Single Dad's Surprise (Wilder Brothers #1)

by Lisa Levine

  I decided to leave and take coffee to the park while I waited for Poppy’s school day to end instead. Normally I would have run errands or tried to work on planning my Europe trip some more, but I was too distracted by thoughts of all that had happened yesterday, both the good and the bad. And now I was also too distracted by whatever was going on inside this coffee shop that made it seem like I was the focus of paparazzi, to want to stay here any longer. I just wanted to go sit among the quiet trees in the park until it was time to pick up Poppy.

  I walked up to the counter to get a coffee refill to go, and now even the barista was looking at me strangely. I ordered my latte and went to give him my debit card. The sooner I got it, the sooner I could leave and go sit by myself somewhere that wasn’t around people being weird.

  “It’s on the house,” he said as he waved my debit card away and smiled at me with a rather slimy and ridiculing grin.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s not every day that we get a celebrity in here,” he said. “Even ones like you.”

  Ones like me, what does that mean?

  “You’d think we would get tons of celebs here due to the location, but surprisingly we don’t, so we take what can get.”

  “I think you may be mistaken,” I said. “I’m not a celebrity at all. I’m just a nanny.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, we all know you’re a nanny. You’re probably one of the most famous nannies trending on social media right now, though. I think you’ve even made it to the front page of the local news.”

  “What? Why?”

  Suddenly his face went serious as he looked at me. “Oh, wow,” he said. “You don’t know yet, do you?”

  “Know about what?” I was getting tired of this really quickly.

  The guy pulled out his phone from his coffee shop apron and pointed it at me. “Sorry,” he said. “But I want to get your reaction to this. It could make me famous, and I really need the money.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” I was nearly at the point of shouting when the woman behind me in line showed me her phone, which was pulled up to an article on social media.

  I had no idea what the article was about, but I could very clearly see the picture on the cover of it. It was Jake and me sleeping in bed. It had to have been taken within the last several hours since the incident at the playground because his face was all bruised and swollen in the image. But it looked like the picture had been photoshopped and altered because instead of it being just the two of us lying there, it was an obscenely erotic picture of the two of us engaged in an explicit sexual act with pretty much everything showing. It was a crude image in which our innocently clothed bodies had been replaced with nudes in an overtly sexual position. I felt like I was going to be sick, and I guess I looked like I was, too, because the woman behind me asked me if I was okay and then helped me to a chair to sit down. She was really very nice, and she ended up getting my coffee from the counter and bringing it over to me.

  “You didn’t know about this, did you?” she politely asked as she sat down next to me.

  “No,” I said as I shook my head and felt the tears form in my eyes. “And this isn’t a real picture, that never happened.”

  The woman shook her head in sympathy. “I figured as much,” she said. “It looked photoshopped to me. Such a shame what they do to celebrities these days.”

  “But I’m not a celebrity,” I whined.

  “But he is. Jake Wilder is an attractive and famous billionaire in a high-profile industry. Getting involved with him is sure to bring stuff like this with it. It’s just all part of the lifestyle.”

  I didn’t want any part of that lifestyle. My dad would see that picture. Everyone I knew would see that picture. I bet even Poppy would see that picture somehow at school.

  Oh no, Poppy! I thanked the woman who had been nice enough to help me and then ran out the door to the car, leaving my coffee behind on the table. I raced to her school, not even caring what time in the school day it was. If Poppy saw this picture, it would be awful, and she would be upset.

  When I got to the school, I burst in through the doors of the office and demanded to check her out of class.

  “But it’s the middle of the school day,” the receptionist who already didn’t like me said. “Does she have a note or an excuse from her father?”

  “I’m on the pickup list,” I said. “I’m allowed to check her out.”

  “Maybe I should just confirm that with Mr. Wilder, if you’ll give me a moment to try to call his number.”

  I slammed my hand down on her desk. “I am on the list,” I said again, this time much more threatening than I had before. “And I want to check her out now. Mr. Wilder will not be happy that you’ve interrupted him at work. That was the whole point of his putting me on the list, to begin with. Now get Poppy for me.”

  The receptionist gave me a startled look and then called Poppy’s teacher for her to be dismissed and sent up to the office. As soon as Poppy walked in, I knew that she had seen it or at least been told about it.

  “What’s happening?” she asked me as we walked out of the office together and hurried to the car.

  “Something was put on the internet,” I said.

  “Yeah, I heard it was a picture of you and dad.” She looked down as she got into the car.

  I came around to sit in the driver’s seat and get us back home to call Jake. I felt like I was trying to do damage control again, but this time I was part of the damage.

  “Did you see the picture?” I asked her as I started to pull out of the school’s parking lot.

  “No. One of the kids at school was trying to pull it up on their phone, but the teacher made him put his phone away before I had a chance to see it. All the kids were talking about it, though. They said that you and dad were naked together and doing things. Is that true?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “That’s not true. The picture was photoshopped, and it was just an innocent picture of your dad and me resting in bed together that someone altered and changed into something inappropriate. I don’t even know how they got a picture of us to begin with.”

