Unconventional Husband

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by Riley Knight




  Unconventional Husband

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Unconventional Husband © Riley Knight 2017.

  Cover design by Ravishing Romance Designs

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  The author has asserted his/her rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book.

  This book contains sexually explicit content which is suitable only for mature readers.

  First LoveLight Press electronic publication: October 2017

  http://lovelightpress.com

  Unconventional Husband is set in Los Angeles and as such uses American English throughout.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter One

  Scott

  What was he still missing in his life?

  Scott already had everything that he could need, at least on the surface. Everything that he could possibly desire, even. He’d achieved everything that, when he’d been a child and his whole life had come crashing down on him, he’d made a vow to himself that he would achieve. All of the boxes had been checked off.

  House, check. He had two, even, a moderately sized mansion outside of the city, and one in the downtown core of Los Angeles, close to where he usually worked. Both were professionally decorated, classy and tasteful and expensive. The sort of thing that was designed to impress anyone that he brought home, and that had gotten him laid more than once.

  Money, definitely. So much that, even if he made a serious effort, he wasn’t sure he could spend even a fraction of it. He’d fallen into this weird sort of place where he could actually live off of the interest from his investments.

  Everything should have been perfect. He was the epitome of success, though a few short decades ago, no one would have thought it possible. He was a superstar, not just some flash in the pan, as it had been predicted that he would be.

  Most of all, he had his job. His career, which he’d build himself, bit by bit. When people told him to quit, to give up, he’d stubbornly ignored them as he pulled himself out of the depths of obscurity to make his fortune.

  He even had friends. Kind of. He had, at the very least, people who were happy to hang out with him now. People that were fun and amusing and kept him busy in the little bits of spare time that he had. People that he didn’t quite trust, and that he was sure didn’t quite trust him, but were, on a superficial level, at least, his friends.

  Or something of the sort, anyway. Close enough. From what he could tell, in Hollywood, that was pretty much all that friendship was. He hadn’t seen too many examples that would tell him otherwise.

  So it wasn’t perfect, maybe, his life, but it was just about as close to it as a human could get, he figured. So why, he wondered, as he looked out at the set that he had created, at this amazing thing, this long-running show that had made him rich, and that wouldn’t exist without him, why did he feel so empty inside?

  Because the show was all that he had, he realized abruptly, with a surge of such intense sadness that he had to briefly close his eyes against the force of it. In that one moment, with no one looking at him, he could let his guard down just enough to realize just how blindingly, staggeringly alone he really was.

  So alone, and so unable to allow himself to fix that. No one had been able to get close to him in so long that he was pretty sure it was actually impossible, at this point, for him to break past that. For anyone to.

  Funny how that didn’t seem like something that he was going to be able to keep up for much longer. Despite having what most people would consider being an ideal life, despite being successful beyond even his own wildest dreams, he felt more and more like he might scream, like all of his loneliness and sadness might just burst out of him in a huge wave, all at once.

  “Scott?” someone asked, someone with a vaguely familiar voice. Scott had been so lost in his own world that he hadn’t even noticed when someone approached him, and he blinked, forcing himself back down to earth.

  “Oh. Mark. Hi.” Scott took a deep breath and forced a smile to his lips. His show, a sitcom, often had guest stars, and Mark was one of them. It didn’t always work out terribly well to have a guest star who wasn’t an actor in his own right, but Mark had, during his filming, proven to be absolutely delightful.

  He hadn’t been sure what to expect when Mark had agreed to do the show. As a successful comic book writer, Mark was certainly talented. Scott had read a few of his comics himself. They were dark, to the point where Scott had wondered how Mark would fit into a comedy show.

  But Mark had apparently wanted to do it, and Scott had been pleasantly surprised. Mark was dark, yes, but he was also witty, delivering all of his lines in a delightfully deadpan way.

  It didn’t hurt that Mark was much more handsome than Scott would have expected. He’d read some of the comics, but Mark didn’t look anything like the skinny geek that Scott had been expecting.

  Full lips, high cheekbones, dark hair, and those eyes. Scott had never seen eyes like those before, a true gray with just the faintest hints of blue, like clouds coming in over the Pacific and turning everything almost silver, even the ocean itself.

  Slender, yes, but no couch potato, that much was obvious. Those shoulders. Broad and strong …

  Wow.

  Scott forced himself back to himself, hoping that he hadn’t been gawking at the other man for too long. He was straight, he reminded himself. A few strange feelings toward men didn’t change that.

  Pushing the attraction down, Scott tilted his head and looked at Mark.

