Keeping His Secret

by Danes, Ellie

  “Get back on the bed,” he commanded, and I obeyed, letting him ease himself back on top of me. “Brittany, I want no one else. You make me whole again.”

  “You light a fire inside of me,” I whispered back to him, and he plunged his lips into mine. We held each other, enjoying holding our breath together as we kissed passionately. Then, he slowly pressed himself into me, and I called out his name in pleasure so loud that I swore the entire building could hear me.

  Our bodies slipped against each other as our sweat started to mix, our skin hot to the touch as his chest pressed down against mine. He pushed deep into me, his hands still lost in my hair until he started to explore my entire body. His fingers circled around my nipples, rolled down the curve of my breast and down my midriff. It was invigorating to have him all to myself and all over me. He pulled me up and on top of him, spanking me as he did, and told me to do whatever I wanted to him.

  I rode him until he couldn’t take it anymore as I clawed at his chest and ran my hands over his muscles. His large biceps were solid as I grabbed them, feeling him throbbing inside me as he almost released our tension. Before he could, he lifted me up without separating our bodies and slammed me on my back against the soft bed, increasing his pace. We stared intensely into each other’s eyes, and he brought his right hand below my neck to cradle my head as he rammed into me.

  My whole body started to shake, and I could feel heat flood my skin like fire engulfing me. At the same moment, my body quickly became sensitive. Dalton groaned in pleasure and whispered my name in my ear as he buried his face in my neck, unable to contain his ecstasy. He fell down on top of me and wrapped his arms completely around me, holding me tightly against him as we finished together.

  We lay there, not moving from each other’s arms, enjoying our warmth as we breathed together.

  “I’ll always be here, no matter what you do, or who you become. No matter what, I’ll always love you,” Dalton whispered.

  Speechless and grinning like a fool, I turned to him and kissed him. He nuzzled his nose against mine.

  I grinned against his skin. “I’ll always love you too, my bulldog.”

  Epilogue

  Dalton

  I was her bulldog. I didn’t understand her nickname for me until I saw the painting she had entered to be put on display down at the harbor a few weeks later. She had done it all without telling me a word. I had no idea when she found the time to paint since I’d seen her every day after her father had abruptly halted payment for her room in 2A and she had come to live with me in my room. My father didn’t find out for an entire day, and when he did, he also threatened to kick me out for good. When he called me, his voice dripping in rage and disappointment, Brittany and I decided in that moment that we would elope. Nothing else ever felt so right in my life. We didn’t tell anyone. No one would have come to the wedding anyway, and when both of our fathers found out at first, their heads nearly exploded but they both soon calmed down when they realized this was what we truly wanted. Even though they were still pissed, we didn’t care what they thought one bit.

  We said our vows in an empty chapel, none of our families around, and within a week I received access to my trust fund. Instead of instantly spending a lot of the money to move far away, I invested a considerable amount into a new business I wanted to run instead of forever being an apartment manager for August Jones. It was the start of what would soon become an important refuge for victims of domestic violence and abuse in the city.

  It didn’t take long for Brittany to make her way into some prestigious art galleries around town. Her father never came to see any of her pieces on display, but once her mother came and she even bought one to support Brittany’s dedication to her new career. She wasn’t the only one who bought a painting, and soon Brittany was making a significant earning from her work.

  I wanted to help pay Brittany’s way for art school, but she refused, saying that she wanted to push herself and find the means to pay for art classes herself. Seeing how hard she worked every night on her passion, I had full faith in Brittany’s ability to make it on her own. I had more than enough money from the trust fund to buy us a lavish apartment down by the harbor even though my new business was a non-profit. After we moved in, Brittany spent every waking moment either with me or alone on the roof with her paint. It took quite some time, but she caused so much buzz in the art world around the harbor that soon some very important critics in the city started to take notice. Once the snowball began rolling, Brittany was a force to be reckoned with. She gained a scholarship for a full ride based on her talents to a school not far from our home, and very quickly became a local household name to those in the industry. We started to travel together, using the money my father had entrusted to me, and many of her paintings were asked to be hung in Paris restaurants during the trip that changed our lives forever.

  We had just come down from the Eiffel Tower and were walking hand in hand together in a park. I kissed Brittany underneath a cool, Parisian sky, tasting espresso on her lips, and we found a secluded spot underneath a sycamore tree to make out. Couples all around us were doing the same, and we fondled each other as we giggled in the spring breeze.

  Going back to our hotel, I lifted her up in the elevator on the way to our room and kissed her exposed midriff, brushing my lips across that line that curved down from her hips to between her thighs. I carried her to our room with a view overlooking the city. Painters stood on the sidewalk far below, working as Brittany and I made love. It was before noon when we started, and we kept each other occupied in that room until late in the evening. Drinking wine and wearing only silk robes provided by the hotel, we sat together on the balcony and watched the night life bustle below us. Far off, we could her a woman singing a song in a language we didn’t understand, and we watched the stars of street lights blink on one by one as Brittany held my hand in hers while playing with my fingers and the wedding ring I wore.

