The Baby Bargain

by Layla Valentine

  “Come here,” I pleaded. “I want you.”

  His dick twitched, and I knew that he felt the same way.

  “You’re beautiful, Harley Phillips,” he whispered before he plunged into my depths.

  Chapter 15

  Harley

  I’ll be honest: the rest of that night was a blur. Have you ever enjoyed yourself to the point where your brain simply can’t retain the memories, for fear that nothing will ever feel as good again? Like, in the interest of keeping you alive and functioning, it has to blot out some of the highest pitches of your pleasure?

  If you don’t know what I mean, well…find yourself a lover who listens to your body, and who worships it as it ought to be worshipped. Find yourself an Ashton Swann.

  Not the Ashton Swann of course. He’s all mine.

  So, I’ll leave the details of the rest of our night together to your imagination, because frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

  All this to say, we woke up the next morning in a fog of bliss. Regaining my senses after that first wild session, I’d had the presence of mind to call the childcare center, where the staff quickly confirmed that they could take Levi overnight. I gave my consent, hung up, and with that, Ashton threw the phone across the room, and we resumed our lovemaking.

  The following day, it was Ashton who woke first and volunteered to leave our little den of desire and go pick up the baby. Now, that was true chivalry. I fell back into a doze, snuggling deep into his side of the bed, filling my nostrils with his musky, minty scent.

  He arrived back soon enough, and I was awoken by the sound of Levi’s squeals. Ashton placed my boy on my chest, and with a grin, I cuddled up to my baby.

  “Hold on,” Ashton said, watching the scene. “I need to take a picture.”

  “But I just woke up,” I whined. “I probably look like a raccoon.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You look like a goddess.”

  Okay, he knew how to flatter me into submission. I held Levi close as Ashton whipped out his phone and snapped a couple of pictures. He walked over to the bed, leaned down, and swiped through the collection, showing me the results.

  And, sure enough, under his artistic eye, I did look beautiful. My golden hair was spread out across the pillow like some Raphaelite beauty, my blue eyes affixed on Levi’s. I was the picture of young motherhood, awash in the divine glow of maternity.

  There was no time to indulgently marvel over the pictures as we were both in sore need of breakfast. Levi had already been fed by the hotel staff, and while a small part of me was jealous at this information, the larger part was glad he’d been in good hands while I’d enjoyed myself.

  I slung on a bikini, a sunshine-yellow maxi dress that flowed over my curves, and a wide-brimmed hat. Ashton was in what had already become his tropical uniform: T-shirt and swim trunks. After carrying out all of the preparations necessary to get Levi beach ready, Ashton and I took off, headed down to the only restaurant in the hotel.

  A friendly hostess greeted us there, and perhaps recognizing Ashton from the cover of any number of magazines, guided our group to the finest table in the joint. We were seated on a balcony that overhung a rocky outcrop, providing us with a spellbinding view. The depths of the water were illuminated to a blinding blue, so clear that you could see all of the rainbow-colored fish which swam beneath.

  So this is what paradise looked like.

  The waiter brought us sparkling water flavored with fresh cucumber while Ashton and I made eyes at one another.

  Turning to look out at the water, Ashton said mildly, “Beautiful day.”

  “Wonderful.”

  And turning back to me, he added with a wink, “Not a bad night either.”

  “That all you’ve got to say about it?” I joked.

  “In the middle of a restaurant? Yeah, that’s all I can legally say about it.” He paused. “But if you’d like to hear my thoughts on the matter later…well, you know where I’m staying.”

  I giggled like a schoolgirl as menus were deposited on our table. Throwing a sidelong glance in their direction, I motioned Ashton towards the task, saying, “I’m too wiped out to think about food. You pick.”

  Most guys would’ve shrunk at this, assuming I was testing them, anxious to see if they would pick out the right meal. In reality, all my mind could handle was visions of Ashton’s sweaty body, poised over my own. If left to my own devices, I’d order sausage, and that wasn’t exactly tropical destination food (or even on the menu, for that matter).

