His Pretend Baby Read online

  “Man, you sound angry. Was she that cute?”

  Now she really started struggling to get free. “Let me go,” she said. “Let me go right now, Beau Prescott.”

  “No,” he said. “Not until you promise to marry me.”

  She stopped struggling. “What?”

  And he cursed. “I’m not doing this right.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “You should have been here earlier. I had this whole speech about how much I love you, about how you make me a better person. But now we’re here, and it sounds like I’m threatening you, but I’m not. Josie, I love you. That’s all. More than I ever loved anybody else, ever.” He reached up and stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “So even though, I know Prescotts don’t apologize, here’s me, Beau Prescott, telling you, Josie Witherspoon, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the things I said, the way I treated you. Sorrier than I’ve ever been about anything in my entire life. And I’m sorry I can’t leave you alone, but I want you to—no, scratch that, darlin’, I need you to spend the rest of your life with me.”

  She stared up at him, her eyes glistening with tears. That speech had been so beautiful, she could barely believe it had come out of Beau Prescott’s mouth. Yet even though his voice shook when he spoke--and this was likely the first apology he’d made to anyone in over twenty years--there was just one more thing she had to see to truly believe he meant what he’d just said.

  His eyes.

  She tentatively reached up and removed his sunglasses.

  He let her, but his arms stiffened around her waist as she took them off, which let her know he wasn’t wholly unaffected by what she was doing.

  She found his beautiful silver eyes filled with tears, just like hers. And to her surprise, the dark pupils inside of them shrank under the lobby’s bright lights. “Have you gotten some of your sight back?”

  “No, my eyes still respond to light, but they don’t relay a picture to my brain. That’s how my condition works.” She could almost see the effort it was taking for him to hold still under her scrutiny. “I decided to make a donation to UAB’s Department of Ophthalmology, and I’ve got a few other neurosurgeons looking at my file, but as far as I know, I’m going to be blind until further notice. I know that’s not ideal. But I promise, I won’t ever let it affect my ability to love you the way you deserve to be loved ever again.”

  She regarded him for several seconds before saying. “You’re right. I don’t like you as much now as when you had your sight.”

  His grip around his waist slackened. “Oh,” he said, the expression on his face going from hopeful to devastated to resigned in the space of a few seconds.

  But then she said, “I like you way better. Way, way better.” She smiled up at him. “In fact, I love you, too, because now you’re perfect. Yes, Beau, I’ll marry you.”

  And he smiled back, before pressing his mouth into hers. For a moment, the staring Alabamans in the lobby faded away, and it was only them returned to the love-struck teenagers they’d once been, but then she remembered, “Oh my God, Colin! We were supposed to meet to talk about him giving Ruth’s House a donation.”

  But his arms only curled tighter around her and he said, “However much you were planning to ask him for, I’ll match it.”

  “But—”

  “Double it.”

  “Beau—”

  “Hell, you’re going to be my wife. I’ll give you my checkbook and let you decide on the amount.”

  And lest she think he was actually trying to buy her again, he capped this declaration with the sweetest, most sincere, and most grateful kiss she had ever known.

  Epilogue

  To their credit, Josie and he did manage to make it out of the back of Mac’s car, before they consummated their reunion. But there was no way he was going to let them get all the way up the stairs, or even to a chair or couch. In fact, Beau considered himself a damn gentleman for closing the door all the way behind him, before he threw Josie down on the foyer’s floor.

  She seemed desperate for him, too, because not only did she go down on her back without a word of protest, she unzipped his pants and pulled him out as she did so.

  But despite his many changed ways, Beau still wasn’t the type to give his future wife what she wanted without making her work for it. “I don’t hear you narrating, darlin’,” he said, refusing to go along with her as she started to position his cock between her wet folds.

  Below him, she went still. “Are you kidding me?” she asked.

  “Not even a little bit,” he answered, pulling back slightly to make his point.

  She let out a huff of air, but eventually said, “I’ve got your thing in my hand.”

  “Josie…”

  “I’ve got your dick in my hand—and wow! It just got harder as soon as I said that.”

  “What’s your other hand doing?” he asked, trying to ignore the aching pain that came with wanting to be inside someone this much.

  “It’s, um, on your butt, trying to get you to….”

  He finally allowed himself to sink his cock into her, and savored the sound of her delighted moan when he was all the way inside and began moving. Now both her hands were on his ass. But soon after he started thrusting into her with long, hard jerks, he felt both of her hands thread themselves under his arms, before hooking around his shoulders from behind, as if she were trying to hold on.

  “Tell me what you see,” he said.

  “From this position, just my hands on your shoulders.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  And he could hear the smile in her voice when she said, “Well, the right one is just my plain old hand, but the left one has a big honking diamond on it.”

  His diamond. The one he’d put on her in the back of Mac’s car when he realized he’d forgotten to propose to her with it.

  He let out a strangled groan and pushed into her even harder, making sure he hit her clit with each stroke. More than anything, he wanted to please Josie, wanted to spend the rest of his life pleasing her.

