The Surprise (Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  "No," she said, and tried to ignore the feeling in her gut that she was in over her head. If it was with Alex Blume, looking at her like that, she would go in so far over her head that she couldn't see the surface, as long as he asked her to.

  3

  Diana's eyes couldn't stay on the paper and it was about twenty minutes past distracting. The fact that there was more to this than met the eye was obvious. She wasn't a lawyer, nor training to be one, aside from the fact that she had read as many case briefs as some law students.

  But even Diana was able to see that there was something strange about what he wanted. Even if he were only giving her the information to hand off to a partner, it was strange. Why would he come here to do it? Why not just go to his own lawyers? Surely there was a law firm in Seattle that he could find, instead of staying out here for another week or more so that he could get this all set up.

  But here he was, regardless, and here he was apparently planning to stay until the trust was finally set up in its entirety. Something about the whole thing felt off, but Diana wasn't in a position to ask and she certainly wasn't in a position to know what it was. She'd already been lectured once for trying to talk him out of the decisions he was making and she wasn't about to open herself up to that kind of criticism a second time, not when it was Alex freaking Blume.

  She looked down at the written notes, looked over at the laptop screen that made a checklist so simple that a monkey could follow it, and ensured for the third time that things were all in order.

  "Uh, I think this is everything. So if you just give me a minute," she said, packing everything up, stuffing her pen back into her breast shirt pocket and bundling the pad and the notebook computer together. "I'll come back with one of the partners to talk to you about the details and draw up the contract."

  "You're not going to be the one drawing me up?"

  "I, uh, don't do that. I'm not even really a law student, I just applied for the job and they gave me a chance." The smile on her face was honestly bashful and Diana wasn't sure whether she should be embarrassed or not, but she felt it either way. "Someone will be with you in a minute, Mr. Blume."

  "I told you to call me Alex, didn't I?" He had a faint smile that she hoped was supposed to tell her that it was all fine, really, and he was only teasing her. If he was, then it was working, because she was as nervous as could be.

  "Sorry, Mr. Alex. I'm just... don't, uh. I'll have someone in here in five minutes, so don't worry for a second."

  "No, I won't worry in the least bit. I know you can do it."

  "Well, if you'll excuse me," she said, and started to open the door.

  "How's six o'clock?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  Diana realized what he meant an instant before he spoke his answer. "I asked you to dinner, didn't I?"

  She laughed, sounding nervous even to her own ears. "I'm flattered, but I'm sure you've got more important things to do."

  The gaze he fixed on her wasn't nearly as playful as the ones that he'd given her up to that point. If anything, he looked a little bit irritated, as if he were tired and frustrated by her efforts to play hard to get.

  "If I had something more important to do, I wouldn't ask. Trust me, Diana, when I say that this is important."

  She let out a long breath and tried to hold her own focus for a moment, distracting as his face was. As every part of him was, really, from his star power down to his suit that cost more than her beat-up jalopy. "Uh. Yeah. Six is fine. I might be, just a few minutes, late coming down, if that's not a problem."

  "Great. I'll see you then. Six sharp. I'll be waiting in the car outside. You won't be able to miss it."

  She gave him a nervous smile, unsure how she was supposed to take his interest in her, except that she knew that she was taking it somehow. She might not have been sure how to deal with it, but she knew one thing to a certainty, and that was that she appreciated it more than she probably should have. She shivered as she left the room and that gaze, hot and heavy, fell off of her shoulders.

  She pulled the paper from the pad that she'd been writing on and dropped it onto the copy machine, punched the buttons to start it copying in triplicate, and went off to find Mr. Rosen. He was in his office, same as always, staring at his computer screen. Diana did her best impression of not thinking for a moment that he probably wasn't working much at all.

  If she were honest, there was a big part of her that suspected he spent the majority of the day on Twitter. But she wasn't in a position to question her boss's day-to-day habits, and it wasn't exactly a position she wanted to try on for size, either.