  With a nod, Ashton waved the server over, and gave her various instructions regarding our food. Meanwhile, I played peekaboo with Levi, who was getting awfully good at the game. My little champ.

  Before I knew it, a veritable buffet of food had been brought to our table. I saw eggs, hash browns, and even some sausage. Ashton had read my mind, in more ways than one; after such a vigorous night, I needed to carbo-load, and I dug into the food with relish.

  I was midway through a mango-banana smoothie when a loud, obnoxious ring interrupted the gentle cry of the gulls.

  “What’s that noise?” I asked Ashton.

  “My phone.”

  Oh. Of course. Somehow, my island mind had totally forgotten about the existence of all modern technology.

  Ashton hesitated, apparently reluctant to fetch it.

  “You gonna get that?” I asked.

  He sighed, “I guess.”

  I watched as he extracted the device from his pocket, took one look at the screen, and frowned.

  “Something wrong?” I questioned, worried by the abrupt change in his demeanor.

  “No, it’s just…I have to take this.” He scooted his chair back from the table, the legs scraping across the wood, and said, “Excuse me,” before walking out of the restaurant with the phone pressed to his ear.

  Huh. The frown wasn’t really like him, but then again, I could allow that maybe I just hadn’t seen him unhappy before—which would make sense, given how briefly we’d actually known each other.

  But leaving the restaurant? That was definitively out of character. Not that I knew him all that well, necessarily—again, a few days is hardly enough time to know someone’s habits—but from what I’d already seen, I knew he wasn’t the variety of man who took a call during a meal. Maybe that was just him, or maybe it was his Texan upbringing. Either way, Ashton took manners seriously, or seriously enough that he would never leave his dining companion to attend to some work matter.

  I fed Levi some pieces of fruit, patiently biding my time, hoping Ashton’s call would be over quickly. When it seemed like more than a few minutes had elapsed, I decided to throw manners out the window and continue working away at my own plate. Hey, a girl’s gotta eat, and this girl was downright ravenous.

  About ten minutes later, Ashton reentered the restaurant. Gone was the smiling, open guy that had been seated with me only moments ago. In his place, a cold, closed-off businessman had appeared. A total stranger. My hands grew clammy as I realized that, no, I wasn’t actually seeing a stranger—it was the Ashton from all of the media profiles. The shark. The asshole.

  He strode back to our table, and with no prelude, said, “We have to leave the island. Now.”

  “What?” I questioned, unable to keep the frantic edge out of my tone. “We just got here.”

  “There’s been a…business emergency back on the mainland,” he explained bluntly. “I need to get back, stat.”

  “I don’t understand. Everything was fine a minute ago. What happened?”

  “You don’t have to understand. The private jet is waiting for us. We’ll get back to the room, pack our bags, and be on the plane within the hour.”

  “That’s not enough time—”

  I saw his fists clench and his eyelids lower. The stance was menacing, and I shrank back instinctively.

  “Harley,” he insisted. “This isn’t up for debate. It’s an emergency. That’s all you need to know.”

  Unsure of what to
think or say, I simply nodded.

  “Okay,” I replied. “Then let’s go.”

  I grabbed Levi from his high chair, and we left without even paying the bill—Ashton simply shouted in the hostess’ direction to “put it on his room.” That, more than any of the other changes in his demeanor, shook me the most. Up until then, he’d been exceedingly kind and respectful with all service workers. What had changed? How serious was this “business emergency?”

  My flip flops smacked rapidly on the floor, rubber hitting cement. We got back to the room in seconds and packed our backs in a frenzy of silent activity, the only audible noises the tossing of pieces of fabric one on top of the other. I threw everything back into my suitcase, but upon trying to close the top, I realized that I couldn’t—the zipper wouldn’t budge.

  “Are you ready?” Ashton asked from the other room, his tone suggesting that I better be.

  “Almost, but I can’t quite close—”

  Before I could finish, he stormed in from the other room. Sizing up the situation—the suitcase piled high, unwilling to slam shut—he tore the top few items from the bag, and heaved the lid down.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “That’s my stuff; I want to take it back.”

