A Secret Baby Romance
Prologue
I could feel the groove of his finger as it skittered over my lip, my breath hot on his hand. I sucked in each breath one after the other, reminding myself desperately to breathe.
In and out. Bring air into your lungs.
Hot air. Air that smelled just like him. Musky and sweet and filled with so much promise.
If the taste of him on my lips was a drug it was one I never wanted to give up. I’d stay an addict for all time.
I’d be a junky if it meant that I didn’t have to give him up.
“Are you sure you are ready for this, Rose?” he asked me, his hands firm on my sides. My skin prickled at his touch, the goosebumps raising up against his hands. I could feel him against me. Teasing me, torturing me.
His hands slid up my sides as he positioned me right where he wanted me. He was so close.
I could feel his cock hard against the inside of my thigh. Throbbing right up against me. Warning my body.
Warning me that there was no turning back.]
“I’m sure. I want this, Wyatt.” My breath hitched again, the sweet smell of him filling all my senses and making me dizzy.
So dizzy.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I would have it too, all of it. Because he wasn’t going to quit on me. Not now. Not here.
“I want you, Rose.”
I quivered as he said it. Wyatt Graves was my biggest mistake, but I didn’t care. I just opened my mouth and let out a slow moan.
It might be a mistake, but it wouldn’t be a regret.
Chapter One
I pounded the steering wheel once. I was fucking pissed.
“What an asshole,” I swore as I turned down the narrow dirt road, making sure not to stick a tire in the ditch. There was barely room for my truck to head down the middle of the old road. Gravel and shit kicked up everywhere, flying off my tires, the ping of rock hitting my undercarriage.
I loved the sound, relished it. To be honest, it was why I kept the old rust bucket around. I wasn’t worried about it getting all dinged up. It was already there. I’d been driving it forever, and it hadn’t failed me yet. It was my form of zen.
If you could call it that. Zen my ass.
Normally, this ride would be of the calming type. But not when my father was involved. I may have gotten his good looks, and I may have even inherited his playboy attitude, but when it came to business, we were nothing alike.
That motherfucker took no prisoners. I gave a shit about the people I worked with.
The only real time I felt free was when the wind was blowing through the cabin of my truck. No drama. No responsibility. And no fucking people. But not today. My damn father had to stick his nose where it didn’t belong.
He had to come back home to micromanage me.
At least, there was the added bonus that my phone didn’t get service between properties. Try to tell me how to run things now, I smirked. He couldn’t. Not out here.
My father had been working my ass hard. Between the sowing season and the new contracts with feed suppliers there was a lot at stake. Our corn and grain were worth more than it had ever been, and with the number of properties in the East turning from farms to housing developments there seemed no end in sight to the rising price of our product.
We practically owned half of Montana.
It was big money. Millions of dollars in revenue a year. I wasn’t in it for this, but he was. This agribusiness was just one aspect of his empire, and it was mine to run.
We owned the land but they lived on it, and they worked it.
All while we worked to acquire new properties, which was what I set out to do today. It was on his order, he sent me out. But not before digging into me to get the best deal possible. “I’m not in this business to lose money, you know.”
Miranda Shannon asked to meet with me so we could talk about her fifty-three acres of territory. She wanted to keep another 12 for herself, but since her husband passed it had become unmanageable on her own. It was the perfect opportunity, my father said. The kind I should jump at.
Even though I was still sore over love gone wrong with her daughter. Even though she had ties and tangles with my father.
That was my job, to jump when he said jump, to sit when he said sit. I was just his tool to be used.
To come in and swallow up her farm. Then we’d practically own the entire block. One more piece of land for the fiefdom, I reasoned. My father was a tyrant, after all.
He had several businesses, but the acquisition of land for agriculture was where he started his empire. Where he made his first millions. It was the world that afforded him the ability to start his own food label, invest in production. He started a business but what he'd really done was begin a damn empire.
Except my father wasn’t the proper kind of dictator. He was the equivalent of Ivan the Terrible or Benito Mussolini. Except handsome. Somehow that made the people around him forgive his angry tirades.