Bastard's Baby: A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (Barone Crime Family) (Includes bonus novel Smash!)

by B. B. Hamel

  I got myself off, dreaming of my husband, my stepbrother, my biggest problem.

  * * *

  I hadn’t been to Dad’s office, not since Cindy’s company had bought his. It was a huge downtown thing, a sprawling glass enclosure with lots of natural lighting, art installations, and an open office setting.

  It was everything the modern tech company was supposed to be and more. People walked around in casual clothing, barely looking older than I was, and everyone seemed thrilled to be there. I saw guys and girls sitting on beanbag chairs in conference rooms, eating free food in a huge cafeteria, even working out in the gym. As I wandered around, nobody bothered me, either because I looked like I fit in or because people knew that I was Cindy’s stepdaughter.

  I showed up at the office an hour early and simply looked around. It was unbelievable that anyone could work in a place like that, but I was watching people do it, and happily. It was what contemporary work was supposed to be, the total opposite of the drab office setting. There were colors and lights and lightness, and people didn’t seem so beaten down, so tired of life like they did in other offices.

  As I stood in front of an enormous painting of children playing baseball, I heard heels clacking on the marble floor, coming toward me. As far as I could tell, most women wore flats and casual clothes, and so I was a little surprised to hear heels. I looked up and that was when I saw her.

  Madison was walking toward me. I knew she would scoop me up eventually and take me to Cindy, but still. I had to take deep, calm breaths to keep from screaming at the horrible bitch.

  She was exactly how I remembered her: prim, uptight, and serious. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, neat bun, and she wore stylish and expensive clothes. She smiled but without warmth, without joy. I wondered how she fit in with everyone else and realized that she probably didn’t.

  “Alexa,” she said, stopping in front of me. “I’m Madison, Cindy’s assistant.”

  “I know,” I said. “I remember you from the benefit.”

  She looked at me for a second. “Yes, I saw you there. That’s right.”

  We shook hands, though I didn’t want to touch her one bit. I wanted to throw her through a window, actually, and I realized that I needed to reign myself in. It wasn’t the time to make a move, not just yet.

  I had a plan. It relied on surprise and intimidation, but I thought I could make it work.

  “Come this way,” she said. “I’ll take you to Cindy’s office.”

  We walked down the hall together then, and Madison gave me a quick little tour of everything we passed. She was quick and efficient, if not a little curt, and I had to admit that I admired that a little bit. So many women worked to act like men in the workplace, but Madison simply seemed like she was acting like herself. She wasn’t worried about coming off as a bitch or something like that. Cindy was probably the same way.

  We got into the elevator and she hit the button for the sixth floor. “Cindy’s office is actually just off the elevator,” she said as we sped upward.

  “That’s perfect,” I said, turning toward her. It was time to make my move, and I knew it. “Because I have something I want to say.”

  She raised and eyebrow and smiled. “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I know it’s you, Madison. The pictures, the blackmail.” I paused, letting that sink in. “I know it’s you.”

  Her face slowly fell. It went from passive and amused to surprised in half a second flat. “W-what are you talking about?” she stammered.

  “We found your source, the waitress. She told us it’s you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I glanced at the elevator’s display. We were half a floor away.

  “Meet me in the parking garage at three. Second level, B row.”

  “What?” she said, completely off guard. I could tell she was shaken.

  “Meet me there or your job is finished.”

  The elevator reached the floor with a ding and the doors opened up.

  Madison stared at me for a second and then quickly got herself together. “Well,” she said, “right this way.”

  I followed her out and down a short hallway. Her desk was set up outside a large glass door. Inside I could see Cindy sitting at her desk. She waved me inside, smiling, though she was on the phone.

  “See you later, Madison,” I said sweetly.

  She didn’t respond, simply sat down at her desk as I pushed into Cindy’s office.

  I had to hand it to the girl. I had dropped a bombshell on her out of nowhere, and she had gotten herself together pretty fast. I suspected she would show up at the parking garage; she wasn’t stupid. But I had to be careful of her.

  I didn’t know what surprises she might have in store for me.

  * * *

  Lunch was fine. We ate at an expensive restaurant, and Cindy mostly talked about her job. I asked her questions to keep her going, not really interested in talking much myself.

  I was pretty distracted. I kept thinking about Madison and began to wonder if I had made a mistake not confronting her with everything right there in the elevator. I could have pulled the emergency stop switch or something like that.

  Lunch dragged on and on, but finally we left the restaurant at a bit past two. Cindy headed back to her office, and I took a short walk around downtown, killing time, letting my thoughts roam.

  I kept coming back to Cole’s face and the way he touched me over and over. Even with the terrifying meeting ahead of me, I couldn’t stop thinking about Cole and his cocky swagger. Everything about him was frustrating but incredible, this heady mix of desire and lust and everything forbidden. Our potential divorce had basically slipped my mind, I realized with a start.

