by Nicole Snow
Baby Fever Bride
A Billionaire Romance
Nicole Snow
Ice Lips Press
Contents
Copyright
Description
1. Tick-Tock (Penny)
2. Ninety-Nine Problems (Hayden)
3. When Opportunity Knocks (Penny)
4. Quid Pro Quo (Hayden)
5. Signed in Gold (Penny)
6. Honeymoon From Hell (Hayden)
7. Dancing Around It (Penny)
8. A Hundred Burdens (Hayden)
9. Heart to Heart (Penny)
10. Family Matters (Hayden)
11. Oh, God (Penny)
12. Over the Cliff (Hayden)
13. Alone (Penny)
14. Going, Going, Gone (Hayden)
15. No More Make Believe (Penny)
Prince With Benefits
Copyright
Description
1. Tripped Up (Erin)
2. Grown Up (Silas)
3. Make Believe (Erin)
4. Terms (Silas)
5. Her Majesty (Erin)
6. Once in a Lifetime (Silas)
7. Royal Pain (Erin)
8. Fire in the Night (Silas)
9. Like a Dream (Erin)
10. With Bated Breath (Silas)
11. Open Revery (Erin)
12. Public Eye (Silas)
13. Royal Interruption (Erin)
14. Melting Point (Silas)
15. Royally Ever After (Erin)
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Content copyright © Nicole Snow. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America.
First published in January, 2017.
Disclaimer: The following ebook is a work of fiction. Any resemblance characters in this story may have to real people is only coincidental.
Please respect this author's hard work! No section of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. Exception for brief quotations used in reviews or promotions. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Thanks!
Cover Design – Kevin McGrath – Kevin Does Art. Photo by Allan Spiers Photography.
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Note: This special edition includes the complete billionaire royal romance novel, Prince With Benefits. Baby Fever Bride ends about halfway through. Enjoy!
Description
I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR LOVE. I NEED A BABY NOW...
PENNY
My biological clock just exploded.
Eighteen months. That's how long I have to make a baby happen before it becomes one more broken dream.
Fate has a sick sense of humor, though. Its name is Hayden Shaw.
Yes, the Hayden Shaw. Billionaire developer, scandalously gorgeous, his hard-headed ego only eclipsed by his enormous...reputation.
The man who has everything except one missing piece.
He needs a bride to fool the world. I need a baby. Hello, first class donor material.
It's simple business. Strictly professional. A no nonsense, pretend-my-panties-aren't-melting trade.
Love isn't in the fine print. No, I don't care how many times I have to stop swooning when I'm in his arms, locked in his kiss, smiling like we're meant to be for the cameras.
Simple, I said, remember? Yeah. Who the hell am I kidding?
HAYDEN
My new wife is completely insane. The spitfire who just agreed to play pretend thinks we're doing this baby thing in a lab, without ending up between the sheets.
Too bad I see right through it whenever she says her favorite line. Strictly professional? Please.
Too bad I taste how bad she wants it when we're giving the press something to talk about, lips tangled together like there's no tomorrow.
Too damned bad she's perfection itself, and 'professional' went out the window the second she stormed into my life.
She's also my last chance at stopping a scheme to steal the family fortune, turning my riches to rags.
But I'm Hayden Shaw. I'm in control. I don't back down. Ms. Naughty and Nice will never, ever know how bad I'm twisted up in our chase.
This isn't Cinderella, and I'm no Prince. Soon, I'll show Penny this isn't all make believe. Consummating this marriage is about to get very real...
1
Tick-Tock (Penny)
It's only ten o'clock in the morning, and I'm completely boned.
No, not in the way I want to be. There's nothing handsome, alpha, or inked about the middle aged doctor rattling off my lab results, and they're not pretty.
I'm sitting in his office, trying to listen to what he's saying, before I ask if there's been a horrible screw up.
Wishful thinking. Dr. Potter, a thin balding man who can't stop giving me the most sympathetic look in the world, doesn't make mistakes.
“Just to confirm, we ran your blood test three times before reporting the results to the CDC, as required under Federal law. There's no mistaking it.” He holds a finger up, as if he's read my mind. “I'm sincerely sorry to deliver the bad news, Ms. Silvers. The fever and sweats you've been complaining about should have already diminished. They won't be back. As for the long-term consequences –“
He stops when I choke up. Long-term...that's really what he wants to call it?
He's just told me my blood test came back positive for the fucking Zeno virus. I'm never going to be a mom.
Not unless I get pregnant next month, which seems about as likely as the wiry old doctor ripping off his face and revealing an Adonis underneath. One who'll wink at me and volunteer to be a donor.
Yeah, nobody's that lucky. And if there's anything I'm sure about today, it's my luck running out.
It's my fault for taking that humanitarian trip to Cuba, where one bad mosquito bite was waiting to change my life forever. I can feel the spot under my elbow where the hot red welt used to be. Biting my lip, I reach down and scratch it, even though there's nothing there anymore.
Hot blood races through my cheeks. I'm shaking. Sixty seconds away from breaking down.
