Bad Boy Baby Daddy (21 page)

Kaiden’s going to be fine,
I told myself.
People don’t die in these fights…do they?

An unwelcome voice burst through my reverie a moment later. “Well, hello there! Riley, isn’t it?”

I spun around to see the person I wanted to see least in the world standing behind me—Serra
.
Jesus, what the hell was she doing here? I didn’t need this bullshit right now, not when Kaiden had been hurt and no one would let me in to see him.

“What do you want, Serra?” I asked wearily, avoiding eye contact with her. “I really don’t need any of your crap right now.”

She smirked. “No, I don’t suppose you do. Not while your little boyfriend is getting his head pounded into the ground in there.”

My eyes snapped up to hers at those words. Was he really getting his head pounded into the ground, or was she just trying to rile me up?

Serra misinterpreted my shock, figuring that she’d discovered something else. “So he
is
your boyfriend then?” she said. She threw her hands up in the air in disbelief, and as she had her mini-freakout, I took a second to drink in her look. She was the total opposite to me. I was drab, and she was glam. She’d gone over the top for this event, and it was unreal—she was wearing a short sequined designer dress, the highest stiletto heels I’d ever seen, and perfectly-done makeup. She even appeared to have had her hair professionally styled.

She was definitely here to do more than watch the fight.

I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. “Why are you here, Serra?”

“Kaiden wants me back,” she said, as if it were a well-known scientific fact.

I snorted with laughter and stared her down, unable to believe that she could be so arrogant and deluded. After all she’d done, how could she actually believe that?

“Sure, Serra. Whatever you say,” I finally replied. I was too weary to get mad by this point. She was being ridiculous, and I didn’t even want to give her the time of day.

“Don’t you get it?” She sneered, staring me up and down. “He wants me.”

“Why would he want you after what you did to him?”

“Because I’m more his standard, rather than some chubby little bitch like you. Let’s see—I’m gorgeous, rich, and famous. Whereas you…” She trailed off, screwing her nose up in disgust.

“Yeah, well, you might be all those things, but he still chose me. So that says a lot about the sort of person you really are,” I shot back.

I was done with her bullshit, but I couldn’t resist getting in one last dig. “Oh, and we’re having a
real
baby, unlike the one you invented, so why don’t you just crawl back into whatever hole you came from and leave us the hell alone?” I added.

I must’ve stunned her into silence, because she didn’t reply; she simply stood there, overly-plumped mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

I mentally high-fived myself and turned to walk back down the stairs, never wanting to see her horrible little face again. Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t see her coming up behind me, and I didn’t even know she was there until her hands hit my back.

With one little push, she sent me tumbling headfirst down the stairs.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

I knew I was falling, but I didn’t feel any pain. All I felt was pure shock and a primal urge to protect my unborn child. My hands had already reflexively grabbed my belly, trying to shield it from any impact, and finally the second came where I hit the bottom of the stairs with an almighty thump.

For a moment I was dazed and winded, and I couldn’t move. I stared up at the night sky, my hands still on my belly, and I finally managed to breathe again as blinding pain began to shoot through what felt like every single nerve ending my body possessed.

“He…help,” I groaned in a weak voice, but there was no one around. Even Serra was gone now; she’d probably run to escape the scene.

I finally managed to get myself up onto my elbows, and I looked down between my legs, feeling a distinct wetness as a coppery scent filled my nostrils. My mind barely registered a dark red stain spreading over my thighs, and panic overwhelmed me.
My baby.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 24

Kaiden

Fucking Serra.

What the hell was she even doing here?

I’d been taking hit after hit from my opponent, Blade, and I knew that if I hadn’t seen that bitch’s face smirking at me from the crowd, then I wouldn’t have been so thrown off my game tonight. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get floored and pummeled so quickly, and now, I was struggling to get anything back. I could barely even stand up, never mind swing a decent counter-attack. My chest was racked with agony from where he’d gotten a decent hit in earlier, and blood was seeping from my nose.

Blade was known as a nutcase fighter, but under normal circumstances, I would have easily been able to stand my ground and slam him into the mat. He was much bigger than me, but that had never worried me in an opponent—it was his ‘
I don’t give a shit’
attitude towards the fights that made him so scary to people. He was infamous for performing barely-legal moves in almost every fight; moves that I considered to be cheap and dirty shots, and considering how much I liked to toe the line, that was really saying something.

Anyway, he might’ve been beating the shit outta me right now, but that didn’t mean he was going to win.

Hell no.

