So Much Trouble: Bad Boy Forbidden Love Romance Collection (So Wrong It's Right Book 4)

by Jamie Knight

  “I-I-I—”

  “Erudite,” he teased with a good-natured smile.

  “I’m fine. We’re fine, right, Polly?”

  “Wheee!” Polly burbled as I got the stroller upright again.

  “Speaks French, does she?”

  “And she can identify twelve different kinds of animal,” I boasted.

  “Goodness!”

  “I think she is going to be a zoologist.”

  “Or a zoo-keeper. Either way, it’s great,” the beautiful stranger said, smiling in a way that made me want to plant my lips on his.

  “I’m Brigid.”

  “The Irish goddess of fire.”

  “Among other things,” I said, unable to resist.

  I was impressed that he knew about the origin of my name. But I was trying to act cool, calm and collected, especially since I had just taken a tumble from which I was trying to recover.

  “I’m Leif.”

  “Erikson?”

  “Distantly related. And this is?”

  “Polly.”

  “Hello, Polly,” Leif said, waving from a distance, respecting the current COVID-19 suggested guidelines.

  Polly gave a baby wave in return, somewhat to my surprise, because she didn’t usually like strangers. She was barely able to stand my sister, Meegan. Though that was far from unusual. My dear blood-relation had all the personal charm and social grace of a bog viper.

  “I think she likes you,” I observed.

  “Clever girl.”

  “She is,” I confirmed.

  “Is she the only one?”

  “Who’s clever?”

  “Who likes me.”

  He smirked.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I said, still trying to play it cool.

  “Fair enough. I have to be going. Can I get your number?”

  My mind was screaming at me to say no. I didn’t know him. Yeah, he was hot, and I was really lonely and hadn't touched a guy in longer than I dared think about, but he didn’t know that.

  For all he knew I could be married. It took a hell of a lot of front for him to even ask for my number. Particularly so soon after meeting. So why did I still find him so fucking attractive?

  “You first,” I teased.

  He was ready with it before I finished speaking. Armed with his number, I called his phone from mine.

  “Now you have mine,” I said into my speaker when he answered, trying to keep the tremble of excitement out of my voice.

  As a single mom who was usually cooped up with Polly, this really was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in ages.

  Leif remounted his bike and I took the handles of the stroller and we went our separate ways. Catching Leif stealing a glance at my ass, outlined clearly in my yoga pants, as I turned to watch him ride away, I blushed with a wild sort of pride.

  It had been so long since a man had taken an interest in me. Physically or otherwise. I really didn’t know what to make of it. I took Polly home, wondering if he was genuinely going to call but not daring to hope he actually might.

  The whole thing was a bit like something from a dream. It was possible I had imagined him entirely.

  The house was empty when we got back and I wasn’t surprised. I got Polly into the bath and then put her down for a nap. Meegan would probably be out late again. Her hours at the hospital had gotten really erratic with the overflow.

  She had never been Miss Congeniality, but her temper had gotten even worse in the last couple of months. I put it mostly down to sleep deprivation and stress. It would be difficult to maintain a cheery disposition when there was a forty percent chance someone was going to die on your shift.

  She had also become a real hard ass about cleanliness. Meegan had always been a neat freak before but lately the dial had been turned to eleven. When she got home, she would strip down to nothing in the garage, leaving her clothes by the door, and then scrub in a scalding hot shower for at least twenty minutes.

  She had managed to acquire fifteen pairs of scrubs so she would only have to do laundry once a week, which she would do once again stark naked and then repeat again, taking showers both before and after. It seemed crazy but I also really appreciated her trying to protect me and Polly like that.

  Polly was still asleep when I got out of the shower. I kissed her on the forehead and went into the kitchen to get a glass of wine.

  There was a time when I would have done that naked, it being just us girls, but I put on my robe, not wanting to even be near any windows unless I was covered. Popping the bottle of Australian Merlot from the door of the fancy chrome fridge, I poured out an amount Meegan would never miss. I was careful to replace the bottle just so.

  In the privacy of my room, I opened the robe, loving the feeling of the air against my skin. Getting sufficiently calm with the help of the wine, I logged onto my laptop to do some background research.

  I only had his first name, but how many Leifs could there possibly be in Brooklyn?

  Fifteen. There were fifteen Leifs in Brooklyn, not all of whom had pictures I could find. All the ones that I did fine were not the one I was looking for. Unless he looked very different indeed when he was clean-shaven.

  I let out a sigh, both of disappointment and curiosity. I was really intrigued now, and also kind of liked the mystery.

  I couldn’t imagine that there would be anything bad in his past. Like he was a murderer on the run or something like that. Surely, I would have sensed it. I had more than enough experience with bad guys to know the type when I saw it. Which only begged the question of who Leif would turn out to be. It was enough to drive me crazy.

  Chapter Two - Leif

  I had never believed in love at first sight. It was a nice idea in stories but completely unworkable in real life.

