“Stacy?!” I exclaim, a happy smile bursting upon my lips. “What are you doing here? Come on in,” Leaning in, I reach towards her, but her reaction turns my joy into sheer disappointment. With her hand on my stomach, she pushes me gently back.
“Hi, Michael,” she speaks in a weak tone, heavy footsteps on the floor telling me that Ray and Dean are approaching. “Hello, everyone,” Stacy goes on as my friends stop on my flanks. “I’m sorry to bother you, but, uh…” she falters. “You need to know about something.” Finishing her sentence, she takes her purse off her shoulder. Fishing her hand into it, she pulls out a small, white envelope. “Okay,” she draws in a sharp breath. “Here goes nothing,” she whispers, setting the envelope in my hand. I pry it open with steady fingers. Still, the content shocks me to my very core. It’s an even bigger surprise than Stacy showing up on our doorstep is. It’s a sonogram. There’s a small object in the middle, no larger than a bean.
“I’m nine weeks pregnant,” she announces, taking yet another piece of paper out of her purse. “I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you this, but I couldn’t do a DNA test until last week. You had all left some hair on my clothes,” she continues, handing me over the paper. With my heart pounding as it had been when we were dating, I unfold it. The name on the top of the page shatters my shock in the blink of an eye. A massive wave of bliss takes its place, sending me to a heaven I thought I would never find myself in again.
“Michael Donovan.”
“I’ll understand if you don’t want to be involved,” Stacy declares, the blueness in her eyes darkening. “I mean, you live too far from me, and…”
“Stop,” I interrupt, my chest heaving, my hand beginning to tremble. I reach, grip her wrist, and ease her inside, before Dean pushes the door shut. “This is the best news I’ve gotten in years, and you think I don’t want to be involved?” I ask her, my voice but a whisper. “My life’s been hell without you.”
“Well, so has mine,” Stacy confesses, her voice wobbly. “What are you suggesting?”
“That you move to New York,” I retort, without thinking about my answer.
“Michael, I’d do that, I really would,” she sniffles, a tear streaming down her face. “But, here’s the problem. I fell for all of you back in Crete. You’re my heart of gold. Ray…” She whispers, shifting her attention to him. “You’re my easygoing charmer. And Dean…?” She turns her gaze right to meet Dean’s eyes. “You’re my caring biker.”
Seeing her eyes sinking under a pool of tears sends my heart plunging even deeper into the hell it’s been in since I lost her. On some level, I expected her confession. Why? Because: both Ray and Dean had been enthralled by her. She kept seeing them, which meant she must have had feelings for them. The solution to our issue strikes me in a matter of seconds. It may be unusual, but it’s the only way for me to watch my child grow up.
“Then I suggest we keep the arrangement we had in the summer,” I state, my voice rising in volume. “We all move in to a bigger house. And you won’t ever have to worry about a thing. We’ll raise this baby together. It’s going to have all the love in the world. I love you, Stacy.”
“I’m okay with that. I love you, too, you crazy girl,” Ray says, pressing his lips together.
“Me, too; I love you, blondie,” Dean confesses, his voice thickening with emotion.
“Oh…” a gasp of shock escapes her as two more tears race down her cheeks. “God, I love you all so much,” she whispers, collapsing into my embrace. One by one, Ray and Dean curve her arms around her, pulling her into a big, group hug. Holding her shaking body, I feel tears rising up in my eyes. My summer night’s dream is back. I’m touching her, I smell her, I can feel her body heat. And she’s brought another dream with her. It’s living inside her, growing up every day. In a few months, I’m going to realize it. And I’ll try my hardest to keep my promise to Stacy. No one will love her and this child more than my brothers and me.
Stacy
I’m lost in their arms, and I still can’t believe my ears. I can call Michael, Ray, and Dean my men again. Mine… I can repeat that tiny little word a million times; yet, grasping its meaning will never stop being hard. Three, incredible studs love me so much that they will not let me go. Last summer has just ceased being a bittersweet memory. They destroyed that bitterness as if it was nothing. Moreover, they’ve sent away the prospect of raising this child alone. It’s going to grow up amongst the men I love. My heart isn’t just pounding. It sounds like a wild horse, stampeding across the wilderness.
“Okay, no more tears,” Michael urges, kissing the top of my head.
“They’re happy tears,” I sniffle, easing back out of their hold. “You’ve just given me the world.”
“Actually, you gave us the world and something else,” He maintains, casting a quick glance over at Ray and then Dean. “Like I said, it’s been hard without you. These two are going to be in trouble if they keep messing things up at work, and so am I for that matter. We hadn’t started bitching at each other yet, but I think it was just a matter of time before that happened.”
“Dean, I don’t mean to pry, but you never told me why you consider Michael and Ray your brothers,” I say, tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear.
“I was going to, on the night we crashed,” he says, his face tightening. “I grew up in an orphanage. I was released at age sixteen. I never liked school. After two years in juvie for shoplifting, Michael and Ray found me begging on the street. Michael wanted to give me shelter. Ray wasn’t thrilled with the idea at first, but Michael convinced him. Cooking was the one thing I was good at doing. They paid for Chef College. Today, I’m a chef at one of the most expensive Italian restaurants in downtown Manhattan.”