  So instead she just ignored it, like she ignored most things.

  "Mr. Rosen, sir? Mr. Blume is ready for you in Conference 2."

  The lawyer looked up at her with his lined, grandfatherly manner. She couldn't help thinking that his expression was anything but grandfatherly, but he hadn't made any inappropriate comments, hadn't laid a single finger on any part of her, properly or improperly, so if he was going to notice that her shirt was a little bit low cut today and say nothing about it, then that was his right. After all, the shirt was a little bit low-cut. Besides, she told herself, she was probably just imagining it in either case.

  "Thank you," he told her, smiling and standing up from his desk, slapping a few keys on the keyboard and walking along with her. "I'll be right in."

  "Here's my notes from the preliminary. He wants to open a trust, value of two hundred million dollars, with a trustee to be named by him at a later date. He says it's towards a specific purpose, but when I asked him what it was, he said, I'm quoting here, 'it's a surprise,' and wouldn't be pressed any further."

  Rosen rubbed at his eyes. "Okay, none of that should be a problem."

  "Anything else, sir?"

  "No," he answered. "Nothing else. Thank you, Diana. You can go back to what you were doing."

  There was a little voice in the back of her mind that wondered if there was some kind of bonus for appeasing a big name client like Alex Blume. She didn't bother to ask, though. If there was then Diana trusted Mr. Black and Mr. Rosen to tell her about it, and if there wasn't, she didn't want to risk sounding naive. So she watched him go into Conference 2, a room suited for ten or twenty people all sitting around a desk for negotiations and the like, and would now hold exactly two.

  She turned back to the room where she'd been working. The door was left unlocked, but someone must have closed it in the time she'd been gone. To be fair, having the door standing open for half an hour wasn't exactly reasonable, so it didn't strike her as remotely odd.

  The lights being out didn't surprise her, either; she'd turned them out herself. The library at Black and Rosen wasn't a large one, by any stretch, but it had a dozen or more overhead lights, and Diana wasn't about to be the one yelled at about the unnecessary power expenditure.

  What did surprise her was what she saw when she stepped inside. Someone was standing there, the book flipped open to where she'd marked the pages, his finger pressed into the text and scanning left to right.

  "Mr. Blume!" He looked up, seeming to be almost as startled as she was.

  "Miss Kramer! Lord, you gave me a start. I'm sorry, I got a little bit bored, and I just thought..."

  The explanation sounded hollow, and an instant later Mr. Rosen's head appeared in the doorway. "Diana, do you know..."

  He was looking where he'd expected to find her, Diana knew, but he wasn't going to find her there. She had just stepped in a little way. Instead, he saw exactly what she saw. The man who had come in for a mystery trust, the man wearing his ten thousand dollar suit, the man who could have bought every one of them and the rights to their children if he wanted to name a number high enough.

  "Mr. Blume," he said, at a loss. For a moment the whole conversation seemed as if it were going to play out the exact same way that it had with Diana. Then Alex looked over at her, his eyes twinkling with amusement that she couldn't understand and didn't care to try.

>   "Sorry, I was just looking around. Which way was the bathroom again?"

  He turned as he started to follow Mr. Rosen out the door and mouthed the words at Diana, words she wouldn't have understood if she hadn't just heard them two minutes beforehand. 'Six o'clock.'

  4

  Alex Blume frowned and looked over at the clock on the dashboard of the car, wondering if he had the time before six rolled around to take care of some other business. There was a long distance to travel if he decided he did, but a few miles would barely be a blip on his radar. He would just be getting warm by the time he finally settled back into the car.

  Twenty minutes to cover ten miles out and ten miles back? He mulled the timing over and nodded to himself. There was time, though he'd have to rush when he got there. No time for dawdling. He stepped out of the car and looked around. The highway was right by him, but there would be too many people focused on the road ahead of them. The bigger concern was the building beside him, but...

