Page 14 of Oops, I'm Having My Best Friend’s Baby!

“Of course,” Kai sighed, not surprised in the least and pulling out his phone to show her the article he had saved, the same one Matilda had shown him. Amy took his phone and instantly puckered her lips together like she was trying not to laugh.

“It’s not funny,” Kai said, hating every second of this.

“That’s… that’s kind of funny, though, isn’t it?” she said. “But that’s also karma well and truly biting us in the butt for our little stunt at the reunion, huh?”

“You’re not upset?” he asked, not wanting to analyze why that made him inexplicably happy.

“No? It’s just funny. But back to your problem. Who thinks that we’re getting married and why is that a bad thing?”

“The guy I had a meeting with that I… that was rescheduled. So I came to meet you at the reunion instead.”

“What about him?”

“He invited me to come on a week-long vacation on his yacht to catch up on business stuff instead of doing boring meetings behind a desk, you know.”

Amy’s eyebrows rose, impressed. “Oh wow. Well, that’s great, but I’m kind of failing to see the problem here or why our supposed engagement is an issue.”

“Because he started congratulating me on the engagement and invited you along as well. You know, as a couple’s vacation with him and his wife.”

Amy’s lips puckered again, stifling laughter and only barely succeeding.

“Oh, you just forged on ahead and didn’t correct him, huh?” she said, knowing him too well, an edge of slightly hysterical laughter still in her voice.

“Yeah.” Kai sighed. “And I said yes to everything, me going and you going and us going together as an engaged couple, so…”

At that Amy broke and started giggling, a hand over her mouth.

“Oh, Kai, dude, no. I thought you’d gotten so much better at thinking before you did things.”

“Yeah, well, I fell off the wagon, clearly.”

“So…” Amy prodded, having the decency to get her giggles in check.

“So what?”

“So what do you need me to do to get you out of this sticky situation you got yourself into? Because I’m assuming you can’t just tell this guy ‘Sorry, but we’re not actually getting married.’ That sounds like it would be bad, for businessreasons or whatever. At the very least, it would make you look like a massive weirdo if you fessed up after a full conversation. Am I right?”

Kai could feel the relief flooding through his body and tried to smother it before he got ahead of himself.

“You’d seriously come along and pretend to be my fiancée for a week?”

Amy shrugged as if it were no big deal. “You came to my rescue when I was crazy enough to take on that reunion job. I owe you one. Besides, a vacation on a yacht? I can think of worse places to hang out for a week.”

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, desperately wanting to make sure Amy understood what she was about to get herself into. “You’re going to come along with me and help me save face with this guy, and we’re going to pretend to be getting married, all because I couldn’t use words properly. For a week, stuck together on a boat?”

“Yeah, sounds good to me.”

Kai slumped in his chair, letting his forehead rest against the counter as he finally let the relief wash over him, his lungs able to breathe properly for the first time since he’d hung up the call with Jason earlier that day.

“Oh, my God, you’re the actual best,” he said, still face first on the counter. He felt Amy pat his shoulder.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Besides, it’ll be a way for me to help you out for once instead of you always wanting to help me.”

Aah,now it made more sense why Amy was so happy to jump on such a ridiculous plan to help him out. Neither of them had grown up in great situations, both of them from the poor side of town, and both of them the outcasts at school. But Amy hadn’t had the best relationship with her parents on top of it all. Anything they did for her was seen as a favor that needed to be returned, and to this day Amy had a complex about it, whether she wanted to admit it or not. Their lessons on “the world gives you nothing for free” had been taken too far sometimes. At sixteen she’d been buying her own groceries, walking to work after school because they wouldn’t give her a lift, and living at Kai’s half the time because at least his house was closer to school. To this day you couldn’t give her anything without her looking for the catch or expecting to have to pay it all back somehow. He hadn’t realized how ingrained it still was in her.

Kai changed the subject, not wanting to feel sad about things from Amy’s past that he could neither change nor fix.

“Have you recovered from the reunion yet?” he asked.

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