“You don’t think this is sexy?”
“It is,” I said. “But I just got dressed and—”
“We can fix that,” he said, kissing me on the lips.
I giggled, looking at the digital clock over the mantelpiece, next to the television. “No,” I said. “No, we can’t. Don’t you have somewhere to be in like, half an hour?”
“The wildlife conservation effort can lead itself,” he said. “If they knew the hottie I have at home, they would not mind.”
“I think they would,” I said. “You are their golden boy. Criminal-turned-environmentalist, regulation hottie, and I’m sure they like looking at you picking up trash when you lean down and show them that ass.”
“Are you objectifying me?”
I laughed, throwing my head back. “Do you mind?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I thought you liked me because of my intellect.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I mean, it was, I guess, sort of sexy that you finished your degree in a couple of years.”
“Sort of sexy? Trying to seduce you was the only reason I did that.”
I laughed as he kissed me on the lips again, and I snuggled into him, my head on his shoulder. “Have you worried about it at all?”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your past, I guess, catching up to you.”
“No,” he replied, after a little while. “My past is mostly in prison, and luckily, it had nothing to do with me.”
“I still can’t believe they didn’t call you to testify,” I said.
“They just had enough evidence on the homeowner’s security system, I guess,” he said. “What better than a video, showing clear faces?”
I nodded, sighing a little. “I’m glad you were out of it by then,” I said. “The thought of losing you scared the shit out of me. Of you being hurt, I guess, but if you had to go to prison—”
“Hey,” he said. “I won’t have to go to prison. You’ll have to keep putting up with my terrible jokes for the rest of the foreseeable future.”
“Do you ever worry about what you told them?”
“What?” he said, furrowing his brow. “What do you mean?”
“How you said that you wanted out because you were going to marry me,” I said. “Which obviously hasn’t happened—”
“Oh, yeah,” he replied, flashing me a wide smile. “I wanted the time I actually proposed to, you know, not be because someone threatened me.”
“Guess you have plenty of time,” I replied.
He laughed, throwing his head back, then leaned in close to me so that he could whisper in my ear. “I have been saving for a ring.”
My eyes widened. “I didn’t—I was joking. I don’t actually need anything expensive.”
“Good,” he replied. “Because this Key West vacation is expensive enough without adding the cost of the ring and at this rate, I might have to pay extra for the sunset.”
I turned around to look at him. “Wait,” I said. “Are you saying—”
“I know you don’t like to be blindsided,” he said, kissing my cheek. “You get jumpy. But I want to make you my wife, and—”
“Yes,” I said, a little too quickly.
He laughed. “I haven’t asked you anything yet,” he said. “You can’t say yes to anything.”
I scoffed, but when he put a crooked finger on my chin, tilting my head up, and kissing me, I forgot about everything but the touch of his lips.
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t plan to ever let you get rid of me again.”
“I love you.”
He kissed me again, then sighed as he pulled away.
“Wait,” I said. “I actually don’t think it matters that much if you are a little late.”
THE END
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If you liked this book, you’ll also like:
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The Baron and The Babe
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Paying the price
You might also like this series by Larissa de Silva:
The Healing Process (The Ghosts Of Thornbridge Keep Book 1)
Author’s Note
Thank you so much for reading my book.
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Paying The Price
Blurb
Dr. Becca Baker wasn’t supposed to end up like this, in a dingy Vegas hotel drinking martini after martini trying to forget all about the marriage that was once supposed to be her happy ending.
She doesn’t want to go back to her life.
To her empty home, that she once hoped to fill with children.
To the hospital, where every other surgeon knows exactly what Scott did to her—but only his version of events.
While drinking in a city far away from her own home, she runs into the boy who made her life a living hell in high school.
Kieran Bloom looks just like he did in high school. Tall, ripped, with twinkling eyes and a smile to die for, the man looks like he could model in any high-fashion campaign.
But after graduating high school, his once-promising athletic career went off the rails, and he ended up attending to the needs of lonely and drunk people in a forgotten bar in Las Vegas.
His one accomplishment is having outran his past.
Until he sees her. Little Rebecca Baker isn’t so little anymore. She’s no longer the bespectacled girl with the frizzy hair and the annoying mouth-breathing habit who always spoke too damn much.
Now she’s beautiful, and funny, and interesting.
And she seems to want his services.
He’s not in a position to turn her down.
But Becca might have gotten the wrong idea about exactly who Kieran Bloom is… and now she’ll have to pay the price.
READ NOW
CHAPTER ONE
BECCA
I felt… calm.
I thought.
Is that what being pleasantly drunk was? I had always been such a teetotaler. I hardly ever drank—in case of an emergency, I told myself, but really, I didn’t like the idea of throwing up, and I had always been a lightweight.
I tapped on the bar and the bartender came up to me again. He was a young man in his early twenties with a bun that was made entirely out of dreadlocks. I could’ve kept looking at him for ages, especially because now there appeared to be two of him.
“A screwdriver,” I said. “Make it a double, please.”
“Of course, honey,” he said, winking at me.
My heart fluttered.
I didn’t think he was flirting with me, exactly, but at least he was being nice to me. It felt like it had been so long since a man had been nice to me. Since anyone had been nice to me, really. Estella had gone off to get married or something in what was supposed to be my divorce celebration. Scott and I had officially split up and everything was in motion for me to get my life back.
Yeah, right.