  “What is it?” he wondered, searching that handsome face. There was just the faintest hint of a smirk on those gorgeous, impossibly full lips. The lower one, in particular, was sexily pouty …

  Weird thoughts, damn it. Could Mark tell what he was thinking, somehow? Maybe Scott had been staring more than he really should be.

  “I just wondered if we’re about done for today. Are you okay, man? You seemed pretty out of it,” Mark said, and Scott winced a little. Most people he worked with were pretty used to his moods, by now.

  Of course, with his role as not only the writer and producer but also the main character, he rarely had a lot of time to just stand around and think, like he’d been doing.

  He didn’t know how to answer Mark’s question. Something about the look in the other man’s strange eyes made Scott think that it wasn’t just an idle question and that Mark might not let him get away with a generic response.

  From what he’d seen, at least, the guy tended to speak his mind, and the word about him was that he didn’t tend to suffer fools, or bullshit, lightly or well.

  “Yeah, I guess we’re done.” They’d filmed all the scenes that h
e’d wanted to that day, he realized. The day had more or less passed in a fog. He was in a bit of a slump, and how strange was it that the only person who seemed to know, or care, was the man standing right in front of him, his eyes questioning?

  “Look, it’s none of my business, and I get that, but … what’s going on with you?” Mark asked again. It was like he actually cared.

  For a moment, Scott just looked at Mark. This was a man who wasn’t a Hollywood insider. A man who was just as wildly successful as Scott was, if the stories were true. Mark had built up a comic brand that was getting pretty close to rivaling the big two that had, until now, been the only ones to take note of, at least in America.

  Was it possible that he wasn’t like the other people around here, the ones that Scott called his friends but which he had to admit really weren’t? It was ridiculous that he was thinking about trusting this person that he had literally only met today.

  He knew better than that.

  Which didn’t explain why he found himself sighing softly, his eyes meeting Mark’s directly, pulled to them as iron to magnets.

  “You want to get a cup of coffee or something?” he asked. Even then, he half expected Mark to brush him off. Lots of people might ask if something was wrong, but most of them, Scott had found, didn’t actually care enough to follow through with it.

  “Yeah, okay,” Mark said, surprising Scott again. This man, he broke the rules. He didn’t do things the way that Scott expected them to be done, the way that everyone else that he knew did them.

  Scott found that fascinating. He hadn’t even known that it was an option to play by your own rules, not really. He’d found his success by sticking to the rules, for the most part, and by bending them just enough to be interesting, just enough to give him a show that stuck out.

  Mark seemed to go beyond that, and it was something that Scott found highly strange. It also made it impossible for him to simply brush Mark off, like part of him wanted to do.

  * * *

  In the cafe, Mark headed immediately for the quietest, most secluded part of the store. There was no one else around, so after they got their coffee, it was just the two of them.

  Just the two of them, and a strange sort of energy that ran back and forth between them, like a wire connecting them. A high tension wire.

  Scott couldn’t stop looking at Mark. Could not pull his eyes away from him, not if his very life depended on it.

  “So talk,” Mark said, and Scott opened his mouth, not even knowing what would come from his own mouth, but knowing that there were things inside him that he was almost bursting with. Things that he needed to say, even if he hadn’t fully realized them himself.

  He was always so careful …

  Throwing all of that out the window, even just for one conversation, was liberating. Maybe Mark would end up stabbing him in the back. Maybe this would all end up on some tabloid.

  At least he would have gotten some of this off of his chest.

  “I’m alone,” Scott said quietly. “And I don’t want to be anymore. Only none of the people that I know … it’s like, the show is the only thing that means anything to me these days. It’s my baby.”

  Mark just nodded, but his posture was attentive, and his eyes remained fixed on Scott, inviting him to continue. But what else was there to say? Scott opened his mouth to tell Mark that that was all that there was to say on the subject, but, much to his surprise, other words came out instead. Words that he hadn’t planned.

  “The show is my baby … my only baby. The only thing that I care about.”

  Mark nodded.

  “You’re not married, are you?” Mark asked. “Not seeing anyone?”

  Scott shook his head wordlessly. There was a lot he could say about that, but it was too complicated. Or too simple. He had never found a woman that he could imagine building a life with. The girls in his life came in and came out in a fairly steady stream.

  Not exactly the best situation to get serious with someone. To maybe get married someday. To have a family, a baby.

  And then it all hit him, all at once. What he hadn’t told anyone else. What he hadn’t even admitted to himself, not until this moment, but which must have been boiling away in the back of his head for some time.

  He was almost thirty, and he’d thought that he had everything that he could want in the world. He’d thought that he had it all together. In that one moment, everything changed. Mark drew something out of him that he hadn’t even suspected the existence of.