Another embarrassment I don't need while I'm glued to this chair, unable to put as many miles as I can between myself and this hellish consultation.
“Ms. Silvers, please...it's going to be all right,” he says in his best dad voice, reaching over, pressing a reassuring hand down on my shoulder. It's not helping. “If you'll allow me, I'd like to review the positives in your situation: infertility is the only clinically known side effect of Zeno syndrome. You won't suffer anything more dire. Plus everything I've read in the journals lately sounds promising. They're working on a treatment. There's a real chance Zeno induced infertility may be reversible with good time, if the research pays off.”
If? Until now, I've held in the tears. Now, they're coming, wet and ugly and full of angst.
“Easy for you to say!” I sputter. “I never should've taken that trip. I wouldn't have even thought about it if I'd known it meant giving up my chances to ever be a mom. God, if I'd just stuck to Miami for the beaches, gave myself a normal getaway like most people...”
“No. You can't beat yourself up. Besides, Zeno has been working its way into our coastal communities, Ms. Silvers. The CDC report on my desk says as much. A hundred cases in Florida this week alone.” He's still rubbing my shoulder, as if the most boring, detached man in the world can comfort me. “Listen, if you'd like, we can explore what the university has to offer in terms of egg preservation. There's no guarantees, of course, but it's entirely possible –“
“That what?” My voice shakes. “I'll magically find a way to pay a bunch of quacks to stab me with needles, and then pay them ten times more to keep my unborn children in test tubes? I'm a secretary for a third rate company, Doctor. I make fifteen bucks an hour. You might as well tell me I'm about to meet Mr. Right when I walk out this door, have him propose tomorrow, and knock me up by next Friday.”
Potter looks nervously at the wall. His hand drifts off me. Well, at least I'm not the only one here who's embarrassed, not that it's much satisfaction.
He clears his throat, and folds his hands, leaning toward me over the desk. It takes me a second to realize he's eyeing the medical degree on the wall behind me. Okay, maybe I regret throwing the quack word around in front of him. I'm sure he'll forgive me.
“You do have eighteen months before the full effects of Zeno in your reproductive system make the odds of conceiving virtually zero.”
A year and a half. Lovely.
Not even enough time to build up a serious relationship from coffee dates or – God forbid – Tinder. Much less rest assured I've really met the one, the man I want to have a baby with.
And that's assuming I'd have better prospects than the usual idiots I've met before. Like the boy a couple weeks ago, who showed up late to our dinner at an overpriced French place, bearing gifts. Gifts, in this case, being the cheap purple dildo he buried in a bouquet of plastic roses.
It takes real talent to embarrass a girl in public, plus insult her intelligence in one go.
I'm shaking my head, pushing away date nights I wish I could forget, holding in the verbal sting I want to unleash on the entire world, using the doctor as a proxy.
But it isn't his fault, or his problem. Dr. Potter isn't here to listen to my disasters in dating, or fix my non-existent sex life.
He's a general practitioner, not a psychologist, and having an incurable tropical disease means he can't even help with that.
I want to leave. But there's another horrible question on the tip of my tongue. “So, does this virus affect anything else downstairs? Like my chances of enjoying...you know.”
As if sex should even be on the radar. I've been celibate for so long it shouldn't matter, twenty-three years. Maybe the disease will give me one more reason to keep my V-card.
Dr. Oblivious takes a few seconds to get what I mean. Then his eyebrows shift up. “Uh, no, not at all. You're free to involve yourself with any partner using the usual precautions. There's no risk of human-to-human transmission, Ms. Silvers. Your partners can't catch the disease unless they walk through the wrong mosquito-infested areas at the wrong time, just as you did, and the odds of that happening are exceedingly low.”
Low. Yeah, just like me.
Lucky, lucky me, with my dead love life, boring job, and distant family. Add shattered dreams to the list.
There's nothing to celebrate here. The only place I ever beat the odds was contracting a rare Caribbean virus, destroying my future without even knowing it at first bite.
Why couldn't it have been the lottery instead?
I need to get out of here. I just want to go back to work, punch in my last few hours, and then go home and pull the blanket over my head.
When I'm in my cocoon, I can pretend I never ignored all the half-assed CDC warnings to have a great time in an amazing country that's just opened up to Americans again. I can pretend my junk hasn't just been trashed by a thumb-sized vampire bite, that I'm going to get my shit together, and be an amazing wife and mother whenever the right boy comes along and proves to me he's a man. I can pretend I still have time, more than eighteen months before the sword falls, obliterating the future I always imagined.
And I can pretend the holidays aren't coming, that I won't cry over the dinner table when mom taps my foot with her cane, and asks me why the hell I haven't found myself a boyfriend yet.
“Ms. Silvers?”
“Jesus, just call me Penny, Doctor! That's what everybody else says,” I tell him, giving into the sarcasm pulling me deep into the black pit in my gut. “I read you loud and clear. I get how screwed I am. There's nothing you can do for me, right? Can we be done?”
