UNPROTECTED: A Dark Bad Boy Baby Romance (Hanley Family Mafia)

by Zoey Parker

  I slump back to my old seat, drink most of my drink.

  “Can I have a taste?” the blonde says, now right beside me.

  I shove out the glass. She puts in a straw and, eyes on me, sucks.

  When she’s sucked her fill, I drink the rest in one gulp. Everything’s a bit blurry, but the blonde’s still beautiful, putting her hand on my chest, whispering in my ear, “What’s your name?”

  “Toni,” I say, pulling back and away, “Toni.”

  The ride home is a mist of Toni leaving in the bar with a blur-faced man, and me, swerving and pressing into the gas and dodging cars and people and everything else at the last minute, almost hoping to hit them.

  I shriek into the driveway just as she gets home too.

  She’s happy, doesn’t expect it.

  “Gabe?” her lying whore smiles says.

  I grab her.

  “Tell me. Tell me.”

  She’s scared. Good.

  “You know?” her lying terrified lips ask.

  “I went to the bar. I know.”

  She’s scanning my face, her terror transforming into rage.

  “And… you’re actually upset?”

  She peers in closer.

  “You’ve been… drinking?”

  “I talked to Jake, okay,” I snarl, “I know.”

  She’s shaking her head, snapping, “You’re not making any sense. Jake doesn’t know.”

  I lean in close, get right up in her face.

  “He saw you Toni. He saw you leave with that guy.”

  Now she’s smiling and I want to smack it off of her.

  “Oh, my god, you mean the guy who put the letter on top of the bar for me because I wasn’t tall enough?”

  I stare at her, don’t say anything.

  “So clearly, you don’t know,” she says.

  “You’re lying,” I say.

  She stares at me, as if searching for a glint in my eye, the beginnings of a smirk, as if hoping to find that I’m joking.

  Finally, she shakes her head, says, “Wow, you know what? I set this all up to make it a nice surprise. But now? I don’t think I’ll even tell you. Not today. You ruined it.”

  The words burst out again – not really a belief as much as a fear, “You’re lying. You’re cheating on me.”

  Toni stalks off toward the door, stops at the front mat.

  “No, even better Gabriel, I’m pregnant with your child.”

  The doors slams beside her. I gape at it. At its wooden planes, its bronze doorknob.

  Toni’s lying. She has to be, and yet… why would she lie about this?

  I hurry in after her, but she’s already halfway up the stairs.

  “Toni?”

  “Leave me alone Gabe, you’re drunk and you’re mean.”

  “Toni, please,” I say, “I’m sorry, I… you’ve just been so distant these past days. I didn’t know what to think.”

  On the second floor now, she stands at the railing, looking down at me.

  “Fine, Gabe, but… that? After all we’ve been through, you think that?”

  I hang my head. My boots are filthy; I never noticed.

  “I just can’t bear the thought of losing you…” I murmur.

  She pauses and I rush up the stairs, take her in my arms, ask her, “Were you telling the truth? Is that what this has all been about – all this secrecy?”

  Her lower lip trembling, finally she says, “Yes.”

  I look at her, my wife and now, the mother of my child, I smile, exhale.

  “Thank God.”

  Drawing back, Toni says slowly, “You mean it?”

  I nod.

  “When I told you I wasn’t ready, I was just afraid, Toni. I am afraid. That I won’t be a good father, that I’m not much of a role model. Not yet. May never be.”

  I sit down on the carpet, stare into the wall.

  “You forget what I was doing less than a year ago.”

  Toni sits beside me, leans her head on my chest, “You forget what I was doing less than a year ago.”

  I pat her head, shake mine.

  “Going to the bar to hook up isn’t quite the same as running a sex trafficking business.”

  Toni giggles, turns to face me with a grin.

  “You’re right. You’re an evil, evil man Mr. Gabriel Pierson. Not fit to father children.”

  I pat her head again, smile myself.

  “Glad you agree with me on this one.”

  Next thing I know, I’m being whacked in side of my head.

  “So, you have a bad past Gabe. So what? Lots of people do. You can’t control what happened to you, what you did before. All you can do is try to be the best person you can now. And if you teach even that to our children, they will be the richer for it. You are a kind, brave, giving, compassionate, capable man, Gabe, and any child of yours will be better off for having you as their father.”

  She burrows her head deeper into my chest, and I lean my head onto her.

  The way she said it, I almost believe her.

  I pat her again, and she kisses my cheek, says, “I was so afraid, that’s why I’ve kept it from you. And then when I brought up having kids and you dismissed it, I got scared, wanted to wait until I knew more to tell you.”

