by Ava Storm
Keeping the Boss’s Baby
A Secret Baby Romance
Ava Storm
Copyright © 2020 by Ava Storm
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Knocking Up the Intern (Preview)
About the Author
About the Book
I was focused on my business.
Not my failed engagement.
I had no more time for women who were only after my money.
Then she sat down next to me.
She was honest, raw, and in pain.
Not to mention the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
One night together and we both forgot our troubles for a few hours.
Now two years later she walks back into my life.
Despite my better judgement, I give her a job.
One that keeps her a little too close to me.
Just where I want her. Always.
Now the walls are tumbling down around me.
Paige isn’t who I thought she was, and worse yet,
She’s keeping a secret that will blow my whole world apart.
A secret that looks a hell of a lot like me.
1
Paige
Every time I thought about the texts between my former fiancé and Wendy the Waitress, I ordered another drink.
I had a great time last night was a stout.
Let’s hang out again soon was a cabernet.
I’m really falling for you was a whiskey sour.
“Should we slow her down?” My friend Amanda called over the music to Shelly, the third member of our trio.
God, a trio. That was what I had been in for the last six months, and I hadn’t even known it. I’d thought that Alex and I were still a couple, but that was before I found the texts. I closed my eyes, sickened.
Shelly squinted at me across the small round table at the edge of the dance floor. The club was dark, but in the flickering neon flashes, she must have been able to see the pain on my face. “I think we should speed her up,” she said, and ordered a round of shots.
I made a face when they showed up. I didn’t take shots. I didn’t drink too much. Alex and I might have a beer on Friday nights, but that was it. Not last Friday night though, a mean-spirited voice in my head reminded me. Last Friday he stayed out late and came home drunk. Last Friday night, he had a great time with Wendy the Waitress. He really fell for her.
I took the shot. Shelly clapped. Amanda looked concerned.
Quickly, the vodka mixed together with the whiskey, the wine, and the beer and the combination created a thick gauzy cloud between my churning head and broken heart. For the first time, I felt brave enough to re-examine what had followed the texts. Alex’s denial, his excuses, his confession, and then his tears. I still hadn’t cried.
“It’s because it hasn’t hit you yet,” Amanda explained over the music, and I realized I’d been talking out loud.
“I think something is hitting her,” Shelly said, and she ordered us another round.
We left the club shortly after that. Despite Shelly’s hopes, I did not want to dance away my heartbreak. I wanted to talk about it, and my friends were tired of trying to catch the words between the pounding electronic rhythm.
Amanda took us to a quiet bar she frequented with her fellow law school students. Shelly thought it was too nice for our purposes--we needed spinning bar stools and a jukebox, not fancy velvet upholstery and classical music--but I was wearing Shelly’s heels and refused to take another step in them.
“They’re too high,” I complained when we sat down. I crossed my legs and edged my heel out of one, dangling it from my toes.
“Didn’t you see the sign?” Amanda said. “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
I squinted back toward the front door. “Did it really say that?”
“It didn’t have to,” Amanda said. “This isn’t a fish shack, babe. Keep your shoes on.”
“Compromise,” Shelly said. “She’ll keep her shirt on.”
While my friends bickered, I looked around the elegant lounge. It was nothing like the college bars we’d frequented when we were all undergrads at the University of Chicago. This was the lobby bar of the most luxurious hotel in town, and it lived up the $500-per-night rooms. The bar was highly polished, shining oak. The seats were blue velvet cocoons. The line of liquor behind the bar was on one shelf, because it was all top shelf. Even the people looked expensive. They too were highly polished, buffed and shone to perfection. They looked like people who thought nothing of ordering twenty-four-dollar cocktails and would never do something as pathetic as discover smutty texts on their fiancé’s phone.
“Okay, but you know that he is the pathetic one, right?” Amanda said, and I realized I was talking out loud again.
Shelly was laughing. “I haven’t heard the word smutty since my grandmother died.”
“Not helpful, Shell.”
“More importantly, are the drinks really twenty-four dollars?” Shelly asked, looking around for a menu. “If so, we really need to go somewhere else.”
“I mean it,” Amanda said. She reached for my hand under the table and squeezed it. “He is the one who threw away a four-year relationship six months before your wedding for some brain-dead waitress.”
“She could be really smart,” I muttered fairly.
“She’s an amoeba with tits,” Shelly disagreed. “Don’t defend her.”
“I don’t even know what an amoeba is. Maybe I’m not that smart.”
“Stop that,” Amanda scolded. “You both have careers,” I said woefully. “You’re both smart. No one would ever cheat on you.”