  Well, there was plenty to worry about, he knew. But there wasn't much time to worry about it, and everything was fine most of the time. If it wasn't, well, he could buy the silence of everyone in the building for less than he hoped to gain.

  He stretched out and let the glamour fade, let himself stretch out the wings that he'd been holding back and leaped into the air. His wings unfurled, a dozen or so feet into the sky and caught the wind under them, and he pulled himself up into the air by them, the wings moving too hard and too fast for the wind to move out of the way, pulling him up. Up, up, up, until the buildings around him looked like toys.

  Then, he dove hard towards the ground, picking up speed, faster and faster, until he pulled his wings back wide again and flattened out, a scant thousand feet off the ground. The air whipped against his face, but he pulled himself faster, faster, faster. He had places to be, and barely any time to waste moving from point A to point B.

  There were few dragons who preferred to keep up their glamour when there were no humans around. It was uncomfortable, sucked at the back of your mind, like the feeling of having maybe left the oven on when you left the house, multiplied by ten.

  Alex wasn't one of them, but it was hard to do any serious flying when you had to hide yourself. Hard as hell. He smiled to himself at the thought of what he'd been able to get done that day. There was a lot more to be done. A hell of a lot more, if he were going to get his revenge. That would come later. For now, he had to hurry, and had to make sure that he didn't let his concentration slip for even a moment as he flew, darting between the tallest of the tall buildings until he hit the edge of town.

  There was a trio of dragons outside, wearing their human appearance well. Each of them were attractive, thoroughly muscled like athletes. Each of them wore clothes as expensive as any he'd worn.

  It was easy, when you hid yourself with magic, to pretend that you could afford anything you wanted to be able to afford. To have seen a piece of clothing was to be able to show it off to the rest of the world as if it was your own.

  Alex preferred to wear honest clothes, like a human. Like the man that he delighted in pretending to be. He swooped down hard, pulled himself up only a few feet from the ground and then dropped down when his momentum had stopped itself. The landing would have hurt his knees, if he were the man he pretended to be, but for a dragon, it was a little thing.

  "How's it going?" he asked, shifting only momentarily into a human appearance.

  "You know you're not supposed to be going around like that," said one. "You'll be seen."

  "Hardly, and if I were, then so what? It's not a big deal, either way."

  The female scowled at him, her features darkening until she looked like she might lose more than just her composure. "You know better, 'Alex Blume.'"

  "I know I do, Cyanora. And you know full well that I don't much care, regardless of what the rules say."

  She sneered at him and hissed out a warning that carried with it a subtle charge of electricity that tugged at the hairs on his arm. Then he stepped towards the hill and through the illusion of ground and into the lair. It had been a long way. Exceedingly long, even for a Dragon. To have two homes, two proper homes, was odd. To live in his human form, Alex thought... that was even odder.

  Then again, he knew a certain amount about that life. He knew what it was like to be strange, to do things his own way. To do things the wrong way, if the three outside were to be believed. They were not unique in their estimation of things, but when one of their kind died, it wasn't something that they took lightly.

  The fact that he'd let it happen to himself, that was another story altogether.

  Killing a dragon was hard to do, by any stretch of the imagination. Killing one with his glamour up made it easier. It was hard to fly properly. Hard to hunt. When you looked like a human, it was far, far too easy to slip into the habits of humans. To think like a human, to act like a human. To feel like a human.

  Alex knew the feeling too well. In the room with the daughter, he'd been overtaken by too many human emotions. There was the greed, the same as always. The feeling of want. But he didn't want her as any status symbol, or as a tool. He wanted her the way that a man wanted a woman. A human man.

  Was it a mistake? He didn't know. But he knew one thing. If there was going to be anyone who could take down Alvin... no, he corrected himself, who could take down Keleth, then Alex would correct that mistake immediately. More than immediately. He started with the options. The three outside were out. Cyanora was the strongest of the three, and she looked like she'd seen death's face herself at the very idea that Keleth's territory was up for grabs.

