by Sylvia Fox
OBSESSION
Alpha Bodyguards Book 2
Sylvia Fox
Copyright © 2017 by Sylvia Fox
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.
Contents
Don’t forget…
Synopsis
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
23. Epilogue
About the Author
Don’t forget…
…to follow me on Facebook! And make sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can be the first to find out about new releases and sales.
Synopsis
AYLA
Six years ago, he showed me the best night of my life.
But I never found out his name.
Our night of passion was quick and explosive. I relive it in my daydreams, constantly.
It was out of character for me to have a one-night stand, but there hasn’t been a second that I’ve regretted it. My desire is borderline obsession. No other man will ever do for me.
Somehow, I can live on that one night forever.
Life since that fateful night has been anything but a fairy tale, unfortunately. I work two jobs so I can raise my son, Preston.
My baby is worth every bit of lost sleep, but I still can’t stop thinking about his father and what might have been...
MICK
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
I’m Mick Merryweather, former secret agent for MI6, clandestine mercenary, and now the bodyguard of the most powerful man in Las Vegas.
Six years ago I met the woman of my dreams; an angel in a city full of sin. Our moment together was all too brief, and despite my talent to track information down, I never was able to find out her name.
Yet there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think about her. My obsession with her is what drives me on my darkest days.
I can live on that one night forever.
I had just begun to accept that I’d never see her again. What were the chances that she even lived in Las Vegas? Or that she’d remember me?
Until one day… it happens. And nothing will ever be the same.
Because the woman of my dreams has a secret of her own.
WARNING: This is an over-the-top love story of epic proportions. (And a lot of Insta-Love) So much is at stake with these lovers and yet their stars have crossed for a reason. If you love scorching hot, passionate moments and secret babies, then this story might just be for you. (Guaranteed HEA included, naturally)
1
“Please pick up, please pick up, please pick up!” Ayla Murray muttered softly, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other. When the voicemail picked up instead of her neighbor, Sam, Ayla slammed her fist down on top of the pile of packages outside the truck she was supposed to be loading.
“Shit!” she exclaimed.
Once Sam’s recorded voice was done reciting instructions, Ayla left her message. “Sam, this is Ayla, I had a favor to ask. Huge favor, actually. I’m still at work, and my roommate just called to tell me she has to leave for work soon, and our babysitter hasn’t shown up yet. I had to leave early once last week and I missed that day when Preston was sick. Anyway, I really can’t mess up this job… I’m sorry I’m rambling. Never mind. I’ll… figure something out. Bye.”
Ayla looked around, hoping an answer would appear. When none did, she wiped her nose with her sleeve and then blinked back her tears and got back to work, trying to get as much done as she could before the last possible minute when she’d have to go.
She had to leave work early. Again.
“Come on, Murray, get back to the belt! You’re missing packages!”
Ayla’s face burned hot with rage. Her supervisor, Jeff, subscribed to the drill sergeant school of management. Lots of screaming, yelling, and intimidation, with very little in the way of any positive reinforcement or compassion.
She hustled in and out of the two trucks she was charged with loading, ripping packages off the conveyor belt in front of her and setting them up in order on the shelves. She was one of only two women who worked the overnight shift at the “South Center” in Las Vegas for National Parcel Express. The other woman, Lynn, had more muscles than most of the men who worked there. Ayla was athletic enough, but lean and feminine. She seemed completely out of place among the crew of sweaty Neanderthals who made up most of the NPE truck-loading fraternity.
But the position came with excellent medical and dental insurance, despite it being part-time work, at no cost to her beyond her modest monthly union dues. She had a full-time day job in a call center, but the insurance there was very expensive, so she’d picked up the overnight shifts to both supplement her bank account and to provide health benefits for her six-year-old son, Preston.
She received no financial assistance from Preston’s “father,” since she didn’t even know the man’s name.
Ayla no longer felt the shame that once plagued her because of the one-night stand that blessed her with her son, but her parents had never forgiven her. Coming from a church-going family with roots in the Deep South, appearances were everything, and having an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter— despite her being an honors graduate from a good high school and on her way to college on scholarship— didn’t fit the narrative they wanted to portray to the world. They still had Ayla’s older sister, Amy, and her little brother, Allan, both of whom stuck to the straight and narrow.
So, Ayla had been cast aside, more or less disowned by her disapproving parents. Her brother Allan, still living at home, couldn’t express his opinion, but her sister Amy, away at college herself in California, championed Ayla in secret, mostly moral support, with a few dollars thrown her sister’s way when she could spare them… which wasn’t often.
