Pregnant by the Wrong Brother Chapter 1

As my wife’s kept man, I possessed that rarest of virtues: self-awareness.

When you are fortunate enough to live on an heiress’s dime, you don't commit the amateur mistake of begging for her heart.

So, when she was whispering sweet nothings into her first love’s ear, I stayed in the hall and kept watch. When her golden boy showed up at our penthouse to stake his claim, I held my tongue, lowered my lashes, and simply asked my wife for a little more financial compensation.

Until the afternoon she tossed a positive pregnancy test onto the marble island between us.

"I'm pregnant," Camilla said, her voice taut, refusing to meet my gaze. "I have to give Conrad a legitimate place in my life. I know I’ve wronged you, Jonah, and your settlement won't be shorted by a single cent."

I picked up the plastic strip, glanced at the faint pink double lines, and gave her a gentle, obedient smile.

What she didn't realize was the cardinal rule of living in a gilded cage: every time you step an inch over the garden wall, I simply move the property line a foot back.

* * *

Camilla’s eyes flickered with genuine bewilderment. "You're... not angry?"

I looked up, meeting her gaze with practiced softness. "As long as you're happy, darling. Nothing else matters."

She once told me she loved my eyes because they looked like a stray puppy's—wide, devoted, incapable of betrayal.

She had found me three years ago, half-dead in an alley behind a luxury hotel, soaked in freezing rain and bleeding from a fractured rib. The tabloids had gone feral back then, clawing at every iron gate in Manhattan to see what kind of stray had managed to capture Camilla Arden, the untouchable queen of Arden Holdings. But Camilla kept me shuttered away in private estates and sunlit penthouses where no camera could reach.

High society eventually settled on a single, mocking whisper: "Camilla Arden bought herself a pretty pet."

At first, I assumed I was just a passing whim.

Just like my biological parents, who had impulsively driven halfway across the country to track down their long-lost son from a broken foster home, only to discard me like roadside trash the moment their pampered, adopted golden boy shed a few poisoned tears.

Yet Camilla had felt different.

The first year, she spoiled me mercilessly. She wrapped me in bespoke Italian cashmere and fastened platinum watches to my wrist, as if determined to scrub every trace of the gutter off my skin. Looking at my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling glass, I swore to myself that even if she were playing a cruel game, I would gladly let her win.

The second year, she defied her board of directors and married me in a quiet courthouse ceremony. She never asked where I had come from, nor why I had been found bleeding on the asphalt. I signed the register without hesitation. If I was destined to belong to someone in this ruthless world, I wanted it to be Camilla.

The third year, Conrad Kincaid returned from London.

The moment I saw his photograph on her vanity, staring at a jawline, a brow, and a pair of dark eyes that were seventy percent identical to my own, the puzzle pieces snapped together with nauseating clarity.

He was my older brother. The legitimate heir who had lived abroad for a decade, who had never even known of my existence because our parents had erased me before his flight ever touched down at JFK.

That night, I studied Camilla’s eyes while she slept. She had never been looking at me. She had been looking through me, tracing the phantom of the one who got away. It wasn't my eyes she adored; it was the fact that my face shared three-quarters of Conrad's bone structure.

I wanted to shake her awake, to demand what I had been to her all these months. But her phone chimed softly on the nightstand.

A voice note drifted out: "I know you've been dying to see me, Cam. I'm at the Soho loft. I'm giving you your chance."

Camilla startled awake, glancing at me with a flash of raw guilt. I squeezed my eyes shut, regulating my breath, pretending to be lost in deep slumber.

Within minutes, the sheets beside me grew cold.

I lay awake until the pale gray light of dawn bled through the sheer curtains. And in that stillness, I made my peace with reality: a kept pet must maintain the discipline of his station.

When Camilla returned the following afternoon, her face shadowed with exhaustion, she slipped a black Amex into my hand and touched my cheek with remorseful tenderness. "Yesterday was my fault. Buy whatever you want."

I didn't play the wounded martyr. I took the card into my pocket, smiled sweetly, and said, "Thank you, wife."

Camilla froze for a fraction of a second, unsettled by how effortlessly I accepted the payoff.

Then came the second time. The third. Countless nights after that. A vintage sports car here, a deed to a Tribeca loft there. In her mind, anything that could be soothed with a wire transfer wasn't truly a crisis.

And I knew better than to compete with a ghost. Being a facsimile was fortune enough. Why waste energy on jealousy when you could secure a fortune instead?