by K. Z. Riman
Kissing Another Grimaldi
By
KZ Riman
Credits Page
Eternal Press
A division of Damnation Books, LLC.
P.O. Box 3931
Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998
www.eternalpress.biz
Kissing Another Grimaldi
Book 1 of Kissing the Bovaghnian Rogues Series
by KZ Riman
Digital ISBN: 978-1-62929-093-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-62929-094-2
Cover art by: Amanda Kelsey
Edited by: Barbara Legge
Copyright 2013 KZ Riman
Printed in the United States of America
Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights
Worldwide English Language Print Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication page
For Zaldy, the love of my life
For my family
My sincerest thanks to those who helped bring this book to life:
My husband, for all those nights you and I spent talking about nothing but romance just to get my book fueled up.
My mom, my grandma, my sister, my brother-in-law, my niece and my dad, for pushing me and supporting me all the way.
My whole family, for the blessings.
Althea Sarah Ramos, for keeping your mailbox open for my questions and filling mine with suggestions.
Pinky Rose Hartshorn and Brett Hartshorn for all the fun and crazy ideas.
Irene and Honey Joie for the coffee dates and sharing.
Mate, Chloe, Brandon, Mel and Shuriken, thank you for all the help.
Ice, Sha, Hersh, She, Cha and Aiz—you guys keep me going.
My editor, Barbara Legge, for the patience. This book would not have been this great without your guidance. Thank you so much!
My cover artist, Amanda Kelsey, for the great art.
My publisher, Eternal Press, for the first—and hopefully not the last—great opportunity.
The Lord Almighty, my Savior and Light, this wouldn’t be possible without You.
Prologue
“Two lines.”
I stared at it for what seemed to be a million seconds of waiting, to see if things were to change, or if I was going to wake up soon.
Two lines. It remained the same. Nothing changed and I most certainly wasn’t dreaming. I was completely and utterly shaking.
Maybe I should call him. I paced about the room nervously and glanced at the strip again. It couldn’t be a mistake. It was my fifth one.
“I’m pregnant,” I whispered to myself as I sat on the couch, watching as my tester mocked me. I could almost hear it laughing at me.
I believed him when he said measures like condoms or the pills his father’s company developed were safe and that I had nothing to worry about. I still got pregnant. How should I tell him? I wondered if he would be happy about this when he was becoming the best lawyer in Bovaghn and I was a year away from graduating college.
Going back to my room, I played the last message he left on my machine.
“This is Kelsey. I’m not home. You know what to do.” Beep.
“Hey, babe! I…uh…I’m actually on my way back from Klidesville. I’m so excited to see you. I have something to ask you. It’s really…important. It’s going to change our lives. I’ll pick you up at eight. I love you. I love you so much. You know that right? I love you so much I think I would never ask for anything else in my life…but this. I’ll see you.”
I hoped in my heart I was right about what he was going to ask me.
It was already six in the evening and I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. There was no use. I would throw up anyway and then feel a lot worse than before eating. Maybe I should just call him and ask that we stayed in my apartment. I could cook for him. He had always loved my cooking.
If he was going to ask me to marry him which I was hoping he would do tonight before I told him the news, we would be going to a fancy restaurant for dinner.
I readied myself a warm bath and looked at myself in the mirror. There was no change in my body at all. I stared at myself, naked, and touched my belly. For one moment since this morning, I smiled.
“We’re going to have a baby, Seth,” I whispered, practicing how to tell him. He loved me. He had said it a lot in his last call. He couldn’t take this the wrong way.
I let the warm water relax my body and my mind. I still had about two hours before he arrived—lots of time to make myself look so captivating he would not be able to resist me and our baby.
He’s going to ask me to marry him. I could feel it. He loves me. He had loved me since the day he saved me from being the campus target, the bully-victim, just because I was not as rich as the rest of them.
* * * *
“Come on, give those back,” I pleaded as I watched some of the male upperclassmen take the books I was supposed to take back to the library that afternoon.
“Oh, I will, Kelsey.” One of them, the university’s hockey team captain, walked closer. “If you kiss me.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. It was always the same taunting and harassment, which a poor orphan girl could not do anything about against sons of the country’s multimillionaires. “No. Please give them back.”
“Not without a kiss,” he urged, as he tilted my chin and tried to draw his lips closer to mine. I moved away but he pulled me right back, grabbing my wrist. “Come on.”
“I said, no!” I snapped. I was the campus nineteen-year-old virgin and since they found out, they had been all over me. I had Grace, my best friend who also helped at the university library, to blame for that. We were talking about relationships one morning when she blurted out how I never been with a guy. I was so humiliated, having all the nerds laugh at me, and it didn’t stop there. I was teased in my classes and along the hallways of the university. Grace said it would pass and that they would soon forget about it. The girls did. The guys didn’t.