Through a combination of good friends and a tireless work ethic, Ayla managed to keep a roof over her head, food on the table, diapers on Preston, and to keep her head above water.
Life was a struggle, but the reward of her silly, sensationally smart little man made it all worthwhile. He had Ayla’s green eyes, but everything else— the thick dark hair and stocky build— came from his Dad.
Whoever he was.
2
Ayla rented a house in Henderson which was southeast of the Las Vegas Strip. She shared it with a roommate, Desiree. Desiree was a high school friend who worked in public relations for a small downtown casino, and she had to leave for work by just after 7:00 AM.
Ayla had gone through a succession of babysitters who were willing to show up at her house at 6:00 AM to give Desiree time to entertain Preston once he woke up, so that Desiree could get ready for work. The babysitter was also charged with getting Preston ready for school and on the bus or, during the summer, watching him until Ayla got home from her overnight job.
Her call center day job started at 10:00, so she had a small window before getting her son to day care on days she needed it. She worked through her lunch during the day, eati
ng on her breaks, which allowed her to be out early enough to pick Preston up before day care or the afterschool program ended.
Just in time to go home, fix and eat dinner, get him to bed, and start the entire exhausting grind over again the next day.
The current babysitter, Lupe, had done a decent enough job, although she had the personality of the bread crust Ayla trimmed from Preston’s PBJ’s.
“Murray! Do you have both your earbuds in again? Get out to the belt and clean up your damn mess!” Jeff was growling his commands, his idea of “helping” to yell louder and sprinkle profanity in his commentary.
“Sorry, I’m trying!” Ayla replied, rushing back and forth between checking the time. When Desiree called, she said Preston was awake and she’d given him a banana and turned on his cartoons while she finished getting ready, but that she had to leave soon, no matter what.
As reliable as Lupe normally was, however, on this particular morning she’d neither shown up nor answered Desiree and Ayla’s calls and texts.
Running back out of her truck to the conveyor belt filled with packages, Ayla paused and checked her phone: 6:42 AM. Home was a fourteen-minute drive away if she hit mostly green lights. She’d timed it so that she could enjoy the maximum amount of sleep each night, five hours on average. She could remain at work no more than three more minutes before she’d need to clock out, run to her car, and speed home in time for Desiree to leave for downtown.
After dragging two sixty-pound boxes bound for a local dry cleaner onto her truck (how the hell could hangers weigh so much?) Ayla reached down and hit the button stopping the belt, bringing the entire operation to a grinding halt.
“Jeff!” she called out, waving to her supervisor to get his attention.
“Why did you turn my belt off, Murray?” Jeff growled, marching in her direction with fire in his eyes.
Ayla picked up her keys, phone, and bottle of water from inside the truck. “I have to go home. I’m really sorry, but my babysitter didn’t show up, and I have to go. Right now.”
Jeff gave her a hard stare. He had no children and had little sympathy for problems his employees had with their kids. “I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Can’t you see how much work we have left?”
“I know,” Ayla apologized, trying to slip past Jeff and get to the time clock so she could get going. “But I don’t have anybody to watch Preston. I have to go.”
“That’s a you problem. A personal problem. This is work. We pay you to be here. I’ll take this straight to Randy. You know I will,” Jeff warned. Randy was Jeff’s boss. He was much more sympathetic to family issues than Jeff, but ultimately Ayla knew she was putting her co-workers and supervisors in a bind. She hoped it wouldn’t cost her her job.
“I know. I’m really sorry. But I have to go.” Ayla squeezed herself between Jeff and a stack of boxes. She apologized to J.R., the guy who worked next to her, into whose lap some of her leftover work would surely fall.
J.R. was a workaholic, however, who picked up every scrap of overtime he could get his hands on in order to help him pay child support to two different women for his three kids.
“No problem, Ay, we got you covered,” J.R. offered. Jeff shot him a nasty glare.
Ayla clocked out and ran across the parking lot to her old red Toyota, saying a silent prayer that it would start. It had been making a weird knocking sound the past few days and been hesitant to start at times.
This morning, however, it fired right up, and she left the parking lot and joined the other morning commuters on the congested roads of Las Vegas.
With most of the traffic heading out of the suburbs and toward the freeways, Ayla made record time, pulling into her driveway just twelve minutes after clocking out. Desiree was standing next to her own car, waiting, while Preston kicked and chased a soccer ball around the front lawn.
“So sorry, Desiree. I’ll make it up to you, I promise!”
“Whatever,” Desiree replied, making no effort to mask her annoyance. “I have to go.”
Ayla’s roommate got in her car and sped out of the driveway, trying to make up for lost time.
