquisition Page 0,63

decided to call in sick. She’d just called in for a headache last week, but she didn’t feel guilty about this time. She hadn’t had a sick day in over five years. Kate considered that she was definitely due for some sick time.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon before she woke up again. She felt much better. Sitting up in her bed, she looked around, surprised by the afternoon sunshine spilling into her bedroom.

Kate yawned and padded to the kitchen, famished. She made herself a sandwich and ate it quickly. She then showered and changed clothes, deciding to head into the office for a few hours of work. She knew her staff would be confused that they had their team leader back for one day, then she was gone again.

The office was in chaos when she arrived. There were orders misplaced, or shipped to the wrong store, several vendors were calling and demanding payment and one of her buyers was trying to quit. She had her hands full trying to deal with all the small issues and it was almost ten o’clock when she could breathe again.

She was sitting at her desk wondering if there was any other crisis she needed to resolve before she left for the evening when she heard voices outside her office.

David was talking to someone but she didn’t recognize who the other voice was. It sounded like the person who had been in his office the other day when she’d overheard the mysterious conversation.

“No, we’ll sell long and make over ten million dollars on the deal. Then we back out of it at the last minute and no one is the wiser,” David was saying.

Kate didn’t understand what he was talking about but she knew it wasn’t good. He’d been gone all day yesterday and she’d been so busy today she hadn’t had time to talk to him about the conversation from the coffee shop. Now she wasn’t sure she should talk to him about it. What was he up to?

Kate quietly left her office and went home. There was a message from Carlo on her answering machine. He sounded upbeat but he didn’t leave a phone number so she couldn’t call him back.

She hit the play button again, just to hear his voice. Kate bit her fingernail, wondering if she should talk to Carlo immediately about the conversations she’d overheard. Whatever David was doing was way over her head. She knew it was bad and she suspected that he was manipulating stocks during this sale. She knew next to nothing about stocks except what her 401k reports showed so she wasn’t experienced enough to connect the dots and figure out what David was doing. But she was sure Carlo would.

Accepting that she’d have to wait until tomorrow, no matter what she did, she walked into her kitchen and tried to find something to eat for dinner. But her stomach didn’t seem to want to accept any kind of food. She decided on a glass of milk but could only drink half before she started feeling awful again.

After rinsing out her cup, she realized that she was bone weary, just as she had been the night before. She crawled into bed after washing her face, brushing her teeth and changing into a night shirt. She was asleep moments after her head hit the pillow.

Waking up the next morning, Kate was miserable. She felt awful again and didn’t understand why. She thought back to everything that had happened in the last few weeks and gasped.

Could it be possible? Kate shook her head, then stopped the action when it made her stomach more upset.

She lay in bed and tried to relax but her body just wouldn’t allow it. She counted backwards and sure enough, she was more than five weeks late. She had been so busy, she hadn’t even realized that so much time had passed. It had been five weeks since she’d gone on the ship with Carlo. Five weeks since she’d first made love with him. They had used protection every time they’d made love but condoms weren’t one hundred percent effective. Nothing was.

Kate groaned as the reality of her situation sank into her befuddled mind. She counted the weeks again, wondering how she could have missed something so significant.

But there was no way around it. She pulled herself out of bed, then sat on the edge while her stomach calmed down. She needed to get to the drug store and get a pregnancy