  For the past year, I had done nothing but worry about that divorce. I had obsessed and thought about how much better my life could be if I didn’t have an absent husband weighing down my conscience. And suddenly he was back, but the divorce had slowly melted from my mind.

  That was what he did to me. He made me forget what I wanted, replaced it with something else. Because for the past few weeks, ever since he had come home, what I really wanted was him. Not a divorce, nothing like that. Just him.

  Eventually I found myself wandering into the parking structure outside Cindy’s workplace. I checked my watch: five minutes early. I quickly found the spot and leaned up against a pillar, waiting.

  Madison was right on time. She walked out of the elevators and over toward me, her heels clacking on the concrete. Her face was hard and serious. There were only a few cars parked near us, which meant the place had an eerie, empty feeling.

  Exactly what I wanted.

  “Hello, Madison,” I said sweetly.

  “What do you want?” she snapped.

  I smiled and relished in her discomfort. “I wanted to talk to you about our little problem.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “Come on, Madison, really? Denial? That’s pretty weak.”

  She looked flustered, frowning. “I’m, well, I just, I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Blackmail is serious, Madison. It’s a crime. You can go to jail for this.”

  I actually wasn’t sure if that was right or not, but I didn’t care. The threat of jail had the desired effect, though. Madison looked even more agitated, even more confused.

  “What do you want from me?” she said.

  “I want you to stop. I want you to destroy the pictures you bought from Marla, and I want you to leave me and Cole alone.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said again.

  “Marla, the waitress. We met her, you know. She told us that it was you who paid for the pictures.”

  “Marla,” she whispered.

  “Yes, Madison. We found her, and she told us everything. We have it all on tape. I’ve giving you an out here, letting you make up for the pain you’ve already caused. If
you destroy the images and back off, we won’t go to the police with what we know.”

  As I spoke, Madison’s face slowly drained of all color.

  “Marla has proof, you know—emails from you.” I was bluffing, but I figured that was probably true.

  And it paid off, because as soon as I said that she had emails, Madison burst out into tears.

  I gaped at her as she stood there and sobbed. I had no clue what to do. She was my blackmailer and I wanted to hurt her, but I felt terrible that this poor girl was sobbing like an idiot in public.

  “Okay,” I said awkwardly. “Please stop crying.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. It wasn’t my idea.” She was sobbing, and I could barely understand her.

  “Okay, wow, you have to calm down,” I said.

  “Please don’t send me to jail.”

  It was almost funny. This girl had caused me so much stress and pain, so much worry, and there she was crying her eyes out like a child, blubbering about jail. All I had needed to do was threaten her a little bit, bluff a little bit, and she totally broke.

  Which was actually strange. If she were blackmailing me, you’d think she would have prepared herself for this. And yet there she was, sobbing into her hands.

  “Okay,” I said, reaching into my bag. “Here, take these.” I handed her some tissues.

  She took them and blew her nose. “Thanks.”

  “You’re not going to jail. Please calm down.”

  She took deep breaths, tears running down her face. “I’m not?”

  “If you stop crying you won’t.”

  She nodded, visibly trying to pull herself together. I stood there watching, totally baffled, as she slowly stopped sobbing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “It really wasn’t.”

  I sighed. “Okay, Madison. Who was it then?”

  “My boyfriend, Trent Hanger.”

  I recognized the name, but it took a second before it really sank in. When it did, though, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

  Trent was the name of Cole’s big nemesis, the same guy he was going to be fighting soon.

  I gaped at her. “Did you say Trent?”

  “Yes,” she sniffled.

  “MMA fighter Trent?”

  She nodded, dabbing at her eyes.

  I shook my head, completely mystified. “Tell me everything. And start with how the fuck you know Trent.”

  Slowly she began to talk, and she told me the most improbably story I had ever heard in my life.

  Madison used to work for Ultimate Fighter Championship, or UFC, the most famous MMA league in the United States. She lived in Las Vegas back then and was working her way up in the company as a member of the public relations group.

  As a PR person, she worked with the fighters constantly. That was how she met Trent. At first, she said, she hated Trent, but slowly she fell in love with him. Apparently he was persistent, and although I wasn’t interested in the details of their courtship, she decided to tell me way too many anyway.

  Finally, though, she and Trent got together. Back then, she had no clue who I was or who Cole was, and she had no plans to ever bother us. But things had changed when she had applied for an internship at Cindy’s company a few months ago.

  “I never thought I’d get it,” Madison said. “But I did, and Trent agreed to move to the Bay area with me. I guess Cindy liked me, because after a month of the internship, she fired her old personal assistant and hired me.”

  I listened as she talked about the nightmares of that job and how stressful it had been when the companies had merged. She said she wasn’t really that ambitious, but Cindy was teaching her a lot.

  The blackmail happened by accident. Madison had hired Marla to take some pictures of the event, mostly of Cindy’s family just in case any gossip magazines wanted a scoop about the scandalous company marriage. She said she was in the habit of doing that just to make some cash on the side, another one of Trent’s ideas. She said she never expected to find what she found.