“Yeah, that’s sixteen grand I’m never going to see again,” Michael says, mock regret sending his voice up an octave.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have said that,” Dean growls, jumping onto him. I burst out laughing, striding past them. I prefer to leave them play their silly game. They may be grown men, but deep down, they’ll always be boys. Just before I enter the kitchen, I look up at them over my shoulder. Michael is behind Dean, his hands locked over his friend’s stomach. He’s lifting him up as Dean thrashes about, attempting to break free from the grip. I love that image. If anything, it’s indicative of their bond. I need that bond to be strong. My happiness and the well-being of my unborn child depend on it. I’m not afraid, though. We put that relationship to the test in the summer, and it passed with flying colors. We did that again just minutes ago, and the results were identical. Soon, the trio will have something else that will bring them even closer. And I do believe Michael’s statement about our child having all the love in the world. If it’s even half the love my men and I share, our baby will grow up in absolute bliss. Michael may be its biological father, but in truth, it’s going to have three fathers. They’re the rocks I can build on; the people who gave my life a meaning: my saviors; my lovers. my own men.
Going Deep: A Single Dad & Nanny Romance
Rule #1: Your boss is OFF LIMITS.
I never should have agreed to become Derek Blake’s live-in nanny.
But he’s rich and powerful, and I need the money.
In exchange, I have to live in his palace of a penthouse.
How’s that for a choice?
The only problem?
He’s out of my league.
Way, way out of my league.
Too wealthy. Too sexy. Too…skilled.
And with men like that?
Everyone knows it never works out.
It wouldn’t work out.
Right?
1
A blaring noise, in the middle of the night, woke me from my sleep as I peeled my eyes open. The incessant crying of what sounded like a stuffed pig caused me to rip the covers back from my body. Who the fuck had a damn pig in this complex? For god’s sake, it was two in the morning and I had one of the most important business meetings of my life in
a few hours. Dealing with different time zones was a pain in the ass, and it didn’t matter that I was worth a few billion dollars; sometimes you just had to stroke the potential “client’s” ego.
But I had no intention of making them a client. I had every intention of purchasing their little “business” outright and taking my pet project underneath my global conglomerate umbrella.
The crying got louder as I approached the main room of my penthouse suite, and for the first time, I found myself cursing the stars I could see over New York City as the crying grew louder and more piercing. The floor-to-ceiling tinted windows is what made me buy this place: I could press a beautiful pair of tits up against the glass and thrust into the warm, tight caverns of a woman’s body while surveying the beauty of the stars.
It really was a sight to behold.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my tired and aching eye sockets and my ears latched onto the dying sound. The explosive and rattling crying was now fading into the background, and I felt anger bubbling up in me even more. Of course the crying would stop just as I had made it out of bed and reached the great room. I turned towards the phone and went to dial the downstairs security officer to let him know someone had smuggled a damn baby pig into the complex. Furthermore, I wasn’t paying to clean up pig’s blood off of some bastard’s carpet if he was trying to slaughter the damn thing.
And what happened then?
I heard
it; the slightest little sound of a sniffle.
Pig’s don’t fucking sniffle.
I strode to my front door and ripped it open, looking left and right to see from where the sound might have been coming. My mind was hazy with sleep and my body was screaming to climb back into bed before I had to get up and piece myself together into a nice suit for a damn conference call being sent halfway across the world. But just before I went to go shut my door I heard it again.
I looked down to where I had heard the sound.
Sitting at my feet was a little cradle, no bigger than the fruit basket sitting in my kitchen. It had a bottle, a diaper, a pink-and-yellow blanket, and a note.
A note attached to the bonnet of a child.
The fuck was a child doing sitting at my door at two in the fucking morning?
I watched as the child’s big, blue eyes slowly fluttered themselves closed, and the splotched redness of its face told me the stuffed pig sound had been coming from it. This child, who was tucked away in a basket far too small for its chunky size, was sitting in the hallway of the most prestigious apartment complex in this damn town.
Who the fuck let someone up here to drop off a child?
I grabbed the handle of the basket and slowly tugged the child up. I picked it up and carried it over to the intercom before I mashed the button, and when the familiar voice from downstairs rang into the room I didn’t even let him finish his sentiment before I spat the words out at him.
“Why the hell is there a child at my doorstep, Franz?”
His pause told me he was just as startled at the question.
“Did… you say…a… child, Mr. Blake?”
Theodor Franz was the most intuitive man I had ever met. What the security guards lacked in profession Franz made up for with experience. The guards were trained to pounce and ask questions later, while Franz simply understood people. He knew when something was wrong, he knew when something was right, and he knew when to question people coming into the complex before letting them through the front doors.
He also wasn’t too bad to have a drink with at the local.
The man can hold his whiskey.
So when Franz is just as confused as I am, as to how a baby got placed in front of my door in this apartment complex, it means someone either ducked him or deceived him.
Neither of those had ever been done on his watch for as long as I’d known him, and I’d lived in this complex for over a decade.
“Mr. Blake?” Franz asked again.
