Virgin Dot Com Novel

[Jasmine's POV] The pregnancy tests sat on the café bathroom counter like accusations. Three of them, because Nora had insisted on multiple brands for accuracy, like maybe one would be wrong, like maybe I'd get lucky and biology would take pity on me for once in my fucking life. I stared at them, willing the results to be different, knowing they wouldn't be. Two minutes. That's all it took to confirm what I'd been afraid to acknowledge, what my body had been screaming at me for weeks while I deliberately ignored every signal because ignorance felt safer than knowledge. Two pink lines.

Digital readout spelling "Pregnant" in letters that felt like a death sentence. Plus sign so clear it might as well have been carved into my retinas. I was pregnant. The thing is, my first thought wasn't joy or terror or any of the emotions I'd imagined feeling in this moment back when pregnancy was theoretical, something that happened to other people with their lives together. My first thought was a calculation so cold it scared me: which one? Liam, Asher, or Finn. Three men who'd somehow become my entire world despite every odd stacked against us.

One fertilized egg currently hijacking my uterus without permission. And absolutely no way to know whose genetic material had won this particular lottery, whose cells were dividing inside me, whose child I was carrying. The uncertainty of it felt like another violation layered on top of everything else. Not knowing. Not being able to point to one of them and say "yours" with certainty. Carrying a question mark instead of an answer. My second thought was darker, more visceral, tinged with a shame that made my stomach clench: Jackson's hands on my body.

His fingers between my legs just this morning, pressing against fabric while I stood there and let him because I'd made a deal and I kept my fucking deals even when they cost me everything. The violation I'd been enduring for three days, would endure for one more, while a cluster of cells divided and multiplied inside me, oblivious to the degradation happening around it. I pressed my palms against the sink, breathing through the nausea that had nothing to do with morning sickness and everything to do with the impossibility of my situation.

The cold porcelain grounded me, kept me tethered to reality when everything else felt like it was slipping away. Pregnant. With Jackson touching me. With the brothers not knowing. With everything so fucking complicated I couldn't see a way through that didn't end in wreckage. A baby, I was going to have a baby. The reality of it crashed over me in waves-not the clinical fact of pregnancy but the visceral truth of what that meant. A person. A human being who would have my eyes or Liam's intensity or Asher's precision or Finn's charm.

Someone who hadn't asked to be born into this clusterfuck of complicated relationships and family drama and scandal. Someone who deserved better than what I could give them. When I emerged from the bathroom, Nora took one look at my face and immediately pulled me into a hug. I stood there, rigid and shaking, while she whispered comfort I couldn't absorb, promises that things would be okay when we both knew better. "It's going to be okay," she said anyway, because that's what people said. Because hope was supposed to exist even in impossible situations.

"I'm pregnant," I said out loud, testing how the words tasted. They sat heavy on my tongue, foreign and terrifying and undeniable. "I'm pregnant with a child whose father could be any of three men, while subjecting myself to a fourth man's harassment to save a company that might not even be worth saving." Saying it out loud made it real in a way the tests couldn't. Made me confront the full scope of the impossibility I'd created through a series of choices that had seemed reasonable at the time but now felt like elaborate self-destruction. The timing couldn't be worse.

The cosmic joke of it made me want to laugh or scream or both, made me wonder what I'd done to deserve this particular intersection of blessing and curse. Because a baby should be a blessing, right? Should be wanted and celebrated and joyful. But all I felt was terror and confusion and the overwhelming certainty that I was going to fuck this up spectacularly. Nora pulled back, hands on my shoulders, forcing me to meet her eyes. "You have to tell them. The brothers. They deserve to know." Everything in me recoiled from that truth.

Telling them meant making it real in a way even the positive tests couldn't. Meant watching their faces as they processed the implications, calculated odds, wondered if the baby was theirs. Meant adding this complication to an already impossible situation, watching them try to figure out how to navigate being potential fathers when we'd barely figured out how to be whatever the fuck we were. "After tomorrow," I heard myself promise. "After Jackson is done and gone. One more day. Then I'll tell them everything." One more day of endurance.

One more day of his hands on my body, his voice calling me good girl like I was a pet he'd trained. One more day of dissociating while he touched me like property he'd purchased with corporate strategy. I could survive one more day. Had to survive it because the alternative was letting him win, letting him break me when I'd promised myself he wouldn't. Except I didn't know if I could. Not with this knowledge sitting in my chest like a stone, weighing down every breath.

Not with the awareness that every touch now carried different implications, that Jackson's hands on my body weren't just violating me but coming too close to something precious and vulnerable I needed to protect. The afternoon passed in fragments. I returned to the office, performed my role with mechanical precision. Smiled when expected. Brought coffee when summoned. Bent over his desk to retrieve fallen papers, feeling his eyes on my exposed skin, knowing exactly what he was thinking.

And all the while, my hand kept drifting to my stomach-flat still, showing no evidence of the impossible thing growing inside me. A reflex I couldn't control, my body already trying to protect what I wasn't sure I could keep. What I wasn't sure I deserved to keep, given how I'd been living, what I'd been allowing. Because how do you bring a child into this? Into the wreckage of scandal and harassment and families that would rather you didn't exist?

How do you explain to a kid someday that you don't know who their father is, that they were conceived during the most complicated relationship clusterfuck in recorded history? That their mother agreed to let a man touch her inappropriately while pregnant because she thought she could save something that might not have been worth saving? The thoughts spiraled, each one darker than the last, until I was drowning in hypotheticals and worst-case scenarios. Until the only thing keeping me functioning was the rigid routine of survival-one task, then the next, then the next.

At three thirty, Jackson's voice crackled through the intercom. "Jasmine. My office." I stood, smoothing my too-short skirt over thighs that wanted to tremble, and walked toward his door on legs that felt disconnected from my body. Each step felt weighted with significance I couldn't name, dread pooling in my stomach alongside the nausea that had become constant. Knocked once. Waited for permission to enter my own degradation.

"Come in." He was smiling when I opened the door-the kind of smile that made my blood run cold, that suggested he knew something I didn't and was enjoying the power differential. The kind of smile that promised nothing good. He sat behind the desk in Liam's chair, lord of a kingdom built on someone else's foundation, and gestured toward the chair across from him with casual authority. "Sit," he said, and the single word carried weight I couldn't decipher. Command wrapped in invitation. Threat disguised as courtesy.

I sat, hands folded in my lap to hide their trembling, and waited for whatever fresh hell he'd devised. One more day. I could survive one more day. Even if I had no idea how. Virgin Dot Com