  His lips searched for and eventually found the thin scar at the top of her left breast. He promised himself that from then on, he’d kiss it every time they made love, for the rest of his life, as a reminder of what she had survived in order to make her way back to him.

  And it felt like his heart would come out of his chest when she began bucking beneath him. She cried out his name, “Beau!” before she seized up and came with a happy sigh.

  He was glad she was happy. He wanted that even more than he wanted his own orgasm, which came crashing over him a few minutes later. He released into her, already knowing after their upcoming wedding and the birth of their children, this moment would be forever seared in his mind as his most favorite.

  But then it was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. “Yoo-hoo, Beau, darling!” came his mother’s voice. “I’m finally….”

  The thud of what sounded like one of his mother’s expensive purses hitting the floor came next. “…home.” Then: “Josie Witherspoon, I do not believe this is the job I hired you for.”

  “Oh. My. God,” Josie said underneath him, obviously mortified.

  But Beau just laughed. Not even this latest interruption could diminish the joy of finally winning the heart of Josie Witherspoon. His dream girl. His favorite ally.

  His one and only love.

  THE END

  But wait! Who was that mystery woman? Find out in Colin Fairgood’s southern fried, scorching hot romance, HIS FOR KEEPS!

  HIS FOR KEEPS

  Prologue

  THAT NIGHT

  “Cool. Let’s meet up at my house around eight. Parents will be gone.”

  That was the text that started it all. It was from Mike Lancer. My boyfriend. Well, sort of, but not really. We’d been hooking up all summer, and he only ever invited me over when his parents were out. But his parents were out a lot, so we’d settled into a routine: I was the girl he called w
hen his parents weren’t around. And if I wasn’t due to perform with my mother that night, I was the girl who went over to his place.

  He’d called me his “secret girlfriend” a few times while we were making out, before he stuck it in me. So I guess that made us… something.

  This was his first text message though, because I’d just gotten a new phone the day before. My first cell phone, an early birthday present from my mom, bought because she was feeling optimistic.

  She’d finally landed a gig for the following weekend at The Rusty Roof, one of Birmingham, Alabama’s oldest and most legendary country music venues, and she’d just gotten a call from the club’s manager that Lee Street, from Big Hill Records, was coming all the way down from Nashville to see her perform. Really, he was coming to see the band of twenty-year-olds slated to go on right before her—the club manager told her that straight up. But Valerie Goode had always been on the crazy side of confident about her career prospects.

  She didn’t care who Lee Straight was really coming to see. He’d be in the room. And for a magical thinker like Valerie, that had been enough to make her buy the daughter she called her “right-hand guitar,” her first cell phone. Of course she did it with money she didn’t have, because she was banking on Lee Straight making her a big star after he saw her perform on stage—and/or in bed if need be. In Valerie’s mind, she was always just a performance and one really good fuck away from becoming the world’s first black female country music star.

  As far as she was concerned, the only reason she hadn’t made it to fame and fortune before the age of thirty-five was because she’d gotten pregnant with me in her prime contract-signing years. According to her, my birth ruined everything: her relationship with my father, her ability to get the gigs she needed in order to be seen by the right people. Everything Valerie deserved but had never gotten was because of me.

  We got along just fine for the most part, but whenever Valerie drank too much—which was often—she let me know just how far I’d set her back. I and I alone was responsible for where she was now: thirty-five and pinning every last hope she had on one gig at the The Rusty Roof.

  In reality, this would end up being the gig that finally convinced Valerie she would never, ever make it in country music. The gig that would finally convince her to toss out her “right-hand guitar” and go to L.A. by herself to try to make it there.

  But she didn’t know that the weekend before what happened happened, so she bought me a phone. And the first thing I did after I got my new cell phone was text the only other person I knew my age who also had a cell phone. Mike Lancer, the rich boy I’d met at the state fair. On purpose. I’d cornered him at the cotton candy booth after I’d seen him walking around with Beau Prescott, the quarterback of the Forest Brook Vikings. Beau was the boy I’d been secretly watching from afar for years now. The boy I’d never been able to bring myself to talk to.

  So I’d gone after his friend, a beefy blond who was more than happy to hook up with me as long as I was okay with going straight to the servants entrance when I came over, because, “No offense, my parents would freak if they knew I was hanging out with a black girl.”

  Which was why I was surprised to receive a text message right back from him, just a few seconds after I sent mine.

  “Who’s that?” my mom asked, hearing the ding of my phone. “Somebody about a gig?”

  She was on the couch, one shapely leg bent beneath her as she painted her toenails. Valerie might have been thirty-five, but she looked at least ten years younger thanks to an insane eating regimen, a wardrobe made up of Southern party girl staples, and her insistence on wearing toenail polish the color of candy. Today she was painting them neon pink.

  Pretending to be her manager, so she looked like she’d already had one, was one of the duties my mother had given me, along with playing guitar for her sets and singing back-up when needed. Thanks to an extra serving of T&A that had come in over the past school year, I looked a lot older than fifteen years, especially when I wore stage make-up. Like Valerie, in reverse.

