The Baby Pact Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  The Baby Pact

  Lexi Whitlow

  © 2017 Lexi Whitlow

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.

  Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented are 18 or over.

  Kindle Edition 2017

  Cover Design:

  Red Hott Covers

  Created with Vellum

  To all the people out there who have struggled to have children. The Baby Pact is for you.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Bad Boy’s Fake Wedding

  Excerpt from Guarding Her

  Excerpt from A Perfect SEAL

  Also by Lexi Whitlow

  Prologue

  Macon - Ten Years Ago

  “Macon Sands, you are too much,” she says. She kisses me again, and something deep inside of me stirs.

  I want her, need her. Love her. Maybe that’s the right word — but we’re eighteen. I shouldn’t say it, not yet.

  Her chestnut hair glistens in the sun. We slipped away to the beach after our senior year dance, and we slept on the beach, fooling around on a blanket I’d kept in the back of my beat-up Honda Civic for the past year, hoping that Eliza would finally run away with me — even if just for a night.

  I pull her close to me by the waist and move my hand up her skirt. Her panties and bra came off hours ago, in the middle of the night when we were still slightly drunk from the Schnapps she stole from her parents’ liquor cabinet.

  It’s a funny thing — having a liquor cabinet. The house, if you can call it that, where I live, is just filled with liquor bottles. The whole damn thing is a liquor cabinet. But I didn’t mention that to Eliza. Instead, I tasted the minty, burning alcohol and pretended I knew what it was.

  Her skin is warm against my touch, and I feel my cock stirring again.

  We’ve done everything we could think of, everything except for that last, final thing.

  When my hand travels higher, I find her wetness, and she spreads her legs reflexively. I groan, almost dizzy from desire. I’ve spent the last four years wondering what she would feel like, imagining it, staying up late looking at the school photo she let me had.

  Her sex feels sweeter — tastes sweeter — than anything I’d ever thought could be possible. And I need her today, if she’ll have me.

  We’re leaving for school in six months, and if she’s on a college campus, she’ll find some other guy, someone more deserving.

  I do what my brother told me to do — I let her guide me. Her hand lifts her dress and finds mine, pushing my fingers in further.

  “Don’t stop,” she moans, biting her lip. “Just like that, baby. Put your thumb right there — oh!”

  She bucks against my hand, lifting her hips, begging for more.

  “God,” I say, inching closer to her so I can feel more of her body against mine, “you feel so damn good.”

  Her hips are still bucking against my hand, and one strap of her pink dress falls away, exposing a perfectly round breast. I put my mouth to it and dance my tongue across her nipple. She cries out — and as best I can tell, she comes again.

  My cock is now at full mast, straining against my cheap slacks.

  “Eliza,” I moan against her skin. She smells tropical and musky and like roses — everything good all at once.

  Her hips finally stop moving, and her fingers tangle in my hair. “Macon,” she whispers. “Do you have — a — you know…a condom?”

  I gulp. I hadn’t thought it would get this far. “No. I don’t. We could wait,” I say through gritted teeth. My cock stiffens even more, though I would have thought that wasn’t a possibility.

  “I don’t want to wait,” she says. A stiff breeze catches her hair.

  It’s stupid. It’s reckless.

  But we’re alone on this beach, waves crashing against the shore just yards away from us.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nods, her cheeks flushing. Who would have thought that the smartest girl in school would go for a guy like me. Sure, I know a little bit about math — and a fuck load more about computers, when it comes down to it. But she’s gorgeous and smart, and her family is way better off than mine. I’m like the street urchin kid in all those Dickens books she likes.

  I think that kid eventually gets the girl, but I didn’t pay attention to that shit. I was too busy looking at Eliza.

  “Yeah,” she says, biting her lip. She pulls me into her and kisses me, tongue glancing against mine.

  She guides my body into hers, unbuttoning my pants in haste. I lift her skirt and lay her back against the blanket.

  “You’re all I ever wanted,” I say.

  I don’t say the word love because that’s silly. It almost isn’t enough to describe how I feel.

  It’s quick and endless at the same time, and it all takes place in flashes that I won’t entirely recall for the next ten years.

  But the feeling will remain with me.

  Her legs, wrapped around my hips, the feeling of her like a hot vise, her breathy voice, begging me not to stop.

  I let myself go, for perhaps the first time in my life.

  “I love you, Macon,” she whispers.

  But still, I don’t say it back.

