Romance: JADEN: An MMA Fighter Romance (Bad Boy Tattoo Romance) (New Adult Pregnancy Short Stories) (20 page)

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I know that this won’t be accepted by a lot of people, but because you’re so damn famous, it’ll be pretty hard to have a secret affair. That’d be too messy for me, anyways.”

“I don’t want to keep you a secret.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

He laughed and stroked his hand through my hair once again. “I mean, I want to show you to the world. I want to be proud of you, not having some sort of illicit affair somewhere in the shadows while our parents get to be happy. I think that we should all be happy,” he said thoughtfully.

“I used to think that you were a dumb rich kid who mooched off of his parents,” I said in wonder, running a hand over his chest. He had a tattoo over his heart, a Celtic cross. I traced the edges of the ink with the barest hint of fingernail. He shivered under my touch.

“That’s what I wanted you to think,” he said kissing the top of my head. “My mother, as well. She had left us, and every time she saw my face on the news for the senator’s daughter I’d ruined, I wanted her to be ashamed. I wanted her to regret leaving us and taking my money.”

“Well,” I said wryly. “Please tell me you won’t do that now.”

Bastian pulled my head up to meet his electric blue eyes. They were soul-searching, like in the garage, but ten times more intense because of what we had just done. “I would never hurt you like that,” he said with conviction. “I love you.”

I blinked at the admission. Sure, I had way too many feelings for him for my own good, but I had assumed that he kept his heart more closely guarded than that. Then I smiled. Did I care? I believed him. “Back at’cha,” I said, and flicked his nose with my pinkie.

He grinned at me and opened his mouth to say something else when his cellphone buzzed from his pants pocket. I turned and went to the bathroom while I listened to him talk, standing in the doorway.

He flipped the phone shut after a few words, and grinned at me again. “She’s awake.”

I went over and kissed him once more. “Let me go get dressed, and we’ll go back.”

“What about sleep?”

“You ruined any chance of that, Mr. Playboy,” I said, turning around and going into the bathroom before he could ask how the hell I’d come up with that name.

I grinned as I pulled the curtain closed over the shower. This was going to be a fun ride, indeed.

THE END

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Copyright 2015 by Maya Grey - All rights reserved.

In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

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by Maya Grey

As I stood in the airport, holding a sign that I hadn’t even decorated, I felt false. People were giving me smiles that were full of warmth and compassion, and a woman even came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “God bless your brother for what he has done, and God bless you for having the courage to be the one to bring him home.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my stepbrother had been sent to the military as a punishment of sorts about three years ago when he had gotten kicked out of college. I had been eighteen at the time, and found the entire thing incredibly hilarious, and now that I had to be the one to welcome him home, no humor remained in the situation. I was only there because Linda had gotten caught in a city where you couldn’t see two feet in front of you due to the heavy snow, and Dad was busy with a client that he almost had a breakthrough on that would change the entire outcome of the case. He had told me so much over the phone and begged me to leave the comfort of my one-bedroom and my cat Lewis purring at my feet to drive in the thirty degree weather to meet a guy who was supposed to be my brother. Lawyers are always over-dramatic, and I think that the evidence could have waited.

One of my weaknesses is saying no. This is why I was standing here, holding the glittery and utterly ridiculous sign and a bouquet of roses for the one person I truly hate.

I scanned the crowd. There were other signs, none as elaborate or eccentric as mine, and it stuck out like a sore thumb. Many people took second—and third—glances at it to see if it was really that glittery, and then gave me a sympathetic stare. I would give them a tight smile back as if to say, what can you do about it?

The flight attendant opened the doors that led from the plane, and I took in a deep breath of relief. About frickin’ time. I had things to do and places to be, I thought irritably. While it wasn’t true, I would most definitely tell Lucas that the moment I saw him.

The passengers began filing out of the plane a few moments later, and I began bouncing on the balls of my feet in the anticipation of being able to leave soon. That was, of course if he didn’t check his bags.

At first, my brother wasn’t recognizable. I admired him for all of two seconds before I reached the icy green eyes and realized, holy shit, this is Lucas. I had lingered on the wide shoulders and lean stomach, but it was quickly blown away with the revelation that this wasn’t a random man who got off of the plane.

With a strong, lean body that looked utterly ripped, there was nothing in this man that reminded me of the nerdy brother that had been booted off to military camp. He had grown perhaps another four inches, making him tower over my barely five and a half foot height. He didn’t recognize me either, instead began reading the signs.

When he reached mine, he grimaced and took a second look at the face, and frowned. He adjusted the shoulder on his bag and walked slowly towards me. I suppose he was attempting to make an awesome impression for the people around him, but I was utterly unimpressed.