“Come on, guys, leave her alone.” His voice echoed with his footsteps across the dim hallway as he walked towards us. I turned to look as his handsome face emerged through the light rushing in from the windows above our lockers.
He was the university’s basketball captain—sought for, worshipped, loved. Seth Grimaldi. That was his name and I would never forget that moment when he came and saved me.
“Seth.” The hockey captain chuckled as my knight stopped beside me, a girl he had not met before and a girl he would not look at again. “We’re just having fun.”
“Well, fun’s over. Leave her alone.” Seth took my books from them and they started leaving, one after another, still looking at me, but I kept my head down. He eyed his twin brother. “Seriously, Scott.”
“What?” Scott Grimaldi, the university’s quarterback and Seth’s identical twin brother, shrugged his shoulders and laughed as innocently as he could. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was standing here, doing nothing.”
“Exactly,” Seth snapped at him.
I could never unders
tand why he carried the books for me and placed one hand on my back to push me away from his brother. “Where are you heading?” he asked in his deep voice, as we walked.
“The library,” I replied shyly, keeping my head down.
“Why do you carry so many books? Don’t you know what lockers are for?” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight at everyone else, who were probably wondering why he was interested in me when he could be fooling around with half of the cheerleading squad, or with half of the university’s female population.
“They’re not mine.” I could almost not speak. “They’re…the library’s.”
He stopped and looked at me. “Oh, yes. You are that scholar. The one who’s working at the school library.”
Yes, that was me. It was a rare opportunity, really, and I knew I owed it to one man whom I met in the most unlikely of situations. Dean Povenmier was out one afternoon with his daughter, who ran across the street, without warning. I grabbed the kid before an oncoming truck could hit her and brought her to safety. To thank me, the dean helped me with my scholarship application. I was granted the scholarship the next day, on the condition that I worked at the library.
“Where do you need these?” he asked as he entered the library, looking everywhere.
“I can manage.” I tried taking the books from him, but he pulled them away.
“Where do you need these?”
Swallowing hard, I did not reply. I was going to put them back on the shelves, but it was way to the back of the enormous building, where no one usually went. It wasn’t every day these ancient books were borrowed.
“There.” I led him with knees so shaky that I could almost not take a step. “Up there.”
He climbed the ladders with ease and placed each book according to how I asked him to. When he finished with the last one, he stayed up the ladder and looked down on me. “Is it true?”
“What?” I felt my cheeks burning, and fought my need to cover my chest, which I was sure he was having a very good view of from his position. This uniform, a hand-me-down from someone smaller than me, had a neck line that could easily let my cleavage out.
“Is it true you are a virgin?”
Not him, too. A gasp escaped my strong attempt to contain myself. I could not believe he was interested in that, too. “Yes,” I said softly. Perhaps he wanted something in return. “I suppose…”
“Protect it well,” he said, climbing down the ladder and turning away from me. “It’s not every day I will be able to come to your rescue.”
He walked out of the building without another glance at me.
I kept thinking about him, at night, after that afternoon. If it was because of something far greater than his charm and his good deed, I really didn’t know, but he was the one guy who had me feeling I wanted to lose my virginity, and soon. Perhaps if he had asked me, I would have given it there and then.
I often passed his way after that and I was right about him not looking my way again. He was always with his friends and barely with his twin brother’s posse, who still taunted me. I never saw him inside the library again and so to see more of him, my first love, I always went out of my way to watch the basketball games.
For the weeks that passed, he remained the distant figure of a love unreachable, and of how a freshman girl would never be able to date a senior guy. I imagined, in the dark before I went to sleep, how it would feel if he kissed me or touched me all over. When I thought those dreams wouldn’t have even the glimpse of sunrise, it happened one afternoon in the library.
I was arranging some of the books from the hidden corridors of the building again, standing innocently up the ladder, when I heard his voice. “Kelsey.”
I froze and then slowly looked down to see him looking up.
“Seth. Hi.” I climbed down and faced him, though my eyes could not meet his.
“Do you have a minute?”
I nodded, feeling a lump in my throat that made it difficult for me to speak.
“There’s this dance for the college sports teams. The university emerged champion again in the inter-college. Are you interested in sports?”
“Yes, basketball.”
“I want you to be my date.”
What? “M-me?”
“I’m asking you.” He placed both his hands inside his pants’ pockets and shrugged his shoulders.
“Why me?” Then again, why not?
