Baby and the Beast

by Taylor Holloway

  I stared up at him, still somewhat out of my body. This was so not how I expected this day to go. It wasn’t even how I expected this evening to go. This was better.

  Connor’s hand worked between us, lining us up. There was no need for a condom, I realized distantly. I was already pregnant. And maybe that accounted for the fact that just feeling him pressed up against my pussy was almost enough to tip me back spiraling endlessly into orgasm. My body felt over-sensitive. Like it was no longer my own, just his plaything.

  He took me slowly, careful not to hurt me I suppose. But I was in no pain. My body accommodated his easily despite the difference in our sizes. I arched into the penetration, taking every inch he offered me with greedy pleasure. We were a perfect fit. I nodded up at his questioning expression and he smirked at me.

  Then he started driving into me and that little sliver of rationality that had taken root between whatever he’d just done to my clit with his tongue a moment ago and right now went right out the window. He settled into a slow, steady rhythm, staring down at me possessively as he took control of my body once again. I caught on eventually, remembering to breathe and holding onto his shoulders. I raised up my hips to meet his movements, relishing the way his blue eyes dilated as his excitement grew with each eager stroke.

  I heard little moans coming from somewhere and then realized that the breathy, plaintive mewling cries were coming from my throat. I urged Connor on and on. Faster. Harder.

  “Don’t stop,” I panted. “Please, Connor, please…” I was basically just babbling but my mouth was not connected to my brain anymore. A different part of my anatomy had taken the reins and it was desperate. I could feel my orgasm coming, near but just out of sight.

  I needed more and he gave it to me relentlessly, looking just as lost in all of this as I felt. He wasn’t gentle now, and I relished it. The couch was banging up against the wall. Connor’s boots were probably staining the upholstery. The neighbor with her tiny dog could probably hear us.

  But I didn’t want quiet. I didn’t want gentle, either. I just wanted to feel. I could guess that Connor felt the same.

  The pressure in me was building again, exponentially pushing me up and up until I was flying—momentarily losing touch with anything physical. I was just pleasure, clawing openmouthed and breathless at Connor’s shoulders, leaving dark, red scratch marks on his fair skin. He finished moments after me, cursing and then locking his teeth at the base of my neck, marking me back.

  When we finally came down, I looked up at him and he looked down at me.

  “You promised me a date,” I reminded him. This wasn’t the plan for tonight. I could see it on Connor’s face. He’d probably just wanted to test the waters. Dip his toe in. But now we were both drenched. Hell, I was half dead. He’d just fucked me within an inch of my life.

  “Raincheck?” he mumbled, rolling off me and collapsing onto the floor. He looked up at me, seeming less stressed and younger now that he was all tousled and undone. “Wanna’ just order some pizza?”

  We both laughed, but part of me knew this wasn’t funny. Things had just changed. And now there was no going back.

  35

  Connor

  The News

  Luc and Jimmy were in my living room when Isabelle and I walked in from work the next day. That wasn’t unusual in and of itself. Luc and Jimmy were frequently in the house uninvited. Isabelle just waved at them, but the look on their faces worried me.

  While Isabelle went upstairs to change into something for our now rescheduled date, I opened a bottle of water and perched myself on the edge of the couch. I was expecting something bad. I’d had an extraordinarily perfect twenty-four hours. I could only imagine that Luc and Jimmy were about to ruin it.

  “What is it?” I asked, looking from one man to the other. “Just tell me.”

  They exchanged a look. They were never this quiet. Usually it was tough to get them to shut up. This was not a good sign.

  “I want you to stay calm,” Luc said, staring at me with an expression of deep concern.

  I ground my teeth and attempted to look as serene as a Buddha. “Do I not seem calm to you?” I hoped this wouldn’t take long. I wanted to take Isabelle to this really great Italian place in West Hollywood. They had, literally, the world’s best steak. The sooner I could dispense with whatever crisis Luc and Jimmy had cooked up, the better. I wanted steak, and then I wanted Isabelle for dessert.

