The Billionaire's Secret Kink Box Set: Knox: Secret Alpha Billionaire Romance Bundle (Rosesson Brothers Book 1) (42 page)

AND! If you have not read my series, Edge of the Heat, I have a little treat for you. Here is book 1, completely free. Knox got his start in book 7 of this series.

By Lisa Ladew

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Copyright © 2014 Lisa Ladew All Rights Reserved

Book cover by:
http://www.stunningbookcovers.com/

This book is dedicated to my husband, a rock of a man who has supported me for 18 years.

I also would like to thank my facebook friends. My lovely, wonderful facebook (and real life) friends who banded together to support this book and my career.

And I would like to thank Amanda Harris for helping me with several final details above and beyond the call of duty. She created the hot cover. Find her here:
http://www.stunningbookcovers.com/

May 7th, 1983

Westwood Harbor

What the hell was he thinking? He was a stupid idiot sometimes, and this was certainly one of those times. What was he going to do with her?

Hide her for now.

She was fifteen, lovely, and just beginning to show. He had done the math and she could be anywhere from four to six months along. She swore it was four months. He didn't trust her to know. She wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Knives. Again he asked himself did he have the guts to kill her? He had to do something. If anyone found out about this it would ruin his career. Shit! Once he figured a way out of this mess he was done with the teenagers and little girls forever. Nineteen-year-olds were legal and could still look and act pretty young.

No, he didn't have the guts to kill her, especially not with a knife. Until he could find someone to do it for him or figure out another way, she would have to stay here.

He gave her the news. She was visibly relieved. Does your mom know?
No, I ran away
. Does anybody know?
No, I was too scared
. Good. What do you need?
Books, lots of books. And food
. He could do books and food. But he wasn't touching her again. She was ruined now.

What about a doctor
? He would find her a good doctor once it was time for the baby to be born. Until then, he would get her a multivitamin and she would be fine. She was young and healthy. She didn't argue. She felt fine.

September 13th, 1983

Westwood Harbor

The baby is coming.

He rushed home, frantically trying to finalize his plan. This baby could not be born. Maybe she was wrong. Her stomach was huge, and he didn't understand how she could stand it, but by her estimation she was still a month early. By his, she had to be at least two or three months early.

Maybe the baby was so early it would die.

But then he'd still have to take care of her.

The only plan he had right now was not much of a plan at all.

Home. She was right. The baby was coming. She wanted to go to the hospital. He told her he had a doctor coming.

In the kitchen, he mixed up a cocktail of Heparin, Warfarin, and some aspirin thrown in for good measure. Way more than anyone should take at one time. All anticoagulants, in the hope that she would bleed to death, and the baby would bleed to death. What would he do with the bodies? He didn't know yet, but that wasn't important right now.

He coaxed her into taking the pills. They would relax her and help with the labor. The doctor told him to give them to her.
Where is the doctor?
He is almost here.

She took them, trust and relief in her eyes.

Two hours later, he couldn't take it anymore and left the small house. She was yelling over and over for a doctor. He had the music turned up, hoping the neighbors wouldn't hear.

When he returned, three hours after that, hoping to find bodies, he found nothing. Not even a blood trail. The front door stood open.

He sat down, and waited for the ax to fall.

As Emma fell off the roof, her body braced for impact. Her mind tried to turn her around so her feet were the first to hit, but there was no time for that.

She felt the impact on her upper back. It was monstrous. It created a massive, slamming shock wave that swallowed her whole. Agony ripped through her for a split second.

And then she knew no more.

***

Four days of my life gone - one for each story I fell.

Even now, sitting in this uncomfortable Westwood Harbor General Hospital bed, listening to the
beep, beep, beep
of her own heart on the monitor, it felt hard to imagine that the four days before yesterday didn't exist in her memories.

Not paralyzed - the doctors said. You need to rest - the doctors said. No visitors - the doctors said.

She knew she wasn't paralyzed because in the vision, (
The Vision of Her Future Husband
), she had been standing.

That's how she thought of the vision - it should be capitalized in writing and spoken in reverential tones if said aloud. Like The Queen or My God. It seemed
that
important to her. This fall she had just taken off of a roof outside a brick tenement seemed ... inconsequential, except that it had given her this vision.

