Stockholm Syndromance: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 4)

by Ada Scott

  Still a Bad Boy #3.5

  Please note: This ebook is a special limited edition of ‘Stockholm Syndromance’ that includes both the third in the series ‘The F King’ (Still a Bad Boy #3) as well as a bonus short story previously exclusively available to Ada Scott newsletter subscribers (Still a Bad Boy #3.5).

  Sarina

  I’d been apprehensive when Jace relocated us to Port Magnus to establish Ryan in a new lab. Some of my worst memories were from here.

  Still, as the months wore on, I’d eased into it. I hadn’t lived here for very long and it was a big city. The odds were against running into anybody that knew me, let alone recognized me, were slim.

  The little bump in my belly had announced its pending arrival with projectile vomiting that had settled down to really weird cravings. I was only now starting to feel like myself again.

  Kendall and Skylar, Jace and Austin’s other halves, told me to enjoy it while I could, before the “bundle of joy” started sitting on my bladder. Today was one of those days where my willpower couldn’t resist one of what I hoped was my last pregnancy cravings.

  I woke up and all I wanted was cookie dough. Chocolate chip cookie dough, to be precise.

  With the precious commodity tucked under my arm, I was halfway to the checkout when the universe showed me that even slim odds can come to pass in such a big place. Out of everybody that could have spotted me, this was the last I would have wanted.

  I recognized the voice immediately, even though it didn’t have a drunken slur. James Salter. The worst of my foster parents.

  “Sarina?”

  Slowly, with narrowed eyes, I turned, ready for the threat of a fight he always carried around him like a black aura. Pregnant or not, I wasn’t the defenceless girl I had been when he last saw me, not to mention the bodyguards hovering at a respectful distance.

  I was met with a sight that left me wondering if I’d walked into the twilight zone on my way to the supermarket. It was James Salter, but he’d changed even more than I had.

  He was never what you would have called sculpted from granite, but it was always obvious that under that beer gut was enough muscle to put everybody around him on edge. Now, though, he had really packed on the pounds. Especially in the… well, breasts.

  His chest was definitely out of proportion to the rest of him, and the way he carried himself was all different. The sneering test-me-if-you-dare look was gone, he was practically shuffling from foot to foot and hugging himself with uncertainty as he stood there in front of the ice cream section.

  “James,” I said, warily.

  “It is you! My gosh! Look at you, all grown up! So pretty!”

  “Right.”

  His expression fell a little. “I guess you’re still angry with me.”

  “You think?”

  He walked over to me and my eyes narrowed again, but he held his hands up defensively. “Don’t worry. I… I just wanted to apologize. I’m so sorry for the way I acted. Can you forgive me?”

  I looked around to see if I was on some kind of candid-camera style reality show. There were no cameras and no zany host evident, so I turned back to James.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” James almost wailed. “My doctors say it’s almost like I’m pounding back a bottle of estrogen pills every day, but I’m not! They have no idea where it’s all coming from. I’m very careful with what I eat, but no matter what my levels just keep on going up.”

  “When did all this happen?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I started noticing it about five months ago or something. Oh my gosh! You’re pregnant!”

  James reached out as if he was going to caress my belly but I leapt back the same way I would if a decomposing hand had grasped at me out of a grave. This was too surreal.

  Then it hit me. What was it Ryan had said when I first told him about that night with James and his wife? That it sounded like James should get in touch with his feminine side? Ryan had asked me for James’ name when we moved here and I told him it had all happened in Port Magnus.

  I didn’t think anything of it at the time… but now?

  “Don’t touch me!” I said a little above a harsh whisper.

  Wet patches appeared on James’ shirt. “Oh God I’m lactating again! Please, Sarina, I need you to forgive me!”

  James wasn’t making any effort to control his volume, and he was starting to draw attention to us. That was the last thing I wanted.

  “OK! OK! I forgive you, but listen to me.” I stepped closer before the bodyguards shot him or something. “You got off easy. If you tell anybody you saw me, things will get a lot worse for you. You didn’t see me today, and if you see me again… you don’t know me.”

  James held up his hands again. “OK. I understand. Thank you. I just want to get some ice cream.” He looked down at the cookie dough under my arm. “Cottage Indulgence. Good brand.”

  I looked down at the cookie dough and then back up to him. “Yeah… well, goodbye James. I hope you… um… find a version of yourself that you and everybody else can be proud of.”

  “That’s very deep, Sarina, you always were a-”

  “Goodbye, James.”

  “Oh… right. OK. Goodbye.”

  I spun on my heel and made my way through the checkouts, glancing all around in case James was following me. I didn’t see him. Maybe deciding on what flavour of ice cream he wanted wasn’t straight forward.

  “That was weird as hell,” I whispered to my bump.

  If I was right about Ryan being behind that, somehow, then I was right about another thing too. James had gotten off comparatively easy.

  Those two guys who killed Ryan’s mother, they were living a nightmare now thanks to an IV drip of what Ryan called his interrogation serum from hell. He said their bodies would outlast their minds and when they could no longer make any sense of the horrors they were hallucinating, they could live out their days in a psychiatric ward, wearing much-needed diapers.

