Josie was not one to pray, but lately she had begun having whispered, fevered conversations with God.
With her legs up in the air and her husband’s baby paste inside her.
Please let me get pregnant. Please let me get pregnant. Please let me get pregnant.
♥♥♥
Laura turned her head away from the bathroom mirror, her eyes lasered on her smartphone, counting down the timer until she could look at the little plastic stick.
Please don’t let me be pregnant. Please don’t let me be pregnant. Please don’t let me be pregnant.
The timer dinged.
Laura looked.
Closed her eyes.
And had a whispered, fevered conversation with God, too.
♥♥♥
Eternally Complicated is the final (yes, for sure, really, no more books ever, I really mean it…) book in the long-running New York Times bestselling Her Billionaires saga. What started in 2012 as a short novella called Her First Billionaire has turned into an eight-year journey through the lives of Laura, Mike, Dylan, Laura’s best friend Josie and her love, Alex, and so many other characters (including Darla from the New York Times bestselling Random series).
As best friends Josie and Laura wrestle with very different reactions to their pregnancies, they find that one bond endures: friendship.
And with plenty of peppermint sundaes at Jeddy’s Diner, of course!
Available at your favorite retailer!
Amazon: https://mybook.to/ECAMZ
Apple Book: https://mybook.to/ECAPP
Kobo: https://mybook.to/ECKOBO
Nook: https://mybook.to/ECBN
Google Play: https://mybook.to/ECGP2
Print: https://mybook.to/ECPrint
Goodreads: https://bit.ly/3EAmzDO
BookBub: https://bit.ly/3EyVNvC
READ CHAPTER ONE
Laura
Positive. It was positive.
Laura was positive it was positive because the word positive was spelled out in all caps.
Kinda hard to miss.
Red dye standing out over the white cotton strip in a long oval on a plastic stick that she dipped into her own pee three minutes ago said so.
Positive.
What a ridiculous word to describe a complicated situation. And a judgmental word, too.
Because maybe being pregnant wasn’t positive.
Maybe being pregnant wasn’t positive at all.
The sounds of a one of her children screaming in the back room bubbled up into the bathroom, where Laura sat on the toilet, the door carefully locked, the test in her hands. The wrapper for the test, the instructions, and the cardboard box were all neatly rolled up and stuffed into the bottom of the bathroom trash can, buried there under fresh toilet paper she’d pulled off the roll and wrapped into a bundle to toss on top.
“You stole it!” Aaron screamed in the distance.
“Aieeeeee!” screeched Adam, his twin brother, as Laura’s pulse pounded in her temples.
She knew. She’d known before she’d even peed in the cup and dipped the stick in the positive urine to get the positive test to be in this positively impossible situation.
She’d known being a week late wasn’t part of her menstrual cycle repertoire. A day late, maybe two, sure.
But otherwise, Laura wasn’t the type to have erratic cycles.
Stress didn’t change them. Medications didn’t change them. Even living with a group of women like she had in college hadn’t affected her cycle. If anything, she thought to herself as she stared dumbly at the word positive on the plastic stick of doom, the women around her in the dorm had synchronized their cycles to hers.
Not that she knew with any certainty. Her memory didn’t travel back that far for such mundane details. But when too many days had gone by and none of the typical premenstrual symptoms had emerged – no cravings for Ben & Jerry’s, no flashpoint temper at someone leaving the dishwasher door open – the dull thud of certainty had nestled somewhere between her navel and her pubic bone.
Like a small, polished rock, she carried it around for the twenty-four hours of willful denial she’d allowed herself before finally going to the drugstore and buying the test that she now held in her hands.
Jillian was eight. The twins were five. They’d had half a year of kindergarten, with a peaceful home during the day while all of the children were off at school being taught by people who weren’t them.
Her mind traced back the days to five weeks ago. It was a daytime tryst, the three of them, absorbing the luxury of a silent house.
No nannies, no screaming Adam and Aaron, no demands for apple slices and cheese cut a certain way.
No bored children’s cartoon bingeing.
No protests when the electronics were removed and crayons and paper replaced the power button and the touchscreen.
The three of them—Laura, Mike, and Dylan—had reveled in the silence as much as they had in the deep sanctuary of each other’s bodies. This had been their space again, their time, their choice.
They mattered again.
Frantic sex fit in between children’s schedules and demands had been the norm for eight years, but since the school year had started, all of the demands had been theirs and theirs alone.
She’d spent most of the day five weeks ago naked in bed with her men. When they weren’t using tongues and fingers and cocks to please each other, and when she wasn’t inviting them into her body in all of the ways that felt good and freeing, they’d indulged in a new television series, watching episode after episode of a ridiculous comedy until their sides split with laughter and their hearts filled with the kind of satiety that comes with being twinned with a body.
Bodies, in their case.
When a glance at the clock had reminded them that the school bus was coming soon, they’d showered together. It wasn’t sexual. The ritual cleansing had been a demarcation line, an acknowledgment of what they’d just done together and of what was about to unfold as the reality of the children that they had made poured into the silence.
And neutralized it.
The bridge between the nearly holy time of adults in carnality and intimately casual boundary-less-ness felt strange. A piece of Laura that day had snapped to attention as Jillian sloughed off her backpack, chattering about a girl’s birthday party coming in a week-and-a-half, and as Aaron came home yet again without socks.
Like Jillian’s backpack, Laura had sloughed off her identity as a sexual being, but what surprised her that day was how quickly she could go from the bedroom to the playroom.
