The Surprise (Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  The Surprise

  Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance

  Amy Faye

  Published by Heartthrob Publishing

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  Here’s a preview of the sexy love story you’re about to read…

  Even through a zipper and several layers of denim, folded up to make a nice, heavy-wearing garment I could feel her touching me, and I could feel the electric sensation of pressure driving me up a wall.

  “You like that, don’t you?”

  It was my turn for my breath to catch in my throat, to sound ragged and needy and demanding. “Don’t tease me.”

  She looked up at me and batted her eyelashes demurely. “No? Why not?” Then she started to drift down to her knees, her hand still rubbing the front of my jeans.

  “God… I just… don’t.”

  “After all those years that you teased me?”

  “Don’t hold high school against me.”

  “I’ll hold whatever I want to against you, David Collins. And if that means…” She paused to bring her face dangerously close to my crotch without ever making a real move to take my hardness out of them. “If that means that you get teased, then you get teased.”

  I sucked in a breath. “You sure that’s what you want?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You might end up regretting it,” I say, trying to make my voice sound vaguely threatening.

  “Who says I’d regret it?”

  She let the question hang in the air a moment before reaching up to undo the button of my jeans, and then worked the fly until I was standing proud of the opening of my jeans, my hardness straining against the fabric of my boxers.

  “God,” I growled. “I should have done this years ago.”

  She didn’t respond to that, just pulled the boxers down a little bit, enough that my cock sprung loose and stared her in the face.

  “You think so, huh?”

  I took a deep breath in and leaned back against the counter. It didn’t creak under my weight.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. An image flashed in my mind, halfway remembered. Something about the smell and the sensation of her hand gripping my shaft aroused a memory, faint even in focus.

  Then she took me into her mouth and I lost my mind and the memories it held. The only thing that existed was the feeling of her lips wrapped around my shaft and giving me the pleasure that I needed. Pleasure that was all-encompassing and impossible.

  “God, that’s good,” I growled. It was an effort not to take her hair in my hands and force her to move faster.

  I let her move at her own pace for a minute. But the temptation grew, and grew. I pulled her away and looked her in the eyes.

  “I’m going to move, now,” I said.

  She didn’t respond except to start sucking again. I grabbed her head and thrust my hips. It caught in her throat and she made a soft choking noise as I pulled back. My body wanted to keep moving, keep going deeper and deeper until I was practically all the way to her stomach. But I forced myself to stay to a slow, controlled rhythm.

  Then I pushed her away.

  “No more,” I said. My breaths were coming hard and fast and my head needed to clear. But even then I had trouble controlling myself. Even knowing what was still to come. “Stand up.”

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  One

  Dave

  I always hated my home town. There’s a reason that I left, and I used to tell myself afterward that there wasn’t going to ever, under any circumstance, be a reason I came back.

  But when you’re a teenager, things are a little different, I guess. You don’t have responsibilities. No sense of responsibility. So I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, looking back, that I was wrong. Because I was a teenager, making brash declarations that I was going to make everything different this time, and I was just as wrong as every other teenager who thinks that.

  When I was seventeen the whole thing seemed small. I knew every little nook and cranny of Woodbridge as if it were a part of me. As if I could know the whole place by sheer intuition, and there was nothing that I needed to know aside from that.

  Coming back, after so long in so many other places, I can tell that it’s not as small as I’d given it credit for. When you’ve seen tiny villages, fewer than a hundred people, you start to gain a sense of perspective for how many moving parts their are, even in a town that I thought was impossibly small when I left.

  I took a deep breath, and let it out slow. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and my foot eased down onto the gas pedal. The car beneath me groaned and started to move forward at a snail’s pace. The rental car wasn’t my favorite, but I had my entire life in the back of it, all three bags of it, and I needed to trust it even if I didn’t like it.

  There were changes everywhere. The impression I got was that it was almost all change: nothing seemed to be all that familiar, or to have stayed the same after all that time. The houses were different colors, they’d been replaced with new houses, with massive additions. The middle of town is the worst of all; Tom’s Hardware closed, and it’s been replaced with an Ace, same as any other hardware store in Michigan these days it seemed.

  Everywhere I look, it feels like the local flavor’s gone and it’s just another town. Might as well be two miles out of Detroit, for all the difference it makes. At least then you’d be able to get some business going, rather than living in some dead-end place where there’s no work and no future for much of anybody.

  Eight years is a long time for anybody. For someone who said they were never coming back, not for nothing or nobody, though, it wasn’t nearly long enough.

  With a long, deep breath, I pulled off the main road and towards the house. The town had changed, or at least the paints of coat that it wore had. But the skeleton was still the same. Alverson onto Washington, left turn onto Scott. The fourth house on the left. It hasn’t changed at all. The old Ford is still sitting out front, right where the old man left it. Only, I suppose he didn’t leave it there this time.