  “Right now, you look perfectly calm and nice,” Jimmy said. I’m sure that was accurate because I was thinking about Isabelle and she made me calm and nice. But Jimmy looked like he was at peak nervousness. One little push, and it’d be Church for Jimmy. The heart attack that was always right around the corner was gonna’ get him if he didn’t settle his nerves. “But,” he continued, “once we tell you that someone on Night Stalker’s stolen almost two million—”

  “What?!” I roared. “Who? How?”

  Jimmy recoiled into the couch and Luc handed over a small pillow for him to hide behind. He held it like a shield.

  “This is why we agreed that I would tell him,” Luc said, staring at Jimmy.

  Jimmy cradled his pillow. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Calm? Calm was a memory. Calm was a tiny whisper amid a giant roaring ocean of not calm.

  Two million fucking dollars?

  “Start talking,” I ordered Luc since Jimmy was shaking. “Explain who did this, how, why, and how you’re going to fix it.”

  Luc sighed. “I don’t know the how. I don’t know the why. But I do know the who.” He swallowed. “And you’re really not going to like it.”

  “Tell me.”

  Somehow, a sense of deathly calm came to me. I’d been ranting and furious a moment ago, but now, I’d returned to my Buddha state. I took a deep breath. In and out. I felt at peace with the world. I just needed to know who had the fucking balls to steal so much money from me.

  In an instant, I ran through all the people who worked on Night Stalker. There were hundreds. Almost a thousand when you factored in all the contractors, and the vendors, and the support and admin people. I wasn’t even counting the extras, although the idea that they might be responsible was unlikely.

  One person stood out. One particular person that I didn’t like and seemed sketchy as fuck. Ashton Radley, douche bag extraordinaire. If this was him, I was going to figuratively nail him to the wall. He’d be going to jail.

  I felt a smile crawl over my face. Jail. Yes. That was the perfect place for pretty boy Ashton Radley and his date rape-y comments about Isabelle.

  It was him. I knew it was him. I smiled at Luc.

  He didn’t smile back.

  “All of the evidence we’ve found so far points unequivocally to Maurice Schmidt.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “What’s this about my dad?” Isabelle asked, coming into the room. She was wearing that low cut, red dress, pearl earrings, and high heels. She looked and was the woman of my dreams. The mother of my child. My lover. The woman I was falling in love with.

  I wished that I were dead.

  36

  Isabelle

  The Thief

  “He didn’t do it!” I screamed at Connor. My arms were crossed over my chest and he was sitting, stock still and upright in a nearby chair. Aside from his rigid posture, he looked perfectly conversational. I wanted to smack that insufferable calmness off his face. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Luc and Jimmy were also still sitting in the living room. Luc was staring at the ceiling. Jimmy was staring at the floor. I’m sure both of them would rather be anywhere in the universe than in the middle of our fight.

  “Jimmy has the records right there,” Connor finally yelled back at me. Secretly, I was glad he was angry. It made my own anger feel less irrational. “What do you want me to believe when the proof is literally right there?”

  I hissed in my breath. I’d been on cloud nine for the past day. I should have known I’d come cra
shing down sooner or later. But not this quickly. And I never in a billion years would have expected it to be over this.

  “Your proof is wrong,” I snapped back at Connor. “It’s just wrong. So, find a different suspect. A different theory. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what proof you think you have. All I know is that you’re incredibly wrong and need to figure out what really happened before you ruin an innocent man’s life. My dad has never stolen a penny in his whole life. He’s been working on films for over forty years and he’s had a lot of opportunity. He wouldn’t wait until right now to start stealing.”

  Connor sent a “help me” look to Jimmy and Luc. Jimmy was still staring meekly at the ground, so he missed it. But Luc just shook his head.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Luc told me. “But on that day when you got into the altercation with Radley, the same day that your dad quit, someone swiped the corporate credit card that was in the workshop where your dad worked. Since that time, the card has been used over four dozen times, all for huge cash withdrawals.”

