Her Swedish Billionaire's Baby: A BWWM Pregnancy Romance For Adults (4 page)

Amy was on her
instantly, hugging her feverishly. “We’ll be friends,”
she murmured. “Best friends. Friends with benefits. Friends
with the full package of benefits: dental, vision ....”

Samara grinned
against her hug feeling happier than she’d been in all the time
since she left home. “You do realize,” she murmured
softly as she fished around for another piece of pizza, “you’re
my first friend here.”

Amy tittered
gleefully. “You’re such a fucking liar!”

“
No
.... I’ve done a lot of stuff, but ... I didn’t really
want to. Moving around a lot because we were trying to stay one step
ahead of the creditors meant that we couldn’t really form deep
connections y’know? This is the first time I’ve known
where I’ll be a year from now.” It pierced her heart to
know it; especially with the hole of Alison’s absence in her
life.

“
Well
in that case, I’m glad to have the honor,” Amy said.

She couldn’t
resist her anymore. Even if she hadn’t been so lonely and
fragile about her family, the tenderness of her touch would have
overwhelmed her, as would her echoes of her loneliness. Her whole
life had been brutality. This was a sweetness she’d never
expected to experience in this world. She wasn’t even sure it
existed. Alison had had their mom, at least for a little while; she’d
known the gentleness of a mother who loved her. Samara had only had
Dad and Alison, rough and tumble and afraid of their feelings. Samara
hadn’t realized she’d been starving for simple affection
all her life until she got her very first taste. They fell into a
food coma soon after.

She and Amy were
still all wrapped up together, asleep, when Samara’s phone rang
the next morning. She fought her way out from under the covers (this
must be why hustlers generally shunned them) and grabbed madly for
her pants, managing to get to her phone out of her pocket before it
stopped ringing, but she didn’t have time to see who was on the
caller ID. first. “Hello?” she gasped.

A pause, then
Alison’s voice: Guarded. Cool. “Samara.”

“
Alison?!”

There was a long
moment when neither of them said anything. All Samara could think
about was how happy she was to know her sister was on the other end
of the line, whatever she might say to Samara in a few seconds.
“Yeah,” Alison said carefully at last.

“
How--how
are you? How’s Dad?”

“
Dad’s
... well, you know. And me, I’m ... fine.” Samara’s
face creased. That didn’t sound good, but she couldn’t be
sure exactly what it meant; Alison had never talked like that before.
“What about you?” Her voice sounded strained. “How’s
college girl? You there with some frat boy ass?”

Maybe Amy could hear
what Alison was saying; she smirked where she still lay on the bed.
Samara made an irritated noise and turned away slightly. “That’s
an offensive term, Alison,” she said, lowering her voice.

Alison snickered, but
her heart wasn’t in it. “You really are. Now I know why
you left. I guess.”

Samara was all the
more irritated. “I didn’t go to college so I could get
laid.”

“
Yeah?
Then why the fuck did you? Why, Samara? All of a sudden, I find you
climbing out our bedroom window, no warning, no nothing?”

Samara got out of the
bed and tried to stand in the far corner for some privacy, but it was
a dorm room, so this was only about three feet away from where she’d
been before. She lowered her voice further, also knowing this would
accomplish nothing, but she couldn’t very well go out into the
hall of the girls’ dorm naked. “Alison, you know I’ve
wanted to get away forever. And you knew I wanted to go to college!”

“
So,
what, you don’t even tell us? What if I hadn’t caught
you, Samara? You were gonna ditch out and that was it, no note, no
explanation, you’re just gone?!”

“
I
was going to call you and tell you where I went, of course. Hopefully
after it was too late for Dad to drag me back.”

“
Like
he could?! You’re eighteen now, Samara, you can do whatever you
want. What did you think he was gonna do, tie you up?”

“
Maybe.”
Actually, Samara had envisioned all sorts of scenarios. When it came
to his daughters, Samara honestly wasn’t sure he had any
limits. “But I guess I may as well not have called,” she
couldn’t help saying bitterly, “since you wouldn’t
have answered, anyway.” When Alison only scoffed, Samara
snapped, “Why didn’t you answer my calls, Alison?”

