Stone Hard: A Secret Baby MC Romance

by Melinda Minx

  “I’m glad you like it,” he says. “Once we’re done eating I’ll take you back into town. Enjoy this real food while you can.”

  I nod. I consider bringing up the idea of me staying for another night, but he does seem in a bit of a rush to get me out of his way. I’ve probably already messed up his “routine,” and with the way he lives, he needs to stick to it to keep the cabin warm and food on the skillet.

  “You come all the way up to Evergreen Cove just to hike?” He asks me between bites of bacon.

  “No,” I say. “I work for a major hotel chain. There’s a little, locally owned hotel in town on prime real estate. They sent me and a co-worker here to try and buy them out.”

  Coal laughs. “So you’re the bad guy? You’re running local businesses out of Evergreen Cove so some asshole in San Francisco can make more money.”

  I laugh. “I do what they pay me to do. Though they don’t pay me enough.”

  “What’s the incentive?” Coal asks. “If you succeed, you don’t see a dime.”

  “The threat of being fired, I guess,” I say, shrugging. “They sold it to me and Lindsay as getting to travel on the company’s dime. It was the cubicle or the wide open spaces and fresh air of Evergreen Cove. Easy choice. If we take over that space, the hotel we build there will be able to hold a lot of people, so even more people will get to enjoy Evergreen Cove.”

  I grin at him as I say it, and he scowls at me. I mostly said that to get a rise out of him, and I’m glad that it worked. A guy that tries to isolate himself in the woods is not going to be happy about “more people” enjoying his lonely woods.

  He holds up his mug of black coffee. “A toast.”

  I grab my coffee, which I have to admit I am starting to like, and I hold it up to match him. “What are we toasting?”

  “We’re toasting to you fucking up the job--to that little hotel lasting another hundred years.”

  I pull my mug away. “I’m not toasting to that! I’m good at my job, and we’re giving them way over market value!”

  “Good at your job?” Coal asks. “Aren’t you supposed to be working those hotel owners now? You just stayed up all night fucking me, and now you’re hanging around here all morning.”

  I put my coffee down. “Fine, I’m shit at my job! Happy? You still going to take me back into town?”

  Asshole. It’s like 8am, it’s hardly been all morning. I can take a hint. He could have found a more subtle way of telling me to get out of his way.

  “Yeah,” he says, standing up and draining his coffee in one long gulp. “Let’s go.”

  The trip through the snow-covered forest takes a bit of the edge off me, and when I see Evergreen Cove in the distance, a nervous longing fills my stomach. It’s the kind of feeling you get at the end of a vacation, when you realize you’re about to be sentenced back to months and months of reality and daily grind. I look at Cole walking leisurely through the snow in front of me, and I feel hugely envious of his carefree existence.

  But more than that, I realize this end-of-vacation feeling I have is actually how I feel about leaving Coal. He’s going to dump me into town and forget about me, and I’m probably never going to see him again.

  “Do you have a phone?” I ask, as we hit the big NEVER HIKE ALONE sign.

  “No,” he says.

  “Alright then,” I say, “I guess I don’t even have to give you a fake number then.”

  “Who said I was going to ask for your number?” he says, grinning. “It’s not like I’d call you.”

  His smirk tells me he’s only half teasing me, but I do get the sense that I disrupted whatever it is he’s trying to accomplish out there in the woods. I was a vacation for him, just like he was for me. And vacations always end.

  “I can take you all the way back if you want,” he says.

  If you want, he’d make me impose it on him. “No,” I say. “I’m good from here.”

  “Alright then,” he says.

  There’s a long, uncomfortable pause. Memories of him inside me--the masculine scent overwhelming me--and the sound of my screams hit me like a brick wall. My lips twitch, and I look away from him. Jesus, it was good sex. I consider reaching out to kiss him again, or at least to hug him, but the few steps I’d need to take to reach him from here feel like miles.