  If the brain chemicals that caused the love reaction are so quickly or easily employed, what is there to stop someone from falling madly in love with a different person every other day?

  At least, that was what I used to think, anyway. How radically things can change within an instant.

  The bike certainly got some odd looks. Not as many as it would have in Los Angeles or another car-based city, but enough to make it uncomfortable.

  Most of the car-less within the Five Boroughs, of whom there were many, preferred the city’s famous public transit system. But that system was something less of an option now that everyone had to stay at least six feet apart by government mandate.

  There was also the environment to consider. While a modernist in many ways, there were still some areas in which I could be considered a traditionalist. To the point of naked anachronism, even. Fact was, I was descended, however distantly as it might have been, from a people who lived not so much off the land as with it, building shelters literally out of stones and earth. I had a vested interest in, and familial duty of, keeping things ecological.

  The range was one of only a few of my regular haunts still open during the crisis, and that not without serious alterations to the business plan. Only one shooter was allowed at a time, and you had to book well in advance to make sure there were no unfortunate overlaps.

  I hadn't spent long with Brigid and Polly, but it was enough that I nearly missed my start time. Not that it wouldn’t have been well worth it. It had been a long time since I had encountered a woman who had intrigued me as much as Brigid had.

  Even our names were of a similar wild flavor. I had also meant most of what I had said about Polly, although the zoo-keeper line was very much a joke.

  Most shooters at the range went for carbon compound bows. Huge, unwieldy things with more protrusions than a musket. One of the major areas in which I was a traditionalist was archery. Wood, leather, and string for me; and I damn well loaded from a back quiver. As Tolkien intended.

  Hand-carved stone heads pounded straight and true into the targets with resounding punctuation. I was nearly at the farthest distance. My ultimate goal was to be able to split an apple in the tree that
marked the end of the range with a no-look shot. The slices still weren’t quite even.

  I possessed thirty arrows in all. All hand-crafted with the best materials I could find. It had taken weeks to fashion them all, and weeks longer to finally finish the bow to my liking.

  I had seen a video, online ironically, demonstrating in great detail how to craft a Norse bow from scratch, starting with little more than a thick stick. That gathering run was a fun ride back from upstate.

  The target looked like a porcupine. The arrows on the fringes had been intended to gauge the new distance or were the result of misguided, but fun, triple loads, which tended to go all over the place. Down to my last shot, I decided to have a bit of fun and split the previous bullseye Robin Hood-style.

  I could always mend the shaft later, since a split going clean up the grain would leave the head, which was the real bugger to make, wholly intact. Then came the really fun part: pulling them all out and getting them back into the quiver. At least I was able to go right up to the target for this part, as being alone on the range meant the risk of getting shot in the back by another archer was reduced to nil.

  “All done?” Lucy, the owner of the place, asked, her voice muffled slightly by the mask.

  “Indeed, I am, Lucy,” I said, sliding the tag through the little slot in the protective window.

  Both these precautions were in place even before the outbreak. Just in case someone snapped and decided to go all Hunger Games in the range.

  “Any big plans coming up?” she inquired.

  “Not tonight but soon; very, very soon.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Brigid.”

  “Bridget?”

  “No, Brigid, with a ‘d’.”

  “Oh, like the Irish goddess of fire.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Cool.”

  “No argument here,” I said with a playful wink.

  I’d known Lucy since we were kids. We had bonded over archery at camp one year and had kept in touch ever since. It was odd not to be able to see her smile due to the mask she was wearing, but it was just the way things had to be.

  I got my ID back, turning in my bow and quiver in return. Even a place as open to quirkiness as the city of New York had some qualms with open-carry bowmen. Particularly with one as skilled as I was and after 9/11.

  It is a little-known fact, at least among people who see archery as kind of a joke compared to firearms, if not to the cops, that a bolt fired straight and true from a longbow can punch straight through plate armor. Something that many a soldier found out the hard way on battlefields of the past.

  Next on the agenda, written out plain and neat in the pre-yellowed pages of my trusty notebook, was a visit to the Crow’s Nest. Somewhat ironically named, the store was at the bottom of a nearly vertical set of fairly rickety stairs, several feet below street level.

  Part of the reason it wasn’t shut during the lockdown was how few people actually knew it was there. Still, the owner, Ola Hallegrim, a recent émigré from Norway, wasn’t anyone’s fool, and had positioned boxes of masks and gloves on a table next to the door. God help the smartass who tried to enter the premises, more than big enough to keep six feet apart, without these protections.

  “God dag, soster.”

  “Od du, bror,” Ola replied, the two of us tapping elbows in lieu of our usual complex handshake.

  Her Norwegian was a lot more native than mine, which really only stood to reason, though I did my best to help her feel comfortable.

  I drifted through the rows of vinyls. Ola had hired a craftsman upstate to build her record racks from solid aged ash wood. The Crow’s Nest had the best selection of Black Metal in the tri-state area, much of it imported directly from Europe.

