Baby Blue_A Father's Day Secret Baby Romance Read online

  Baby Blue: A Secret Baby Romance

  Copyright © 2018 by Juliana Conners; All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Sizzling Hot Reads

  To Matt.

  The best daddy, and hubby, ever.

  ***

  This book is a work of fiction and any similarities to real places, people or events are entirely coincidental. This book may not be reproduced or distributed in any format except for short quotes for review purposes, without the express written consent of the author.

  Chapter One

  Kayla

  No.

  His answer is going to be no. I could waste this night in so many other ways—like using my new ability to drink legally. It doesn’t have the same appeal as it did last year, when I was just 20 years old. But last year was a lifetime ago. Literally. I’m different now. I’m getting my shit together. I’m going places.

  Yet here I am. Choosing to spend my night getting rejected.

  But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think this night offered a chance, tiny as it may be, for him to say yes.

  The intercom seems to stare back at me as if it expects my touch. A mixture of shame and anxiety shivers down my back. But those nerves don’t spur me to send brain signals to force my fingertip to press the intercom buzzer.

  I keep my eyes trained on that buzzer while my head runs through the scenarios that could unfold. And they all end with a “no.”

  Still, I haven’t embarrassed myself. Yet. I can still turn on my heel and run from the rejection that’s destined to come.

  I last spoke to Zach months ago. To appear out of the blue only to ask for a favor seems not only rude, but a sure fire way to get him mad and yelling at me.

  Though yelling isn’t his way of doing things. Politeness is more his style. But I’m sure he won’t shy away from an opportunity to voice his disappointment in me. And our relationship. Reasons to help me can be counted with one hand. And even those reasons may not be good enough for him.

  Behind me, I hear the clopping of an older couple stepping up into the building’s entry porch.

  “Did you forget your keys, dear?”

  A lively lady with glowing brunette skin squints at me as she smiles. “We can let you in, darling,” she says with a wink.

  I shake my head and step aside to let her and her husband into the building.

  “Thank you, but I’m just trying to get someone to come down.” Not my best lie. But it’s better than admitting I’m too spineless to get on with it and ask someone important to me for a life-changing favor.

  I bid the cheerful couple a good night and thank them again for their offer to let me in. Maybe I should have taken it and walked up to Zach’s apartment. I’d have the opportunity to knock on his door and catch him off guard. But then I’d have to see him face to face. I’m not prepared for that.

  There’s even the possibility that he’d want me to come up. Fuck. I didn’t think this through. Maybe this could have been done over the phone. Every breath I take trembles through my body. Every tremble adds to my insecurity.

  Screw it.

  My index finger shoots out, slamming into the button for apartment 320.

  Bzzzzzzt. “Zach. It’s Kayla.” Somehow, I sound brisk and all-business.

  I relieve my finger from the button and wait for a response.

  Maybe I didn’t ring the buzzer long enough before speaking. Or what if he’s in the bathroom? He might not even be home. These variables escaped my mind before committing to this leap of faith, or act of stupidity, by ringing that buzzer. I now realize this undoubtedly could have been done over the phone.

  Bzzzzzzt. “Kayla. What-- what do you want?”

  Even over the fuzzy intercom, his voice releases a wave of relief over me. It shouldn’t though. His tone is noticeably terse and tense. But no turning back now.

  I take a deep breath and rush out, “I need a letter of recommendation… Please… If that’s okay.”

  Excruciating seconds of silence pass. He could be laughing hysterically at the thought of recommending me for anything. Or he could be walking back to his couch and popcorn, done with hearing from me for the night. I can’t take any more.

  “Are you still there?”

  I hear a sigh after the abrupt buzzing of his side of the intercom. “Yeah. But… Just to clarify… I want to be perfectly clear, you want a letter recommendation for--”

  “The Police Academy,” we say in unison.

  “For Christ’s sake, Kayla. Why?”

  Could he really not know my reason for wanting this? Or does he just want me to say it aloud?

  “It’s something I need to do,” I confess. “And you can help me. I don’t know many other— Or anyone else who works at a police academy. Please, Zach can you—”

  He cuts me off, voice biting. “So this has nothing to do with Dad?”

  I recoil at his query and release the intercom button like it burns me. I take a quick breath. I repeat to myself several times the line that’s been haunting me for months now. Another heaving breath. Now I’m ready to say it out loud. I strike back at the buzzer like an attack.

  “I want this for me, Zach. But in doing it, I will be honoring his memory.” I can’t hide my pride in arriving at this conclusion, all by myself.

  But Zach snickers. “As much as I’d love to believe that, I know you. You’re a daddy’s girl, and now that daddy’s gone you want to throw your life away to make his ghost proud. Is that about right?”