  Nine months after that, our daughter was born. Brittany, my goddess of a wife, was able to raise her and begin teaching art classes of her own at the same time. When she opened her own art school many years later, our daughter Talia Elizabeth Jones was the first to be enrolled.

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  BONUS!

  Keep reading for previews of two of my favorite books!

  A Bad Boy Romance

  By

  Ellie Danes & Tristan Vaughan

  www.EllieDanes.com

  www.TristanVaughan.com

  Book Description

  Sometimes walking away leads you to the perfect place.

  I thought I could fix him, my ex, but he was beyond repair.

  He was broken and dangerous.

  He left me scarred and scared with only one choice,

  Pack up and start over someplace new.

  That’s when I met him, Evan.

  He was everything I never knew I wanted and more.

  Tall, dark, handsome and kind.

  The moment I saw him I knew we were meant to be.

  He was who I was escaping to.

  Until I met his family and learned the truth,

  you can’t escape your past and mine was now

  staring me right in the face.

  Walking Away is a 70,000+ word full length romance with shocking twists and turns and plenty of steam.

  Prologue

  Lora

  I found my focus wandering from the pavement in front of my car. The soft hum of the tires on the road and the gentle droning of the motor served to hypnotize me, gently lifting me out of the present and taking me back, back, back...

  Rage. Terrifying rage. A look in his eyes I'd never seen before, a look that chilled me to m
y bones and sent an icy dread rushing through my veins like liquid nitrogen. I'd never known true fear of another human being before, not until this moment. I remembered backing up as he came closer, trying to get away as my heart pounded with huge, terrible thumps, pumping that icy blood through my veins as—

  I blinked, and I was back in the present. The memory dissolved in the warm air like morning fog in sunshine, leaving only the lightest traces of unease in its wake.

  I cranked up the bouncy pop tune playing on the car radio.

  “Come on, Lora,” I said to myself. “It's all over. You have nothing to worry about any more. You'll never see him again, never. And now you're on your way to a new town, a new life. Positive, c'mon, be positive! Let those positive vibes flow through you.”

  I glanced up at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. Looking back at me was a pair of sparkling blue eyes—my mother's eyes. I had my father's brown hair, but my mother's blue eyes. I felt a stab of sadness as this thought entered my mind. I was going to miss both of them greatly, but moving away from my hometown was something I really had to do. And besides, I wasn't even crossing county lines. They would only be eighty miles away, which wasn't really that much. It was just that I was so used to seeing them every other day, and now our visits would happen far less frequently.

  Still, as sad as I was to be leaving, I was also happy and excited. My new job was going to be amazing; I'd met the manager of the winery a few times now, and he was a fantastic guy. The benefits and salary were a lot better than my previous job too, so I had that to look forward to...And, of course, there was the general sense of excitement and anticipation that comes with moving to a new place.

  Yes, I had made the right choice. I was doing the right thing. Sometimes, you really did have to pack your bags and leave a place and turn over a new leaf somewhere else. It had taken something terrible to make me finally realize that, but ultimately, I was glad that it had happened.

  I focused on the road again. I had been climbing up a steep hill for some time now, but I was nearing the top. The sun shone brightly, intensifying the hues of green of the hills around me, and the blue of the sky above.

  Finally, I crested the top of the hill and I saw it, spread out below: Sala Valley, my new home. With a smile I hit the gas pedal and started making my way down toward it—toward a fresh start, a new job, a new home, and a new life, full of wonderful possibilities...

  Chapter 1

  Evan

  I woke up at five a.m. sharp on Friday morning, as I did on every weekday morning. On weekends I allowed myself to sleep in, and would get up at five thirty, or maybe, if I was feeling especially lazy, six. As I always did, I jumped out of bed, dropped straight into a push-up position and cranked out fifty push-ups. I then went to my bathroom door, to which a pull-up bar was attached, and did twenty-five chin-ups. After that, I jumped into the shower—ice cold, the most intense wake-up possible. It beat coffee any day, and I’d learned it was great for my immune system and testosterone levels, too.

  It was as I was getting out of the shower that I heard my phone ringing in the bedroom. Man, always at the worst possible time. Who the hell would be calling me now, at twenty past five?

  I wrapped my towel around me, not having had the time to dry myself off properly, and then jogged out to my bedroom to answer the call.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Evan.”

  “JB? What are you doing calling me this early in the morning?”

  “It's about the bar. There's a little uh, issue that I need to talk to you about.”

  I groaned and shook my head. There had been far too many of these “issues” in the last few months. There were times I wondered if the only real way to sort things out with the bar would be to fire JB—except that I couldn't. Not only because he was my step-brother, but I actually wanted to see him succeed. I wanted him to be able to stand on his own two feet without me having to bail him out of mess after mess. That dream, however, seemed as if it were getting less and less realistic.

  “Well go on, spit it out,” I said.

  “There was a bit of a brawl at the bar last night. And now one of the guys involved wants to press charges against us.”

