Dirty Little Secret_A Secret Baby-Second Chance Romance

by Michelle Love

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  The water’s cold…She’s red hot!

  She sits on the white, rocky shore as I stalk her from behind.

  Her aspirations are as big as the Texas sky.

  I have other plans for the Yale College girl.

  Kinky plans!

  I’ll command her body and she’ll command my heart.

  The first step in my plan, make her crave my c*ck.

  Then everything else will fall into place.

  My only fear is that one day she’ll go away.

  Leaving me alone to miss her…

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  Dirty Little Secret

  A Secret Baby-Second Chance Romance

  By Michelle Love

  Copyright

  ©Copyright 2018 by Michelle Love - All rights Reserved

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Table of Contents

  Free Gift

  Dirty Little Secret

  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

  Dirty Little Secret Extended Epilogue

  Dirty Little Secret

  When a young teen couple accidentally get pregnant, the girl is forced to give the baby boy up for adoption.

  Little does she realize, it’s the father of the baby’s aunt and uncle who’ve adopted the baby.

  Once the father reaches twenty-five and has made a Doctor out of himself, the aunt and uncle give custody of his son to him. And one fateful day, ten years after the boy’s birth, the two who conceived him meet again.

  Can the three become a family after all this time?

  Chapter 1

  Zandra

  Cold wind whipped around me as I climbed the stairs up to my apartment, which I shared with four roommates. Unfortunately, they were four of the messiest and most immature individuals I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting.

  I’m met all of them while working as a cocktail waitress at Underground, a nightclub in Chicago, and we’d gotten along well enough to decide to live together. Little did I know that all four of them were very different people at home than they were while working with the public.

  Being a few years older than any of them, at twenty-six I supposed I was just growing up a bit. That had to be the reason behind my budding impatience with the people I’d lived with for the last year.

  It seemed like just yesterday that I was right there with them all, dumping clean laundry onto the floor instead of putting it in my closet, making a mess while trying to search for just the right thing to wear. Or even leaving dirty dishes in the sink with the hope that someone else would get disgusted enough with the mess to feel the urge to clean up. Yes, I was once just as filthy as they were, but things had changed in the last few months.

  I had changed. Now all I wanted was a clean apartment to live in.

  Is that too much to ask for?

  Walking back into the quiet house after having a morning coffee at the small café down the street, I headed toward the one bathroom the five of us shared.

  I would’ve loved to have been able to go to the bathroom without having to clean the damn toilet first. Two of my roommates were guys who had a habit of leaving trails of pee in places that didn’t make sense. Along the edge of the tub, around the floor near the toilet, and once even by the door, for some odd reason. And they never seemed to notice their mishaps either, leaving them for someone else to deal with.

  I’d begun carrying around a little container with convenient small towelettes covered in peach-scented bleach that I would use to wipe things down. It seemed I was becoming more like my mother in this regard, a realization I disliked very much, but had no clue how to push away so I could go back to not giving a hoot about cleanliness.

  In retaliation to my impending maturity, I’d gone to the salon to get my dark hair done in a more fun, youthful fashion. The new dark blue streaks might just be a visual representation of my attempt to cling to my youth, but so what? I liked them.

  But even as I looked into the bathroom mirror after wiping the entire room down, I could see a new maturity in my blue eyes that hadn’t been there even a few months ago.

  Yes, the streaks in my hair were the same color as my eyes. A girl likes to match, you know.

  Staring disconnectedly into the eyes of the person looking back at me, that empty feeling I had at times started to creep in. Most of the time I could ignore the emptiness, but now and then it would find me and linger for a while before letting up and allowing me some relief once more.

  Whenever it hit me, my life would temporary turn into a hellish existence. My dreams would turn into nightmares, and all I could do was drink coffee to keep me awake, trying to keep the bad dreams away. Wishing the feeling wouldn’t last more than a few days this time, instead of the week-long agony that had nearly drowned me the last time it hit me, I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them up again, I saw myself staring back at me once more. A young woman, no longer the girl I had been. I needed to face things instead of trying to ignore or forget about them.

  I had a bad past. So what?

  Lots of people had bad things happen to them in their lives. Who did I think I was?

  Was I invincible? Was I too good for anything bad to ever happen to me? No, I wasn’t. And I had to stop the internal berating that came along with every bout of depression.

  Leaving the now-clean bathroom, I went to the bedroom I shared with the other two girls in the apartment. They were sprawled out on their little twin beds; one of them had her head at the wrong end of the bed.

  I fought the urge to move her into the right position, a motherly urge that only proved to make the depressed feelings inside of me edge closer to the surface.