  I spend every moment in college and in the following years when I make my first billion dollars — wishing that I had.

  But it seemed so innocent then, so new.

  We spent the next weeks doing it anywhere we could get a chance — with protection, every time after that. The whole love word never came up again, and I didn’t push it. I felt like it all might fall apart if I did.

  But it fell apart for a different reason entirely.

  It only takes once — and by prom, Eliza’s belly had started to swell.

  There was a baby, and where there’s a baby, there’s no end to the trouble they can create.

  I wish now that I’d told her how much I loved her, that I’d do anything to help her, to make her mine.

  A pact. A promise. Anything.

  But I didn’t.

  And everything was lost. For a good goddamn long time.

  Graduation Night

  “You’re an irresponsible little shit,” my mother says. “And you are leaving this town until college starts. You’re supposed to be the one making money for us — making this family into something a little better than it was, and you’re a piece of shit just like your father is. You know that?”

  My mother lights a cigarette, and in one fluid movement, also picks up her Coors Light and takes a long swig. She’s on a roll.

  “I told Eliza I’d take care of her,” I say. I’m sitting on the floor since she sold our La-z-Boy chair last week for beer money.

  “Oh yeah? How’s that working out? Her mother won’t let you see her. And she’s pregnant. She won’t be going to NC State with you in the fall. Is that everything she ever dreamed of?”

  “No,” I say hoarsely. We tried to hide it for so long, to make it just between us. But there’s only so much hiding you can do when you’re in high school. I did tell her I’d take care of her. I offered to find money to stop the pregnancy, even though I regret that now.

  It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong idea to suggest.

  I should have just told her I loved her that day on the beach. I should have followed that up with, “I’ll get a condom. Let’s just wait another day.”

  I didn’t.

  It was stupid. It was irresponsible. And here I am, facing my mother head on. My father is God-knows-where, and my brother got out of this shit hole of a town five years back. It’s me against her, much like it is with El
iza back in her own home. A different version of the same hell.

  There’s a long pause, and I break it, watching my mother drink. She opens a second beer. “I could get a job. Stay here. Defer entrance into school.”

  “You’ll do no such thing, Macon,” my mother snarls. “You’re leaving for your uncle’s place in Atlanta — tonight. And you’re starting school. It’s paid for with that big ass fancy scholarship. You can get a job there and send money back to me when you make it big, right?”

  Her voice softens a little at the end. My mom isn’t a poster child for supportive mothers, but she does like to brag about her son going to college. The scholarship sweetened the deal. It would be a first for our family.

  I swallow hard. “No,” I reply. “I’m staying for Eliza.”

  “Fuck no you’re not. You’re going to college. I’m suing for custody so I can get a little money from the state. You can see the little thing when you get back next summer.”

  “You’re not suing for custody! And I won’t go to college,” I growl. I stand up and stomp back to my bedroom, thrusting a few things into my backpack. Eliza’s parents hate me just as much as mine hate her, but I’ll have better luck there. At least there aren’t five hundred beer cans on the floor. Maybe they’ll give me a place to sleep while I work things out.

  When I come back out into what qualifies as a living room in our mobile home, my mother is standing, hands on her hips. “Fuck. No.”

  I push past her, but when I get to the door, my uncle is standing there.

  He carries me, kicking and punching and biting at him, to his truck, throwing me in and locking the door before he bolts out of town and south towards I-95.

  I scream at him until I’m hoarse.

  But he has a brick-laying job for me that summer, and I do it.

  I save every penny, thinking of Eliza.

  But tragedies happen, and there’s nothing I can do to stop the big thing that happens next.

  Chapter 1

  Eliza - Nine Years, Six Months Ago

  “You really got yourself in a pile of trouble this time, Eliza,” she says as we pull into the hospital parking lot. She looks over at my increasingly large belly. Twenty weeks — yeah it’s a pile of trouble. But it’s a pile of trouble I’m planning to have, no matter what.

  She’s said it at least six thousand times since she found out I was pregnant at the beginning of the summer, and there are lots of fun additions — ‘you’re a whore, you’ll never get a job, you’ll never get up to NC State, never make anything of yourself.”

  I only nod, because it’s all basically true. Except I don’t think I’m a whore. I was just stupid and in love — Macon’s gone now, but I stand by my decision to be with him. He’s scared and he ran — at least that’s what everyone is telling me.