  “Uh oh,” Poppy said from the backseat.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Poppy started to cry. “I took the picture, Annika. I’m so sorry! I saw you and dad sleeping, and you guys looked so perfect together, and I wanted to have a picture just for me. I don’t know how someone got it, though; it was only on my phone.”

  “Poppy,” I said as everything started to come together in my mind, “do you have family sharing on your phone?”

  “Yeah, I use it with Dad and Mom so that we can share music and—”

  “Pictures,” I finished for her.

  “Oh, no!” Poppy shouted. “This was all my fault! Mom got the picture.”

  I caught sight of her face through the rearview mirror, and she looked completely mortified.

  “It’s okay, let’s just get home and call your dad. I’m sure he already knows about this, too, and is probably on his way home already.”

  I raced to the house as I tried not to think about the repercussions of this picture for all three of us. I had no idea how far the photo had spread or how to stop it from spreading further. I focused on just getting home and keeping Poppy calm and then would try to let Jake handle it. When we got there, his car was already in the driveway, and he was just stepping out of it.

  “Hey,” he said with a worried look on his face. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure where I put my phone.”

  I was really hoping that I didn’t accidentally leave it in the coffee shop, but then Poppy found it in the car and handed it to me. The ringer must have been accidentally switched to silent while I was at the café.

  “I just went to go get Poppy and bring her home. I didn’t really know what to do. I just thought it was best for us to be here at home.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said as he put his
arm around both of us. “That was definitely the right call to make, thank you. Let’s go inside before anyone gets here.”

  “Why would someone be coming here?” I asked in confusion.

  “Because now there’s a story,” he said as he hurried us into the house.

  Once we got inside, I explained to him about how Poppy’s phone likely shared the picture with Maleah unintentionally. He had already known about the picture since he had seen Poppy this morning with her phone out when we woke up. He reassured her that it wasn’t her fault and that what Maleah did with the photo was uncalled for and wrong. As usual, Maleah was thinking only about herself and not on the effects that this would have on Poppy.

  “How do we get rid of it?” I asked him.

  “Well, we can’t really get rid of it entirely,” Jake answered. “The minute it got uploaded onto the internet was the minute people were able to take screenshots and downloads. There’s no way to make it disappear now. The only thing we can do is mitigate the damage and the spread of it and try to track it back to Maleah to threaten legal action. I’ve already got my attorney working on getting it removed from social media.”

  “It’s just a picture,” I said as I tried to talk myself down from hysteria. “How much harm could one falsely photoshopped picture cause?”

  “I’m betting that Maleah thought this would be a perfect way to smear my company name and ruin my career. There aren’t a lot of musical artists who want to sign on with a company that gets bad press. I’m guessing that this she also sees this as the perfect way for her to be let out of her contract with my record label.”

  Yeah, that was bad.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked as Poppy sat and watched us wide-eyed with her bear in her arms.

  “Lucie is already on it; she’s proactively reaching out to all of our clients to tell them what has happened in case they haven’t already seen it. She’s great at reassuring people that everything will be fine, although this will definitely be her biggest task yet.”

  Jake picked up his phone to check his messages and see if Lucie had contacted him with an update on the situation at the company.

  “Annika,” he said as something on his phone caught his eye. He looked up at me with a dismayed frown. “Have you seen your social media pages?”

  “No,” I said as I reached for my phone. My ringer was still on silent, so I flipped the switch back on, and it immediately started blowing up with dings and beeps and then a ringing incoming phone call, which I sent straight to voice mail because it was my dad and I just couldn’t deal with him right now.

  There were notifications from every single social media page I had. Each of them was blowing up with comments, and each of them had tagged me in that photo. I put my hand over my mouth in shock.

  “All of my friends and family will see this,” I said as my eyes started to fill with tears. “My old college professors, the students that I taught at school, everyone I know will see this explicit picture of me.” I looked up at him as the tears started to run down my face, and I held my phone out in my hand as if it were infected with some sort of disease.

  “Put in your password,” Jake said.

  I did as he asked, and then he took my phone from my hand and started to go through and delete as much as he could. He was right, though; it was spreading like wildfire, and there really wasn’t any way to control it now.

  My phone rang again, and he handed it back to me. It was my dad again.

  “Maybe you should answer it,” he said gently. “Sometimes, things are worse when we try to avoid them instead of just meeting them head-on.”

  I nodded and took the phone from his hand. I answered the call and put it to my ear, which was immediately a bad idea since my dad was already screaming before I even said hello.

  “Dad,” I tried to get a word in edgewise, but he wouldn’t stop shouting long enough to even hear me. “Dad!”

  He yelled things about ruining my future and my reputation, and things about how stupid I was and how disappointed my mother would be in me if she were still alive. When he finally stopped yelling and said, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” I had nothing left to say. I stood there crying into the phone as my dad waited expectantly for some explanation that I didn’t have. I felt my face turning red, and my hands shaking. I wanted to say something, but mostly I just wanted to go crawl back into bed.