“Do you think this self-pity is going to last all night?” Shelly asked Amanda. “If so, we should have stayed at the club where we couldn’t hear it.”
“We need to distract her,” Amanda said. “Paige, go get us drinks.”
I blinked. “How is treating me like a bar wench supposed to distract me?”
“It’s not,” Amanda said. “He is.” She flicked her finger discreetly toward the bar. Shelly and I turned to look.
Sitting beside the service bar was the most handsome man I had ever seen. He was a study in contrasts. The sharp planes of his face against the soft dark hair that looked like it would feel like panther fur beneath my hand. The body of a fighter in an expensive, understated suit tailored to fit his broad shoulders and tapered waist to elegant perfec
tion. The lazily sensuous gaze and the flat, humorless mouth. He did not look like a man who wanted to be approached.
I swallowed as heat shot through me. When was the last time I’d felt lust punch me like this? Usually it was coaxed on by foreplay and obligation--four years was a long time to keep the spark alive. Was this what Alex felt when--
No. My mind shut down the thought before it could fully form. No, I would not think of Alex anymore tonight. I hadn’t ridden the train for three hours to cry over him. I could have done that in Branville. I was going to have fun tonight.
2
Ford
I noticed the three girls when they came in. They stood out in the Cherington 54 lounge, which catered to an older, more sedate crowd. Still, the redhead seemed to know the bartender. Mitch smiled when he saw her and quickly responded to her mouthed request for waters, please.
I rubbed my eyes and then forced them back to my phone screen. I had a habit of watching strangers, observing them with impartial interest. It was useful in my line of work, but it was an occupational hazard in a bar. People tended to get the wrong idea.
Mitch slid another beer across the bar. “They running late again?”
“Fucking always,” I muttered, my eyes flicking to the time. My best friends and business partners, Griffin and Jameson, ran on a different internal clock than the rest of the world. If we agreed to meet in the Cherington 54 lounge at eight, I would be there at seven fifty-five even though I knew the other two wouldn’t even call for the Uber until eight-ten. Normally I could count on Kai to walk in right at eight, but my brother was in London working on one of our international deals.
I put my phone face down on the bar. I’d gotten up at four am to conference call with Kai and our team in London and hadn’t stopped working since. Now my eyes felt like rocks in my skull. Part of me wanted to go home, but it was Griffin’s thirty-second birthday. I knew if I bailed, I’d hear about it until the thirty-third.
My eyes drifted back to the girls. I wished they’d leave. There was nothing Griffin liked better than a redhead, and Jameson was in a brunette phase. If my friends saw them, I might very well end up having to make conversation with the blonde, and I was not feeling particularly sociable tonight. There was no reason for my mood to be sour. The deal Kai had secured had officially made us a multi-billion-dollar company. Maybe it was just that I’d had enough of blondes.
Just then, the brunette stood up. She smoothed her short black dress over her curvy hips and pushed her long dark hair over her shoulder. Then she sat back down. The redhead and the blonde shook their heads emphatically. Bemused, I raised an eyebrow as she reluctantly stood back up again and made her way over to the bar. To my surprise, she walked over to where I was sitting.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to be interested. She was beautiful with cascades of auburn waves that fell halfway down her back, large doe-eyes, and a full red mouth. But her beauty in itself wasn’t particularly interesting. Since we created Blip Inc., beautiful women came out of the woodwork. But those women sparkled when they looked at me. Their eyes were mischievous, or flirtatious, or promising. This one looked aggravated.
“Can I sit here for five minutes?” she pointed to the seat next to him. “Long enough for my friends to think I tried to sleep with you?”
My eyebrows shot up, and I barked out a quick laugh. It had been a long time since someone surprised me. “Be my guest.”
She slid up onto the seat, making sure to keep her skirt smoothed around her thighs. I tried not to look at her long, toned legs or the fuck-me heels that kept slipping off one foot. They belonged to one of her friends, I decided. She normally wore sneakers. But why was she wearing them tonight?
It doesn’t matter, I reminded himself. You’re not working.
She ordered three whiskey sours, then turned to me. “We have to talk,” she explained. “Or they’ll know.”
“They’ll know what exactly?”
“That I’m not trying to sleep with you.”
I nearly laughed again, but she looked so serious that I stifled it. “Have we decided that for sure?” I took a long pull from my beer, keeping my eyes on her.
She rolled her expressive brown eyes. “Yes. I’m engaged.”
I looked at her bare ring finger and cocked a curious eyebrow.