  “I want a baby,” Scott said, his own voice sounding quiet and full of wonder to his ears. “I want a family.”

  Chapter Two

  Mark

  Mark didn’t believe in love at first sight, but in some cases, he figured, it didn’t take very long for it to happen. That was the case with Scott. Maybe it wasn’t love, but there was some sort of connection there that Mark felt more quickly than he was used to.

  The desire was there, of course, from the moment he laid eyes on the guy. Even from the pictures that he’d seen of the man, even from watching him on his show, he’d known that the man was gorgeous.

  He just hadn’t known how meeting Scott would feel. How it would feel like touching a highly charged electric wire when he took Scott’s hand for a handshake. It felt like that, like something dangerous, unpredictable.

  Mark knew about Scott. Everyone did. He was a big deal, a man who had made it despite an incredibly rocky start. So many child stars crashed and burned when they were a teenager, but Scott had risen out of all of that, like a phoenix from the ashes.

  So yes, Mark knew the gossip. He knew how Scott ran around from Hollywood starlet to Hollywood beauty. How he was always being linked with some actress or another. How he was rarely with any of them for more than a month. He’d always told himself that he was too good to pay attention to Hollywood gossip, but the truth was, he’d had a fascination with Scott for quite a few months at this point.

  He’d never heard of Scott being linked with another man before, though. So the guy was probably straight. That was what Mark had always figured, at least until he met Scott in person.

  Then he’d caught Scott looking at him, and the gaze seemed almost predatory. Like he was checking Mark out. Wishful thinking, almost certainly, but there was something about the look that Scott got in those big, dark, mysterious, and utterly gorgeous eyes that made him wonder.

  Something was going on with Scott. Something that Mark didn’t quite understand, but, to his surprise, he really, really wanted to. He wasn’t the sort of person that got fascinated with very many people, but when he did, it got intense.

  He was starting to get fascinated with Scott. Not just on a physical level, though he could definitely see having some fun between the sheets with the gorgeous, intelligent, and hilarious man. But there was more to it than that. The physical hadn’t been enough for Mark, not for a long time.

  There had to be more than physical attraction for him to be interested, and something about Scott suggested that he could offer that in spades.

  So all of this led to him sitting in a coffee shop, wondering when the last time was that he’d gone out on a date, even if it was just a coffee date. It had been awhile. A depressingly long time, actually, if he thought about it too much. He tended to spend most of his time working, or at home with his daughter.

  It was nice, but a little bit surprising, that they were going out. Until Scott dropped that particular bombshell on him, the one about wanting a child, and then it went from just slightly surprising to outright shocking.

  Mark had been raising his coffee to his lips to take a sip, but when Scott said those words, he slowly eased it down again. It was that or potentially choke on his drink. Scott was a playboy, it was well known. He was married to his career, but he was hardly averse to having a good time.

  So the stories had always gone, at least.

  “What?” Mark managed, looking at Scott, seeing him in a whole new way. Scott was not only a
dorable, but he actually wanted a kid? That was a whole new side to him, and Mark had always liked to really get deep into what made people tick.

  “I know. It’s weird. It was really sudden that I realized it, but I’ve felt like something’s been missing for ages. I want a kid. I’m almost thirty, and I don’t feel like I have anyone.”

  Mark blinked. He could hear the longing in Scott’s voice, and he found that he couldn’t question his sincere desire. Mark understood. Hadn’t he felt the same way when he’d adopted his ex-wife’s baby, and when he’d kept the child even after she split?

  It had surprised him how much he wanted to keep that baby. How Mary Anne, his daughter, had come to mean so much more to him than his ex-wife had. His relationship with her had always been transient, he’d known that somehow, even when they were married.

  Mary Anne, however, was a different story. His devotion to her, he knew, would last his whole life.

  So yes. Mark could understand the drive that would make a man want a baby. It was a bit surprising, coming from Scott, but he could tell that it was also very real.

  “Is there anyone special in your life that you want to do that with?” Mark asked carefully. “Or did you want to adopt on your own?”

  Scott sighed softly, his eyes going soft as he visibly turned his attention inward. It was clear that he was giving that question some real thought.

  “I’ve been waiting,” Scott finally admitted, his eyes still soft and somehow gentle as he spoke. At that moment, Mark had to admit to himself that he had never seen a man so gifted with beauty in his entire life. “I’ve been waiting for that woman. But I’ve never found her.”

  Woman. Right. No mention of a man. Scott was straight, just as Mark had feared. Or, at least, he couldn’t see himself being romantic with a man enough to get married. That was sort of too bad, really, since Mark had felt a connection with Scott right away. He would have liked to explore that. He was, however, too smart to get involved with a straight man.

 

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