Ayla immediately felt terrible. She tried to shake it off and pay attention to what really mattered for a moment.
“Hey, monkey,” Ayla called out to Preston, who picked up his soccer ball with both hands and punted it over Ayla’s car and into the neighbor’s yard.
“Go get that right now! And then let’s go have some breakfast. Mommy’s hungry,” Ayla said.
Preston half-skipped around the back of Ayla’s car, giving her a high five in passing, eschewing her offered hug. “Can you stay home with me today?” he asked as he disappeared to fetch his ball.
“No, buddy, I’m sorry, I have to work,” Ayla said. “Though I wish more than anything I could.”
“You’re always working,” Preston complained, trudging back toward the house. “I don’t want to go to stupid daycare. The only two boys my age just speak Spanish and I don’t want to play with the girls.”
Ayla was exasperated. Leaving work hadn’t gone well, Desiree was pissed at her, and Preston hated his daycare. Truth be told, she hated having to send him. She’d love nothing more than spending an early summer day with him at the splash pad at the park down the street or hanging out at the pool eating popsicles.
Unfortunately, however, none of those activities helped to pay the bills. To make matters worse, her day job— the one that just barely kept her from drowning in that ocean of bills— was mind-numbing drudgery.
She sat in a cubicle farm, answering calls for a bank from customers disgruntled with their credit cards. They needed a balance increase, despite being two months behind, or they wanted to dispute that six-dollar fast food meal from three weeks ago, even though it was charged at the same “restaurant” where they ate lunch five days a week, and always for the same amount. Or, in some cases, it seemed like they just wanted somebody to yell at and empty their entire arsenal of creative profanity upon.
One particularly memorable caller, a man whose name contained an incomprehensible, unpronounceable series of consonants with vowels added seemingly just for comic relief, became so agitated with Ayla for not waiving his annual fee that he stammered and sputtered before he settled on calling her a “cuntcock.” Ayla had been so taken aback that she politely asked him to repeat the insult, which got her a verbal warning from her supervisor. The customer screamed “I said cuntcock!” so loudly at her that when she held her headset up in the air above the cubicle dividers, co-workers three deep all around her could hear him.
Mostly, however, it was an interminable series of the same questions, over and over again, the monotony of which was broken only by customers telling her how “stupid” and “worthless” she must be to work in a call center.
This was not the life she envisioned for herself while getting straight A’s in high school and scoring near the top of her high school class on the SATs. That girl— the one she used to be— would be ashamed to know her, much less be her.
Dropping Preston off at daycare so she could sit in a cubicle for the next eight hours made Ayla want to vomit.
Her son stood at the door, holding it open for his mommy and smiling, and her heart melted. For a moment she considered calling in sick, but the fact that her most recent power bill came in one of those ugly fluorescent orange envelopes with “URGENT” stamped all over it motivated her to be a responsible adult, no matter how badly she didn’t want to.
“Okay, how about this. After I pick you up, we’ll go to Roberto’s for a quesadilla and then to Leatherby’s for ice cream,” Ayla asked Preston, who nodded enthusiastically. “And I think we can make some lemonade at daycare, too.”
Preston cocked his head sideways and gave her a confused look.
“There’s a saying, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. Have you ever heard that?” Her son had not, or if he had, he didn’t recall. “Lemons by themselves don’t taste very good, right? You can’t eat one
like an orange. But you can use them to make lemonade, which is yummy. Make sense?”
“We’re going to make lemonade at daycare today?” Preston asked.
“Not really,” Ayla explained. “What it means is that we’re going to take something that seems bad, in this case the boys at daycare not talking to you because you can’t speak Spanish, and turn it into something positive. Something good.”
Understanding flickered in Preston’s dark eyes, but he couldn’t make the complete connection in his six-year-old mind.
“You’re going to learn to speak Spanish. And then, maybe teach those boys English. I know once they get to know you, they’ll see how cool you are. And I bet they are, too. What do you think?”
“Spanish seems really hard,” Preston countered. “But I could try.”
“Riding a bike seemed really hard at first, right? But now you ride with no hands and do tricks and everything.”
Preston grinned and nodded his head.
Once inside, Ayla rummaged through the pantry and the fridge for something she could fix for breakfast. In the freezer, she found half a box of frozen waffles, although she knew there was only enough syrup to make a batch for Preston.
He wolfed down his waffles while she nibbled at one dry one, using the remaining syrup on his plate to make it just palatable. She grabbed two sticks of her son’s string cheese to refuel after her shift at the shipping company and packed herself a sandwich to take to work.