  “So that means my dad did it?” I asked. “That’s crazy. Anyone could have stolen it that day. I could have stolen it. Maybe it was me.”

  Luc shook his head. He looked like he felt bad for me, and I wanted to scream. I didn’t need anyone’s pity. Because I knew that my dad was innocent. “No, Isabelle, you couldn’t have done it. You were walked out, remember? Then you were with us for weeks, literally unable to use the card. You had no opportunity to make the purchases.”

  “Maybe I stole it when I came down to talk to my dad. Right after I got told I was fired and before I went to scream at the director.” I couldn’t believe I was having to do this basic investigative process with them. It was so obvious that my dad didn’t steal anything. “Maybe I took the card and gave it to someone else to use.”

  “Did you even have the combination to the safe it was kept in?” Jimmy asked.

  I shook my head at him. “No. But maybe my dad gave it to me.”

  “So, he had it. Who else did?” he was asking these questions like he knew the answers already. It reminded me of the way detectives asked questions on Law and Order. Jimmy thought he was already two steps ahead of me. But he was wrong. Because I knew the truth.

  “Just my dad and Rocco had the combination.” I blinked. “Why do you think my dad did this? It was probably Rocco.”

  Luc frowned, answering before Jimmy. “It wasn’t Rocco.”

  I wanted to pull my hair out. “Why wasn’t it Rocco, Luc?” I couldn’t believe how easy this crime was to solve. Jimmy thought he could be a Law and Order detective. He was a dilettante. I’d watched a lot of Law and Order when I was living at the castle. “He’s incredibly cheap,” I told Luc. “You should see what he did to some of my puppets and fur suits for the production. He seems to me like the kind of guy who can’t be trusted with money.” Honestly, Rocco had seemed okay to me. But he must have been a creepy-ass criminal. Because my dad wasn’t one.

  “It couldn’t have been him, Isabelle.” Luc looked resigned.

  “Why?” I pushed.

  “It can’t be Rocco because Rocco is in Honduras with his dying mother.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “He went there a few days ago. And that credit card is still being used as we speak. It was used yesterday at an ATM a block away from where your dad lives. There’s a video of the person using the ATM. It’s hard to see, but it could be your dad.”

  “That’s a coincidence.” I frowned.

  “No. That’s circumstantial evidence,” Luc said. “The police say it’s enough.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  I gulped. Enough evidence? Enough evidence for what? “Maybe Rocco is lying that he’s out of town. Maybe someone else got access to the safe. Maybe it was Ashton Radley. He’s the worst, you know that?” Something about the look on Luc’s face made me shut up. There was something they weren’t telling me.

  “Isabelle,” Luc said, standing up and moving closer to me. “The police have confirmed Rocco’s alibi. They say your dad is the most likely suspect. They’re going to—”

  I froze. “The police are involved? They think my dad did it?” If the real Law and Order detectives were working the case, then this was real. It was all very, very real.

  The three men in front of me all looked sympathetic. They felt bad for me because they thought my dad was a criminal. They thought he was a thief. I wanted to hurt them for their pity. Connor most of all.

  “Yes,” Jimmy said, finally speaking up. “The police are going to be making an arrest tonight.”

  My breath hissed out of me. “They can’t arrest him unless they have some real proof that it’s him.”

  Jimmy nodded. “You’re right. But they’ll find the credit card when they search your house. If they don’t find the card, then we still have a solid civil case--” He trailed off at my expression of total horror.

  “You called the police to search my house?” I stuttered. I was feeling somewhat sick. I staggered over to a chair and sat down. “What the fuck?”

  “We reported the crime,” Jimmy stuttered. “They were the ones who investigated and decided to do this.”

  Connor stood up, looking worried. He wasn’t listening to Jimmy. He was coming toward me. He raised a hand to touch my shoulder and I stared at him warily. He dropped the hand.

