My Surprise Secret Baby (Romance Box Set)

by Lexi Wilson

  “I,” I managed. “I- I love you, too.”

  It was the first time we had said the words directly to each other, and it felt good to have my feelings finally out in the open. I did love Josiah. I loved him more than anything, and I believed him when he said he felt the same way.

  I could be with him now, and I could still get my degree. As he pulled me close and pressed his lips to mine, all the fear about what people would think melted away.

  This was my life, and I was happy. I’d chosen it for myself, and nothing was going to change my mind.

  Chapter 30

  Two Weeks Later

  Josiah

  Laughter filled the air, and I was so happy, I felt like I could explode. It was the first time I had ever brought my family together in my apartment, and somehow, it all just felt right.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and Zia was able to return to school the following Monday, but we were going to celebrate our relationship with our families while we had the chance. Things were going to get busy for Zia, and I was going to launch into a new business plan myself, so I wanted to have the chance to talk to my family before things got serious.

  Zia had told her mother about the pregnancy, and I was glad to hear that her mother was also elated to find out she was going to be a grandmother. I knew Zia had been worried about that, but now she didn’t have to. She was free to be with me, free to be herself, and free to have the support of everyone in her life.

  And I was so proud of her. She had come a long way since I had first met her, and I couldn’t believe we had reached this point in our lives. She had brought me closer to my family again – and closer to my sister and dad than I had been in years. They were also thrilled with the news of the newest addition to the family, and the lively chatter that was happening around the table was like a breath of fresh air.

  I was determined to be the best father I could be to our baby, but I was struck with how close my family was becoming once more. My parents were flirting with each other, and my sister wasn’t drinking for once. Even Kira was present, laughing and talking with the rest of the families like she was a sister.

  She and Zia made up a week after the fight, and I was also glad for that. It made me feel good knowing she had that relationship back in her life, even if I didn’t get along with Kira all the time.

  We were doing our best to get to know each other, and I had a feeling the day would come when we would be friends. But, for now, we were willing to make it work for Zia’s sake. After all, Kira wanted to be the godmother of the baby, and Zia told her if she was going to be, then she had to get along with the baby’s whole family.

  “So what are you going to do now that you don’t have work?” Dad asked me. I hadn’t told him what my plans were yet, and I figured now was as good of a time as any to launch into them.

  “I’m going to start my own school,” I said. “I don’t have to work. I’ve got money through investments, but I want to be able to teach. I love teaching, and I know there are a lot of students who aren’t able to get into these bigger colleges, but who would love to get into something smaller. I’d not charge as much as the bigger names, and I’d cover a wide range of topics.”

  “Do you think you could take that on by yourself?” my mom asked.

  “At first, yes,” I said with a nod. “I’ll grow with time. This scandal didn’t blow up into anything too big, and I could probably even get a job at another university if I so choose, but I’m really not wanting to do that. I love teaching, but I hate dealing with the system. I would like to take a new approach to education and see where that takes me and the students I teach.”

  “Sounds like you have it all figured out,” Dad said. “I’m proud of you.”

  “If you need someone to help you with the business side of things, you know I have a degree in that,” Miriam said. “I would be more than happy to give you a discount on my services.”

  I laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

  “And what are you going to be doing, Zia?” Dad turned his attention to my girlfriend, and she smiled.

  “For now, I’m going to focus on getting through school and getting my biology degree. I’m not sure when the baby is born if I’m going to take the year off or not, but I do know that I’m going to stick with it until I get that paper telling the world that I managed. After that, I’m going to go into science,” she said.

  “You picked a smart one,” my dad turned to me with a grin. “I like her.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “I guess I like her a lot, too.”

  Everyone laughed, and the conversation continued. It all felt so natural to be together, and I knew having Zia there was making all the difference. She was the one who changed me, and I was proud to call her my own. But there was something else on my mind – something I wasn’t going to let go. I had invited everyone to my house for a reason that afternoon, and I was glad they were all able to make it.

  Not only did I want to be the best father there could be for my baby, but I wanted to be the best partner I could be for Zia, too. I knew she was happy with how things were going between us now, but I also knew that she wanted to be official.

  We might be officially together, but we were going to have a baby together, and I knew she wanted more than just being a girlfriend if we were going to be a family. And, the closer we got to each other and the more her belly started to grow, the more I agreed with her.

  I didn’t want to just be dating when the baby was born. I wanted to be more. I wanted the world to know that she was mine, and she was going to be mine forever. We had gone through hell together, and we had come out a stronger couple on the other side.

  I was proud of her for sticking by me through it all, and I was ready to prove to her that I wanted to have her by my side for the rest of her – and my – life. So, when there was a lull in the conversation, I rose from my seat and clinked my spoon against my glass.

  “Everyone, can I have your attention,” I said. The table fell silent as everyone turned to me. “There was a reason I wanted you to all be here today, and I think now is the right time to tell you what it is.”

  “I thought you just wanted to see us,” my mom said, and everyone laughed.