He smiled, before turning on his heel, speaking as he walked away. “I will pick you up on Saturday, at seven. I won’t be late.”
For a moment, I stood there, thinking of the possibility of him wanting to take me to his bed after the party, where I was sure to be the center of unwanted attention and gossip. But he didn’t. He took me back to my small apartment and saw me to my door.
“I will pick you up every day from Monday, for school,” he said, as he placed both hands on my door jamb, closing me in.
I heard my own heartbeat drumming loudly and wildly in my chest as I stared at his purple eyes and his handsome face. “Okay,” I murmured.
He leaned forward and drew me in for a light kiss. It was the kiss I had wanted to happen for so very long, and time stopped. For something so swift, it lasted me months until he asked for his special birthday and early graduation gift. That was it…the moment when I had to become a woman.
“Marry me,” I heard him say, as he kissed me that night. Wait. Marry him? “Marry me, Kelsey. I love you. I love you so much.” I heard his laughter and the distant sound of a ringing telephone.
Where is that coming from?
I jerked my eyes open and was startled at the realization that I had slept for fifteen minutes in the tub. I guess I was thinking about him so much that I dreamt of him asking me to get married. I turned and looked around, shaking sleep from my body, and heard the sound of a ringing telephone again.
I hurried to answer my phone, in case Seth had changed his mind and wanted to stay in for dinner. “Hello.”
“Hello. I would like to speak with Miss Kelsey Fontez, please.”
“Yes. This is she.”
“Miss Fontez, this is Lana of Bovaghn Medical City. We have a patient here by the name of Seth Grimaldi. He listed you as his emergency contact person…”
“Why? What has happened?” I felt my strength leave my body as I sat down on my bed.
There was a long pause. “We would like you to come down here, ma’am. There has been an accident.”
The world stopped again.
Chapter One
Kelsey’s Home
“Mommy, I’m bored,” my five-year-old wonder complained as I paced about my bedroom. He had been watching me for the last half hour as I thought, was I really ready for this?
“Yes, honey. Mommy’s almost done,” I said. I sighed as I put on my diamond earrings, the ones Seth gave me the very first day he started picking me up for school. It was the first…and the last gift he ever gave me.
“No, you’re not!” Sean threw his toy car on the floor and sulked. He had been waiting for months for this trip. Sometimes, I felt like he had been waiting for this since the moment he was born.
He was going to meet his father’s parents after a lot of phone calls from them. They had wanted to take us in since Seth died in a car crash on his way to me. I didn’t answer most of their calls and when I did, I always had a lot of excuses.
“Oh, honey. Don’t do that. Mommy’s almost done.” I rushed now to check that I had packed everything and sat in front of a little boy with a heart that longed each day for his father. “Sean, we will only be staying there for the summer, okay?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Okay,” I whispered in relief and kissed his head as I stood up. I had difficulty breathing, panicking for no reason at all. It wasn’t like they were
going to take him away from me. They just wanted to meet him and spend some time with him. There should be no harm in that, right?
I held my boy by the hand as we walked down the stairs and met an old man named Luis at the door. He carried our bags for us and escorted us to a black limousine.
“Wow! A limo!” Sean ran towards it and touched it with glistening eyes and a wide smile. He turned to Luis to ask, “Is this Grandpa’s?”
“Indeed.” Luis had a smile for Sean, which made me a little less fidgety. “It is almost yours, too.”
“Did you hear that, Mom? Luis said it is almost mine, too!”
“Well, don’t get all too excited, honey. We talked about this.” I scolded him as we climbed inside the car that was too luxurious for a woman and a vulnerable little boy like us. I didn’t want him getting too comfortable with this kind of lifestyle, which I would not be able to give him once we return home. If we return.
Luis got in the car and smiled at me. “Mrs. Grimaldi instructed that we go straight to the mansion for your dinner, madam.”
“Actually, there is one place I would like to visit before we go there,” I said softly, as I watched Sean kneel on the car seat and look out the window. He was so excited.
I wanted him to meet his father, after five long years. Since I moved to Brizhania, I didn’t go often to Bovaghn Cemetery. I felt guilty not having taken Sean there, even once. Just like in my conversations with Seth’s parents, I had a lot of excuses.
The first few steps towards something painful aren’t easy to take. I stared at the long stretch of peaceful gravestones for a while before I started walking towards the mausoleum of one of the richest families in the country.
I had not come here for a very long time, but I knew exactly where to go. I held Sean’s hand as he walked with me, quiet and unsure. He looked at me a few times before I could smile at him and nod. Everything was going to be fine, I kept telling him, or perhaps it was me who needed convincing.