She heard Alison
breathing, loudly and almost evenly, like she was trying to calm
herself. It didn’t work. “Because I wanted to wait until
it wouldn’t end in a screaming match, but looks like I didn’t
wait long enough. So what, that’s it? You just ditch out to be
the big kahuna on campus and tell your family to fuck off? You’re
done with us?”

Samara sighed sadly.
“Of course not! But, you know, did it ever occur to you and
Dad--ever once, in eighteen years--to think about what I wanted?”

“
We
did think about what you wanted! That’s all we ever thought
about!”

“
Then
how come it never occurred to you to let me have it? This is the only
way I was ever going to get it, Alison. The only way you guys would
ever let me have what I want is if I left and got it for myself.”

Alison was obviously
trying to restrain the nastiest words that were jumping to mind. “So
all that matters is what little Samara wants, is that it?”

“
No,
but in eighteen years, I’d think it should matter once.”

“
It
always mattered! All Dad and I were ever thinking about was--”

“
Yeah?
Then how come we never once did anything I wanted to do, Alison? We
didn’t get a house. We didn’t stay in one school. Hell,
it was all I could do to get any studying done at all, between
hustling and constantly being on the move. Do you have any idea how
hard it was to learn what I had to learn so I could do this?! All
day, every day, it was Dad and his hustles! That’s all you guys
thought about! The closest I ever got to something I wanted was
trying to read in the back of the Cadillac, tuning you guys out. That
was your big concession to letting me do what I wanted, and you still
never stopped giving me a hard time about it!”

“
That’s
bullshit!” Alison hissed viciously. “You had friends, and
boys, teachers--”

“
Sometimes!
For a few weeks! Then Dad would rip them away from me again! I NEVER
HAD ANYTHING, Alison! Could you and Dad just let me have one nice
thing, for once?!”

“
But
this isn’t for once, is it!” Alison sounded like she was
practically foaming at the mouth. “This is forever!”

“
I’m
not the one who made it that way,” Samara said coolly. “You
did. You and Dad.”

“
Fuck
you, Samara!” Alison roared. Samara saw Amy flinch out of the
corner of her eye. Yeah, there was no way she hadn’t heard
that. She wasn’t the only one who flinched.

Samara looked sadly
at her phone for a few seconds. She had really hoped for more caring
and understanding. She’d actually finally up and left, and
still, nothing was different. Nothing at all. She was begging for her
sister’s understanding, for her blessing to live a life that
didn’t make her unhappy, and this was her response? ‘Fuck
you’? She’d always thought Dad and Alison, or at least
Alison, were dimly aware of Samara’s feelings and desires and
needs, but maybe not. Somewhere in her mind, she’d always
believed that, deep down, they wanted her to be happy, but maybe she
was wrong.

She put her phone up
to her mouth only long enough to say, “Goodbye, Alison,”
and closed it. She knew she’d never call Alison again, and from
the sound of things, Alison would never call again, either. So this
was it. Dad and Alison, always going on about the importance of
family, but they only meant it as long as they were the beneficiaries
of that arrangement. They meant that Samara had to do what they
wanted, not that they had to do what she wanted. Hell, they wouldn’t
even let her do what she wanted all on her own. They wouldn’t
even stand by her, support her. How hard could it be to let her live
her life the way she wanted to?

She stood there
staring at her phone until Amy got out of the bed and hugged her
around the waist. Eighteen years of trying to be a part of her
family, gone up in smoke with one phone conversation. She shouldn’t
have been surprised. She was never really one of them.

“
Well
... I thought you were shitting me last night,” Amy told her on
their way to breakfast. They were holding hands. “I mean, it
didn’t make any sense that your family could be anything but
proud that you’re going to UCLA, but ... there’s the
proof.”

Samara squeezed her
hand. “It sure is nice to hear you say that. Sometimes I’ve
thought maybe I was nuts, thinking my family should maybe, oh I don’t
know, value education or care about what every member of the family
wants, not just one or two of ’em.”