  Tears began to sting the backs of my eyes, and I left the room to go to the kitchen and clean some more. Cleaning was fast becoming the outlet I turned to whenever the emptiness tried to claim me.

  And with this crew of slobs, there was plenty of cleaning to do. The dishes needed washing, so I did the sink full of them. The floor needed to be swept and mopped, so I did that too. The fridge needed to be cleaned out, the leftovers tossed, and the entire thing wiped down with one of my handy bleach wipes as well.

  By the time the first roommate woke up and dragged his ass out of bed, the k
itchen sparkled, and everything smelled peachy. Standing there in his not-so-white, tighty whiteys, Dillon rubbed his brown eyes with the back of one hand as he yawned loudly. “What the hell are you doing, making all this noise on a Sunday, Zandy? We didn’t get in last night until four in the morning. Are you insane?”

  Am I?

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I felt it best to ignore his question. “I’m cleaning, Dillon. A thing the rest of you must not have learned how to do yet. I’ll try to be quieter, so you guys can sleep. Sorry about that.” Apologizing for doing chores shouldn’t be something anyone should have to worry about.

  I found resentment building up inside of me. These ungrateful kids should have to live in filth!

  As Dillon walked wearily back to the bedroom he shared with the other guy who lived with us, I looked at the clean floor and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

  My parents lived just outside of town. But I would never go back to live with them. I only talked to my mother when she called incessantly, and then only for a very short amount of time. I would let her know that I was alive and fine, but nothing more than that.

  She didn’t deserve to know any more than that. Not after what she and my father had done to me.

  Their evil deed had left a hole in my heart. A hole that I knew could never be repaired.

  Going out the front door, I took a seat on the top stair outside our apartment. The wind still blew a thousand miles an hour, making my hair fly all around me. The cold air chilled me to my bones, as I’d come out once again without so much as a sweater on to keep me warm. Only an old sweatshirt and a pair of jeans covered my body. It wasn’t enough to keep the cold out.

  Fiddling with a hole in the knee of my jeans, I made it even bigger. The image of a baby made a brief appearance in my brain before I successfully pushed it aside.

  No, I didn’t ever let things like that take up any space in my head. But when I fell asleep, those thoughts and images would sneak in, taking my dreams and turning them into nightmares.

  Two days had already passed with little sleep. Waking up with tears on my pillow, I would get up and do anything I could to make myself stop thinking. Thinking only made it hurt worse.

  Ten years have passed. Why does it still bother me so much?

  Looking down at my left arm, I still couldn’t believe that I’d gotten so drunk three nights earlier that I’d gone and gotten a tattoo on the inside of my wrist.

  Why did I do this to myself?

  Why would I purposely do anything that would be a constant reminder of the one thing I tried desperately to forget about? Why would I put that on my body?

  For the rest of my life, I’d look down and see “05/03/2008” written in baby blue ink multiple times a day. Why would I do such a hurtful thing to myself?

  Only God knew why I would do such a thing, no matter what amount of alcohol I’d consumed. Or the devil. I wasn’t sure which had the strongest hold on me.

  At times, it sure felt like the devil was the one who’d laid out the path my life would take.

  Is there a way to change my path, or is it too late? Can there be a way out of this emptiness?

  If there was, I knew now that I wouldn’t find the answer in Chicago. Of that much, I was sure.

  I’d been dragged there against my will when I was just sixteen years old. When I left my parents’ home on the day I turned eighteen, I could’ve gone anywhere. I had ten thousand dollars that I’d inherited from my grandmother. She’d died when I was twelve, and the money had been left in a bank account in Charleston, South Carolina, where we’d lived most of my life.

  When I turned eighteen, I gained access to that money and hauled ass out of the house I’d essentially been held captive in for two long-as-hell years. Without any other plan, into the big city of Chicago I went.

  The bank card from the Charleston bank had come in the mail a few days before my birthday. It had my name on it. The accompanying letter said that it would be activated on the date of my birth and would be ready to use that very day.

  I used it to buy myself a birthday present—a cab ride into town and then a week in a cheap motel. I found a job that very night at Underground.

  My first roommate was a girl named Sasha who’d been working at the club for a few years. At twenty-five years old, the older woman took me under her wing, teaching me everything I needed to know in order to bring in big tips by being flirtatious and sexy.

  A couple of years later she met some guy and moved out to live with him. She also quit working at the nightclub. That’s when I met a new friend. Taylor had come to work at the club when she was just eighteen, too. I was a little older by then and took her under my wing, letting her stay in Sasha’s old room.