  “I did, but there’s more to it than that,” I replied. “I wanted you all here for a very special moment in our lives, and that moment has arrived.”

  Zia was looking at me inquisitively, but her face changed when I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small box. I got down on my knee next to her chair and took her hand, looking up into her eyes with a smile on my face.

  “Zia, you are the love of my life, and I know we went through a whirlwind of a relationship, but I know I love you more than anything. I am proud to be yours. Proud that you are the mother of my child. Proud that you and I are going to be together. But I want more. I don’t want to just be together because we say we are. I want the whole world to know that we are together when they look at us. Even when we aren’t physically standing side by side, I want to prove to the world you are mine,” I said.

  There were tears in her eyes, and there was silence around the table as I opened the box, revealing the ring inside.

  “Zia, will you marry me? Make me the happiest man in the world? Be my wife?” I asked.

  She was crying now, too hard to even manage to say anything. But, that didn’t stop her from nodding, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She held out her hand so I could slip the ring onto her finger, then she nearly fell out of the chair as she threw her arms around my neck.

  We shared a kiss right there next to the table while both families cheered. There were wet eyes all around the room as everyone applauded our engagement, but no one was happier than me and Zia.

  It was official. We weren’t just parents anymore.

  We were going to be married.

  Epilogue – Five Years Later

  Zia

  Cheers rang throughout the room, and I threw my hat in the air along
with the rest of the students. Graduation day had finally arrived, and I couldn’t have been happier.

  There were a lot of familiar faces in the audience, but it made me really happy to see both of my parents, along with both of my in-laws, sitting amongst the crowd. But, there were two faces I really wanted to see now that it was all over.

  My husband’s and my daughter’s.

  It had been a long five years, but I had finally made it through to graduation, and I was eager to start working. I had taken a year off when Jasmine was born, wanting to spend all my time being the best mother I could be for her during her first year of life, and I was so glad that I did.

  But after she turned a year old, I was eager to get back to school and finish my degree. I wanted that more than anything, and I wasn’t going to give up. Now that I had my credentials, I was so glad that I had stuck with it through everything.

  Jasmine and Josiah were waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, and they both wrapped me up in a hug as soon as I reached them. Josiah’s school had taken off, and it was growing by leaps and bounds. He was already incredibly successful, and I was proud of him for branching out and going out on his own.

  Now, I just had to choose the job I wanted to have, and I could start my own career. As a biologist, I had more options than I knew what to do with, and many of them were based right there in Chicago. I didn’t have to worry about working remotely or traveling, and I could spend as much time with Zia as I wanted.

  I never thought I could be so happy in my life, but everything had come together for me, and we had managed to stick together through the ups and downs of me being in college. Now I knew we would be able to stick together through whatever life had to throw our way.

  It wasn’t always going to be easy, but I had my family, and I was eager to prove to the world this is what I was meant to do with my life.

  “I’m so proud of you,” Josiah said as he kissed me. “I knew you could do it.”

  “Thank you, baby, I love you,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “You know what I think we should do now?” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think we need to go celebrate with ice cream,” he laughed.

  “Yay!” Jasmine shouted. “Ice cream!”

  I laughed, too. “I think you might be right.”

  He took my hand in his and gave it a squeeze, but I stole another kiss before we went to meet our families. Life had come together for both of us. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. It was so much better.

  And I was the happiest woman in the world.

  Quarterback’s Secret Baby

  Chapter 1

  Bama

  It was the last Saturday in January. And, in the world of football, that means only one thing.

  The Super Bowl was tomorrow.

  Yes, the Super Bowl. If football is your religion, the Super Bowl is your high mass, your most holy of all holies. In football, the Super Bowl is the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys all rolled into one. The game where one team in the whole NFL gets to be the world champions for the year.

  And in a huge, palatial penthouse suite on the top floor of the most exclusive hotel in Dallas, my team, the Rangers, were whooping it up before their biggest game.

  Carrying on the “religion” analogy, you could say I was part of the church choir: a cheerleader. We were all there, the cheerleaders, celebrating the end of the season with the guys. It was our place as the women who cheered the guys on to victory – or kept up the team spirit when they lost – to be part of the atmosphere. We were there to keep our mighty Rangers in a winning frame of mind for tomorrow.

  My name is Brianna Majors. People just call me Bama because – surprise – I was born and raised in Alabama. Rocket science, right?

  I went to school with an undeclared major until I finally settled on Liberal Arts, not finding anything else I really wanted to commit to, and graduated with that. Then, I had to figure out what to do with my degree and my life. And it just so happened that I was a cheerleader.

  I was a natural for the role. Looking at my big, bright, flashing smile, my cloud of golden-brown hair, and my figure – and boys looked at my figure a lot – anyone would think, “cheerleader.” And, that’s what I was, all the way through school high school and college until the day I graduated and didn’t have a clue what I’d do with myself next. That is, until I saw a call for open tryouts for the cheerleading squad of the Dallas Rangers.

