ROMANCE: Military: SEALED BY APACHE (Military Soldier Navy SEAL Romance) (Alpha Male Billionaire Bad Boy Romance Short Stories) (148 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Heather answered her phone with a smile on her face, assuming that Adam’s number on her caller ID was a sign that she had gotten what she wanted. 

She had known he would come around, and the fact that it had only taken him a day to make up his mind proved that she had won.  Yes, he had lots of potential.  He would be a fun project to take on.

“Hi, baby,” she cooed, sipping at her tea as she swiveled in her chair.  “I didn’t expect you to make up your mind this fast.”

Adam was silent on the other end for a moment.  Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Heather, but I can’t go.”

Heather sat up quickly in her chair, spilling tea across the desk and onto the paperwork she was supposed to be looking over.  She wasn’t used to not getting her way.

“What do you mean, you can’t go?”

“I can’t leave,” Adam answered.  “This is home.  This is Kelly’s home.  We just can’t pick up and leave it all behind.”

Heather felt the rage start to eat at her gut.  “You talked to your sister, didn’t you?” she spat, knowing the answer before he could say it.

“I talked to Sarah, yes,” Adam said.  “And actually, when you think about it, she’s not really my sister at all.”

Heather blinked her long lashes in confusion.  She put him on speaker and tossed the iPhone on the desk and hovered over it. 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Heather, I’m sorry,” Adam said, though he didn’t really sound sorry.  “I really hope this doesn’t change your plans.  I can’t leave, but you should go.  You’d be crazy not to.”

“Change my plans?” Heather snorted, the anger apparent in her voice.  “Change my plans?  Because you want to spend the rest of your life working as a fucking bartender, cuddling up to your sister?  No, Adam, that doesn’t change my plans.  I don’t need you in France.  I can’t find a hundred men like you!  The bottom of the barrel is full of them!”

Adam was silent for a second, then his voice brightened as he said, “I’m sorry you’re down to scraping that low, Heather.  I think that says more about you than the men you’re finding there.  Have a nice life.”

“No, you listen to me, you -” Heather started, then screamed out in fury when she realized he had hung up.  She threw her cellphone against the wall and watched it shatter to pieces, cursing loud enough for the entire department floor to hear.

CHAPTER NINE

“Well, that was fun,” Adam said as he came in from the bedroom where he’d been talking to Heather.  He smiled and tossed his cellphone onto the kitchen island and sat down beside his daughter for breakfast.

“I wish you would have let me listen in,” Sarah said, smiling as she served him scrambled eggs.  She filled a glass with orange juice and pushed it toward him.

“I assume she didn’t take it very well?” She didn’t bother to hide the devilish grin that was plastered to her lips.

“Daddy, are we still going to France with that awful lady?” Kelly asked.

Adam glanced at Sarah as she looked down, blushing slightly, and turned her attention back to the stove.

“No, sweetie,” he replied, giving her a hug.  “I think we might just have a good reason to stay where we are.”

Sarah leaned against the counter and wiped her hands on a towel and smiled.  She watched father and daughter eating, Adam winking at her as he fought with Kelly over a slice of bacon. 

She smiled to herself, a relieved smile, a happy smile.

Adam had told her last night that he and Kelly were the luckiest people on earth to have her around. 

That morning, at that precise moment, she knew for a fact that she was the one who was lucky.

THE END

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THE

BAD SEED

Erotic Stepbrother Romance

By

Aubrey James

CHAPTER ONE

    Belinda Ravelli had always been a beautiful girl; the type of girl everyone thought would grow up to be a beauty queen or the wife of a billionaire or perhaps a high fashion model.  

Her mother Homira was from India and her father Tony was a second generation Italian-American.  Their genetic makeup had combined perfectly to create Belinda.  

Her complexion was the color of honey, making her appear perpetually tanned.  Her hair was like her mother’s: long, thick, and black as night.  She was curvy in all the right places and hard as rock in others.

Her eyes were quite possibly her most striking feature.  They were cat-like; two grey orbs floating in a sea of white.  Her lashes were naturally thick and long and she used them to her advantage. 

Belinda knew her looks stopped men in their tracks and caused women to gawk with jealousy.  She knew her looks could be a comfort or a weapon, depending on how she used them.  

When she was a toddler her mother dressed her in traditional Indian saris.   As she got older she resisted, wanting to wear “normal” clothes like the other girls at school.   It became just one of the things she and her mother would argue about in the coming years. 

Belinda would one day come to regret the amount of time she spent arguing with her mother.  It was time that could have been spent in so much more productive ways.  

Despite her natural beauty, Belinda had always been modest and kind; a gentle person who was happy to be friends with everyone.   She believed deeply in Karma, you reap what you sow and all that.  It drove her to be the kind of person who inspired others to be good and kind, sometimes even to her own detriment.  

Her mother instilled the belief in Karma in her; telling her many tales of how Karma had affected her own life, in both good ways and bad.   There hadn’t been any formal religion in Belinda’s home, but she’d always been taught that good things came to good people.  

“If you are a good person,” her mother often said, “then your life will be one of prosperity, goodness, and happiness!  You will meet a good man and have a wonderful life and give me many grandchildren!”

Belinda never doubted her mother’s words.   She liked the idea that the good vibrations she put out into the world would be returned to her manifold. 

As she grew older, however, she came to doubt many of the things her mother had told her.   Bad things seemed to happen to good people all the time, no matter how hard they tried to be good.  

Little kids got cancer.  Favorite pets ran away.  Grandparents got terrible diseases and died.