  Jake saw me struggling and took the phone from my hands.

  “Mr. Miller,” he said calmly into the phone’s receiver. “This is Jake Wilder. About the picture, this was not Annika’s fault.”

  I could hear my dad continue to holler through the phone, and I just couldn’t take any more of it. I walked out of the kitchen and straight into my bedroom. I crawled into bed and pulled the blanket up over my head. I had done a great job of adulting with everything so far, and now I need to just hide for a minute for my own self-preservation.

  After a few minutes, I felt someone next to me and opened my eyes to see Poppy crawling under the blanket beside me with Bear in her hands. She curled up next to me, and I wrapped my arm around her. I was still so tired from everything, and so was she. It was very cozy and snuggled inside the blanket, so we fell asleep for a while.

  When I woke up, everything seemed hazy and groggy. Poppy was still sound asleep beside me, so I slid out of bed and left her and Bear covered up with the soft blankets. I checked Jake’s bedroom first, but he wasn’t there, so then I went downstairs to look for him. I eventually found him sitting in one of the libraries with a glass of bourbon in his hand.

  “Hey,” I said as I walked in on quiet, bare feet and sat down in the small space of the chair that he had made for me when he scooted over.

  “Hey,” he said as he wrapped his free arm around me.

  “I’m sorry. I fell asleep. Poppy fell asleep, too; she’s still up there in my bed.”

  “I know,” he said as he smiled. “I saw the two of you. I’m glad you did. You both needed the rest, and you looked super peaceful and comfortable together.”

  “What happened with my dad?” I asked. I felt bad that I had left him on the phone with my father and just walked away. I kind of threw him to the wolves with that one.

  “I did the best that I could, but he’s pretty mad. I tried to tell him that the picture was a fake and that you had nothing to do with it, but he started spouting off about how you should have never gotten wrapped up with me and something about how this is the kind of thing that happens in the music industry. I tried to talk him down, but he just wasn’t listening to a word that I said.”

  “I’m sorry that you had to deal with him,” I said. “Thank you for trying.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry that you had to deal with any of this.”

  We sat for a few more minutes and then went up to bed together. We decided to let Poppy stay in my room for the night since she and her bear were already so cozied up. Even with the nap, I was still exhausted. Emotional exhaustion is harder to remedy than physical exhaustion. We lay down, and I could tell that Jake was wiped-out too because he fell asleep within minutes. I lay on his shoulder with my ear pressed up against his chest and listened to his heart beat steadily for a little while. Then, once I knew that he was too deeply asleep to be easily woken, I slipped out of bed and grabbed a bag and shoved essential things into it. My car was still sitting in his big, fancy garage—hopefully, it still ran—and my keys were in the pocket of my jacket.

  I didn’t want to leave. It killed me to think about Jake and Poppy waking up and looking around for me and then realizing I was gone. But I just felt like I was drowning and that I had gotten in way over my head. Who was I to be able to fight Maleah and the publicity of what had just happened? This wouldn’t be the last time she pulled a stunt like this, and not only did it hurt my life, but it made life worse for Jake and Poppy, too.

  I didn’t know what the right answer was, but things seemed to have gotten worse instead of better f
or Jake since I came into the picture. And I just couldn’t do that to Poppy anymore. She’d be angry with me for leaving, but she’d be worse off if she kept being put in the middle of her mother’s jealousy. It had to end somehow, and removing myself from the situation was the only thing I could come up with to do. Besides, I needed some time to think. Hopefully, my apartment was still vacant, so at least there would be a roof over my head if nothing else. I would rather sleep on the floor of an empty apartment than crawl back to my dad.

  Chapter Sixteen (Jake)

  When I woke up and saw that Annika wasn’t beside me, a feeling of dread came over me. I knew that was probably ridiculous because she was most likely downstairs, making something to eat or playing with Poppy. I had lost all track of time and didn’t realize that we had already slept through the whole night once I checked the clock on my phone. No wonder Poppy rushed into my room, saying that she was starving. It was already breakfast time.

  “Do I have to go to school today?” she asked with her sweetest and most pleading eyes.

  “No,” I said. “Not today. I’ll email your teacher. Where’s Annika?”

  “I don’t know,” Poppy said with a scrunched up face that looked confused. “I thought she would be in here with you.”

  “She’s probably downstairs,” I said as I sat up and got out of bed. I reached for Poppy’s hand as we walked down the staircase together.

  We looked all over the house as Poppy called out her name, but Annika was nowhere around. I called her cell phone, but it just kept going to voicemail. That’s when I started to get really worried. Finally, after I had sent her a half-dozen text messages that asked if she was okay, she answered me.

  “I’m fine. I just needed to leave,” her text said.

  “What does that mean?” Poppy asked with her lip quivering. “When is she coming back?”