  “Yeah… he got off easy.”

  Sarina

  I drove through the gate as the guard gave me a polite wave. The house Jace had set us up in was slightly north-east of the center of the city, where he and Kendall lived. It was the heart of his operations, the safest place he could put us.

  He had wanted to give us a spot in his own building, but Ryan and I wanted somewhere with some land around it, especially when we found out I was pregnant. We wanted a back yard for our little one to play in.

  Well… this was one hell of a back yard. It was huge and, although it was riddled with motion sensors and patrolled by a security team, they were almost invisible.

  If the Highston Disaster, as the media were calling it, taught me anything, it was that life could turn on a dime. All the security made me feel as safe as possible under the circumstances that it wouldn’t turn on a dime in a terrible direction too easily again.

  When I walked through the front door, I was already halfway through opening the cookie dough packaging. The only thing on my mind was trying to come up with the best way to ask Ryan if he was poisoning my ex-foster-father with estrogen when he returned home from the lab.

  The resistance of the plastic between me and that forbidden chocolate-chippy goodness faded in importance as I saw a trail of rose petals on the floor. A tiny smile raised the corners of my mouth and I looked all around as if Ryan might jump out from behind a pot plant like a ninja.

  The rose petals started to scatter when a gust of wind came in through the open door, so I quickly closed it. With my eyes still darting from side to side at any likely hiding place Ryan might surprise me from, I slowly followed the trail of red, white and yellow petals upstairs.

  I passed the baby’s room, full of half-built furniture and as much gender-neutral stuff as we could get before we found out what we were having. From here, I could see that the petals led to our closed bedroom door.

  The handle was cool in my grip as I turned it and t
entatively pushed the door open. The smile that had been tiny when I entered the house grew broad when I saw Ryan there, standing next to our bed.

  “What are you doing home so early?” I asked.

  Ryan ignored the question. “There you are!”

  He closed the distance between us in a few quick steps and got down on one knee in front of me, pulling my shirt up. I held my arms out of the way, looking at him quizzically before he planted what must have been a million little kisses on my belly.

  It tickled and I couldn’t help but giggle and squirm. “Ahhh! I surrender. What’s going on?”

  Ryan took a deep breath and looked up at me for a moment. He opened his mouth and then the cookie dough caught his eye.

  “Oh really. I thought we were past this.”

  I looked at my hand and was unapologetically delighted to find that I’d subconsciously continued unwrapping it as I followed the trail of rose petals. “Speak for yourself. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

  I took a big bite, too big to comfortably maintain the smug look on my face that I wanted. I tried anyway, while my cheeks bulged and I chewed with determination.

  “Well… OK. Perhaps it’s for the best. This’ll give me a little… hey, hold on there!”

  Ryan grabbed me by the hips as I tried to walk around him into our room, keeping me standing where I was. A mouthful like this deserved the kind of concentration you could only get from a seated position. I furrowed my brows in frustration at him, but he didn’t let me go.

  “Sarina…” Ryan took another deep breath.

  For the first time I really saw the position he was in, on one knee, and my mind pieced it together with the trail of rose petals. My eyes bulged almost as much as my cheeks when he pulled a ring out of his pocket.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman, inside and out, that I’ve ever met. I know it wasn’t an easy decision for you to leave everything else behind and come into this unknown with me. Without you I feel like I’d have nothing but revenge… and when that’s all done?” He shrugged. “You give me life and a future outside of all that. You’ll be the mother of my children, and I want you to know how much I love you, how much I am committed to you, to us. Sarina Bell, Sarina Beckett, whoever you are… will you be Sarina Crewe? Will you marry me?”

  From the moment he started talking, I’d been frantically trying to chew my way through the cookie dough, but I didn’t have enough time. I was fanning my tears away with my free hand and still chewing when he reached for the cookie dough and brought it too his mouth.

  “Take your time,” he said, then took a much more conservative bite than I had.

  It wasn’t easy swallowing around the lump in my throat, but somehow I managed it. Even then I couldn’t get the words out that I wanted to. I couldn’t give him the poetic declaration of my love.

  How could I pinpoint why being proposed to made me feel like this when he already made me feel special every day? How could I tell him that my decision to leave everything else behind and go with him wasn’t as hard as he thought? He mattered more than anything else my life, because he loved me, respected me and needed me more than anything else in his life.

  I held my hand over my mouth and nodded, feeling those unfanned tears coming down my cheeks.

  “Yes?”

  I nodded again, trying to cram all those words that wouldn’t come out into a single gesture. Ryan slipped the ring on to my finger and stood up to hold me close. I let him bear some of my weight because I suddenly felt a little shaky in the knees.

  With his arms all around me, I gradually brought myself under control and wiped my eyes using his shirt. His lips were right there waiting for me when I turned up to look at him, and he buried his hand in the hair at the back of my head while giving me my first, wonderful, kiss as his fiancé.

  “You are going to get so lucky,” I said, when I could talk.

  “Oh I know,” he said, moving his hands to my ass and lifting me off the ground. “I’ve got a big day and night planned for us, but this next part would have been incredibly awkward if you had said no.”