When he reached me, we simply sized each other up. The couple next to us was embracing each other with enough love to make up for our lack of it, but I had to put on a good show for everyone who was watching, didn’t I?

I tried a smile. It seemed strained. “You’ve gotten taller, Lucas,” I said, having to crane my neck up to meet his gaze. Damn him.

He smirked down at me. “And you’ve gotten smaller.” His smirk widened, and he replicated my tone. “Katy.”

Fifty pounds lighter, two runs a day and eating nothing but carrots and celery, and all he could say was that I was ‘smaller.’ Jesus this man knew how to understate. I narrowed my eyes at him and nodded.

“Yes, I have.” People were staring at us, so I thrust the flowers out at him. “Take them and pretend like you’re happy to see me,” I ground out from between my smile.

He blinked. “What if I am happy to see you?” He took the flowers all the same, and then grinned at me, leaning forward and crushing me in a hug. My nerdy, Dungeons and Dragons obsessed, X-box playing douchebag brother who had never stepped into a gym in his life, had biceps, and he was using them quite effectively to murder my air supply. As he drew back I gave him a glare.

“I highly doubt you are. I am not happy to see you.” It was the truth. Now that he was back, there would be the drama between my dad and stepmom once again about what we would do with him.

“Then why are you here, holding a big, glittery and very pink sign that professes your utter and complete love for me and happiness that I am home?” his eyes smoldered with an intensity that I had never seen from Lucas before he left. I frowned.

“Dad made me come, and your mother is caught in a city halfway around the world where it’s snowing cats and dogs,” I said.

“Raining,” Lucas corrected.

“No, it’s snowing,” I snapped.

Lucas smiled. Oh, he had worked on that smile, too. It had been all crooked teeth with overbearing braces that matched perfectly with his round Harry Potter style glasses. Now it was just a quick quirk of the lips on one side. “The correct terminology is it’s raining cats and dogs,” he said. Well damn, his time playing war games hadn’t done a single thing to make him stop spouting encyclopedias.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said, waving him off. “Let’s just leave so that I can get back to my room and as far away from you as humanly possible.” He smiled again, and this time it was with teeth. I don’t know what he must have done to get his teeth that white, but from the braces, they were perfectly straight. He had the smile of a movie star, and that pissed me off even more because I found it attractive.

“Oh, and if you have another bag,” I cautioned, leaning close to him so that the elderly couple that was beaming at us wouldn’t overhear, “I will pull your entrails out through your nose.”

“Kitty-cat doesn’t like big scary places like this?” Lucas asked.

“No, I don’t like wasting my time,” I snapped, folding up the sign. Lucas attempted to hand me the roses back, but I just shoved them back against his chest. My finger slipped on one of the thorns, and I gritted my teeth.

Hot irritation was singing through my veins, replacing the blood. He had used that nickname, the one I remembered from a long time ago when he had still been a nerdy boy who liked his X-box more than people. I most definitely hadn’t missed that.

Lucas looked about ready to respond with some snipe, but his phone beeped in his pocket, and he wrestled the roses into one hand in order to reach into his jacket pocket and pull it out. He frowned down at the phone for a few moments. His taste in technology hadn’t been altered a bit. He was still for the high-tech, top-of-the-line work that cost thousands of dollars. Hell, he’d probably taken this iPhone apart and added a few extra somethings to make it that much better.

I glanced back up on his face, and for the first time, he didn’t have that ridiculous smirk on his face, and I noticed that there was something very different about him. It wasn’t just his physical appearance, but it was the way he carried himself and the haggard, haunted look in his eyes. I wondered how many times he had seen combat over the last three years.

Then he glanced back up at me and grinned again, and the illusion—for what I must have been seeing was illusion at best—disappeared. “Ready to go home?” he asked.

“Most definitely,” I replied. “Hurry up before they expect us to hug and make up again.”

Lucas glanced around at the people. “Aww, Kitty, you were never any fun.” He reached out and snaked an arm around my waist, pulling me against him. I screeched in protest at the unapproved action, but Lucas didn’t let go. I saw him slip his phone back into the pocket of his camouflage jacket and then both arms were around me.

I hated to admit it, but after a few moments, the strangeness of it all disappeared and I began to feel safe in his arms. I let my guard down for six heartbeats before I remembered how he used to light my hair on fire and kill my pet gerbils and then dissect them as a science experiment. I pulled away. “What are you doing?”