  Americans still tried their best to copy the style, and it was something, but nothing beat the real thing. It was no accident that the form originated in northwestern Europe. Given a choice, I would take the more melodic and technical Swedish bands, hands down, though the other Nordic countries had their attractions as well.

  Collecting my weekly stack, I got as close as I ever did to Ola, playing the usual game of interaction roulette with the aged and cracked debit machine that had been third-hand when she had gotten it through dubious means. I strongly preferred cash, but that had recently gone the way of the dinosaur. Too much direct contact involved, even with gloves.

  I nodded to her once more as I left the store.

  Thinking that a respectable amount of time had passed, I got out my phone and hit the listing for Brigid’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Leif.”

  “Oh, hi, Leif!” she said, her voice brightening up noticeably.

  “I was thinking about you.”

  “I-I was thinking about you, too,” she confessed, her breathless tone implying that her thoughts had not been entirely pure.

  “I was thinking about that date.”

  “Yeah, about that, how are we going to manage that with the lockdown and everything?”

  “You just leave that to me, okay? All I need from you is for you to be home, preferably alone, okay?”

  My head was racing with ideas, but I had a plan in mind.

  “Okay, I can do that.”

  “When is good for you?”

  “How about now?”

  “Okay. Do you need, like, my email or something...?”

  “It’s all figured out. Are you at your computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay there. We can begin in an hour.”

  I snapped my phone shut. I had some preparing to do.

  Chapter Three - Lisa

  It’s funny how things go sometimes. Just when life is getting bad, a bit of hope comes and makes you think maybe everything will turn out alright.

  Suddenly an alert came up on my screen. I didn’t recognize what it was at first, almost having forgotten I had ever set up the video-chat app. Closing my robe quickly, I tapped ACCEPT.

  As though by magic, Leif was there. He seemed to jump out of the screen, almost like he was sitting right across from me, in a beautiful chair in a room as dark as mine, illuminated by blue light like I was. It gave him an otherworldly, almost supernatural quality.

  He was dressed nicely, in a simple black suit with a blue dress shirt, open at the collar. A small silver Hammer of Thor, symbolic of Nordic mythology, hung around his neck. It was really nice that he had made an effort.

  I, on the other hand, was still in my robe, having taken his directive to stay where I was a bit more literally than he had likely meant it. Fiercely independent as I might try to be, I was a submissive at heart. Particularly to a strong, powerful man like Leif.

  “Hi,” he said, as though it was just another Tuesday.

  “Hi.”

  “Turn your camera on, please.”

  “Oh, why?”

  “So I can see you,” he said, in a way that instantly made me wet.

  “Okay.”

  It took several minutes to find the camera controls. My trembling fingers were not helping much. Still, Leif waited patiently for me to figure it all out, his soft expression giving an uncommon sort of comfort.

  “There, did that work?”

  “It sure did. There you are.”

  I blushed at the pet name, too shy to conjure a witty reply. Let alone a similar name for him.

  “You look amazing,” I blurted before I could stop myself.

  “So do you.”

  “Come on. I’m in my robe.”

  “A Chinese silk robe.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh yes. It’s hard to tell without seeing it in person, but early nineteenth century, I would guess. Looks to be in nearly mint condition, too.”

  The robe had belonged to my ex. He’d walked out on Polly and me so fast I figured he must have forgotten it. It felt pretty good to know I had something of his that might be worth something.

  “Valuable?”

 
“If it’s the real thing, extraordinarily so.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I like old stuff. I mean, I still have a smartphone and all that jazz. I am well aware of what century I live in, don’t worry. I just take pleasure in the simpler things, like studying that which came before. When we ran into each other earlier today, I was on my way to archery practice, in fact.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I really could see him with a bow and quiver, driving bolts though the dead centers of targets. His arms certainly looked big enough to get decent string tension.

  Just the thought of it made me pretty hot. I wasn’t really the type to spend time worrying about the end of the world, but if things really did go south and society crumbled, I would want someone like Leif by my side.

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Oh, it is, particularly when it is going well. I crafted my bow and arrows myself. Had to buy the quiver, though; the right kind of leather is just too hard to come by around here. Had it imported from England.”

  My hand slipped down to my aching pussy. I knew I shouldn’t. Not when he could see me. But I was just so horny I had to find release, or I might explode.

  “Sounds expensive,” I said, trying to keep up the conversation, gently stroking the outside of my pussy.

  “Not really. I have my ways. Is your hand where I think it is?”

  “What?” I asked, pulling my hand away quickly.

  “Your hand.”

  “I, um, where do you think it was?”

  “Between your legs,” he whispered in a way that made me melt like ice cream in August.

  “It was,” I confessed, blushing furiously.

  “Take off your robe,” he ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” I whispered, without a moment’s hesitation.

  I wanted him to see me. Even if he couldn’t touch me.

  “Good girl,” he said, making me bite my lower lip. “Now open your legs.”

  I obeyed him, spreading my legs wide, the cool air brushing onto my pussy making me tingle.