by Sparks, Ana
The Playboy Prince's Baby
Ana Sparks
Layla Valentine
Contents
The Playboy Prince's Baby
1. Francisco
2. Erika
3. Erika
4. Erika
5. Erika
6. Erika
7. Francisco
8. Erika
9. Francisco
10. Erika
11. Erika
12. Francisco
13. Erika
14. Francisco
15. Erika
16. Francisco
17. Francisco
18. Francisco
19. Erika
20. Erika
21. Erika
22. Erika
23. Francisco
24. Erika
25. Erika
26. Francisco
27. Francisco
28. Erika
29. Erika
30. Francisco
Epilogue
The Prince's Irresistible Offer
1. Evie
Want More?
Also by Layla Valentine
The Playboy Prince's Baby
Copyright 2020 by Ana Sparks & Layla Valentine
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.
All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
Francisco
I pressed my forehead down into whatever I was lying on top of and prayed that whatever that surface was, it would open up and swallow me whole.
I had no idea where I was, but all that mattered was that someone—anyone—take away the pounding in my head. Because given the state of my brain, I was starting to think I might actually be dead this time.
In fact, I was pretty sure I’d finally done what my brother had always said I would. Drank too much and actually died from it. Or maybe from something I’d done while drunk.
I mean really, the choices were endless. And yes, I know how that makes me sound. But I swear I’m not actually that bad.
Most of the time.
At that moment, music started blaring through the atmosphere, and I sat straight up in shock—and then started to gag. Both of which proved, I guessed, that I wasn’t actually dead. Because I was pretty sure dead guys didn’t sit up and then try to throw up all over the floor.
Right. Well, alive it was, then, I thought, gazing around through eyes that seemed to be only partially working. From what I could see, I was in an enclosed place—which, I thought, was a good thing, since it meant that wherever I’d passed out this time, I’d at least managed to choose a place that kept me out of the weather. And, theoretically, safe from muggers.
Unless you called the incredibly beautiful woman currently standing in front of me a mugger.
But I didn’t think muggers came equipped with masses of wavy brown hair and eyes to match, over an upturned nose and lips so full that they immediately made me think of one thing, and one thing only.
Until those lips turned up in a wry and somewhat triumphant grin. One that told me that although she might have left me sleep here, she wasn’t exactly the sort who was going to keep her voice down to stop from hurting my head.
A moment after that, I had another thought.
She was the one who had turned the music on. And she was now laughing at me about it.
“That was mean,” I told her, frowning.
She just shrugged, the curves of her body moving in a way that made her look like she was dancing.
That woman had music in her soul, I thought. Then I shook my head. Was I still drunk? Because it was really the only excuse for even having a thought like that.
“That,” she answered in a soft, husky voice that made me think even more of music, “is the bar’s policy, I’m afraid. I let you sleep here the entire night—which, I’ll add, I wasn’t supposed to do—but we’re closed in the morning. For cleaning,” she added, when it became obvious that I hadn’t really understood what she meant. “Cleaning up after the drunks we let sleep here.”
She finished with one eyebrow lifted and a quick—and very sharp—glance down at the floor underneath me.
“God,” I moaned. “I’m sorry. I swear I’m not usually this bad. How long… um… What time did I get into this place?”
I was looking around and realizing that I had zero memory of this particular establishment. It was a dive bar, and so it looked a whole lot like most of the other dive bars I remembered. There was a bar. Obviously. And walls, which were covered in a mass of what looked like music posters. I saw the inevitable neon lights advertising beers and live music, and the menu above the bar, and then, over the door at the front of the place, the ‘Open’ sign. Which wasn’t lit.
I shuffled my feet a bit, and felt what I was sure were peanut shells underfoot.
Ugh. I hated peanuts. What the hell had I been doing in the sort of place that allowed you to eat them and then throw the shells onto the floor?
“Feels like you’re cleaning up after more than just the drunks,” I noted, moving my feet around a bit more.
The woman cringed at that, and then nodded. “It’s not glamorous,” she admitted. Then she stepped forward and took my arm, pulling gently. “Still, rules are rules, and I’ve got to do it. It’s part of that whole keeping-my-job thing. And as for when you got here, I didn’t see you come in. But I saw the fight you had once you and your friend had been here for a while. That was around midnight. You passed out pretty soon after that. And we just… let you be.”
I snorted—or came as close to snorting as I could manage with the state of my dry mouth. And as I did that, and considered the exit that she was now leading me toward, I started to have flashes of memory from last night.
