Page 65 of Secret Baby for My Brother's Best Friends

I didn’t know how difficult it would be until the general meeting, where we discussed the progress of the marketing campaign and the roll-out strategy. The minute I walk in, I meet Sam's gaze, and the weekend just comes rushing back to me. After he took me to bed–platonically–he rubbed my shoulders, massaged my wrists, and gave me a hot compress to help with the nausea.

All of those thing helped surprisingly.

Then he rubbed my feet too, until I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was already gone, and Jenna was there. Apparently, he left when she arrived and told her to call him if I had any trouble again.

I've never had a man so dedicated to making me feel good before. And the fact that he sits there and smiles sweetly at me, as though it were nothing to him, makes my heart skip a beat.

I'm still distracted by the other two, who make matters worse.

Jake begins the meeting by pulling out a chair for me when I walk in, making James growl.

Jake ignores him.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asks.

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine.

“You sure? You passed out yesterday.”

“You what?” James barks.

Shit. I should have told Sam not to tell them. I also didn’t want James to find out about my passing out because he's already overprotective as is, and he’s a total nightmare when I’m sick.

“It’s okay. Just food poisoning,” I say quickly.

“You should have told me. I would have postponed the meeting, you should be home with chicken soup."

“No. I feel fine.”

“Feeling fine and being fine are two different things.”

"Okay, remember what we said, about special treatment and how I don’t want you to treat me any differently from any other employee."

"Yeah, that won’t work here. If an employee of mine had food poisoning the day before, I would also ask them to stay home for the day. We’re not doing anything world-changing here. We’re not curing cancer. We could have waited an extra day to have the meeting."

I try not to grin. "Well, I appreciate it, but I’m fine. Though the meeting can wait, we're coming up on the first stage of the roll-out and I'd rather we not skip that just because I was feeling under the weather yesterday. I'm much better today."

James appears reluctant to continue twisting his pen between his fingers.

Then he ultimately sighs. "I guess you're already here."

But as the meeting continues, the men still pay far too much attention to me. A cough to clear my throat has Sam jumping out of their seat to attend to me. If I so much as wince, their eyes go to me. It looks far too suspicious, and I can tell my brother is growing suspicious, too.

"Okay, what's going on?" he asks, as the meeting winds down. "Is there more to this illness than I should know about?"

"No," I say, giving each of them a warning look.

Adam is the one who speaks up first. "We're just worried that she's not feeling well and wondering if maybe someone else should head the project in the meantime."

I glare at Adam.

"That's not a bad idea, actually," my brother says as I say, "Absolutely not."

"But if you're not feeling well-”

"I'm fine," I snap. "I worked hard on this, on all the presentations, and I'm going to see it through no matter what. I don't need anyone else coming in and continuing for me. I'm fine."

"Okay," James says with a placating hand. "If you say so."