  I remind myself that I know I could find his cabin again if I had to. If I ever wanted another “vacation.” I know how unlikely I am to do that, but telling myself that it’s possible makes it easier to walk away.

  “Alright,” I say. “I guess this is goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Andrea,” he says, He holds up a hand, waves, and turns his back to me.

  I turn around as well, and I don’t look back.

  I’m back in the office the next day. The moment I step back into my cubicle, it feels as if everything in Evergreen Cove and Coal’s Cabin never even happened.

  It was all too surreal and feels like some kind of dream.

  David, our boss, chews us out for failing to persuade the hotel owners to sell. The whole time David is screaming at us, I imagine Coal’s smug grin as he basks in my failure.

  “What the fuck did I even pay you both for? I tried calling Andrea all morning and couldn’t get a hold of her at all. Does that shit hotel not even have cellular service? This is exactly why we need to get in there.”

  Lindsey gives me a look. I told her where I was. It’s her fault for bailing on me and not going hiking in the first place.

  “David,” I say. “We tried our best, but the owners have zero interest in selling. They are both in their late 60s with no kids.”

  “So?” David asks.

  Lindsey speaks up. “They just looked really happy. The guy said something like ‘no need to retire when you love every minute of what you do!’ and then his wife smiled wide, as if that’s exactly what she was thinking.”

  I nod. “That hotel is all they want in the world. What’s the point of having a lot of money if you have to sell what you love to get it?”

  “Fucking Hell,” David says, slamming his hands onto the table. “You two are up there for three days and suddenly you’re some fucking tree-dwelling hippies? Maybe you just didn’t push hard enough?”

  Now I’m mad. It was bad enough when Coal implied I sucked at my job, but David knows that I’m good at what I do.

  “David,” I say. “It doesn’t matter how we approach them, how we frame it, or how much money we offer them. They are not receptive to a buyout. I am confident in that. You sent us there to assess the situation and to give you our impressions. You must have sent Lindsey and me because you trust our judgement and abilities. Correct?”

  His face twitches in anger, but he holds his tongue. I see him cool off a bit, and then he nods. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. You think there is a zero percent chance that they will take a buyout then?”

  I nod. “Yes, that is my assessment. Buying these two out will not get you the land.”

  And it’s the land he needs. Almost every square foot of Evergreen Cove is protected. Only existing structures are allowed to stay, and even if we do buy out the land, there will be hundreds of strict regulations about how we can rebuild.

  “Back to the drawing board then,” David says. “I want you two working with Yousef on Vegas. Meet with him and have him get you up to speed.”

  “What’s wrong?” Lindsey asks me as we step out of the meeting room. “Fucking Vegas! This rocks.”

  Working with Yousef on Vegas. It should be exciting. How do you open a hotel in a city famous for amazing hotels? It’s a serious challenge that puts my abilities to the test. But giving up on Evergreen Cove means that I may really never see Coal again.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I just…”

  Lindsey laughs and points at me. “He got you good, huh?”

  “Shhh!” I say, hushing her. I whisper to her, “Don’t tell anyone about that! No one!”

  “Why not?” Lindsey asks. “You think David or Yousef
’s never boned anyone on a business trip?”

  “I want people to take me seriously.”

  “Double standards,” Lindsey says. “If a man does it, it’s expected, if a woman does it, suddenly it’s unprofessional? We gave the pitch all we could, Andrea. We did our research, we built a rapport, and we went in for the kill. If anything, finally getting laid seemed to loosen you up and made you better at your job.”

  “Shut up! I don’t care about double standards, it’s not about that. It’s about me, personally. I don’t want people to think I screw around on business trips. It’s got nothing to do with the patriarchy, alright?”

  “Alright,” Lindsey says. “We’ll find you a better guy in Vegas--”

  “Shut up!”