That door. The way it jangled when you opened it. Coming in here. Yeah, I remembered it now. I’d come in…
“To use the bathroom,” I muttered. “I only came in to use the bathroom.”
The bartender shrugged. “And then I guess you decided to stay. Though I don’t think the guy you had with you agreed with that particular idea.”
“Roger,” I told her firmly. “No, Roger thought it was a terrible idea. Because Roger is my brother’s man, and he thought we should just get back to the hotel and go to sleep. So I fired him.”
She gave me a look that was all arched brows and wide eyes. “Oh. Obviously. That’s what I do to all the people I have disagreements with. I fire them. Loudly. With lots of shouting. And more than a couple broken glasses.”
Now it was my turn to cringe, because I remembered that, too. There had been a lot of broken glass over the situation.
Mostly because Roger worked for my brother instead of me. Which meant that Roger always thought he knew best—and always reported back to my brother. Which was exactly why I’d had to fire him.
I mean, when your brother’s the king of a small nation and you’re the no-good princeling who gets into so much trouble that your brother only lets you out of the house with a keeper, what else are you going to do but fire that keeper at the first possible opportunity?
Not that I was going to say any of that to the hot bartender currently hustling me toward the exit. Because that whole princeling thing—hell, the royalty aspect in general—wasn’t something I
normally told people. It tended to give them funny ideas about who I was and what I was supposed to be like. It almost inevitably made them immediately want to be my friend and see what they could get out of me. And it had gotten me into a world of trouble with certain women in the past.
Not bartenders. I didn’t normally hang out with bartenders. But I didn’t think they would be any different when it came to finding out they were talking to a prince.
Still. Call me crazy, but this particular bartender had let me sleep all night in her bar, instead of throwing me out like I was sure she was supposed to at closing time. And instead of tossing me out on my ass this morning, half-asleep and still in an alcohol daze, she’d woken me up first. I mean yeah, she’d done it with music so loud that it was hammering against my skull like an actual jackhammer, even now, but my point stood.
She’d woken me up first.
Maybe that meant there was a good soul under all those curves and the mane of brown hair.
“Say,” I said, giving her my best sideways glance and half-smile. “Before I go, I don’t suppose you’d mix me a drink, would you? Something to get me back on my feet?”
She gave me an equally sideways glance, the corner of her mouth turning up. “That, good sir, is against bar regulations.”
I leaned a bit closer to her and dropped my voice, going for the gravelly, charming tone I liked to use on people I was trying to, well, charm. “You, good lady, don’t seem like the kind of person who follows those sorts of rules too closely.”
Her grin got a little bit bigger at that, and she looked at me for a moment, then tipped her head side to side a couple of times. “I mean, I try to follow the rules. And I succeed. Most of the time. But I’m also supposed to be the bartender here. So… drinks are my job.”
“And what kind of bartender would you be if you refused a patron a drink when he specifically asked for one?” I asked, my tone serious, as if we were having a real conversation rather than one that included her trying to escort me out of the bar where I’d fallen asleep.
And now her grin grew to full strength. She nodded once, then turned away from the door and headed for the bar itself.
“Right you are,” she said, equally serious. “What sort of bartender would I be if I didn’t get a man a drink when he asked for one?”
She slid me onto a barstool and went around to the other side of the bar, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Now, what’ll it be?”
And that was how I found myself sitting in a bar in Chicago at six in the morning, drinking a margarita and talking to the hottest bartender I’d ever seen—while desperately trying to remember what hotel I was supposed to be staying in, and how to get back there without my security guard to direct me.
Chapter 2
Erika
Strictly speaking, I wasn’t supposed to be talking to the guy at all. I mean, he was a guy who’d come into the bar just before midnight last night and then gotten into a huge fight with someone who he now claimed was his brother’s ‘man’—whatever that meant. They’d caused a huge ruckus and broken more than their fair share of glasses, plus a table and two chairs, and we were going to have one hell of a time convincing the owner of the bar not to press charges for any of that.
But I’d talked to Gwen, the other girl on the bar at the time, and we’d agreed that we weren’t going to bother telling the owner what had happened. We’d just chalk the table and chairs up to general disrepair and leave it at that. I mean, furniture wore out. Especially when that furniture had been sentenced to spend its life in a dive bar in Chicago, where people weren’t exactly kind to the things they were using.
And no, it wasn’t because the guy who’d done much of the damage was passed out within minutes of the fight, in a sad ball in the corner. No, it wasn’t because that guy was insanely hot, either, or had been shouting in an accent that made him even hotter, all mussed-up curls and flashing brown eyes, with scruff that went a whole lot further than your standard five-o’clock shadow and right to ‘I Haven’t Shaved in Two Days’ scruff.