  “Actually,” she said, “it wasn’t me that figured it out. When Marla gave me the pictures, I didn’t think anything of them at first. Trent found them buried in a pile of a bunch of boring other shots.”

  “And that was when it happened?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Trent knew what it was right away. He recognized Cole and he knew all about the drama, of course. He actually is a good listener.”

  “Okay, Madison,” I said, annoyed. “I don’t care if Trent is a good listener.”

  “Sorry. After that, he took the pictures and said he knew what to do with them. I thought he was going to sell them to some magazine, not blackmail you. Anyway, he made me go back to Marla and get more.”

  “So you didn’t know we were being blackmailed.”

  She shook her head. “No! No, I swear.”

  I stared at her for a long time. The story seemed incredibly improbable, but it made a kind of sense. She was lying, of course, at least according to Marla’s story, but it was amazing that Trent and Cole would end up so closely linked. It was a near miracle, but it had happened.

  “Madison,” I said, “I need you to get the pictures back for me.”

  She looked at me for a second and then burst out crying again. “I can’t!” she wailed.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, patting her back. “Why not?”

  “Trent dumped me!”

  I almost laughed out loud. The poor, pathetic girl. She clearly had been used by Trent, and the second he got what he needed, he had moved on.

  It was disappointing. I had been so close, but apparently I was still too far away. The real blackmailer, the final piece of the puzzle, was Trent himself.

  As Madison slowly stopped sobbing, I knew that my part in the whole thing was coming to a close. I knew that once I told Cole about Trent, he would lose his shit and probably try to kill the guy.

  But once I convinced him not to do something stupid, I knew he’d take care of it. Even though it seemed so insane and impossible, I knew Cole would come out on top.

  As I comforted Madison, I knew it was almost finished.

  Finally, after what felt like hours, Madison got herself together. She told me that she was sorry and never meant for any of it to happen, but it didn’t matter. I felt bad enough for the pathetic girl to forgive her anyway.

  I walked her to the elevator and watched her get in.

  “I’m sorry again,” she said.

  “Forget it. I’ll take care of Trent.”

  “Tell him I said he’s a fucking piece of human shit.”

  I nodded. “Okay.”

  The elevator doors shut.

  I turned and walked back toward downtown. My heart was racing in my chest. I didn’t want to tell Cole, but I knew I had to.

  I was afraid, but I was excited. It was finally coming to an end.

  16

  Cole

  As the fight drew nearer, my life became more and more focused. That was how it always happened. The things that swirled around my life and caused me stress, and even the things that I enjoyed, they all were swept aside as I prepared myself.

  MMA fights didn’t last very long. Because of that, people tended to think that they didn’t take much effort. Sure, you were normally in the ring for less than a half hour, sometimes only minutes.

  But the time spent in the ring was the most brutal and intense moments imaginable. You were constantly fighting for your life, trying to defeat your opponent. That person across from you was as trained to fight as you were, and he wanted to beat you into unconsciousness or hurt you until you begged him to stop.

  It was a bloody frenzy, a terrifying frenzy, and I loved it.

  But because of that, I had to prepare myself. The weeks leading up to a fight were spent training my body, but also my mind. I would meditate on the fight, watch film of the guy I was going to be up against, prepare my strategy. I
would plan and think and try to keep myself in the right frame of mind.

  Since the Trent fight was coming up fast, I had to do all of my intensive preparations that much faster. I hated to rush everything, but I had no other choice. My only solace was knowing that Trent was rushing his preparations. More than that, he didn’t have any film of me fighting, while I had film of every one of Trent’s matches since I was last in the ring with him.

  And he had gotten much, much stronger since then.

  I remembered a relatively weak guy that was prone to fits of rage. He used to love to stand up and throw punches. But the guy Trent had turned into was much more lethal, much more controlled. He didn’t lose his temper a single time, and he picked his opponents apart with smart and well-timed attacks.

  He’d gotten a lot better, but so had I. Back before I left for Thailand, I was known as a Judo fighter, a submission guy. I was good at getting my opponents onto the ground and getting them into submission holds, forcing them to give up before I broke their bones or choked them out.

  In Thailand, though, I had gotten much stronger. Muay Thai fighting was all about throwing punches and kicks. Trent knew the sort of stuff I’d learned over there, but he had never actually watched me practice it. As far as he knew, I was still that same Judo guy he remembered.

  That fact changed my game plan. That plus a hundred other factors went into my planning and made my head spin.

  Which was why I didn’t even notice when Alexa walked down into the basement. I was too deep in my own head, envisioning the fight, going over my moves, as I finished my sit-up reps.

  “Hey,” she said, yanking me out of my daze.

  I looked up at her. She was sitting on the bench press machine, her legs crossed. She was leaning back on her hands, making her breasts jut out from her chest. I couldn’t help but look up and down at her body.

  I hadn’t seen her much in the last two days. As far as I knew, it was Tuesday, but I wasn’t keeping good track.