  “No, it’s that boy I met at the fair back in June,” I answered her. “He wants me to come over, and we’re not performing tonight…”

  My mom actually looked up, her heavily mascaraed eyes flicking over my outfit. Denim Bermuda cut-offs and an old Dick Tracy movie t-shirt I’d cut to hang off one shoulder.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, I don’t like to look like I’m trying too hard.” Especially with Mike Lancer, who was always more concerned with getting me out of my clothes than noticing what I was wearing.

  But my mom, the queen of trying too hard, just sucked on her teeth.

  “You been taking your pill? You know I’m not—”

  “Taking care of no grandbabies. Yeah, I know,” I finished for her. “I’ve been taking it.”

  Another disapproving up and down, and my mom went back to her candy toenails.

  “Well, see you later, I guess.”

  I knew I ought to be grateful to have a mom who didn’t care what I did or where I went at night, as long as it didn’t interfere with my ability to play guitar for her the next weekend. But I remember it grating on me as I left our apartment to wait for the first of the two buses it would take to get me all the way to Forest Brook, Mike Lancer’s neighborhood. Sometimes, I remembered thinking, it would be nice to have a mom who actually gave a shit. For that matter, it would be nice to have anybody who gave a shit.

  An hour later, as I walked through Forest Brook, one of Alabama’s richest suburbs, I recalled my grandparents in Tennessee who I used to stay with during the summers. That was before I learned how to play the guitar and Valerie decided she needed me down here in Alabama more. My grandparents gave a shit, and I felt a tug of guilt knowing how much they would disapprove of what I’d been doing with Mike Lancer all summer.

  And as I walked past the Tudor mansion Beau Prescott lived in with his parents, I remember wondering to myself why I was doing this. Taking two buses to hook up with a boy I’d met at the fair, just because he was friends with Beau.

  But I kept walking. Keeping my head down, so it would be easy for folks to assume I was either one of the many black live-in servants who worked in Forest Brook or one of their daughters. It wasn’t that hard of a role to pull off. My mom used to be one of those servants. So really, I was just acting like what I would have been if she hadn’t decided to pursue her country music career full time after having me.

  Still, I remember feeling a little stupid as I slipped around the side of Mike’s large colonial house and scuttled to the servants entrance in back, like a cockroach who did booty calls.

  However, this time when I got to the back stairs, I didn’t find them empty like I usually did. There was a boy there, sitting at the bottom of the steps. Like he was guarding the staircase.

  This boy, from what I could tell, looked to be around my age, but he was very long. It took five steps to accommodate his bent legs. I’d sat on these steps before to wait for Mike and knew it only took two or three drops before my feet found a place to rest.

  I stopped short, not quite knowing how to handle this. I’d never run into anybody back here before. Hell, sometimes Mike wasn’t even there to greet me, which is why I knew how many steps my legs took up. From waiting, since I wasn’t allowed to knock or do anything else that might draw attention to me.

  This boy on the steps was blond, too. But he didn’t look like Mike. While Mike’s hair was combed back in lacquered waves, this boy’s hair fell past his ears in stringy locks that made my hands itch for a bottle of shampoo to throw at him. The rest of him wasn’t too much better. He was sporting what looked like a huge black eye behind a pair of thick, square glasses. And his clothes were worn. Not in a cool way, but like they’d originally been bought at a deep discount store, given away to the Salvation Army, then bought out of the dollar box by him. High-water corduroys and a dingy t-shirt.

  The boy wa
s also “skinnier than a pile of sticks” as my grandmother might say, with long knobby arms hanging out of his t-shirt. Even before I spotted the violin case, sitting at his feet, the word “nerd” ran through my mind. Maybe he was Mike’s younger brother. A sibling who’d inherited even more height, but not any of Mike’s wide receiver beefiness.

  But somehow I didn’t think so.

  This kid had a different energy than Mike. A kind of feral presence I recognized well after nearly a lifetime spent in honkytonk bars. Even with the glasses and the violin and the fact that he was here, he looked like what he probably was: poor white trash. Especially with that black eye.

  To me, he looked hungry in ways that had nothing to do with food, and I didn’t know who he was or why he was here but I recognized him for what he was from the minute I laid eyes on him: a coyote in human clothing.

  “Hi,” I said tentatively. Just like I would have if I had run into an actual coyote in the woods behind my grandparents’ house.

  He gave me a lazy coyote up and down look, before asking, “You one of Mike’s girls?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer his question, seeing as how I wasn’t supposed to be claiming Mike out in public. Also, I didn’t love hearing myself called “one of Mike’s girls.” So I didn’t say anything.

  Which was answer enough for him. He leaned back, resting his knobby elbows on the steps behind him.

  “Figures. He likes them from the wrong side of tracks—as long as mommy and daddy don’t find out.”

  His voice was deeper than I would have expected it to be, coming from such a skinny body, and it rang with authority. Like he didn’t need me to confirm nothing, because he already knew everything he needed to know about me.

  This time when he looked me up and down, I could see judgment in his eyes as they tracked over my dusty brown hair, my cut up clothes, and most of all, my light brown skin.