Page 12 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

CHAPTER 6

KAI

“Um, Mr. Nichols?”

Kai had been knee-deep in reading through a contract, picking it apart piece by piece, and it took him a second to rise from the depths of legal jargon and return to the real world. Matilda was standing in front of him with her lips pursed and her phone in hand. That was never a good combination.

“What’s happened?” he asked, bracing for the worst.

“Have you been online at all?”

Kai blinked at her, still trying to remember how to form a sentence that didn’t contain the words indemnity or confidentiality. “Uh, sorry. No, I haven’t. Should I have been?”

He was starting to worry properly now because she had that look on her face that meant she was about to tell him something that was going to take up the rest of his working day.

“Your friend Amy…” Matilda said.

Kai sighed. “I’m sorry. Has she been calling again saying her cat is sick? I told her to apologize to you for that.”

“Oh, she did,” Matilda said, brightening up for a brief second. “She was lovely, really. She even insisted she’d bring in a cake to the office as compensation. But she didn’t mention that you two were getting married?”

Kai sat up straight at that, so fast he felt his neck crick. “What?”

Matilda, her expression perfectly unreadable, handed him the phone she’d had clutched in her hand, the screen already open to the latest gossip sites that sometimes latched onto Kai’s personal life as fodder. Sure enough there was a picture of him and Amy, hugging each other tightly at the high school reunion, smug smiles plastered on their faces, underneath a headline that read Billionaire a Bachelor No Longer.

“Oh, God,” he groaned, sitting back in his chair and feeling a headache starting to thrum through the back of his skull.

“Guessing that’s just a rumor, then?” Matilda asked with a sympathetic smile.

“Yeah, but we’ve only got ourselves to blame for that one. Great.”

He handed Matilda her phone back.

“Want me to start on damage control?” she asked, prepared for battle as always, entirely unfazed, and Kai made a mental note to give her a raise simply for having to deal with all of this ridiculousness.

“Just give me a second to think it through…” he said, rubbing at the base of his neck. “Then we can come up with a strategy.”

Matilda let herself out, back to do actual work rather than field headlines about her boss’s social life, and Kai was alone once again.

He pushed the contract he’d been reading out of the way and let his forehead fall onto the desk with a thump. It wasn’t the end of the world; he was going to force himself to believe that, one way or another. And it wasn’t like he was upset about the thought of people thinking he and Amy were actually engaged. In fact, that thought lit up a pit of warmth in his stomach that he steered away from as soon as he felt it bloom. Because they were just friends, he and Amy, pretending otherwise had been a joke to play on all those terrible kids that had grown into terrible people at the reunion, and now it had gotten out of hand and out into the world. It was a mess, that’s what it was, something he’d be fielding questions about for weeks, something the tabloids would latch onto with hungry teeth, something that could very well have Amy getting stalked by photographers and God knew who else… She didn’t quite realize how much a part of his life all that stuff had become. Kai hadn’t really talked about it, preferring to ignore it. But now… well, now it could be a real problem.

His phone rang and Kai was about ready to hurl it through a window when his hand froze in midair, Jason Torres’s name flashing on the screen.

Good God, this day just kept getting worse. But If Kai ignored Jason’s phone call after blowing off that meeting, he’d never live it down. And considering he had never expected to hear from the man again, curiosity got the better of him.

“Hello?” he said, trying not to sound like he was in physical pain as he answered the call.

“Kai, why didn’t you just tell me the truth, man?!”

“Sorry?”

“I saw the announcement about your engagement. I don’t know why you made up that weak excuse that ‘something had come up’ to ditch the meeting. If you had said you were going to be out celebrating with your new fiancée, then it would have been no problem! I mean, if I had landed the girl of my dreams, you bet that I’m going to carve out time for her over work. I’m not losing that. I would have understood.”

“Uh, well…”

“All that to say, congratulations, man,” Jason continued jovially. “And I know whatever the tabloids say is usually trash, but that picture of you two is real cute. Where have you even been hiding this girl?”

“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” Kai said, too far into the depths of shock to stop himself from just blurting out facts. “Always been in touch one way or another.”

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