Yet how woefully hard it was to go in the opposite direction.
Dylan
The damn drugstore bags were more see-through than Laura must have realized, he thought to himself as a prickly sensation made him stand tall, senses on alert.
He knew what was in that bag.
Dylan watched her walk through the kitchen in a daze, acknowledging no one, walking up the stairs to their bedroom with a worried look on her face. His eyes had flitted to the bag in her hand, the word Pregnancy on the side panel, opaque and startling at the same time.
His gut tightened.
His testicles pulled up, as if they were trying to choke him.
Why would Laura have pregnancy tests?
“Papa!” Aaron said, yanking hard on his hand, the one with the wedding ring Laura had put on his finger three-and-a-half years ago. “I want the green apple, not the red apple,” Aaron insisted.
Looking down, Dylan realized that he held a honey crisp in one hand with the knife in the other, ready to attend to the careful peeling.
One did not simply remove apple skin from an apple for a five year old; one peeled it with military precision, lest a single cell of red peel appear anywhere within fifty feet of the bare apple slice.
Puzzled, he looked at Aaron and said, “You don’t like Granny Smith apples.”
“Yes, I do!”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you—”
Stopping himself, Dylan realized that it was a fool’s errand to get into an argument with anyone under the age of…well, fifty.
“Okay, buddy,” he said, grabbing a green apple and washing it. To his knowledge Laura had only ever been pregnant twice, once with Jillian and once with their twins.
Three times? a voice inside him wondered.
Hold on.
Josie.
Those must be for Laura’s best friend, Josie. Eight miscarriages and counting, Josie and her husband, Alex, had been trying forever.
Relief made his shoulders drop. He had an explanation.
It was Josie.
Maybe Laura was buying them so Alex wouldn’t see them? Hiding the evidence? Maybe it was a surprise?
Or… something.
He didn’t care why. Just as long as it wasn’t for Laura.
Three kids in three years was a blessing from his wife he could never appreciate enough, but three was also enough.
“I want a Granny Smith apple,” Jillian announced, prancing into the room wearing a tiara and Mike’s Patriots jersey, the one he wore when they made it to Gillette Stadium on their once-a-year pilgrimage to the football game. The sleeves flopped down to the ground, and the jersey came to the tip tops of Jillian’s ankle bones.
“Okay,” Dylan said automatically.
“But there’s only one, Papa. The one in your hand.”
He looked down, the thin sliver of green skin the only indicator that this was a Granny Smith apple. Five plump Honeycrisps the size of softballs sat in the wooden bowl on the kitchen counter.
“You can have a Honeycrisp,” he said.
“I don’t want a Honeycrisp,” Jillian sputtered. “I want a Granny Smith.”
“I want a Granny Smith,” said Aaron.
I want a fuckin’ beer.
Uh oh. Did he say that aloud?
The two kids kept fighting. Good. He hadn’t.
A glance at the clock told him that Laura had been upstairs for five minutes. If she was taking that pregnancy test, then she’d know by now.
But that was impossible. Because the test was for Josie, right? She must be buying them for Josie, being a good friend to her.
Carefully slicing the Granny Smith in half, he cored it and then handed each kid a half, reaching for a Honeycrisp.
“You each get half of each apple.”
“I don’t want half! Now it’s cut and it’s broken,” Aaron declared in an outraged tone, as if Dylan had chopped a dog they were fighting over clean in half.
“I’m the apple referee,” Dylan said in an increasingly aggravated tone that even he could hear with his own ears, “and I say you each get half.”
“That’s fair,” Jillian said, nodding sagely as she took a big chomping bite out of hers.
“But now it’s broken!” wailed the little boy, who had no real reason to complain other than the endless work of trying to figure out the world.
“I was gonna cut it into slices for you anyhow, Aaron,” Dylan said, hoping logic would rule the day.
His son’s lips wavered as he suppressed a series of emotions that Dylan couldn’t read or identify, but he could see that they churned through his little mini-me.
“Fine.” The little boy turned on his heel and stormed out of the room. “I’ll eat my half of the Granny Smith apple, but I’m only half happy!”
Shrugging, Jillian ate the rest of hers and tipped her face up to look at Dylan. “If he’s only half happy, does that make him half sad, too, Papa?”
“Yeah,” Dylan said automatically, as Laura’s bare feet made their way into his field of vision. One step at a time she moved down the stairs, slowly. She was wearing yoga pants that hugged all of the best parts of her in all of the best of ways. A loose knit top with embroidery around a V-neck finished the simple look. She’d kicked her boots off in the entryway and hadn’t bothered to put on slippers.
Step.
Step.
Step.
He paid attention to her in a way that he didn’t normally, as Jillian nattered on about apples and fairness. Laura held something in her hands, curled in toward her like cradling a baby. She stopped on the other side of the kitchen counter, drew in a deep, shaky breath, and then smiled at Jillian.
“Hi, Mama!”
“Hi, honey.” A softness in her eyes as she looked at the boys made his stomach drop.
A hard swallow, and Dylan knew. Oh, God. He knew instantly.
It wasn’t Josie who was taking that pregnancy test.
Available at your favorite retailer!
Amazon: https://mybook.to/ECAMZ
Apple Book: https://mybook.to/ECAPP
Kobo: https://mybook.to/ECKOBO
Nook: https://mybook.to/ECBN
Google Play: https://mybook.to/ECGP2
Print: https://mybook.to/ECPrint
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