  “How long have you been keeping it from me?” I ask.

  “I’m two and a half months pregnant,” Toni says, “So far the baby is healthy. Our little angel.”

  “What?!” I ask, standing up.

  Toni leaps up.

  “Were you just pretending to be supportive so you could tell me later to get rid of it?” she demands, eyes flashing.

  “No, I just… you’ve been lying to me for two months?”

  Toni takes a paper out of her jacket pocket, shakes her head.

  “I found out a couple of weeks ago, didn’t want to tell you until I knew more. I’m sorry.”

  She hands me a paper, and I find all my arguments dissolving in my mouth.

  It’s an ultrasound photo of the baby. Our baby. With a big alien head and little lump of body. Ours.

  “Wow,” is all I can come up with to say.

  Toni takes the photo back with shaking hands.

  “So… you’re okay with this?”

  “Ok with this? Toni, I’m going to be a father! I’m going to have a little baby with you!”

  I race all the way down the hallway and back.

  “We’ll have to outfit one of the storage rooms into a nursery,” I say, then race back down the hallway and back to Toni, “Tell Jaws after a few more months, I can only imagine the gifts he and Tinsley are gonna unload on us… and Toni?”

  I stop in front of her. She’s beaming.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “Names! We have to start thinking of names.”

  Toni nods. “Yeah, but Gabe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can, just... I thought, maybe, we could call her ‘Natasha.’ What do you think?”

  I sit down on the carpet again, and Toni sits down beside me.

  “Gabe?”

  “I… I think…”

  I turn to her, take her face in my hands.

  “I think that’s perfect. Natasha, my baby girl.”

  And then I pick Toni up and sweep her to the bedroom. Our bedroom, our silk-sheeted, black on red, silk on velvet boudoir where I have made love to my wife, and made a baby with my wife, and will make love to my wife, will make more babies with my wife.

  “Natasha,” I say, flinging Toni onto the ruby top-cover.

  “Natasha!” she declares, tossing a decorative velvet pillow at me.

  I catch it, fling it back at her, and collapse on the bed beside her.

  We lie there, all curled up in each other and these silky, silky sheets, and our incredible stupendous love, laughing at nothing, at how lucky we are, at the gloriousness of life itself. Every once in a while, one of us will say it, the delicious refrain, the fusing of our past, present and future into a being, a creature,
a child that will be our better in all ways.

  We say it to ourselves, murmur it to the universe. “Natasha, Natasha.”

  THE END

  Bounty: Fury Riders MC [FREE BONUS BOOK #2]

  By Zoey Parker

  A picture is worth a thousand words, but I only need three:

  You. Are. Mine.

  The life I lead isn't for the faint of heart.

  A man like me has to say what he means.

  Take what he wants.

  And fight to keep what he has.

  Erica thought she would be safe behind her camera.

  Little did she know she was teetering on the edge of the rabbit hole.

  When she sees something she shouldn't have,

  she falls in.

  She's lucky I showed up when I did.

  Without me, she'd be thrown to the wolves.

  Torn apart.

  Devoured.

  But it doesn't take long before she starts to wonder.

  Is she better off on her own…

  …or at the mercy of the beast inside me?

  At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

  I tell her how it is:

  "Moan as loud as you want, babe.

  You aren't going anywhere."

  Chapter One

  Erica

  This is a bad idea.

  It was all I could think as I traveled deeper and deeper into a seedy part of town I had little experience with. The night seemed darker there, deeper. Scarier. As a kid I was fascinated with the way darkness changed the world around us. Things we wouldn’t be afraid of in the light, things we might even enjoy—trees rustling in the wind, a covered bridge, our own front yard—suddenly became ominous once the light went away. Shadow and darkness tended to do things to our brains.

  That was why I started taking pictures in the first place. I became fascinated by the way light and dark played off one another. We all loved the light. We sought it out. We basked in it. Yet shadow made for a great shot. Better than one that was over-exposed. A lot more could be shown in a dark shot with just a hint of someone or something coming out of the shadows than in one taken in a brightly-lit room.

  Then again, we all brought a part of ourselves into what we observed. I could hang a print on the wall, taken in one of those dark rooms with just a hint of a shape coming out of the darkness—a face, maybe, or an arm or a desk chair, anything—and one person might find it inspiring, one might find it depressing, and one might find it frightening. Same photo, three reactions. We brought our projections to the image we saw, making it what we wanted it to be.