As if, I told myself as I tipped the glass back and felt the ice coating my tongue. I was drunk. I would’ve never done anything like that if I had been sober, I told myself.
At least I wasn’t making a fool of myself in front of anybody I knew. I had kept it together at the hospital, even when it felt like I wanted to jump at Scott and claw his eyes out. I couldn’t believe that, after what he had done to me, everyone was pretending that things were normal.
I understood that there were more important things. Our patients were more important than our personal drama. But we couldn’t operate together, and being unable to work with one another had hindered the hospital.
Of course, Scott had put it all on me.
I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about what Scott had done. I didn’t want to tell them about the late nights when he would arrive home stinking of alcohol and with lipstick marks all over his collar. I didn’t want to tell them about the texts I found on his phone, from women who were saved under contact names like Dr. Panama and Dr. South Korea. It was clear that they weren’t doctors, that they were sex workers he had met on one of his many nightly escapades, and since he couldn’t remember their names, he would just save them in his phone as their nationality.
It was insulting. Probably a little racist.
If I had told anyone what Scott was doing, then they might lose respect for him at the hospital. I didn’t want that to happen. Despite all his personal failings, his shortcomings as a husband, and his inability to be faithful, he was a wonderful and dedicated surgeon with a better success rate than most surgeons in our state.
Hell, in our hospital.
I hadn’t wanted our staff to respect him less, and I knew the office staff was immediately going to cling to any little bit of gossip about Dr. Noble and Dr. Baker. The Ken and Barbie of our hospital, people thought about us the way they thought about a homecoming king and queen.
It was terrible.
I hated it.
It was an ideal neither one of us could live up to and I didn’t even want to try. But I had fallen into it, rather unexpectedly, because Scott was popular and I was his wife, and I couldn’t escape his influence.
He looked like the kind of man who should play a surgeon on TV, rather than an actual surgeon. Hell, he probably would have, if it hadn’t been for his mother’s overbearing influence.
And I had always liked looking at him.
If nothing else, eventually.
But I had also liked how respected he was, and respect and his ability to be a good doctor, were, as far as I could see, tied to each other. So I kept my mouth shut even as he announced—without telling me beforehand—that we were separating.
When people asked him why, he painted me as unreasonable and jealous, and though I gritted my teeth, I felt like strangling him every time.
The patients came first, I told myself, even as I saw the twinkle in his eyes. Maybe he did see himself as a victim, I thought, feeling a little sick to my stomach.
I turned to my side, trying to keep myself upright on the bar, and saw a handsome man sitting to my left. I stumbled down on the stool when I tried to find my footing and he extended his arm and caught me before I could fall face first on the floor.
He laughed, a deep sound that stirred butterflies in my stomach.
Maybe it was the drink.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you okay there?”
I nodded, licking my lips and trying to sit my ass on the stool again. “Fine,” I said. “Just having… woo. Balancing problems.”
“Not a gymnast, then?”
I laughed. “Nothing that glamorous.”
He looked me up and down. His eyes were dark, or maybe it was just the lack of light in the bar, but damn, he was intense. He wouldn’t stop staring at me.
“Can I guess?”
“Please don’t,” I said. “If you guess anything about my life, and you’re right, I’m gonna hate myself forever.”
He laughed again. It sounded so sincere. I could’ve kept listening to him forever. There was something familiar about him, too, like I had heard him before, like I had just come home and he was there, sitting on my living room couch, having a cup of tea with my mother.
Fuck. I was so drunk.
“I was only going to guess something good.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you in fashion?”
I laughed again. “You are a comedian,” I said. “Right?”
“In entertainment,” he said. “But not a comedian.”
“Close enough,” I said, taking a sip of my screwdriver. It was so strong.
“Can I buy you another drink?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“Kieran,” he said, extending his hand as he laughed.
“Becca,” I replied.
He squeezed my hand, which was surprisingly sweaty. Not very attractive, I thought. But then again, I probably looked like a mess, just in general.
I tried to sit up straighter—ridiculous, when I couldn’t even see straight—and ran my fingers through my hair.
“What are you doing in this bar?” Kieran asked. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“I’m, uh,” I said. “I’m supposed to be having a divorce party.”
“It’s not much of a party.”
I laughed. “My friend went and eloped,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “Friend. She just wanted to come to Vegas so she could marry this guy, I guess. What’s a better excuse than my divorce?”
“Your ex is an idiot,” he said.
“Cheers to that,” I replied, holding my drink up in the air. It was enough to get the bartender’s attention, which made me giggle. “I think they might kick me out.”
“They deal with worse every day,” he said. “Trust me.”
“I do,” I said.
“That wasn’t very nice of your friend,” he said. “How did you end up here?”
“I wanted an inexpensive bar that wasn’t next to a casino,” I said. “And you know, this seemed like the perfect place for a lonely divorcee not to get picked up.”
“Are you not getting picked up?” he asked. Even in the darkness, I could see his eyes were twinkling.
It had been so long since I had been with a man, and the last few times I had slept with Scott, he had hardly seemed interested in me. He was just going through the motions before our marriage died. I could tell he wasn’t interested in me anymore.
This stranger—this gorgeous tall man with the mischievous eyes—he was going to be into me.
And I was drunk enough to actually go for it.
“What are you saying?” I asked after I took another sip of my strong drink.
“I’m saying… do you have a hotel room around here?”
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All Grown Up Page 13