  Alex wasn't startled by it in the least. Cyanora was young, yet. She didn't know the way of the world. Didn't know the kind of threats that were out there. There had been wars, literal wars, fought between their kind in the past. He'd lost more friends in those days than were still alive today. Which was a big part of why they'd been able to put their differences aside.

  He pushed the thoughts out of his mind. There was something here, there had to be. Something that would allow him to claim the territory, for one. Territory he'd long since promised that he would take. It put him directly in the cross-hairs of anyone who wanted to find Keleth's killer.

  There had to be some clue to who the killer was, as well. The fact that he wasn't it didn't matter to anyone but him, Alex knew. He had been too interested in Human society, though. Lost interest in his native people. Lost interest in their petty squabbles, lost interest in their politicking. Lost interest in their hoards. There would be time to claim those things from them.

  Eventually, he would lose interest, as they always did. As everyone always did. The Human world moved faster than their own, fast enough to provide a little bit of entertainment for anyone who had grown tired of their hidden lives. But even then, Alex thought, there was supposed to be something for him to come back to. Politics of his own to settle. Rivalries to be fought.

  To have Keleth taken from him should have been a relief. Someone had taken it upon themselves to settle the dispute once and for all, and Alex hadn't had to lift one single finger. He grit his teeth together and looked around the room. He had to hurry, if he was going to meet the daughter.

  But first, he had to figure something out, had to understand what had happened here. As he looked around, smelling for the scent of gold, for the scent of magic, for the scent of any sort of power at all, he started to grow pale.

  There was nothing to be found, he was starting to realize, and there was much to be done before he could begin to absorb the territory. There would be challengers, as well, but those were no worry of his. He could manage with those.

  The problem was the power, and the proof. If he could absorb Keleth's horde, then he could make that into an effective claim to the territory. To his seat at the council, a seat that had remained empty for almost thirty years.

  The problem was that wherever that horde was, it wasn't here. And worse, it hadn't been here in a ve
ry, very long time.

  5

  Diana Kramer was the exact distraction that Alex Blume, multi-billionaire and occasional Human Being, couldn't afford. He glowered at her as she stepped out the front doors of the high-rise office building, furious with her for being who she was and looking the way that she did. Then he eased the car into gear and pulled out, turning at the last moment to line the car up perfectly with the sidewalk.

  Cars these days perform quite a bit better than they did at their inception. In the beginning there was barely enough power in them to equal to a fast run. Horses were faster, and flying faster still. It wasn't until decades after that, that humans invented their own flying machines, and soaring through the sky became a little bit less safe. Still, it was the fastest way to go short of buying an actual race car, and then it was only a little bit faster, and only in a straight line.

  He let out a long breath and then forced himself back under control, threatening to lose it again as she slipped in beside him and he smelled the scent of her perfume, thick and heady and womanish. It had been a long time since he'd cared to indulge that part of him. It wasn't something that Dragons did often, and certainly, when they did it, not generally with humans.

  There was some amusement to be found there, of course, same as with anyone and with anything, but it was like eating popcorn as a meal. There was fun to be had but it didn't last, wasn't filling, and wasn't satisfying.

  No, most of his kind preferred the company of nobody at all; the few who did prefer company preferred the company of a fellow dragon, and then only from a considerable distance. Keleth had done something few others had. He'd taken a human wife. More than that, he'd sired a human daughter, as well.

  "How was work?" Alex slipped the car out of neutral again and eased off the clutch. They started slowly, which was his preference, in spite of the car's natural speed. It had more than enough power to spare, more than he ever really would need. If he were in that much of a hurry, it would be easier to climb out and start flying. But something about the car attracted him. The same thing that attracted dragons to all sorts of things. He wasn't a collector, not of cars, but even he could see the attraction.