  “Are you alright?” he asked carefully. “Isabelle, you look very pale.”

  I gaped at him and it took me a few seconds to even reply. “Do I fucking look alright? You sent the police to my house? They’re going to go through my stuff? Through my mom’s stuff? Nobody has been in her room since she died…” My voice sounded weak and my hands were shaky. I felt tears starting to fall from my eyes and my breath was coming in little pants. “This is going to kill my dad. It’s going to be too traumatic. Humiliating. He’s innocent and this is going to scare him…” I took a deep breath. “I have to go over there right now. When is it happening?”

  Jimmy checked his watch. “It happened about half an hour ago.”

  37

  Isabelle

  The Investigation

  A couple of weeks later…

  “Do you like my new ankle bracelet?” My dad joked, correctly interpreting my horror for what it was. I stared at the ankle monitor like it was a viper wrapped around his ankle. Every time I saw it, I had the same reaction. And every time I did, my dad made the same bad joke. “It’s not really that bad, Izzie.”

  “It’s awful, dad.” I swallowed hard. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Why did they give you that thing?”

  “Well, it beats being in lockup.” My dad’s outlook on this whole weeks-long nightmare had been one of bemused confusion mixed with only mild annoyance. He took it all much better than me. Even the police had to admit that he wasn’t acting guilty. They also hadn’t found the smoking gun—the card—at my dad’s house. So, they let him go. With an ankle monitor that Aunt Roberta had negotiated for him. He was never arrested; they’d need, well, real evidence for that. “Isabelle, this is voluntary,” he reminded me. “I’m helping them solve the real crime.”

  “I hate this.” I wanted to grab the bolt cutter and get that weird doohickey off my dad’s body. It looked uncomfortable.

  “They said that the ankle monitor was just to eliminate me as a suspect,” my dad reminded me. “It’s not that bad, Isabelle.”

  It was. It was that bad. I’d never been so angry in my life as I was at Connor, and he’d made me plenty angry before. Since I stormed out of Connor’s house a week ago, we hadn’t spoken. He was giving me space, I guess. Which was smart. Because if he got anywhere near me at this point there was going to be a real crime to investigate. Murder. It was a miracle we managed to pass one another in the hallways at work without violence.

  “Connor didn’t believe me when I told him you were innocent,” I said for the one millionth time. “He’s such a pig.”

  My dad shrugged. “We kn
ew that.” He smirked. “What did you expect from a rich, eccentric, Hollywood guy? I mean, he’s paying you to give him your baby.”

  It wasn’t my baby. This fight was boring now, so I just ignored that part. Besides…

  “I thought maybe he was alright.” Was the pain obvious in my voice? Because I was in pain. A lot of pain.

  Hell, I’d fallen head over heels in love with Connor. Against all my better judgement, it just happened. I’d tried to fight it. I’d tried to be smart. But he’d won me over. I’d been planning on telling him, too. That very night he accused my father of being a thief. Thank God I’d kept my impulsive, dumb mouth shut.

  “Izzie,” my dad ventured, “you know it wasn’t Connor who personally accused me of stealing his money, right?”

  I stared at him in disbelief.

  “Are you… sticking up for him?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.

  He raised his hands up defensively. “No. I think he’s a creep. Only a creep would pay a stranger to have a baby for him and require her to live in his house. But you have to admit, this wasn’t him. He wasn’t to blame. It was the police. And they were following the evidence that they had at the time. It just so happened to lead to me.”

  “But you didn’t do it.”

  My dad patted my hand. “I know that. You know that. The police are going to figure it out eventually. And Connor Prince? Who the fuck cares what he thinks?”

  I did. I wanted him to believe me. But he didn’t. He believed Luc and Jimmy over me. He believed the evidence, which was super fucking weak. The police were already following up on other leads at this point, probably, because my dad hadn’t done anything wrong. When they found out who was really to blame, Connor was going to be sorry. Or maybe he wasn’t going to care.