  “Whatever it was, I’ll buy you new ones. Now, let’s go.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to disagree; no sooner had he said “let’s go,” than he’d grabbed my suitcase and begun wheeling it to the door. A bell boy, who I guess had been standing at the ready for quite some time, jumped in and took the rest of our luggage.

  So much for our little getaway.

  Just as Ashton had insisted in the restaurant, we were out the door and arriving at the airport within the hour.

  I boarded the plane in a daze, and it struck me that this is what my reality usually felt like: not the soft, warm glow of the Bahamas, but the abrupt awfulness of leaving too soon.

  Anger and fear roiled through my body as I settled in for what promised to be a miserable flight. No polite stewardess offered me drinks; no pilot came to greet us. There was just silent, angry tension.

  I held Levi on my lap and looked over at Ashton, who had taken a seat on the other end of the cabin, in what I reckoned to be the absolute height of pettiness. What, he couldn’t even look at me now? How rich.

  Why was he treating me like this crisis was somehow my fault? I’d had nothing at all to do with his stupid business kerfuffle, assuming it wasn’t caused by a disaster in the HR department. But even then, he was the one who’d begged me to come on the trip, who had made excuses to my other bosses. In the end, this was all his fault.

  We took off only moments after boarding; I wasn’t even sure it was legal to get up in the air that quickly, but I was less scared of the plane crashing than I was of Ashton’s mood.

  The flight consisted of absolute, overpowering silence, just like the packing had. I leaned my cheek against the cool plastic of the window frame, turning away from Ashton’s scowling face so that he wouldn’t see the tears springing up in my eyes.

  I wanted to ask him what was going on, if there was something I could do to help, but everything about his demeanor indicated that that would be a bad idea. His shoulders had grown rigid, his brow stony. The change from man to beast was completed when, about halfway through the flight, he went into the bathroom and reemerged some minutes later, dressed in his most severe suit.

  With a dawning horror, I wondered if Ashton had been right the other night—if he really was, after all, just a copy of his father, a vindictive workaholic who would never be able to make time for love or family. That same evening—was it only last night?—I had denied it to him, saying that there was no way he even mildly resembled that man.

  But now? Well. I wasn’t so sure.

  Chapter 16

  Harley

  I didn’t sleep on the flight. I was wired with anger and energy. My thoughts seethed, anxious to get out and unleash themselves with a fury upon Ashton, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I reasoned that it wouldn’t be proper conduct in front of the baby, and besides, spending the next six hours in a metal box with the person you’d just berated was an obvious way to make a bad situation even worse.

  We landed in the evening, and no sooner had we disembarked the plane than I noticed that there were not one, but two, tinted black SUVs waiting on the tarmac, their engines idling.

  “What’s this?” I asked him, the first words I’d spoken in hours. My throat was dry from inactivity.

  “Cars,” he replied, his tone sarcastic and scathing.

  I wrestled with my baser instincts, convincing myself to maintain my temper.

  “Yes, Ashton, I know they’re cars.” I took a breath, and tried to modulate my voice. “I’m asking why there are two of them.”

  Okay, so I wasn’t totally able to keep my rage in check. Tears welled in my eyes, but I refused to let them erupt. I had to stay strong.

  “I need to go straight to the office, and I don’t have time to drop you off,” he explained, no emotion in his tone. He sounded like an android, like some sort of monstrous robot that resembled a human in face alone.

  Swallowing my pride and remembering my manners (even though Ashton had clearly forgotten his), I began, “Well, thanks for the trip—”

  “Don’t mention it. See you.”

  With that, he turned on his shiny heel and stormed off to one of the black SUVs, leaving me and Levi alone on the runway. My tears broke free and my shoulders shook as I watched Ashton slide into his car without sparing me so much as a single, solitary glance.