  He hasn’t contacted me, and that’s fine, I guess. Or well, he’s responded to my emails with clipped replies. He’s told me he’ll do right by me, but the emails are less and less frequent. Fine. I can do this on my own.

  My mom and I walk into the hospital, silent. And just as silently, we walk back to the exam room with the ultrasound machine. I’m supposed to get some blood tests done today — and a bonus ultrasound since I’ve been feeling weird. After a long, awkward silence with my mom staring at the wall behind me as I sit on the exam table in a paper gown, a chipper nurse comes in, followed by some OB resident who looks like she might know what she’s doing.

  “Alrighty,” the resident says, “let’s take a look.” I watch as she puts on her crisp blue gloves and turns on the machine. The cool gel hits my belly, but immediately, it’s clear to everyone in the room that something is wrong.

  That whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sound doesn’t fill up the room like it should.

  I sit up, jarring the resident and the nurse. “What’s going on?”

  “We might be seeing — uh — let me get a doctor,” the resident says, looking at the nurse.

  “Shit,” my mother says, keeping her eyes from meeting mine.

  After what seems like hours, a doctor strolls in and looks for far too long at the ultrasound screen, rolling the cold wand over my belly. I shudder, my mind racing.

  “Little Bit,” I say, my voice heavy.

  “Hm?” the doctor says.

  “That’s just what I was calling her.” My throat closes up, and tears start to form in my eyes. “She’s not there anymore —” My voice breaks then. I hadn’t wanted Little Bit when I found out about her, but I came to view her as mine as time wore on.

  “Well, honey,” the doctor says, looking at me with a ripe pity in his eyes. “It does look like she passed on very recently. How far along are you? Nineteen weeks? Twenty?”

  “Twenty,” I say. “Half way.” I choke back tears as the words come out, but somehow I keep saying them, even though everything has changed.

  “Sometimes, there’s no rhyme or reason. And sometimes, there’s a chromosomal abnormality we just fail to detect. Or an infection. We just don’t know…”

  The doctor rambles on and on, mentioning my family history of endometriosis as a possibility. But it all fades together in a garble of words as I sit there, trying to hold it together in front of my mother and everyone. There are procedures mentioned, ways to induce. I respond blandly, tears rolling down my face, choosing induction over everything else. Maybe then I could hold her — just once.

  After that, things move fast. I’m admitted to the hospital, and everything is over almost as quickly as it started. I hold her once — impossibly tiny — and say goodbye.

  The next day, we go home.

  Everything is surprisingly normal — back how it used to be. I have time to enroll in community college, reapply to State for the spring.

  I send Macon an email one night when I can get away to the library — my mother took away my laptop months ago. I tell him that she went easily — there was no pain. She just slipped away. The good thing is, she won’t have a mom who’s utterly unprepared, and she’ll never know pain or want or the agony of being split between two families.

  I delete it before I hit send.

  I send another, shorter message, telling him I lost the baby, simple as that.

  He sends a long reply with promises and anger and sadness that I never respected. But I skim it, and I delete it.

  People need to move on, I tell myself. Over and over. People get over things all the time.

  I make a vow to myself — a promise. I will have a child, and it will be mine.

  This one will be prepared for, and wanted, even if I have to walk to the ends of the earth to make it happen.

  And I’m not planning to fall for Macon Sands again.

  He’s a fine boy — a gorgeous one — but he’s no man.

  I bury the pain and keep on, simply because I have no other choice.

  Chapter 2

  Macon - A Year Later

  I’m so late. I’m so freaking late, hauling my sorry ass across the brickyard trying to get to the bus to catch a lift to Centennial Campus to make my last exam. I hate living on campus almost as much as I hate being in school. I swear to god, if I get locked out of this exam for being late, I’m going to take it as a sign from the universe that I should just blow it all off and quit. I could get a six-figure coding job in about fifteen minutes, with or without a college degree. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg knew that. I know that. Every decent tech start-up in the country knows that. I’m wasting my time here. There’s nothing these troglodyte college professors can teach me that I didn’t teach myself in junior high. Most of these codgers still think this C++ is cutting edge.

  There is one – only one – reason to stay here, and it’s on fine display today. The brickyard, hell, every inch of campus, every inch of this town, is over-run with gorgeous women of every size, shape, color, nationality, and physical description. It’s a big state school. I never run out of eye candy nor am I short on girls to hook-up with. Other than coding, that’s about the only thing I’m good at.