CEO'S Secret Baby: A Standalone Surprise Pregnancy Romance by Iona Rose (books for 5 year olds to read themselves .TXT) 📕

no good. Two of them have children and the third, while having no obvious baggage, doesn’t have the kind of experience I need. I don’t know if she could keep up with the pace of this position. The next two are both good candidates. Millie Brown has worked in various high paced environments and Angus Heron has over five years of experience in a very similar industry to mine. At the moment, Angus is looking like the front runner. A man would hopefully never fall apart because his girl walked out on him.

I keep going through the stack sorting them into the two piles. Angus still looks like the winner. Then I open the last file.

Elena Woods

My heart skips a beat when I see the name. It can’t be the same person. Surely not. That would be a bizarre coincidence. I lean back in my chair. Suddenly, the past comes back, vivid and in full color. Elena standing in front of me, her face defiant.

“All that money and you bought those pants?” I taunt.

The rest of my gang laughs. I strut away, proud as a peacock. Outside, I was smiling— inside I was devastated.

Elena Woods and I went to the same high school, but we’re from completely different worlds. Her family is old money, so rich her father knew the President. My family was the opposite. We were dirt poor. My dad left us when I was just two years old and he never came back even to see me. My mom worked three jobs just to keep a roof over our heads, and the only reason I got to attend the Franklin School, a private school full of Elenas, was because I got a scholarship through a program for gifted students.

My mom made sure my clothes were always clean and well pressed, but they were hand me downs, sourced from charity shops, or as the years went by, from the well-meaning mother of an older student, which shamed me immensely. I was the poor kid, the charity case, and I knew I would never fit in with my peers on their level. I made myself the dare devil rebel, always misbehaving. It made me popular, and I soon forgot I had nothing in common with any of my friends.

I wore my hand-me-downs so aggressively, sewing skeleton faces on them and ripping them to shreds that I started a fashion all of my own. Soon, all the kids were ripping their jeans the way I had them while sewing on skulls and crossbones onto their clothes. I was king of my world, until Elena’s family moved to town, and she came to Franklin School.

The first moment I saw her, I knew I had to have her. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life, with green eyes and long blonde hair flowing down her back like liquid sunshine. But she was also the daughter of an extremely rich banker and a supermodel. She was rich, spoilt, and not someone to be messed with.

A girl like Elena would never date a poor kid like me. Ever.

Date? Hell, she didn’t even notice I existed. My slicked back hair, my skulls, ripped clothes and my tattoos, didn’t impress her one bit. I don’t think she even knew my name. I decided to ignore her, but the more I tried to suppress my feelings the more violent they became. Knowing I could never have her made me want her more and more. It became an obsession. Who knows? If she didn’t live in a massive mansion surrounded by high brick walls, protected behind big, black gates I might have ended up under her bedroom window every night. That’s how crazy about her I became.

I was infatuated and infatuated bad.

To ease the hurt of my unrequited obsession, my childish mind found a different way to get her attention. I started to mock Elena. I just wanted a reaction. And it worked too. She for sure knew my name after a couple of comments I made about her that cracked up the whole class. But then she began to give me hateful looks that made my gut burn. I had ruined it. It escalated from there, and before I knew it, I was full-on bullying her.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I became an insufferable asshole.

I wanted to stop, I hated myself even while I was doing it, but I couldn’t. I was a bunch of raging hormones and rejected pride. If I hadn't been so caught up with feelings I didn’t know how to handle, I would have made her notice me by making her laugh. Instead, I made her cry.

I remember one time, I was walking along the corridor with some of my friends and Elena was coming the other way with some of her friends. She hadn’t noticed me yet, and she was laughing with her friends.

I started to mimic her laugh and my friends laughed, egging me on.

She looked at me with surprise as I snorted, something she did when she was laughing hard. I curled my nose up like a pig’s and snorted again, adding in an oink this time. My friends started to oink too. Even now, I can still remember the way she looked at me. Her eyes were full of hurt, but her jaw was clenched tightly. It still makes me feel ashamed of myself to this day.

“Why do you hate me so much?” she asked in a shaky voice. “I’ve never done anything to you.”

And that was the problem. She’d never done anything to me because I was nothing to her.

I looked back into her eyes, and biting down the black shame I felt inside, I smiled cruelly. “Because you’re nothing. You’re just a grunting pig.”

This got another round of oinks from my friends.

Elena’s face had crumpled and she’d run.

Like I said, I was an unforgivable asshole. A monster.

It’s fair to say Franklin School taught me nothing about how to get girls