  I put the car in park. Maybe this is a mistake. I could get out of here. There’s no reason that I have to come into town for the funeral. Mom can handle it. She’s handled plenty of other stuff without me, this is just one more thing, right?

  My jaw sets. Not this time. I’m not going to keep running away like this. Not if I can help it. I push the door open and step out, and breathe in the air.

  I didn’t realize how different the air here is from other places, until I left and saw half the world, and realized that not everyone has this damp smell in the autumn. The smell comes off the lake. Even though it’s almost two miles outside of the edge of town, and there’s no beach, you can’t escape the smell of damp lake water when the humidity is up, and the humidity never seems to go down after August.

  I heft one of my bags onto my back and start the short walk up the stairs. It’s the longest three steps I’ve ever taken, and at the top of it there’s nothing to be done but knock. My hand comes up, and then it goes back down.

  I can still leave. I’ve got enough time to get back into the car and go. Keep my promise, never go back to this little dead-end town.

  The door opens and a woman looks out at me. She’s young. Too young to be Mom, that’s for sure.

  “It’s you,” she says. I recognize the voice, long before I recognize the woman. She doesn’t look anything like herself, not any more.

  “Laura?”

  “You could’ve called.”

  “I
s my mother home?”

  Laura steps away from the screen door without a word. I open the door and look around.

  Everything around is changing. There’s new development, and stores are getting bought out and replaced all the time. But not my mother’s house. It’s a testament to the fact that almost thirty years can go by without a damn thing happening. A boy is born, grows up, leaves, and comes back, and nothing’s moved except the trash can liners.

  “Mom?”

  She’s sitting on the sofa with her fingers gripping her knee. She turns when I speak, even though I know she must have seen me come in.

  “David.” She purses her lips with a worried half-smile. “I didn’t know if you’d be coming.”

  “Of course I came,” I say, as if I weren’t just thinking about leaving without even stopping in for a moment.

  “I wasn’t sure you would, after the way… well, whatever.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  Her smile doesn’t become any more convincing, but it does become slightly wider. “I’m doing alright.”

  “She’s barely eaten,” Laura says from the other room. “Since Mark passed.”

  “Mom, you have to eat.”

  “I eat when I’m hungry,” she says defensively. “I’m not going to stuff myself just because someone says I’m not eating enough. And besides, I just… don’t like to cook.”

  I frown. There’s a lot to digest here. Mom looks ragged, like she hasn’t slept in a week. Maybe she hasn’t. I don’t know what her and Dad’s relationship was like when I wasn’t around, but when I was around, it was strained. Maybe that’s not the right word.

  Strained sounds as if they were having temporary difficulties that would eventually, with a little effort, be resolved. Their relationship was tuned up like a piano wire, and if you hit it with a hammer it would make a nice clear note. It was so strained that it had taken on the strain like it was a permanent characteristic of all relationships.

  “Is that what Laura’s here for?”

  “Laura,” Mom said softly, “is here to tell me that I don’t eat enough, and I need to leave the house more, and that I’d feel better if I put some work in.”

  “You would feel much better,” Laura intoned from the other room, obviously drawn by the comments from Mom, “if you just worked at it.”

  The sound of pots and pans banging around as they were shifted out of the lazy Susan made as clear a sign as there could be that she was cooking. I pushed myself up. “Do you need anything from me, Mom?”

  She shrugged.

  “A bullet to the head?” Then she gave one barking laugh and shook her head.

  I purse my lips and look down at her. Her hand had worked itself loose on her knee, and moved now to wrap around herself, both hands holding her body like she was worried her front might start wandering away.

  I step through and around the couch, and into the kitchen.

  “You need any help in here?”

  Laura takes a pan full of something white and liquid and puts it on the stove. A moment later, underneath the pan, the flame burner kicks to life.

  “No,” she says. “I can get along just fine.”

  I look down at her. Some parts of her are still the same. She’s still got a knife-shaped nose. She’s still got large, voluptuous lips. She’s still dark-haired, and she’s still almost a foot shorter than I am.

  That’s where the similarities end. Her hips are wider, now, and her bust heavier, as well. When she steps across and fills another pot with water I take a moment to look at her. Hourglass, I suppose you’d call her. When I was in high school, I’d always thought of Laura as a thin woman, maybe even twiggy.

  The decade I’d spent away from her had been kinder to her than it had to the rest of the town. I looked at her left hand, where all five fingers were bare. Then I took a deep breath.

  “So how have you been?”

  She ignored me and turned back with the pot of water. “I have to get this pasta on the boil,” she said by way of explanation. “Or nobody’s going to eat in this house until the cows come home.”