“
So
what, your dad’s like some crazed NRA guy who just loves to
kill things?”

Samara couldn’t
help chuckling softly at that image of her dad, until she realized it
wasn’t that far off. “More or less. More because he’s
ex-military than because he’s a gun nut, but ... he’s
into weapons, too, now that you mention it.”

It was heavenly, to
be able to share at least some of the truth about her bizarre life
with someone and for her to simply accept it--and more, for her to
acknowledge how crazy it had been, to have someone validate some of
her own perceptions about it. Dad and Alison acted like it was all
normal, but it was so not normal.

“
And
that’s all he did? Your sister, too?”

“
Pretty
much.”

“
Freaky.
You’re so not that type. Where did you even come from? I can’t
imagine you coming from people like that.”

“
Well,
my mom was normal. Actually, I hear the whole family was pretty
normal, until she died.”

“
Oh,
she died? Oh, Samara, I’m sorry. How old were you?”

She really didn’t
want to tell her. She seemed to like feeling pity for her, but there
was only so much sorry a person could feel for another, and she felt
like the few things she’d told her must have already strained
her capacity to sympathize to the limit, or possibly push her story
past credulity. Had her life really been that tragic? Maybe so, but
Alison and Dad obviously didn’t think so. They’d always
acted like she had it made, looks and smarts and being the baby of
the family. “Six months,” she finally said shortly.

Yeah, she pitied her.
She saw the pain for her on her face. She let go of her hand, put her
arm around her waist, and hugged her close. There was one person in
the world who understood. It shouldn’t surprise her that it
wasn’t family.

Samara checked her
email, reading through a message she’d gotten from the dean’s
office with a frown. Once she was through she sat back with a sigh.

“
Huh..”
she said. “I should post that on the message board.”

Since she was alone,
there was no response from anyone and so she logged into her class
blog and copied and pasted the message on there.

Samara is online
now

Senior Member

Organization:
Masters Student UCLA

Department: TA/MBA

Active: 2008-2015

Join
Date: Feb 2009

Posts: 1,733

Jan Fredriksen-
RIP

From one of my
professional Institutes have just had the following Press Release:-

Nordstorm’s
founder, ship-owner, entrepreneur and family man, Jan Fredriksen has
passed away at the age of 66 years old. He leaves behind his children
Freja, Arvid, Leo and Bjorn and their families.

Jan Fredriksen was
one of Sweden's greatest entrepreneurs of all time. He was born in
1954 on the island of Donsö, in Gothenburg's southern
archipelago. His childhood on Donsö was marked by close family
feeling, responsibility, thrift and diligence, something that would
characterize his personality and life. Jan Fredriksen's father,
Gustav Fredriksen, was a major role model for his son. By the time he
was 27 years old, he had bought a schooner, on which he was the
master. And thus was born the young Jan’s dream, one day he
would run his own business. The seed to Nordstorm's success story was
sewn.

The first step was
to get an education. He attended both Ljungskile Folk High School and
the commercial college in Gothenburg. After various trainee ships,
and just 22 years old, he started his first enterprise, the trading
company Jan Fredriksen Metallprodukter. Jan Fredriksen had a rare
feeling combined with a talent for business. This, combined with hard
work, thrift and honesty, made the business flourish. What had
started as a small company in the scrap industry quickly grew under
Jan Fredriksen’s leadership. The shipping company was started
in 1974 and during the 1980s it was operating 12 owned and 12
chartered freighters in coastal traffic. Today, the Nordstorm Sphere
is a successful group of companies with operations spread all around
the world.

Jan Fredriksen was
not the type of director to sit on his laurels, far from the
operations. Quite the opposite. He managed the businesses with a firm
hand and worked hard and was goal-oriented.

1992 was a crucial
year in Nordstorm's history. This was the year when Jan Fredriksen
entered the passenger ferry business, on the Gothenburg-Skagen route.
This was the start of Nordstorm Line, which has grown into one of the
world's largest ferry companies.