The Werewolf CEO's Pregnant Boy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Pink Lines
Perry's pregnancy test is positive, Garret calls it a con in front of his board, and Perry tears up the $100,000 check and walks out; that night Garret's grandmother tells him the baby belongs to the pack.
Six weeks ago Perry Mulvaney slept with a werewolf.
This morning the test in his hand said pregnant.
He was a man. He was twenty-five. He taught tap.
Perry sat on the closed lid of the toilet in his mother's studio and read the little window again.
Two pink lines.
Through the door, eleven seven-year-olds were doing shuffle-ball-change in eleven different tempos.
His sister knocked once and came in anyway.
Brianne looked at the stick. Then she looked at him.
"Okay," she said. "So either that's broken, or your fancy contract boyfriend has some explaining to do."
"It's broken."
"You ate a raw steak over the sink on Sunday, Perry."
"I was hungry."
"You growled at the mailman."
He had. The man had rung the bell twice.
Brianne didn't know what Garret Burkhart was.
Perry did.
Page nine of the contract had said it in plain type, above the place where he signed.
Ninety days of being the human the Alpha of the Lakeshore pack had chosen. Dinners, galas, one hand on his back in public.
Then a staged breakup at the Harvest Moon gala, in front of three hundred wolves.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
The first half paid off this studio.
The second half was a check Garret left on Perry's kitchen counter the morning after the gala.
The morning after the one night that wasn't in the contract.
It was still folded in Perry's wallet. He had never cashed it.
"Take the four o'clock class," he told Brianne.
"Where are you going?"
"Downtown."
"In your tap shoes?"
He didn't change them.
The Burkhart Tower guard on Wacker Drive knew Perry's face from ninety days of galas. He let him through without a word.
The sixtieth floor smelled like cedar.
That was new. Six weeks ago it had only smelled like carpet.
Perry could hear voices behind the boardroom doors. He could hear a pen clicking. He could hear somebody's watch.
He pushed both doors open.
A dozen people looked up from a long black table.
Garret sat at the head of it in a black suit and a black tie.
His gray eyes landed on Perry and went flat.
"Mr. Mulvaney," he said. "You don't work here."
"I need five minutes. Alone."
"No."
On Garret's right, his cousin Rodney leaned back and laughed.
Sandy hair, golf tan, cologne you could taste.
"Look who's back. The rented boy." He smiled down the table. "What's the matter, sweetheart? Spend it all already?"
A woman near the window snorted.
Perry's face went hot.
He took the test out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of Garret.
Nobody spoke.
Garret looked at it for a long time.
"What is this?"
"You know what it is."
"Humans can't carry." His voice was very quiet. "Not men. Not women. Not from us."
"Tell that to the stick."
Rodney picked it up between two fingers like it was dirty.
"Five bucks at Walgreens. I can buy ten that say whatever you want." He tossed it back. "This is the con, Garret. He's had six weeks to think it up."
Perry waited for Garret to tell him to shut up.
For ninety days, Garret had told everyone who looked at Perry sideways to shut up.
He didn't.
He stood, buttoned his jacket, and looked at Perry.
"How much do you want this time?"
The room went so quiet Perry heard the watch again.
Six weeks ago Garret had held Perry's face in both hands in his kitchen and said his name.
Now a room full of people were watching Perry get priced.
He opened his wallet.
He took out the cashier's check. One hundred thousand dollars, made out to Perry Mulvaney.
Folded in four. Never cashed.
He held it up so the whole table could see the amount.
Then he tore it in half.
Then in half again.
He let the pieces fall on the table in front of Garret.
"Nothing," Perry said. "I want nothing from you. I'm keeping my baby, and I'm raising it myself."
Rodney started to say something.
"You don't get to talk to me," Perry said.
Rodney shut his mouth.
Perry turned and walked out in his tap shoes, and every step rang off the marble.
Behind him, a chair went over.
He didn't look back.
He cried on the Blue Line until Irving Park.
Then he washed his face in the studio bathroom and taught the Tuesday night adult beginners.
Six women and one retired mailman, all of them terrible, all of them happy.
"Heel, toe, and step," he called. "Arms are not part of tap, sir."
Everybody laughed.
His hands had almost stopped shaking.
At eight-fifteen, a black car pulled up outside the front window and stayed there.
The bell over the door rang.
An old woman stepped in out of the cold.
Silver bob. Pearls. A camel coat. A black cane she didn't lean on.
Under her other arm she carried a book the size of a church Bible, bound in cracked brown leather.
The adult beginners stopped tapping.
Perry knew her from every pack dinner. She had never once said his name.
Dolores Burkhart. Garret's grandmother.
"Mr. Mulvaney," she said. "We need to talk about my great-grandchild."
"Class is still on."
"Then they can listen."
She set the book on Brianne's front desk and opened it to a page marked with a red ribbon.
"Six wolves in that boardroom smelled it after you left. My grandson knocked over his chair." She tapped the page with one finger. "When the moon chooses a human for an Alpha, the human will carry. It has happened once before, in 1843."
Brianne came out of the office with a mop in her hand.
"Perry? Who is this?"
Dolores didn't look at her.
"A moon-born pup is the Alpha's heir. Our law says it's raised by the pack, in our house, from the day it's born. The carrier is paid, and then he's released."
She closed the book.
"It isn't yours, Mr. Mulvaney," she said. "It never was."
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