  November passes in a blur. I’m so busy on the Vegas project that I almost forget Coal. Almost. When I feel particularly lonely, he worms his way back into my mind. Usually late at night. Usually when I’m wet.

  Luckily I’m busy enough that Coal’s dirty grin burned into my brain is only a mild inconvenience.

  I’ve more or less come to terms with the whole thing, and I guess that by Christmas I’ll have him totally out of my head.

  “David wants to see us.”

  It’s Lindsey’s voice.

  I look up and see her head poking into my cubicle.

  “Want me to get Yousef?” I ask.

  “No,” Lindsey says, “Just you and me.”

  Just me and Lindsey? David wouldn’t want to talk to us about Vegas without Yousef.

  Lindsey reads my face and says, “Yeah, I’m worried he might be pulling us off Vegas.”

  Fuck.

  “He wouldn’t,” I say. “We’re making good progress, and Yousef is happy with us. There’s no reason he’d pull us.”

  “Don’t jinx it,” Lindsey says.

  We sit down, and David has a thick pile of folders and binders in front of him. Like a great wall of paperwork.

  “I’m not pulling you two off Vegas,” he says.

  We both let out audible and relieved sighs.

  “However,” he says, “I need you two back on Evergreen Cove for the next week.”

  I eye the big stack of papers. “Isn’t that over?”

  “Of course not,” he says.

  I narrow my eyes at him. “Didn’t we decide it wasn’t worth our time? That a buyout was impossible?”

  “Yes,” David says. “We did. Your exact words, Andrea, were ‘Buying these two out will not get you the land.’”

  “Right,” I say, nodding, “So...what are we doing here then.”

  David slides the giant mountain of papers toward us. “Legal has been on it for a month. These are the zoning regulations, the loopholes, the loopholes to get around the loopholes--everything. We’re not going to buy them out, we’re going to sue them into the ground. You told me that the main reason they didn’t want to sell was that they were happy running the hotel? Once we snare them into a mosquito-ridden swamp of legal bullshit, they won’t enjoy running the hotel anymore. They’ll beg us to sell.”

  Lindsey and I frown at each other. “So...isn’t this legal’s thing then? We’re not lawyers.”

  “No,” David says. “But you two have an established relationship with the owners. You are the good cops, the lawyers are the bad cops. We’ve already launched the initial blitz of lawsuits. When you two arrive in Evergreen Cove next weekend to present the settlement buyout deal, you’ll look like saviors to them.”

  Next weekend? Shit. I’ll be going back to Evergreen Cove? I sigh, it’s not like I have to see Coal. I’d have to go out of my way to see him. I won’t run into him at the supermarket. But then again, being just a few miles’ hike away from him will have his teasing grin right back in my head. I’ll remember all the wonderful things he did to me in bed, and--dammit! Why couldn’t I have just been sent to Vegas. They even have a saying for Vegas--what happens there, stays there!

  What happens in Evergreen Cove, apparently, follows you around for months.

  “Where’s your fire?” David asks. “You get to redeem yourselves, take out these greedy squatters!”

  Greedy squatters? They have owned the hotel for decades, and they love what they do. These legal threats and buyouts are shoving them off the land and stopping them from living out the last years of their lives doing what they love.

  Coal was right. We are the bad guys. Dammit.

  Lindsey grabs my shoulder, clenches her first, and says, “We’ve got this, David! We won’t let you down!”

  I nod. “We have the fire.”

  “Good,” David says. “I want to send you two up there early to relax a bit. Be seen around town a bit rather than just showing up and throwing the book at them.”

  Lindsey smiles. “Maybe we can go hiking, Andrea? That sounds relaxing.”

  My face burns red, but I just nod.

  About the Author

  Melinda Minx lives in Denver with her loyal Corgi. She writes late into the night with a hot cup of Earl Grey. Like her page on Facebook and join her mailing list to stay up to date on new releases and free promotions.

  MelindaMinxAuthor

  melinda@darkstarpress.com