I tried to catch Riley’s eye once more, just to try and convey to her that I was going to be all right. I had no doubt that she was worried about me—after all, she had told me that she didn’t usually like to watch my fights because it upset her to see me hurt—but she was nowhere to be seen. Her seat was empty, and it was as if she’d never been there; as if I’d imagined her face.

Maybe I
had
imagined her. Maybe I’d taken one too many blows to the head in my fighting career, and I’d finally lost the plot.

I turned my attention back to the fight and quickly found myself at the point where I could barely breathe, but not from pain—from pure rage. Being beaten down by Blade was getting to me, and I needed to get back on top. I wasn’t going to lose to some dirty-fighting prick like him.

I took a deep breath and waited for his next assault. I could already tell what he was planning—he was going to kick me in the legs to try and knock me down. That was the thing about fighting; it didn’t really matter how big or small you were. What really mattered was your ability to see your opponent’s next move and counter it. As I’d predicted, Blade’s leg was soon flying towards me in a right kick aimed at my right shin, but I’d seen it coming, and I got in faster. I aimed my own foot towards his leg with a thundering kick of my own, and that threw him right off balance.

I almost laughed at the expression on his face as he began to wobble. He hadn’t seen my counter-attack coming at all, and after a quick glance towards his trainer, he immediately changed tactics. Instead of going for the hard, heavy hits he’d been getting in earlier, he charged at me and tried for light, speedy hits, but I spun away from the danger and left his fists punching the air.

“And it looks like Kaiden is
back,
everybody!” shouted the commentator.

I tried to block out all the outside sounds and concentrated purely on beating Blade’s ass, and I landed a ferocious kick on his right leg again before delivering an uppercut to his jaw. I dodged away from his next two takedown attempts, and with only a few seconds left in the round, he grabbed me. I broke from his grip and kneed him.
Hard
. He hadn’t expected that, and he dropped to the canvas with a resounding thud, upon which I pounced and got in two heavy punches.

The referee stopped me and called the fight ten seconds later as Blade remained on the ground, and the commentator yelled out to the crowd again.

“And it looks like once again, Kaiden Cross has defeated his opponent! Blade looks like he doesn’t even know what hit him, and after such a strong first round, too!”

I grinned and waited out the typical aftermath of a fight—screaming fans, flashing cameras, reporters trying to get a word in. There was meant to be a PR rep here with me to make sure I didn’t say anything stupid to any reporters who wanted quick interviews, but my new rep, Frank, was nowhere to be seen.

Weird.

Oh well, I’d learned enough from him and Riley to know what was appropriate to say, and what wasn’t. I answered a few questions about the fight, and I tactfully avoided any questions about Serra, simply offering up several ‘no comment’ statements.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the questions from coming.

“I saw Serra in the crowd tonight, Mr. Cross,” one sports journalist said a moment later, pressing a mic right up in my face. “Can you tell me what that was about? Did she come to apologize for the things she was caught saying to you on camera several weeks ago?”

I grinned, unable to resist getting in a dig at Serra if she ever saw this interview. “I’m not sure. I wasn’t even aware she was here,” I lied.

Ha.
If there was one thing Serra couldn’t stand, it was not being noticed. After the ‘fake baby’ scandal had broken recently, she’d been getting even more attention than usual—albeit, the bad kind of attention—and it would probably make her scream to see an interview with me where I pretended as if I hadn’t even noticed her smarmy face in the crowd.

I saw my manager waving at me frantically from the edge of the room a moment later, so I wrapped up the interviews and strode over to him.

“What’s up?”

His face was ashen. “You need to get to the hospital, Kaiden.”

“What? Nah, I’m fine, man. Blade pummeled me a bit in the first round, I’ll admit that, but a bleeding nose, split lip and some bruises don’t need a doctor.”

“It’s not about you. It’s about Riley,” another masculine voice said.

It was only then that I realized there was a man standing next to my manager. I couldn’t place him at first, but I quickly realized he was Riley’s PR boss, Eric—the guy who’d caught us kissing and almost fired Riley over it.

“What did you say?” I asked, my blood running cold at the thought of something happening to Riley.

Eric’s skin was even paler than my manager’s, and his eyes were wide. Something awful was obviously going on, and adrenaline began to pump through my body like mad as I waited for his response.

“Riley was upset because I had to fire her,” he said. I could tell that he felt guilty about this part, but I knew more was coming. There was no way he’d come in here to tell me that Riley was now unemployed. “I told her she couldn’t come back in to the fight, and I left her out in the lobby. Then I felt bad and went back to find her so I could apologize for being so hard on her, and I looked for her outside and saw…”

“Saw
what?
”

“I don’t know what happened, but I saw Serra Silver running away, and Riley was just…lying there. She might have fallen, but I think Serra pushed her down the stairs.”