“Giving the good people a show. We might be internet famous, Kitty-cat,” he added, nodding to the woman who had her camera out and was following us with it. I rolled my eyes.

“Maybe you want fame, but I don’t.”

His hand reached over and tousled my curly hair, making the already messy curls look positively obscene. I ducked away, but he held me tight. “Fame isn’t something that I want, Kitty-cat.”

“Really?” I snorted. We walked past the many gates, and I imagined that I was boarding each one of them. Even Detroit sounded better than taking my brother home to our big, empty house and expecting me to get along with him as if his time at the military had changed his piss-poor attitude at all.

I sighed. When we were finally around a corner, I pulled away from Lucas again, and he let me go. The folded up sign I held in my hands got put in the nearest trashcan, and I wiped my glittery hands on my pants, not caring that they made my thighs sparkle. At least every time I brushed my face, I wouldn’t have little bits of the annoying stuff sticking to my face.

Lucas made a move to throw away the roses as well, but I shoved them against his chest once more. “At least put them in a vase to make Linda happy,” I said. “She spent hours picking them out for you.”

“It took my mother hours to decide on a dozen red roses?” Lucas asked, examining the flowers. They were rather wilted from the cold, but still hanging on.

“You know how she is.”

“I do.” He nodded and lowered the flowers so that they hung beside him. I let out a breath. It was bad enough that I had thrown the sign away. Linda would freak out if she found out that Lucas had gotten rid of her other beautiful and so very original gift as well. She would bounce off the walls with anger.

The rest of the walk to my car was uncomfortably silent. It had been three years since I had put up with Lucas, and both of us had changed so much that it was as if we had met each other for the first time.

Lucas had always had the potential to be good looking, and my friend from high school had said, “With a few pounds of muscle and a tan, this kid would be a knockout.” Of course, there had been more than that. The nerdy t-shirts with ironic meanings, those damned round glasses that weren’t really serving any purpose and the strangely fitting jeans would have had to go as well.

With those few pounds of muscle and the tan he must have gotten from being outside a lot, I would have liked to see what Melany would have said about him now.

“You’re staring,” Lucas drawled, leaning back in my seat.

I quickly snapped my gaze away. Had I seriously just been admiring my step-brother? The one who constantly tortured me as a teenager and made my life difficult?

Yes, yes I had, but I would never tell anyone else that.

“At your ugly face, indeed I am. I wondered if it was possible that anything could have made it any uglier. Well, ding-ding-ding, this is it.”

“I actually think that the thirty girlfriends I had while I was in Texas would beg to differ,” Lucas said, glancing over at me. His voice and face were tinged with amusement.

I sighed. “You are insufferable,” I said. “I can’t believe that you’re back. I might have to go jump off of the nearest high-rise.”

Lucas grinned, a deep, low chuckle sounding in his chest. It sent shivers down my spine, and I internally slapped myself on the cheek. Get it the fuck together, I told myself. This isn’t going to work if you stop hating him.

“Yep,” I said instead, focusing solely on the road. “Definitely going to. Maybe I’ll bring you with and shove you off first.”

“Oh, hun, I’d like to see you try.”

We hadn’t made it ten miles from the airport and we were already squabbling like old times. This was going to be a long and hard process.

###

Dinner was quiet without Linda here to coo and fuss over her baby boy who had come back a hero. Dad had come home a few hours after Lucas and I had returned from the airport. I had been looking forward to a nice, long session of reading in the den with a fleece blanket thrown around my shoulders and old movies running in the background, but Lucas had ruined that with a few simple actions of sitting down on the couch, propping his feet on the coffee table where I usually rested my mug of tea, and flipping the TV on to the sports channel.

I had high-tailed it out of there and sulked in my room until Dad came home. Since Linda wasn’t here to cook us one of her fabulous meals that she enjoyed getting off of the internet and the cooking channels, I popped some instant macaroni and cheese into the oven to bake, and quickly prepared a salad for myself. No matter what I had told my parents about the dangers of eating too many refined sugars, they had refused to cut down their carb intake, saying that grain was healthy and needed to be consumed at every meal.

Thus, we still had a lot of junky food sitting around in our house, and I had to avoid pigging out on it whenever the urge to eat everything overtook me. I still got that way sometimes, but I had already come so far in my endeavor to become a healthy, fit person and resisted the urge to eat a full box, bag, or package of the unhealthy thing. I let myself have some, in moderation.

I wondered if Lucas had eaten well. He would have had to because those kinds of muscles don’t come naturally to a skinny guy. He would have needed a lot of protein and lots of reps of heavy lifting—why was I thinking about Lucas lifting weights and eating lean meats?