Then the child struck up its annoying sound again. Tears barreled down its reddened cheeks, and its arms were struggling to get free, and the sound caused Franz to hang up immediately as I stood there staring at the struggling little …person.
“Please stop crying,” I murmured lowly.
I swept myself into the kitchen as the haggard haze of my interrupted sleep began to lift from my mind. I swung the basket up onto the table before I grabbed the bottle and flung off the cap, and just before I went to go stick the clear nipple into the toothless, screaming mouth of this randomly abandoned child, the note caught my attention again.
I propped the bottle up with a random dishrag I grabbed and sighed at the silence.
I grabbed the note and fumbled to get it open, and the very first line gave the entire mystery away.
My Build-A-Bear,
There was only one person in the world who had ever called me that. A stupid nickname that came into existence because of a stupid gift I gave an ungrateful woman a year ago: a woman who proclaimed to love me before vanishing into thin air; a woman who packed her bags in the middle of the night and abandoned her apartment lease before I could propose.
The only woman I had ever trusted to want me for me instead of for my money…
I turned my attention back to the note as the child on the counter began to gulp audibly.
My Build-A-Bear,
I’m so sorry for leaving the way I did. Please understand that I loved you with every fiber of my being, but you are who you are: the billionaire rock star with eyes of sparkling emeralds and skin of amber glass.
She always did have a way with words.
I figured she had abandoned me. Gracie’s free spirit was why I had been so drawn to her. Every day of my life is scheduled to the minute with meetings, conference calls, paperwork, and dinner outings with current and future clients. However, Gracie always knew when to swoop in and throw my life into a tailspin. She’d drag me on random adventures through the woods and surprise me with cake I shouldn’t eat and with wine that was way too expensive for her to purchase, and she’d sit with me as we watched the stars. She was just fine with never going out, and she always blamed it on her profession. A “starving author” she called herself, always crafting books halfway through before abandoning them for another idea –
Just like she was abandoning this child… probably for another idea.
When I found out I was pregnant, I knew it would ruin what we had: the spontaneity; the excitement. I also had a feeling you wouldn’t abandon the lifestyle you lived in order to raise a child with me.
The fuck did she know about me, anyway? Yes, I loved the fine wines, fine foods, and fine women, but my parents raised me to be a responsible human being. My parents themselves suck, but I built everything I have now from the ground up, doing nothing but running numbers and opening accounts, for Christ’s sake!
I would’ve taken care of my own fucking child!
But, something’s come up. I can’t explain it right now; it is way too long. But, I can’t take Clara with me.
Clara.
I flicked my eyes back over to the child, whose eyes were now closed. The white liquid in the bottle was slowly leaking out of the side of the baby’s mouth, and I knew enough to know that probably wasn’t good. I put the note down and reached over to remove the bottle from the child’s mouth, and I watched as it squirmed in order to get comfortable.
Wait… not “it.”
“She…”
I watched as she squirmed in order to get comfortable.
I stared at the child for a while; I mean really studied her. I took in the shape of her eyes and her wispy brown hair. I looked at her cute button nose and her perky red cheeks. I looked at the shape of her lips and the light dip in the middle of her chin, but it wasn’t until my eyes drifted over her hands that I saw it.
I saw the same little crook in her pinky finger that I had.
My eyes drifted back over to the note as my heart slowed to a dangerous pace.
Take
care of her. You’re all she’s got now. And, if I can, I’ll come back for her.
I’ll come back for you both.
Love,
Gracie
“You really did mean ‘baby’, didn’t you?” Franz asked.
I jumped and crumpled the note in the palm of my hand. My eyes widened as they trailed over to Franz standing in the entrance of my kitchen, and his eyes were locked tight onto the child sleeping in the basket.
“Jesu- don’t you ever knock?” I breathed.
“I figured niceties could be set aside until I figured out exactly what was going on,” he stated.
“And yes,” I sighed. “I meant ‘baby’.”
I studied Franz’s face as he ran through his entire evening. Franz was wholly dedicated to this place: his daughter used to live here. Though one of the richest real estate tycoons in the business, and he came and visited her often. But one day, the previous doorman made a slip-up that cost him the life of his daughter, and his way of grieving was offering his services to work the shifts the previous doorman wasn’t working.
When they saw how dedicated he had become to vetting people that came in and out of this place, they found the money to offer him a permanent position as the night-shift doorman.
“I took a bathroom break,” he sighed. “I took a damn bathroom break.”
“Franz. You can’t beat yourself up because you had to take a piss. You’re human,” I said.
Franz was slowly gravitating towards the child. His body appeared to be succumbing to the pull of some mystical force he couldn’t see or even explain, and soon he was standing on the other side of the basket, his arms slowly rising into the air towards the baby.
“May I?” he asked softly.
“Be my guest,” I chuckled.
He dipped in and picked up the sleeping child while I ran my hands through my hair. I could’ve gone and gotten a DNA test to see if it – she – really was my child, but between the child looking as much like Gracie as she did and having my recessive crooked pinky fingers, there was no doubt in my mind.
Filthy Desires: A Romantic Suspense Collection Page 20