She frowned and put her hand on her lap beneath the bar so I couldn’t see it. “I mean, I was engaged.”
“In my experience, there isn’t typically a half-life to an engagement,” I observed. “If it’s over, it’s over.”
“Half-life,” she repeated and smiled a little. “You’d like my friend Shelly. She’s a scientist.”
“Is Shelly the blonde?”
“Yes.”
“Then I wouldn’t like her.” I said. “What’s your name?” I’d decided to thwart the inevitable as much as I could. Griffin and Jameson would be here any minute, and the girls weren’t leaving, but at least I could avoid getting stuck talking to the blonde scientist.
“I’m Paige,” she said, and held out her hand.
Amused, I shook it. “Ford.”
Mitch set down the drinks in front of us. To me, he said, “I just saw them pull up.”
“Oh, you’re waiting on someone?”
Paige moved to stand, but I shook my head. “No, it’s just two friends, and I doubt they’re going to sit with me.”
“That’s strange,” Paige said, resettling herself. “Why wouldn’t your friends sit with you?”
I jerked my chin toward the door. “Watch and see.”
As I’d expected, Griffin wasn’t more than two steps into the bar when he noticed the redhead and changed course.
I looked back at Paige and lifted my eyebrow in a what-did-I-tell-you gesture.
“Oh, no,” Paige said somberly. “Amanda is going to like him.” She squinted at Jameson. “And he’s good looking, too. Why don’t you have uglier friends, Ford?”
“I could ask you the same, Paige. Looks like you’re going to have longer than five minutes to get me in bed.”
She rolled her eyes again. I knew I was in trouble, because I was starting to find it sexy. I turned slightly so that I was facing her, my knee against the seat of her chair. “So, are you engaged or not, Paige?”
If she’d pulled away, I might have called it a night and gone home, birthday or no. But instead, she leaned her chin onto her palm thoughtfully and said very slowly, “Not.”
3
Paige
Later, I blamed the alcohol, but the truth was, I’d lost my urge to drink the second I laid eyes on Ford. Maybe it was because the sight of him drove all thoughts of Alex and the text messages out of my mind. Maybe it was because my body was acknowledging that three drinks and two shots had been more than enough, thank you very much. Either way, I never even drank my whiskey sour. Looking back, I thought maybe Shelly had, or Jameson. They’d ended up so close together it was hard to know which glasses belonged to whom. I remembered Ford stuck with beer, though, and he kept my water refilled.
“Are you trying to get her sober?” Shelly complained when he came back with a water pitcher Mitchell found behind the bar.
“Yes,” Ford said bluntly. He topped off my glass.
“What a gentleman,” I said.
“Not really. I just don’t let drunk girls get me into bed,” Ford said, his voice low and pitched just for my ears.
My eyes shot to his. We’d joked about it more than once since we rejoined our friends, but Ford didn’t sound like he was joking now. He ran his hand up my thigh, stopping at the hem of my dress.
“What do you think?” He murmured. His eyes were heavy-lidded now. “I could get a room.”
I swallowed. I shouldn’t. He was a stranger. All I knew about him was his first name and his drink order. I didn’t even live in Chicago. It would be a one-night stand without even the pretense of being more, and I’d never done anything like it. Which may have been why it sounded
so damn good. It was something the future Mrs. Paige Whitehall would have never even dreamed of doing.
I forced myself to think about it. Would I be doing it solely to get back at Alex? If so, I needed to go home right now. Or would I be doing it because I wanted to? Both, I realized. I couldn’t deny that a small, petty part of me relished the idea of revenge, but a much larger part of the reason had nothing to do with Alex and everything to do with Ford. Besides, I had to have sex with someone else for the first time sooner or later. Might as well be sooner. Might as well be with the most devilishly good-looking man I’d ever seen.
I nodded, the gesture nearly imperceptible.
“Okay,” Ford murmured. “I’ll be right back.”
When Jameson went to the bar and Amanda was distracted by Griffin, I leaned toward Shelly. “I’m going to stay with Ford tonight.”
A slow smile spread across Shelly’s face. “Amanda’s going to ask me if I made sure you were sober,” she said. “So are you sober?”
“Too sober,” I said. “I’m nervous.”
“Nothing to it,” Shelly said. “Plus, if it sucks, who cares? You never have to see him again.”
“That’s true.” Over Shelly’s shoulder, I saw Ford standing at the divide between the hotel lobby and the bar. I met his eyes, and heat flooded through me. I would bet money that it wasn’t going to suck. With a last glance to make sure Amanda was occupied, I stood up and slid out of the bar.