The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,49
same business contract we’d had before. The one that said we were just going to get to know each other while I was pregnant. Nothing had changed. And that included me not having decided yet what exactly I was going to do once the babies arrived.
So when he texted me early one Friday and told me to one, take the day off, two, book the entire weekend for a surprise, and three, pack a bag, I was only half-inclined to text back that one, I couldn’t possibly, two, he didn’t have the right to demand that, and three, I didn’t actually own an overnight bag.
Then another text came in saying that he’d had an overnight bag delivered to my house, and the part that was inclined to tell him where to shove his weekend surprise promptly fled with its tail between its legs.
Because that… was who Ethan was. I never would have guessed it before I knew him—and I hadn’t even really noticed it until we’d been hanging out for about two months—but these days, I was coming to realize that he was the kind of guy who suggested something and then, guessing that you might not be able to carry said something off, promptly took care of whatever he thought you wouldn’t be able to do. He had that sort of thoughtful precognition that made it…
Insanely easy to face life.
Even easier because he had a whole lot of money backing him up, and absolutely no problem with sharing it.
And that was something that I hadn’t really looked at, yet. I’d always found life to be a challenge. A constant uphill battle where I had to fight for every single step. But Ethan made it seem like it didn’t have to be that way. He made the world seem like it could be the oyster that was just waiting to open up for you. And it wasn’t only because he had billions in the bank.
It was also because that was just who he was. He saw a problem and he fixed it. He noticed when something was wrong, and he did whatever it took to make it right. He laughed at challenges. He was just as competitive as I was—and that meant that he never backed down.
He acted like the entire world was some sort of present just waiting to be unwrapped. And spending time with him was making me feel that way, too.
All of which is to say that five minutes after I got the text, I was marching into my superior’s office and telling him that I was too sick to work (completely believable—everyone knew how far along I was in the pregnancy, and what it was doing to my ability to sit at a desk for more than three hours), and then gathering my things and walking out into the chilly December day, my mind already on the weekend and what Ethan could possibly have planned for us now.
When he got to my apartment, he took one look at me—dressed in jeans and a cable-knit sweater, with a scarf in my hand and mittens already on—and then glanced at the overnight bag.
“Do you have enough in there for four days?” he asked quickly.
I frowned. “You didn’t say anything about taking Monday off as well.”
He leaned down and grabbed the bag, then took my hand. “On the drive, email the office and tell them you’re taking Monday off as well. I’m not going to want to come back to the city until Monday afternoon.”
I hustled after him, trying to figure out how my firm would take that—and where we could possibly be going that would require a Friday-through-Monday timeline.
I didn’t really stop to think about how presumptuous he was being with my time, or with the assumption that he could just order me to take yet another day off work. I mean, I thought about it for long enough to think that I should maybe be pissed off… and then I forgot about it.
Because when we got down to the street, there was another surprise waiting for me. The town car in which Ethan usually traveled was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he walked right to the trunk of a bright red sports car and opened it.
“You actually drove?” I asked, my estimation of the importance of this trip going up several notches.
He grinned at me like a little kid who had just won a carnival game. “I did. I told you I never drive in the city.