  I do want to make Dad proud. It’s not too late. Though, it’s true, I have no idea what happens after death. I wasn’t raised in any church so, to me, death is just a blank nothing. And eternal nothingness is not how I want to picture Dad after a lifetime of heroic acts and unending selflessness. Even if I’m fooling myself, I want to think Dad is somehow watching me. And if that’s the case, then I’m going to do something to make him proud.

  I will follow in his footsteps. I will be heroic. I will save lives.

  Now, instead of smug and sneering, Zach’s voice goes sharp and flinty as he heartlessly chides. “Kayla, there’s no avenging left to do. Dad is as dead as the man who shot him. Enrolling in the police academy is not a healthy way to deal with his death. Focus on something else. Maybe go on a vacation. Or enroll in classes for something you’d actually be suited for.”

  Tears well up. My view of the bricked entry porch begins to blur. “Can’t you… Please, Zach. We’re family.”

  Damn. I shouldn’t play the family card. Because I can’t say I’ve thought of Zach as family. Boy next door would be more accurate, in my mind. He’s been my stepbrother for much of my life, but he entered it in my budding years of puberty. And Mother Nature had been overly generous to him.

  He was already a man—early twenties with a long, well-muscled body. He looked like the celebrities that my friends and I fawned over. High cheekbones, wide jaw, deep soulful eyes. Dirty blonde long bangs, streaked by the sun, usually tried to cover those eyes, so blue I couldn’t believe he wasn’t wearing colored contacts. He was always outside and always sweating. The sunlight bouncing from his moist face made him glisten, and I remember a constant ethereal halo surrounding him.

  I didn’t know what to think of him, at first. He was just a hot boy, sitting next to Dad’s girlfriend. Then, for a few months I would see him every now and again for holidays or long weekends when his mom would stay with us. I was happy to see my Dad with a woman at his side and was excited at the prospect of having a mother for the first time in my life. But I hadn’t considered that her gorgeous son would be integrated into my family.

  Soon, a boy nine years my senior was in
troduced to me as my new brother.

  I shuddered each time my dad and new stepmom referred to me as his “little sis.” I didn’t want to be his sister. I wanted something different.

  Zach and his mother moved in the summer I was starting to discover my body and how to work it properly. My chest was growing. My interests were changing. I’d go to sleep with a pillow between my thighs, wishing that pillow was my new brother’s… something, anything. Some nights it’d be his face. Other nights, his waist.

  These thoughts only increased after I found him playing with himself one day.

  Our parents were out, and he must have thought I had gone with them. That’s the only reason he would have been stroking his engorged cock exercising no discretion. His door was open just a few inches, giving me enough space to peer through and watch him please himself with both hands gripping his penis. I’d never seen a naked man all laid out like that, muscles clenched, veins popping. Glorious. Powerful.

  He moaned intensely as his toes curled, pinching the fitted sheet under him. My eyes opened wide at the sight of his ejaculate being shot high above him and landing on his hairless chest. The voluminous amount of cum on his torso sat still like a white lake. Realizing it was only time before he came to his senses, I snapped a mental photograph and ran away as quickly as my newly teenaged legs could muster.

  “We are family,” Zach finally answers, snapping me out of my probing memories the same way my sense of morality often did. “But think about what you’re asking me. Even with a letter of recommendation, it won’t be easy. Passing tests is easy but being a great police officer, like Dad, that’s hard. It takes commitment and a lot of sacrifice. You… You…”

  This time, I cut him off. “Look. I’m not whatever you think I am. I know you have reservations about me. Forget about what happened between us when—”

  “I already forgot about that.” Abruptly, his voice raises to almost a yell. “That doesn’t have anything to do with this!” He clears his throat, speech returning to normal. “My decision has nothing to do with… that.”

  “Okay, regardless…” I continue, “I’m not irresponsible or air-headed, or whatever I’ve shown myself to be as your little sister. I am capable. I am smart. I’m stronger than I look.”

  Again, he snickers. “Kayla, you’re 110 pounds soaking wet.”

  When it comes to anything serious, I know people think I’m a lightweight. That I go too slow, too wandering in my pace. But I am just trying to think matters through. I know I get lost in my thoughts. I know I can over-think things.

  Maybe it’s fair to think I wasn’t serious, back then, when I was just following my heart. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you’re young? But following this heart has never been easy. It was always searching for something. Searching, maybe, for the mother I never knew.

  But people said I was flighty. Unreliable. When all I wanted was to be true. All I wanted was to make things right.

  “Listen to me,” I snap, “I can do everything you can. And if there’s anything I can’t do, I will learn how to do it. And I will do it well.”

  I hear the weariness in his sigh. “Kayla…”

  Never in my life have I despised hearing my name more. But this is, after all, what I was expecting from him.