It wasn’t the fact that his eyes met mine in the middle of the fight and lit up with such heat that they’d almost melted my bones—for no good reason at all, considering I’d never laid eyes on the guy before.
I mean, I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, any normal girl would have taken that last bit and said she’d do just about anything to feel that sudden rush of heat through her body again. But I didn’t have that luxury. I was a bartender, in a job that I literally couldn’t afford to lose. I wasn’t about to mess that up by breaking the owner’s rules about the tenders sleeping with customers. Even irregular ones—or first-timers.
No matter how good-looking this particular customer might be.
The truth was, I needed the job too badly to risk it. Because, like many other people of a certain age, I’d gotten out of high school and gone right to college. A good and very expensive college, for a major in music.
Why, you ask? Because I was a writer and a musician, and I’d had very big, very exciting aspirations to get a major in my passion, then go out and make a career out of that passion. I was going to take my music and my poetry and the songs I wrote and make a name for myself. The assumption that it was all going to work out made it really easy to sign on that dotted line when it came to taking out thousands and thousands of dollars in loans.
And it kept my faith going until the day I graduated… and found out that a bachelor’s in music didn’t bring you all that much when it came to the music industry.
Instead, I’d graduated with a whole lot of debt and absolutely no way to pay it off. And that led to me working here, where I got to take advantage of the open mic nights… but barely made enough money to cover those student loans I’d so willingly sold my soul for.
So yeah, I needed the job. And when it came to following the owner’s regulations, I was usually pretty good at it.
So why had Gwen and I agreed to lie to him about what had happened to the furniture?
Because it straight up wasn’t worth the trouble. It wasn’t worth all the paperwork and the new rules about respecting the furniture that we’d have to slap up on the wall and then try to enforce. Because this particular owner paid really well—too well for the job, to be honest, though I wasn’t complaining—but he did it with one big expectation. And that was that we set rules with our patrons and then followed them religiously. So, when patrons broke the rules he’d set, guess what happened?
More rules.
All of which probably has you wondering what in the ever-loving world I was doing sitting down on a barstool in the bar I was currently supposed to be cleaning, having an early morning pint with a guy the rules said I should have kicked out last night, and contemplating cooking breakfast for him—all of which would definitely get me fired, pronto, if the owner happened to walk in this early on a Saturday morning.
Well, see what I said above about the heat from this guy’s eyes melting my bones? Yeah, that.
Turns out, I’m a whole lot like other girls, and it had affected me more than I was letting on.
Because the guy was all smolder. All hot-as-melted-chocolate sexiness. He had been last night, when he was fighting with the guy he’d evidently fired, and he still was this morning, despite the massive hangover he had to be nursing. With the way his eyes settled on me and lingered, a half-smile turning up the corner of his mouth and a spark jumping from him right to me…
Well, to be frank, it just wasn’t the sort of thing I experienced very often. And when it came down to it, it wasn’t something I was in a hurry to throw out on its ass in the damp Chicago morning.
So I was breaking my own rules—and those of the bar—and letting him stay. And, it turned out, talking about cooking him breakfast.
“Something greasy,” I told him earnestly, watching as he took another sip of his margarita. It had been an odd request, this early in the morning, but who was I to judge? “Especially if you’ve been sick.”
&nb
sp; The guy looked at me with doubt in his eyes. “Honestly, lady, grease sounds like the worst possible thing right now.”
I mimed finger guns at him. “That’s because you’ve never tried it,” I said. “But I’ve seen a lot of people in your condition, and I know exactly what fixes it. Just wait until you try my hash browns and eggs. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without them. And you’ll be calling me a goddess for teaching you this incredibly important life hack.”
And that, dear reader, is how I found myself not only letting the guy fall asleep in our bar, but also wake up the next morning and not leave, and then stay for breakfast instead. I served him a drink and then let him right into our kitchen—while I cooked—which would get me not only fired but also fined by the city and probably the state as well.
I tell you. I was really racking them up today. It was like I’d obeyed rules for my entire life just so I could save up all the rule-breaking for this one special occasion.
And I still hadn’t figured out what it was about this guy, exactly, that made it feel like I wanted to break those rules. Because it sure as hell wasn’t anything about my life suddenly needing to change. I wasn’t going through some quarter-life crisis where I abruptly changed course and became a rebel.
At least… I didn’t think I was.
Which meant that it had to be about the guy.