  It was all wrong. Tremendously, horribly wrong. The past few days twisted in my memory, as I attempted to reconcile the ecstasy of the vacation with its awful and sudden ending. I couldn’t fit the pieces together in a way that made sense. Was I going crazy? Was there some obvious answer I was totally missing? My mind was spinning out, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to rein it back in.

  I needed to get home before I had a complete breakdown. Relenting, I allowed the driver of the other car, the one Ashton had left behind, to load my luggage into the trunk. I climbed in, and buckled Levi into the waiting car seat; at least Ashton seemed to not hate me so much that he’d forget something as vital as a car seat. Here I was, grateful that a man who I had serious feelings for hours ago had done me the courtesy of thinking about my baby’s safety. God, how far the bar had dropped for chivalry.

  The drive back to my place was brisk and dismal. Levi cried the whole way; he was teething, so I couldn’t really blame him. Besides, if I wasn’t a full-grown adult, I’d be doing the same thing right about now.

  All I could picture with clarity and calmness was the warm promise of my bed. Nothing bad happens in bed. I’d just plop my face down on the pillow and try to wash the past few days from my mind, with a power hose, if need be.

  We arrived at my apartment with little fanfare, and I held Levi in my arms as the driver unloaded our things at the curb. This guy wasn’t Benjamin, though, and didn’t offer to carry them all the way up to my apartment; at every turn, I was being reminded that my clock had struck midnight, and everything was turning back into pumpkins and rats. Who was Ashton in this story? The prince, or the villain?

  Struggling to manage the luggage with just one free hand, I tottered towards the door with Levi balanced on my other hip. The suitcase handle fell from my grasp several times, and each time, I grew angrier. Luckily, no neighbors were around to hear me fume.

  With immense difficulty, I made it through the entrance and up the stairs. I huffed and puffed with my boy and bags all the way up to my apartment, and—

  Shit.

  Taped onto my front door was a neon pink piece of paper. Across the top of the letter, in bold, size thirty font, read the word: “NOTICE.”

  “No, no, no. That can’t be right,” I said to myself. Levi looked up at me, his little face totally ignorant of the calamity that was befalling his mother.

  My eyes darted across the page as I
attempted to comprehend the information printed there.

  It was even worse than I thought.

  No warning about late rent, or a markup in prices—nothing that could be solved by a simple call to the landlord.

  Instead, the paper informed me that the building was being sold to make way for new, luxury accommodations. The entire apartment complex would be razed to the ground. The letter didn’t need to say the obvious: that this new building would be well out of the price range of the middle-class people who inhabited the existing one.

  Frantic, I looked down the hall. Every door bore the same telltale pink paper, like the mark of red blood on doors in ancient Egypt.

  I read on, at last coming to the worst of it, the line that specified: You have thirty days to vacate the premises.

  Stunned, I resorted to mechanical movements. Hold the baby. Grab the luggage. Open the door. Keep doing the things you need to do, and maybe then your entire upside-down world will feel normal.

  I entered my home—though it wouldn’t be such for much longer—set the luggage down with a dull thud, and prepared Levi for bed. I moved like a woman possessed.

  Once Levi was in his crib, and I had no more distractions at my disposal, I sat at my kitchen table and let the tears that had threatened all day spill forth.

  One month.

  There was no way I’d be able to buy a place; even if I raided Levi’s college fund, I couldn’t possibly scrape together the money. Sure, his one-day gig for Swann Innovations—the name made me violently jerk away from the thought—even that, wouldn’t begin to cover the expense of finding another home. With my credit shredded to pieces by Kyle’s debts, I’d be hard-pressed to find an apartment that would take me in.

  A day ago, even a few hours ago, I might’ve asked Ashton for help. It would’ve killed my pride, but I’d have done it. A mother will do anything to keep a roof over her baby’s head.

  But that was then. That was the old Ashton.

  The new one? The hard, unfeeling Ashton who had materialized this morning out of thin air? There was no way I could turn to him; I was doubtful he’d even be sympathetic to my plight. How had the bottom dropped from beneath me so quickly? I was falling and falling, without any signs of hitting solid rock.