  Taylor didn’t need much coaching. She seemed to be a natural at flirting. And it didn’t hurt that she had absolutely no problem sleeping with any guy who wanted her.

  I had issues with sex. My past made me it very hard for me to have any kind of eagerness for the act. It was sex that had gotten me into trouble in the first place.

  As sexy as I dressed and as flirty as I was, it was all a performance. An important one, that helped me keep a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and a car under my ass to keep me going to and fro on my own.

  Following the same routine for nearly a decade can grow tiresome. And boy, did I feel tired. Tired of looking at the same old buildings. Tired of driving down the same old streets. Tired of living with a bunch of overgrown adolescents.

  The back pocket of my jeans vibrated, so I pulled out my cell phone. A smile broke the no-doubt forlorn expression my face must have settled into. As if by magic, Taylor’s name appeared on the screen.

  She’d left a year ago, sparking my need to get a new roommate. I didn’t recall exactly why I kept letting people move in, but I had. I hadn’t heard from her in a good while.

  “Hey, you,” I answered the call.

  “Hey yourself, girlie. What’re you up to these days?” she asked me.

  Shoving my hand through my hair, then holding onto it so the wind couldn’t blow it around, I sighed heavily. I didn’t know what to say. I had been up to the same old dreary thing. But to say that out loud seemed just too pathetic. “Not much. You?”

  “Just working at this badass club in Charleston called Mynt,” came her enthusiastic reply.

  “Mynt?” My mind wandered back to Charleston. The home I’d had to leave when I was just sixteen. Barely sixteen, really, as my mother was constantly reminding me.

  Mom would remind me far too often that I was barely above fifteen when I’d gotten myself into what she liked to refer to as “the situation.” A situation, she also reminded me, that had forced her and my father to uproot our little family and move far away. Life had never been the same after that move.

  “Yeah, Mynt,” Taylor said, pulling me out of my reverie. “And you want to know what I think, Zandy?”

  “What do you think?” I chewed on my long fake black-painted fingernail as I waited to hear what she had to say.

  “I think that you should come on down here to the South and work with me.” She paused to let that sink in as I thought about it. “I’ve got a very nice two-bedroom apartment that my roommate has just moved out of. I could use a new roomie, and who better than you to fill that role?”

  Yeah, who better than me to fill that role?

  Charleston sounded nice. Going back to what I had always considered my home sounded like a fantastic idea. Why not go back there?

  Even if I saw anyone from my old life, it wasn’t like anyone knew why we’d left all of a sudden anyway. What harm would it do to go back to my hometown?

  “And the pay at Mynt?” I asked. “Is it pretty decent?”

  “Let’s just say that I make enough money to pay my bills, eat what I want, when I want, drive a nice car, and even splurge on shopping now and then with what I’m bringing home.” She laughed, the pitch high and shrill but still pleasant, as only Taylor could m
ake it. “Please tell me that you’ll come. I’ve already talked to the boss about you. He thinks you’ll fit right in with our little family at Mynt. It’s lots of fun, Zandy. You’ll love the atmosphere. I promise you that we’ll have a great time.”

  She made it sound like a great idea, and it wasn’t like I had anything holding me in Chicago. A change might be just what I needed to get the emptiness to go away. At least for a little while.

  Another gust of frigid wind hit me, and I got up. My hand balled into a fist at my side; I was ready to make the big change. “It’s a miracle that you called me right at this moment, Taylor. I’ve been in a funk lately. Change is exactly what I need in my life right now.”

  She sounded hopeful. “Does that mean you’ll come?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come.” I went back inside to get out of the cold. “When do you want me?”

  “Yesterday,” she said with light laughter threading her high voice. Taylor was the closest thing to a fairy a human woman could get, and it was utterly charming. People often called her Tinkerbell.

  “Then I’ll pack up my things and give my notice at work. Then I’ll get into my car and come your way. Text me the address, and I’ll be there as soon as my wheels can get me there.”

  Change was important. It’s what I’d been missing in my life lately, and without change life could be one long, dreary existence. I wanted to leave dreary behind me. Hopefully, Charleston would see to that.

  Chapter 2

  Kane

  The crack of the bat connecting with the baseball made my heart swell with pride. “You did it, Fox! Now run, son!”

  On my feet as soon as the ball started soaring, I clapped as my ten-year-old son threw the bat down then ran to first base before anyone could get a hold of the ball. “Go to second,” I called out to him, seeing that he looked a little confused about what he should do.

  The coach shouted, “Go on, Fox. This could be a home run!”

  My son’s first home run!