Belinda started to think that maybe her mother had been wrong all along.  Maybe there was no such thing as Karma.  Maybe how good and kind you were had very little to do with the amount of shit that came your way.  Maybe her father was right.  Maybe life had nothing to do with Karma or God or Fate or Luck. 

“Life is a crapshoot, Belinda,” he said every time life kicked him in the balls, which was often.  “All you can do is roll the dice and take whatever comes up.  Life’s a bitch and then you die.”  

Sometime around her twelfth birthday her parents began fighting more than usual.   They had been relatively happy up until that point, or at least she thought.  They smiled in family pictures and held hands when they walked together.   Her father still wanted sex and her mother gave it to him to keep him happy, so her mother said.

Belinda couldn’t understand the sudden shift in mood.   They did their best to shield her from most of it.  Until the day her mother broke down and told her that she had caught her father cheating with a younger woman from the bakery where he worked. 

“A white American slut with blonde hair and big breasts,” her mother said through her tears, speaking with her hands.  Belinda often wondered if it was the fact that her father cheated that hurt her mother so much or if it was that he cheated with a woman who was the polar opposite of her mom.  

The fighting only stopped when her dad moved out.  He packed a bag, kissed her on the head, and she never saw him again.  

Belinda and her mother were left destitute and broke.  They moved in with her mother’s sister, Fetima, and her family in a tiny apartment in one of the seediest parts of town.  There were eight people packed into a small two-bedroom hovel that her mother said reminded her of living in Calcutta.  

Belinda and her mother shared a single bed in one corner of the second bedroom with four of her cousins.  Money was short and food was never plentiful.  Even with her optimistic personality Belinda remembered it as being one of the most difficult times of her life.

She remembered her mother crying a lot during that time.   She remembered crawling into the tiny bed with her mother, holding her tightly as she sobbed and prayed in her native tongue.  

Belinda never knew what her mother was saying since she’d never learned her mother’s language, but she could tell she was praying for some kind of healing and relief.  

CHAPTER TWO

That relief came in the form of a nice, older man named Abraham Banner, an accountant who occupied a small office next door to the neighborhood market a few blocks over from the apartment. 

He spotted Homira shopping at the market one day and worked up the nerve to approach her.  Homira would later tell her daughter, “I caught him watching me a dozen times.  I didn’t think the man would ever work up the nerve to say hello.”

Abraham was a nice man, with a timid smile, and shy demeanor.  He was balding, wore wire-rimmed glasses and suits that he bought off the rack decades ago.  His shoes were always shined to a high gloss.  He believed you could tell a lot about a man by the way he kept his shoes.

“He makes a good living and he’s very thrifty,” her mother would say.  “He saves every penny he makes for his old age.  He’s a good man.  Not like your father.”

Belinda was standing next to her mother in the produce department when Abraham approached.  He attempted to make awkward small talk, then asked Homira if she might like to accompany him to dinner some night. 

Accompany him to dinner, Belinda thought.  Who talks like that?  They were an odd mix-match, the older Jew and the younger Hindi, but Abraham and Homira seemed to adore one another and married two months later.

Abraham was a decade older than her mother, in his late fifties, when they married.   Her mother didn’t seem to care.  She seemed more concern with his financial stability. 

“He owns a nice house in a nice neighborhood and makes a very good living,” her mother said.  “What woman could ask for more?”

“But do you love him, mama?” Belinda asked.

She remembered a great sadness coming to her mother’s eyes.  “Love is highly overrated, Belinda.  Eating and a roof over your head are not.”

Her mother was a good wife to Abraham and made a happy home for him, though Belinda didn’t think she ever really loved him; not in the way a wife should love a husband.

Still, her mother seemed happier than she had even been, so maybe happiness wasn’t about love, after all.  Maybe it was about security and a warm bed and a full belly.  It was a lesson that was never far from Belinda’s mind.  

So she had a stepfather now.  It took some getting used to, having a father figure again, but Abraham was nice to her, never too strict, and treated her as if she was one of his own.   She came to love him as if he were her real father.

Abraham’s first wife had passed away from cancer years before.  He had one son, Ben, but he didn’t talk about him at all.  Belinda learned from her mother that Ben was serving time in prison for manslaughter. 

The story was never clear to her.  He allegedly killed another man in a bar fight, or something like that.  Belinda never knew for sure.  There were no pictures of him in Abraham’s house; nothing that would indicate that he even had a son.

Belinda was fifteen when her mother married Abraham, and her mother thought Ben was around twenty-two.   He’d been in prison for two years and could be out in eight if he behaved himself.

“Prison changes a man,” Homira said with a heavy sigh.  “If he was violent before, there’s no telling what he will be like when he gets out.  Best he keeps away from our happy home.”

The only thing Homira knew for sure was that Ben’s actions had broken his father’s heart and it would be best if Belinda never brought him up in front of Abraham.

“It makes him sad,” her mother explained.

Belinda was always curious about her stepbrother, but out of respect for Abraham, she never asked questions about him.   She always thought that if Abraham wanted to talk about Ben, he could do so without her coaxing.

Belinda was happy, living with Abraham and her mom, but even happy teenagers sometimes rebel.   The neighborhood where they lived was full of kids her age and she made friends quickly and easily. 

Her mother wasn’t fond of some of the friends she attracted.  Her mother was overprotective and could be more than a little judgmental.  It wasn’t surprisingly that the friends her mother disliked the most were the friends Belinda spent most of her time with.