  Two

  Laura

  I could feel the blood pressure rising. I didn’t like the feeling, and I liked thinking about what’s causing it to rise even less. So I ignored it, because that’s what I’ve always done when Dave Collins is around. This time, I told myself, I was going to keep my wits about me. I wasn’t the same girl I was in high school, and I was never going to let myself get wrapped up in his bullshit again.

  Dave stood in the doorway and watched me cook. I could feel those eyes on me the whole time, no matter what I was doing. Even when he finally turned to go back into the front room, and I could finally breathe easy, I still felt the weight of his gaze on me, as if just having been looked at by him was enough to have a lasting effect.

  I let out a long, low breath. I had the sense not to fall into this trap again. I wasn’t the same girl I was then. I was an adult, and I knew how to have the sense that God gave a rock. Dave wanted to leave, and in three more days he’d be back on the road again. No need to get wrapped up in his orbit again.

  The food was a welcome distraction from my thoughts. If I wanted to, I could cook without thinking at all. I’d been making pasta since I was ten years old, and I could practically do it while I took a nap. I could do it while I had to think hard about something else, in fact—which I knew intimately, because I had to do a surprising amount of my coursework over the stove since I went back to school.

  But there’s nothing that says I had to do it without thinking. I took as much care as I could manage, preparing everything I would need and getting it into the right place. Checked the pot. Not boiling yet. There’s still more to be done before the sauce is ready, though, so I didn’t have to stop yet. I didn’t have to face the other room. I guess we were all coping with our own problems in our own ways.

  Instead, I test the edge of the large chef’s knife on my thumbnail. It skitters easily across the hard surface without ever even thinking about digging in. I fish out the sharpening steel and start making long, smooth, even strokes up and down. Three out and three back. I tested the edge again. It’s getting there.

  Two out, two back, and then one out and one back. Tested it a third time. It’s not sharp enough to shave with it, but I don’t need it that sharp. I’m happy if it will cut instead of just squishing the vegetables under the edge.

  So I set the knife aside and picked up the cheese. The feeling of the cheese in my hands is heavy, hard, and dry. Exactly what I wanted to feel. I pressed hard into the grater and started rubbing. On the other side of the grater, a pile of cheese began to form.

  “You look different.”

  I dropped the cheese on the counter and practically jumped through the roof. I’m not proud of it, but I yelped.

  “Jesus! You scared me!”

  Dave stepped into the kitchen and the temperature rose ten degrees.

  “Need any help?”

  “No,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie, even if it did leave out the most important reasons why I didn’t need any help. Reasons like, I didn’t need any help from him before this, and I would go right back to not needing his help after he left.

  “You sure? Your water’s boiling.”

  I turned to look. He was right. I hadn’t noticed the sound start up, but once I knew to listen for it I could hear the sound of the water hissing under the hum of the television in the other room.

  “You’re right.” I poured the pasta into the pot and stirred it for a moment, and then went back to sauce preparations. I didn’t need to pay special attention to it any more to make sure that it kept my attention.

  My hands moved quickly to form up enough cheese; I pushed it into a mixing bowl and then moved on to the herbs. My recipe has been evolving since I figured out how to cook boxed store pasta. Usually, I take the time to prepare my own noodles, these days. But on short notice like this, I can make do in a pinch.

  What I
can’t make do without was some chopped tarragon and parsley. My hands move quickly and efficiently as I worked.

  “You look good, you know. Better.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was grateful for the distraction of mis-timing the entire effort because otherwise I’d have to think about a whole lot of history that was better off when it was dead and buried.

  “What have you been up to these past years?”

  “Started going to Northern,” I answered.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’ll be completing my masters next semester.”

  “What in?”

  “In being busy,” I said. “I need to deal with this roux before it burns.”

  Dave looked at me hard. Like he was thinking about something real hard. If he’d thought real hard sooner, maybe I wouldn’t want to get him out of this kitchen so badly.

  “Seems like it.”

  “Well, I do my best. What have you been up to? Shacking up with girls in Singapore or something?”

  “I’ve never been,” he answered. He leaned against the side of the doorway and watched me moving. I hated those eyes. But I couldn’t tell him that, because it would be admitting defeat, and I’m not going to let him win.

  “I hear it’s lovely. Just don’t spit on the sidewalk and you’ll have a great time.”

  “I wondered what happened to you.”

  “Well, I’m still here.” I was stirring vigorously, or at least as vigorously as I could without risking throwing everything out of the pan. The physical activity made it easier not to lose my temper completely.

  “The town’s not the same as when I left it.”

  “It’s mostly the same. Well, that’s not true.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We’ve got a Home Depot a few miles down Main, for one. And for another, you aren’t here any more. So I’d say that on the whole, things are looking up around here.”

  He scowled. I scowled back at him. “You really can’t stand me, can you?”

  I looked up at him. My hand froze in the slowly mixing cheese sauce that might be pretty tasty if I don’t burn the shit out of it.