  One train ticket to Texas and one year later, here I was, twenty-three years old and good enough at what I did to be the head cheerleader of the NFL team. I was living the dream of who knows how many girls all over the country.

  And now, here I was with my team; my best friend and fellow cheerleader Kira and the rest of our squad, in a fancy penthouse suite at a five-star hotel, celebrating a winning season that had taken us all the way to the Super Bowl and the biggest game of all that awaited us tomorrow.

  I should have been on top of the world, not just on top of Dallas, Texas. I should have been ecstatic.

  What I really was, frankly, was a bit drunk.

  We’d all been indulging a lot, as you’d expect for a group of people like us on such an occasion. The team was in high spirits. They could smell victory in the air. And why not? I asked myself. After all, you don’t go to the Super Bowl expecting to lose. You go to play hard and win. We were all looking forward to our starting quarterback making Disney World commercials after tomorrow.

  As Kira and I sat on one of the sofas in the penthouse, she with a beer and I with a bottle of some cocktail or other, we looked on and as the guys drank, laughed, and watched some movie full of chases and explosions on the big-screen TV. Everyone wolfed down the big spread of food from the buffet table and drank some more, and the guys huddled, canoodled, and flirted with the other cheerleaders.

  The Rangers were a great bunch of guys – great players, great athletes. But the truth about a football team is that they’re chosen for the shape they’re in and the way they play, not for the way they look. They were mostly not what you’d think of as pin-up or centerfold material. Oh, they were big enough and muscular enough, sure. And while I didn’t socialize with them a lot – we girls usually didn’t – I assumed some of them probably made good boyfriends. Or good bedmates, if you weren’t too picky.

  But, there were just a couple of them that I’d always found tempting.

  The most tempting one of them all, sitting at the bar with a huge glass mug of Long Island iced tea, was Barrett Porter.

  Just the mention of his name was enough to get my skin tingling, whether I was drunk or sober. Barrett Porter. Yum.

  I knew him about as much as the other girls on the squad did. What I mostly knew about Barrett Porter was that he could have his pick of women anywhere he went, cheerleaders or not, and he got around plenty. People talk, and all that. And from the looks of him, I had no doubt that all the talk was true. Barrett Porter was plenty to talk about.

  Barrett was a Most Valuable Player not only for his skills on the field, but for the way he made the team look, just by the way he looked. In the dictionary, every word that means “sexy” and “gorgeous” rightfully ought to have Barrett’s picture next to it. You’d look at this guy and not want to believe he really existed, that’s how insanely, inhumanly hot he was.

  And because of the way he looked, Barrett brought all kinds of attention not only to himself as an NFL quarterback, but to the team itself. There were fitness and exercise magazines – and I knew, because I had my own copies of them – with whole spreads devoted to Barrett and his exercise routines. There were exercise websites where he was fully on display, which I had bookmarked on my own computer. There were pages and pages, in print and online, of Barrett working out, wearing nothing but short-shorts and athletic shoes, or swimsuits – not those damn un-sexy baggy, knee-length swimsuits, either; Barrett was confident enough to wear short, tight swimsuits, even S
peedos.

  Believe me, if you looked like that and you had that kind of build on you, you’d have all the confidence in the world, too.

  Of course he’d worked hard to get that way and continued to hard to keep himself that way. But still, Barrett had plenty to show off, and show it off he did.

  As I watched him sitting at the bar, I pictured him in his photo spreads. The man was absolutely glorious. He played football, but his chest muscles could have been the bases on a baseball diamond, and when he was out of his shirt as I was imagining him now, they were beautifully dusted with hair. He had arms and legs like Thor or Superman, with a dusting of hair on the legs to match the chest. The big, cut stones of his stomach muscles looked as if you could bounce bullets of them, just like the pecs. And then, there was that face.

  My God, that face. Barrett had the riveting-handsome face of a god, with thick dark hair that he always seemed to be able to keep perfectly groomed, just like a high-fashion model. There was a quality about him; he was totally manly and masculine, but there were moments when Barrett made you think of him as a little boy. In spite of his reputation, he had these moments when he looked sweet and innocent, even when he didn’t shave, like tonight, and had a shadow of stubble on his cheeks and jawline and upper lip. Sometimes, he just made you want to hold him. And if you did, you knew you’d never let him go.

  Barrett had one other glory, but if you looked at his swimsuit shots, you’d see what I mean. Between those hair-dusted Thor/Superman legs, you couldn’t miss it. I was always surprised that none of the magazines or websites had ever tried to airbrush or Photoshop it out.

  But seriously, it was very fitting that Barrett Porter played pro football because he was hung like the stalk of a goal post. What he had down there, his short-shorts and swimsuits and Speedos could barely contain. I always wondered if sportswear companies even made a jockstrap big enough to hold that thing. So help me, put Barrett Porter next to a Texas longhorn bull with that cock of his, and the bull would just walk away, shaking his head and snorting, “I can’t compete.”