“What?” I said, my voice almost cracking with fear.

“Like I said, Kaiden,” my manager cut in, his voice grim. “We need to get to the hospital. Now.”

Chapter 25

Riley

“Urgh...”

I groaned, shifting in my bed, and I tried to open my eyes to see where I was, but everything was too white, too bright, too blinding. My throat was dry, my body ached, and my head was thumping like crazy. Was this some kind of hangover? No, it couldn’t be—I was eleven weeks pregnant. There was no way I would’ve been drinking.

So why did I feel like this? It had to be something else, but my mind was still too hazy to recall anything.

“Riley?”

I heard Kaiden’s voice, but it was distant. I wanted him to wrap me up in his arms and make everything feel better again, but that didn’t seem to be happening, so I tried to reply and managed a grunt.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice closer this time.

I felt his hand wrap around my own, and I tried to squeeze it but quickly found that I didn’t have the strength. If I wasn’t strong enough to hold his hand, then what the hell was wrong with me?

My mind seemed to flicker in and out of consciousness as he squeezed my hand in his grip. Glimmers of memories came into focus, but they were too far away for me to grasp. There were pictures of people that I didn’t quite know, and I saw places that I knew I’d been, but I couldn’t remember when or why. It was incredibly strange, and frustrating as hell.

I realized I was going to have to try my hardest to focus if I wanted any answers. I needed to figure things out.

Where am I?
I asked myself, but I had no answer to that.

What happened?
Again, I drew a blank.

Okay…what’s the last thing I remember happening?
I concentrated hard, and I saw Eric in my mind’s eye, shaking his head at me. I also saw a strange girl saying no to me for some reason, and then I saw a flash of blonde hair, but that was it. It wasn’t enough to go on, that was for sure.

“Riley?”

I heard Kaiden again, and this time I decided that I needed to see him to confirm that he was more than a dream. A shadow loomed over my face, blocking out the horrible white light, and that gave me what I needed to finally lift my heavy eyelids and get my eyes open.

All I could see was him.
My Kaiden.
There was nothing else, only his face.

“Kai…?” I tried to speak, but it didn’t come out as anything more than a weird, strangled sound. “W….water.”

I tried to indicate, but my limbs were still too heavy to move properly.

Despite this, I must have somehow been able to make myself understood because the next thing I knew, Kaiden was holding a cup of cool water up to my lips. I drank it down gratefully, feeling like I’d been dehydrated for years.

“What happened?” I finally managed to say. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital,” he said, his voice tentative. I tried to gauge from his expression if he was joking or not, but his expression remained deadly serious. “Something happened to you at the fight.”

A fight?
I couldn’t remember that.

“What? I got into a fight?”

Kaiden sighed deeply, as if the next part was going to be hard to say. “No. Outside the fight warehouse. You came to watch me, and later you were on the outside balcony…and then Serra pushed you down the stairs.”

“The baby…is the baby…?” I couldn’t speak properly. I couldn’t form those words. I just couldn’t make myself ask the dreaded question. It was just too damn awful.

“They listened to your belly with a stethoscope as soon as we arrived, and they said they heard a weak heartbeat, but they haven’t done a proper ultrasound yet. We haven’t been here very long, so we’re still waiting for the doctor to get back about that. They’re pretty slammed tonight from some car pileup on a road near here.”

A weak heartbeat meant the baby was still alive, but I knew it would take an ultrasound to confirm whether or not it was definitely okay, so we weren’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.

“We do know that you have no broken bones, just some bruises. You were very lucky, so I bet our baby was just as lucky,” Kaiden continued.

He was obviously trying to seem reassuring, but concern was plastered all over his face, and a chill set into my bones as I worried about our unborn child. What the hell were we going to do if Serra had done what she so clearly set out to do?

“What happened to Serra?” I asked, terrified that she might come back and finish the job. Now that I knew just how dangerous she was, I was afraid that I’d never be safe again.

“She’s already been arrested,” Kaiden said. He gripped my hand even tighter, and I watched him coil his other hand into a fist. “She wasn’t far from the scene when they caught up to her, and she broke down and admitted what she did.”

His breaths were coming out a little ragged now. This whole thing had affected him badly—understandably, of course. I was still too out of it to feel anything too deeply other than the fear that our baby wouldn’t be okay.