  Ryan carried me towards our bed and I wrapped my legs around him. I kissed him again.

  “And what part is this?” I asked, already sure of the answer.

  “The consummation of the proposal, of course.”

  Ryan crawled us on to the bed and sank down on top of me. I gave a pleasurable little sound when he ground his hardening bulge between my legs and gave him another kiss.

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  I squirmed and gripped him tighter with my legs when he nuzzled my special little spot behind my ear. His hot breath on my skin was like a potent aphrodisiac for a few seconds before he pushed himself up to his knees.

  “Here, let me take that for you.”

  My eyes narrowed, but I let him relieve me of my cookie dough and rolled with him as he leaned over and put it on the bedside table. When he leaned back, he ran his hands up my sides under my shirt, breathing a sigh of appreciation.

  “I’ve missed this sexy fuckin’ body,” he said.

  “Since this morning?”

  “Always.”

  My shirt was pushed up until I raised my arms over my head to let it be removed completely and he threw it away. I worked at the buttons on Ryan’s shirt while he explored my newly-exposed skin with his fingertips, the curves of my breasts and lightly across my little bump.

  “Get that off,” I said, pushing each side of his shirt in the direction of his shoulders.

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  Even after all the time we’d spent sharing the same bed, I still felt a flutter in my belly and between my legs when he shrugged off his shirt. That lean body, those inked muscles, and that wicked intelligence hovering over it all behind those eyes of his. Yes fucking please.

  With both hands, I ran my fingers over his torso from chest to the waistline of his pants. I bit my lip harder with every bump, bump, bump along that washboard. Those muscles would be put to good use soon.

  I curled my fingers into his pants and arched my back so he could unhook my bra. The cool air on my skin where the underwire had been digging in was completely welcome, and I let go of my fiancé’s pants so that could be taken off as well.

  Ryan leaned forward again so our bodies pressed together. I loved the feel of him against me, the way his hard body simply fit with mine, the way my breasts squashed against him and the way his hot skin tantalized my nipples.

  I ran my fingers through his hair as we kissed ever more passionately and kept him as close to me as I could with my other hand on the small of his back and that unrelenting grip with my legs.

  My breath was quickly getting stolen, as much by Ryan’s wandering hands squeezing my ass and caressing my skin as by the deep kiss. By the time we parted lips again the bulge he’d ground against my sex was even more pronounced, and I was panting with need.

  I moved my hand from the small of his back to the front of his pants and stroked his thick cock through the material, gasping as a spark of pleasure jolted me between the legs. Ryan smirked and then bent down to lick and suck at my neck.

  The flick of his tongue and the prickly sensation of his stubble around his lips was too much for me and I whimpered loudly before he worked his way down towards my breasts. Reaching behind himself, he unhooked my heels from behind his back, so he could continue kissing down my body.

  I stroked his hair as he kissed along the upper slopes of my breast and then took one nipple into his mouth, gently squeezing the other breast and rubbing that nipple with his thumb. The diamond on my finger sparkled in the midst of his dark hair and butterflies put on a show in my stomach.

  Ryan moved lower and kissed my belly to soothe the butterfly uprising, before retreating further until I could barely run my fingers through his hair anymore. I felt a puff of warm air on my pussy and wriggled in the delicious knowledge of how close he was.

  “It should be illegal to have a pussy this pe
rfect,” he said.

  “So arrest me-”

  I gasped as the tip of his tongue touched my labia and he gave me a long, slow, lick from bottom to top. My toes wiggled against the covers on either side of him, and our eyes met.

  He was in complete control, but he already had me so excited that I was watching him through half-closed eyes and breathing hard through an ‘O’ shaped mouth. Ryan licked me again and then probed as deeply as he could.

  I could feel that dexterous little muscle inside me, exploring the part of my body that he knew even more intimately than I did. My juices were well and truly flowing by the time he pulled out to lick and suck at my labia again for a moment before concentrating on my clit.

  He was going to marry me! He was going to bring me to window-shattering orgasm and he was going to marry me! I tried to hold my head up, to watch him work his magic, but I couldn’t.

  I threw my head back against the pillow and moaned at the ceiling while Ryan’s masterful tongue flicked back and forth against my most sensitive spot. A current of pleasure, built from the intertwined rivers of love and lust, was starting to course through me.

  Errant dribbles of my natural lubricants occasionally tickled my skin as they almost escaped, only to be lapped up by Ryan and brought back to my clit, where they helped an already slippery tongue slide even easier. My hips started bucking too much and Ryan had to hold on to both of my thighs to keep my pussy just where he wanted it.

  Rational thoughts were starting to be drowned out by the approaching war drums of my orgasm, as well as my own whimpers and moans. The current was an electric thrum that circled my belly and throbbed in my clit as Ryan pushed me towards critical mass.

  The room was mere seconds from fading into a bright white light when I suddenly felt my climax retreating. It took me a moment to realize that Ryan had stopped just when I was about to detonate.

  I growled at him as he stood at the side of the bed and undid his pants, pushing them down and off to reveal that mind-bending cock of his, standing up straight and hard, ready to pound me into ecstatic oblivion. He smirked when he saw my eyes hungrily fixed on it.