  The only problem was, the part of the world I was exploring that damp fateful night wasn’t very pleasant even in broad daylight. Only the most determined Pollyanna could see anything positive there. Roughly seventy percent of the crime in the city came out of that specific area, only twelve blocks square.

  And I was driving into it.

  “You sure you’re gonna be all right out here?” The driver cast a concerned look my way in the rearview mirror. He was a grandfatherly type, and I saw the concern in his eyes.

  “Sure thing,” I said, sounding more chipper than I felt. Really, all I wanted to do was go straight home and curl up in bed with a cup of tea.

  It had seemed like a good idea when I came up with it. I was desperate to find something riveting, something visceral and unforgettable. I was getting photos together for a potential exhibition, one which I had a lot of hopes pinned on. It would make or break me as a photographer.

  I hadn’t been seriously into the photography game for very long. I’d studied it in college, but since my parents nearly dropped dead at the thought of their daughter pinning all her hopes on a career in the arts, I couldn’t major in it and hope for them to pay my tuition. So I majored in criminal justice—they were hoping this would lead to law school—while minoring in fine arts. Three years after graduation and I was still fielding the occasional inquiry into when I would be applying for law school. But I was busy taking pictures.

  I’d been taking pictures since I got my first camera. It was my tenth birthday, and I’d recently spent a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a documentary on street photography I happened to stumble across on TV. I was hooked. I imagined myself taking pictures of people in their everyday lives, capturing a slice of life for future generations to see and ponder. I would be famous, a champion of the people.

  Needless to say, my first roll of film was a disaster. So was the next. I was still too young to be trusted with a digital camera, so all I could work with was point-and-shoot. It was all right—a digital camera would have been a waste of time. I needed to learn how to compose a shot first.

  One thing my parents couldn’t ignore was my passion for learning all I could about the medium. I wouldn’t just point the camera at something and click away. I was very serious. I took out books from the library, spent hours doing research online. How to compose a shot. How lighting affected a shot. What made a good picture. Why photos taken by professionals were better than anything I could come up with. This wasn’t just a silly hobby for me.

  It took three years of saving every bit of money I could get my hands on, but I was finally able to buy an actual, serious DSLR. Countless hours were spent taking shots, analyzing them, comparing them to the ones I saw in photography books and blogs. It became my life, and I was never without a camera in my possession.

  So what was I doing three years out of college? I was working as a portrait photographer in a mall. Hence, my parents wondering when I planned to enter law school.

  It was discouraging. I hadn’t spent so much of my life learning the art to take pictures of kids sitting in front of cheesy backdrops. Yet for all my studying the art, I had no idea how to break into the business.

  That’s when I got the idea for the exhibit. After spending a lot of time at galleries in the area, I’d made a few friends and one of them agreed to showcase my work for a nominal fee. They had connections to art writers at local papers who would cover the exhibition. This could be my big break, enough to get my name out there and get people talking about me and willing to buy my work. I was stoked—this was the chance I’d been working toward.

  All I had to do was take shots worthy of being put up for the exhibition. Nothing I’d already done was good enough. Even my favorite shots were shit all of a sudden. I needed something raw, gripping, evocative. Something nobody would forget.

  Which was what gave me the idea to take shots of city life. Not the glamorous, flashy stuff. The seedy stuff. Gritty, raw, real. The only downside being the need for me to travel to these seedy places to take the shots.

  It’ll be worth it, I thought as I rode in the back of the taxi. No way I was driving my car around there—I would even know where to park to keep it from being stolen.

  “What’s a nice kid like you doing around here anyway?” The cabbie peered at me.

  I smiled to myself. Yes, Erica. What are you doing here? This was a far cry from the suburbs.

  “Taking pictures,” I said, holding my camera up so he could see it. I’d graduated to a much nicer model than the one I bought more than a decade earlier.

  “Of what? A murder?”

  A chill went up my spine. “Uh, I hope not!”

  He chuckled. “Just wondering. Not many nice things happen around here. I’m sure you watch the news.”

  “I do,” I said, looking out the window, biting my lip. I was well aware of what happened there.

  “And you still wanna be here?”

  “I’m a photographer,” I explained. “I have to go where interesting things happen.”

  “Interesting. That’s a word that can have many different meanings,” he said. I smiled to myself. A philosopher cabbie.

  We pulled up to the corner I’d asked for and I handed some money up to the front seat. “Can I ask one more favor?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

  He smiled. “I�
�d have worn a nicer shirt if I knew this was coming.”

  I got out of the cab and looked around. What a depressing area. I felt distinctly fluttery in my stomach but put on a brave face for the driver.