Kaiden sighed and continued. “She had drugs on her, apparently, so she’s also been arrested for possession. She’ll end up in prison for a long time.”

Kaiden kept filling me in on the details, but my brain had switched off to it. Serra was gone. That was all I needed to know. Now all I wanted to know was if my baby would be all right.

“When will the doctor be back?” I asked.

“Soon.” Kaiden screwed up his face and ran a hand through his hair, clearly as frustrated as I was.

I simply nodded, even though I was dissatisfied with the answer, because taking my fear out on him wouldn’t do either of us any good at this point. After all, he was hurt too. He had a split lip, and there was dried blood caked under his nostrils.

“Oh my god!” I said as something suddenly came flooding back to me. “The fight with Blade! I remember now. What happened with that? All I remember is that it wasn’t going too well at first.”

He gave me a playful smirk. “You never need to worry about me, babe. I got him in the end.”

I smiled in spite of the situation. “Of course you did.”

He grinned back at me, and I sat up in the hospital bed, wincing at the aching in my back.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever really asked you this before, at least not properly. Why do you still do it? The fighting, that is,” I asked. “I mean, I know why you started doing it in the first place—because of your dad—but you don’t need to worry about him anymore now that you’re older. Is there another reason you keep at it?”

“Yeah. I started it as a way to look after myself, but I discovered that I love it. The prize money doesn’t hurt either,” he said with a wink. He looked at me for a brief second before casting his eyes back down to the ground and taking on a far more serious expression. “When you first came back into my life, I actually worried that you’d think I’d become the same as
him
. That my fighting made me an abusive asshole.”

“What?” I gasped, completely blown away by this insane statement. “I would’ve never thought that. I knew you’d never become anything like your father.”

I willed him to look up at me, but he didn’t. “You’re great at it too. You’ve become one of the best. I may not like it very much, but you clearly do. It’s just a little too scary for me,” I continued.

“Yeah,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. “It is nerve-wracking sometimes, but that adrenaline keeps me going.”

“What if you get hurt badly one day?” I asked.

Of course I didn’t want to make him quit his dream, but I wanted him to be realistic. His career could be dangerous. His last fight had almost proven that, and we had more than just ourselves to think about now.

“I’ve been hurt badly before,” Kaiden replied, reaching around and rubbing his lower back. “I still have that scar. You remember, right?”

I nodded. I remembered it all right. When we were eleven, Kaiden’s father had thrown him across the room one night, and he’d smashed right into a glass cabinet and obtained a large cut across his back. I’d helped him clean it up, and my Mom had made him stay the night with us. We’d both wished we could do more, but CPS had made it clear that they weren’t getting involved, and we couldn’t exactly kidnap Kaiden from his father and make him come and live with us.

God, how could a man do that to his own child because he was blind drunk and didn’t like something he’d said? And how the hell could Kaiden think that I would assume he’d ever become like that? There was just no way.

“Where’s your Dad now?” I asked.

I knew I probably shouldn’t ask this, because it was likely to dredge up more pain, but I needed to know all the same. I had to know if his father was going to become an issue for our family in the future, and if so, I wanted to be fully prepared.

“He came to me a couple of years ago, when I first became famous. He wanted money, of course,” Kaiden replied. “I wanted to kick the shit out of him, I really did. I was so fucking mad, but I didn’t. I sent him away instead. Told him to leave me alone and cut off all ties for good. I don’t know where he is now. He could be anywhere. He keeps away from me, at any rate, so that’s all I need to know.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“What about your Dad?” he asked. “Did he ever come back?”

“No, we started to drift apart when he and Mom got divorced, and the last time I saw him was when I was about eighteen. He didn’t even get in touch when Mom got sick. He could be anywhere in the world, and to be honest, I wouldn’t want him to come back now. It’d be too little, too late.”

Kaiden grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Well, we might not have much left in terms of family, but we have each other.”

I smiled. “Yeah, we do. And we’re family now.”

“True.”

He wrapped his arms around me, and I allowed myself to get lost in his embrace for a few blissful seconds before a coughing sound interrupted us.

“Ahem. Riley Solis?”

I pulled away from Kaiden’s arms to see a doctor in blue scrubs standing in the doorway to my hospital room.

“I’m here to give you your ultrasound,” he said. “Are you ready?”

I took a deep breath, hesitating before I replied. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready to do something like this, considering there was a chance my baby wasn’t okay, but it needed to happen.

Finally, I nodded. “Yes. I’m ready.”