  “What?” I asked, anger rising within me. “A brawl? What kind of people are you letting in these days, JB? And how did things get to the point where a fistfight could break out? You need to keep things under control. You can't let situations escalate to the point where guys start throwing fists—or bottles or chairs, man! Come on.”

  “Dammit, Evan, do you think I want guys fighting in the bar? Quit being an ass—I called you for help, not a damn lecture.”

  With a sigh, I forced myself to remain calm. “All right,” I muttered, “so there was a fight. But what's this about pressing charges against the bar? Do they want to sue us now?”

  “Uh, yeah. It turns out that one of the guys fighting was the son of a prominent lawyer here in town, Gabriel Nash.”

  I groaned. “Dammit. Nash is notorious for that kind of thing. So, you let his kid take a beating in our bar?”

  “I didn't let the damn guy take a beating! Nash's kid is the one who started the fight!”

  “Please tell me this 'kid' is at least over twenty-one. Because if you're letting underage troublemakers into the bar, then we're gonna be in a world of trouble.”

  “Jeez, Evan, how damn incompetent do you think I am? Of course they're both over twenty-one. Nash's kid is twenty-three, the other guy is twenty-six.”

  I let out a sigh of relief—at least we wouldn't be getting in trouble for that. Still, this whole issue was messed up, and I didn't want the name of our family bar to get dragged through the mud. We had a big problem now, especially since Nash was gonna come after us, and this would mean that I was going to have to put some serious effort into sorting this out.

  “Okay. Tell me exactly what happened, JB, and what Nash wants to sue us for.”

  “Okay, so, I was making some cocktails for these two girls—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said, feeling anger rising inside me again. “You were making cocktails? Where were the bar staff? You're supposed to be keeping an eye on everything that's going on, not making drinks for people.”

  “Spare me the damn third degree, Evan,” he muttered sourly. “Look, do you want to know what happened and what's going on, or do you want to keep freakin' criticizing me? Because if that's what you want to do, we might as well just end this conversation right now.”

  I took a breath. He was right. I needed to bite my tongue for the time and let him finish. “Fine. Go on, tell me what happened.”

  “All right, so, I was mixing up some cocktails for these two girls when I heard someone yelling. There was a commotion at the other end of the bar. Things were kinda rowdy at that point, so I didn't investigate right away.”

  I really, really wanted to say something at this point, but forced myself to bite my tongue. I needed to get to the bottom of this mess, and scolding JB wouldn't help me to get there.

  “Look, Evan, there were a lot of people in the bar last night. It was crazy busy, and I just didn't have the manpower to—”

  I groaned and cupped my forehead in my hands, pressing against my temples as he continued. I was hoping we weren't going to be in serious trouble. “Just get to the point, JB,” I said. “Tell me exactly what happened, not why it happened.”

  “Okay, fine. So, I heard a bunch of yelling, but I had my hands full at the bar, so I couldn't check it out right away. Next thing I knew this kid gets tossed over a tabletop, and then all hell broke loose.”

  “Oh man,” I groaned. “This doesn’t sound good. How many people were involved in this fight? You made it sound like there were just two of them, but if all hell broke loose—”

  “No, it was just two people, but when they started slugging it out, a whole bunch of people stampeded toward the door. The other guy—the older guy, the twenty-six-year-old, this guy Jake—he had just thrown Nash's kid, I thin
k his name is Dominic, over a table. Jake had a bloody nose at this stage. I heard from his friend that Dominic had thrown a sucker punch, and that's what started the fight. Apparently, this Jake guy had been hitting on Dominic's girlfriend, and grabbed her ass or something, I was told they had a history, and—”

  “JB, just get to the point please. What happened after that, and how badly were they injured?”

  “Well, it turns out this Jake guy was a competitive boxer at some point. He ended up breaking Dominic's jaw before I managed to pull him off the kid and break up the fight. After that, the cops showed up and made a report and all the usual stuff.”

  I groaned and shook my head. “A broken jaw? In our bar? So, let me guess. Nash wants to sue us for damages because this happened on our property?”

  “That pretty much sums it up, yeah.”

  “I have a question, JB, and I want you to answer honestly.” I said with my tone as even and calm as I could manage.

  “Uh, all right. Ask away, Ev.”

  “Were you drinking on the job last night, JB? Were you drunk or sober when this happened? And remember, if I think you're not being upfront with me, I can call the cops who were there last night and ask them what sort of state you were in.”

  “I…I might have had a couple of drinks,” he murmured.

  “A couple? Seriously, JB, was it just a couple?”

  “Maybe closer to five or six. Or maybe a little more,” he admitted sheepishly.

  “You have to be the worst damn manager on the face of this planet, JB,” I growled, truly furious. “I warned you, didn't I warn you? More of this sort of shit and you're gonna lose this job. I am at the end of my rope here. I can't give you any more chances. You keep screwing up, and this is on a monumental scale! I don’t want to have to do this, but that's it…This is it, JB. You're done. You're fired.”