  He could give me a real reason to refuse writing me a letter of recommendation, and I could take this refusal more gracefully. But the only reason he’s not helping me is because he still hasn’t forgiven me. Many nights have passed, spent wondering if I can even blame him for not forgiving me. I wouldn’t forgive me.

  I continue foolishly standing at the door of Zach’s apartment building, waiting for him to finish his thought.

  “Zach, if there was anybody else on this earth who could help me, I would go to them. You’re my only hope.”

  The once uncertain silence now feels thick with certain disdain. I imagine his scorn radiating from the third floor studio like a cloud of toxic gas. But I need it cemented. Finish your sentence, Zach.

  “Kayla…”

  Chapter Two

  Zach

  Desperate as always. Seemingly desperate, anyway.

  It’s always you’re my only hope and I can’t do it on my own or this is the last time I’ll ask you for anything.

  With some self-control I’ve been able to rescind Kayla’s requests the past few times she’s decided to crawl back into my life and beg me for help finding a job, buying a car or “borrowing” money. She appears at my door, wearing something skimpy, hugging me tight, showing me affection and the first few times, it worked. She successfully manipulated me.

  My little sister needed help and as she explained, I was the only one who could help her. What choice did I have?

  This feels different though. She’s not standing in my hallway, holding her tits out with a push-up bra and pretending to cry. Though I can’t see her, she sounds more serious than ever before.

  “Kayla,” I say for a second time, “You’re not really Academy material. And it would take you a long time to get to that point. I can’t help you here. It would tarnish my reputation if I recommended somebody completely unprepared and unqualified for The Academy. That’s just the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  “You’re my sister now. Nothing more, nothing less,” I remember telling Kayla back when my mom and I moved into Dad’s house.

  “So you wouldn’t want to be my boyfriend? Nobody would have to know. It’d be, like a secret.”

  I nervously chuckled. I didn’t even know if she was serious. And even if I thought she was striking, even if I wanted something with her, she was too young. And now, we were related.

  “Kay-kay, come over here,” Dad had called from upstairs. Right. He saved me from having to explain to Kayla the taboo nature of what she was suggesting.

  Back then, I had girlfriends and one night stands. Plenty of both. It was a fun time in my life. To say I was sexually satisfied would be an understatement. Yet there was something that attracted me to Kayla. Her petite body, maybe. Momentarily petite. Her breasts went from budding to bountiful. Even with her quick and ample development, she pretended as though her body hadn’t changed and refused to buy clothing that fit her properly, resulting in a year of many accidental flashes.

  Her youthful naiveté was charming, and she brushed off each of her wardrobe malfunctions like water off a duck’s back, smiling easily the entire time. Undoubtedly, this was one of the factors that drew me to her. None of the high school or college women I’d been with would react to a group of people seeing their nipples with such nonchalance.

  I wanted her.

  But I knew I couldn’t have her. Her age and our familial connection made her the forbidden fruit of my desire. Which only made me want her more.

  It was five years after our parents got married. Dad’s entire homicide unit all pitched in and threw them a huge anniversary party with a band and catered food.

  I couldn’t deny my attraction to Kayla and I didn’t try.

  She had grown in age and physicality, which was both a blessing and a curse. Her beauty flourished as she did, but so did her insecurity. It’s inevitable.

  I’ve seen teen girls exclude anyone who goes through puberty too soon or too late. I’ve also seen teen girls tear down their female classmates solely because of their looks. This leads to self-hate that is only amplified by society’s obsession on how women should look and act. I witnessed it as Kayla went from a girl who was comfortable in her body to an unsure young woman whose confidence shrunk as she grew.

  But her love of dancing and music stayed steady. At the anniversary party, I struggled not to stare at her, all made-up and well-dressed. Swirling her long skirt under the disco ball on the dance floor, she beckoned, waving me over. “Go on! Get it! Shake that money maker!”

  I reluctantly agreed. The song was too fast for my taste yet my vanishing sobriety said why not. I did, however, end up enjoying myself
once the slow dancing begun.

  She held me tight as we danced, which made my drunk dick start to swell. The first slow song wasn’t even over when I felt my hard cock press against Kayla’s tight belly. To prevent others from noticing, I held Kayla tighter and tried to slow dance back towards to my chair. The two of us inched closer and closer to my table, but our efforts were ruined by one rogue caterer. The man dropped an entire tray of champagne flutes on Kayla and me, drenching us almost completely.

  The cold beverages effectively shrunk my erection, but Kayla and I both needed drying off. The two of us headed into an unusually empty bathroom at the far end of the event hall and grabbed as many paper towels as we could hold, drying off as much of each other as we could. Kayla patted down on my soaking chest while I tried the same with the bottom of her long dress.