He doesn't say anything, just turns his face to the small tablet in his hands, and begins scrawling a sloppy signature with his finger. A second later, he hits a button, and the device prints out a tiny prescription slip, which he tears off and hands to me.
“This will make you feel better in the interim,” he says. “Simple pain relievers, on the off chance your fever returns. Until then, it should help minimize your discomfort from our talk today. While your viral load is dropping to acceptable levels, it could be lower. Please be sure to rest, and drink plenty of water.”
If only guzzling water like a desert explorer would flush it all out of my system. I'd drink Lake Michigan dry. It's visible outside his window, behind the Chicago skyline, rippling in grey and gloomy November shadows.
“Thanks,” I mutter, crinkling the paper in my fist as the doctor stands, ushering me out the door.
If I were him, I'd be relieved to see the last of me, too. I'm sure I'm about to become the latest statistic in a medical journal, one more faceless person tracked by the outbreak that's been making inroads in the country thanks to people like me. I should be grateful tropical mosquitoes are the only way it spreads, and so far they haven't found any in the Midwest that can carry it.
At least I won't have to worry about infecting anybody else. Small comfort when I'm out the door, heading for the train so I can get across town, back to the office. Frankly, no one else deserves to have this curse inflicted on them if they can avoid it.
But I'm not thinking about them, the lucky ones. I'm being selfish, focusing on myself, and quietly hating every healthy woman in America who will never have to worry about their biological clock going up in a fireball.
The worst day of my life gets predictably worse.
By afternoon, my right heel comes apart. I'm distracted, lost in my own head, mourning the babies I'll never hold in my arms because there's not enough time to make them happen. I don't see the small break in the marble floor that trips me, threatens to send me crashing down face first, or worse.
It's a small miracle I catch myself against the banister overlooking the twenty second floor of the Shaw Glass Tower where I work. I just wanted some fresh air and people watching, staring down at the ants in the lobby, anything to take my mind off the bad news, not to mention the mountain of work I still have left for today's clients at Franklin, Harrison, and Hitch.
Spinning, I grip the banister tightly, catching myself before I go over it. I'm crushed by the news about my childless future, but I'm not suicidal.
The pivot turns the small fissure cutting through my heel into a break. I see the end snap off, and go rolling across the floor, coming to a stop against the wall. I swear, walk over, and throw it into my pocket. At least I'm able to hide the damage for the rest of the afternoon, screening calls for the firm, stuffing envelopes, and responding to last minute requests when Mr. Franklin himself walks up and bangs his fist on my desk.
I'm so distracted, I've lost track of time.
“Hey, you're twenty minutes past quitting time. Go home and get some rest, Penny.” My normally gruff boss flashes me a softer look, before he turns around and heads back into his office. “Looks like you need it.”
Ugh. Finding out I'm Zeno positive is the last thing I need. The second to last is sympathy from a sixty year old partner, especially one whose manners typically match his bulldog appearance. If Mr. Franklin sees how worn down I am, then I must really look like hell.
I gather my things and shut down my computer, dropping a few last envelopes in the mail on the way out. I'm careful heading out onto the windy streets, wrapping my coat tight against the late autumn chill.
I can't wait to get home, curl up on the couch with my cat, Murphy, and watch something that will put Zeno and the babies I'll never have far, far away. Then it hits me that the overfed little lion I call
my pet will probably be the only baby I ever have.
I'm wiping my eyes, waiting for the train, trying to hide the hurt. My luck doesn't improve when the doors slide open. Of course, it's more crowded than usual for rush hour.
I'm so angry on the way in, I only catch a glimpse of the man in the corner, but I feel his eyes. They're on me, hard and searching, glued to my back until the inevitable chill courses up my spine. I tuck myself deeper in the standing crowd, gripping the steel pole, hiding from his gaze.
I don't notice him again until he's right behind me. He wastes no time. His fingers graze the back of my coat, just above my butt.
I've always been creeped out by the pervs I've run into in the city's transit system, but they've never scared me like this man.
I'm also pissed. I spin around and shoot him a death glare, lashing out with my fear.
“What the fuck do you think you're doing?” I turn my nose up. I'm not sorry about it when I see him.
He's probably twice my age. Unshaven. Liquor rolls off his breath when he cracks a half-toothless grin. My hand forms a fist that wants to wipe it off his disgusting face.
“Thought you looked lonely, baby. It's a full house here today. Come a little closer. Let's be friends. You're cold, and I've got all the fucking warmth you're ever gonna need.”
His hand reaches for my wrist. Now, I'm really worried.
Run of the mill pervs aren't this persistent. I don't have time to think, or enough space to punch, kick, or scream. I'm stunned by his aggressive, pawing hands. He catches me around the waist, and pulls me against a tiny open space in the wall, away from the steel pole I'd been hanging onto for my life.
Shit. I don't know what to do. I need to make up my mind fast.
This man could be the city's next serial killer for all I know. He's already eyeballing the door, like he's ready to drag me off, into the unknown, threatening to make my crap day so much worse.