She would recover, she would heal, she would go back to work. And at some point in her future this event would happen and she would finally find her soul-mate. The man that would give her children and be her family, and love her forever, and never, ever leave. The man that would make up for a dead mother, a non-existent father, a missing sister, and a stolen childhood.

Her brain kept pulling back to the fall, wanting to relive it over and over again. She knew that wasn't important though - the vision was. So she lay her head back against the pillow and recalled the vision again in every detail:

It was night time. Orange light filled the sky, barely enough to see by. Something burning. Candles? A man stood in front of her. He was taller than her by at least a few inches. He looked down into her face, his eyes threatening to spill tears. His hair and skin were dark, his jaw strong. His features were mostly hidden in the darkness.

His strong hands were grasping her upper arms almost hard enough to hurt. His voice, husky and strained, broke and cracked as he said:

"I thought you were gone.

I thought I had lost you.

With God as my witness I swear I will never let you go again."

He fell forward onto her chest and slid down her body. He grabbed her around the waist and squeezed her in a bear hug. Now his sobs did come.

In the vision, tingles danced up and down her spine, radiated outward along her back, and wrapped around her body.

She felt ready to explode with love and happiness and ... relief? Her own tears slipped down her face and she hugged his head to her middle, with the same amount of force he was using.

Here the vision ended. If she tried hard she could recreate the tingles, although not as strong as they had felt when she opened her eyes for the first time in four days. If she concentrated enough, she could regain some of the emotions of happiness and love for a few minutes before they faded.

I want to live in that vision forever
.

I wonder if
...

Her thoughts were interrupted by movement at the doorway.

Stupid nurses, they can't leave me be for ten minutes ...

But it wasn't a nurse. It was Jerry, her partner. Her face broke into a smile immediately. The smile hurt, but she didn't care. There was no one else in the world she wanted to see right now except her partner.

"Jerry," she whispered. It hurt her throat and her back to talk.

"Shhhh, don't speak," he said, as he walked to her bedside. "I can't stay long. The doctors don't know I am here, but my pretty little nurse got me in. I just had to see you and make sure it was true - that you are going to be OK."

He raised his hand but it faltered in mid-air, like he wasn't sure if he should touch her. He settled for lightly caressing the back of her left hand.

"Jerry, what happened, was anyone else hurt?" She could barely get out the words, but she had to ask. The only thing she could think of when she wasn't reliving the vision was the "accident" and the doctors wouldn't tell her a thing. They didn't want to "get her excited." They probably just didn't know anything and didn't want to admit it.

"Nah, Frankie picked that asshole up by the scruff of his neck and one of his legs and heaved him in the window head-first. Screw his c-spine." Jerry chuckled a little bit at this memory, but as his eyes lit back on Emma, looking impossibly small and fragile in the hospital bed, the smile withered quickly.

He leaned in a bit and said, "One of the crew, a new guy - Craig something, actually climbed down the drainpipe to get to you."

"What?" Emma felt the pull of every muscle in her face as her eyes widened in surprise.

"Yeah, good thing too, because it took the rest of us clowns way too long to find the door that led out to that alley. By the time we got down there he had your airway open and was screaming for a board."

"Did I ... stop breathing?" Emma forced the words out.

Jerry broke eye contact and looked at the TV high up on the wall.

He doesn't want to tell me. Holy crap, I could have died.

Emma twisted her hand around and grabbed Jerry's. She couldn't totally feel his hand in hers, but she could see with her eyes that she had it. She tried to squeeze and show some strength.

"Jerry, I can take it. I need to know."

"Yeah, he said you did. He said when he got down there you weren't breathing at all. He said he was scared to move you, because we all saw you fall on your head. But he had to risk it to get you breathing again. And he did a great job. I tracked him down two days ago at Firehouse 18 and asked him to show me what he did. You were crumpled up with your head tucked forward, laying mostly on your stomach. He put an arm under your armpit, then up your chest so he could hold the front of your face and then his other arm went on your back, holding the back of your head, and he turned you slowly around as a unit till you were totally on your back. He used his legs to move your lower body at the same time. He showed me on a CPR dummy. It was primo. They should teach it in school."

Emma lapsed into thought. She could see what had happened in her mind's eye. They hadn't brought a board up for the druggie, because even though it was reported as a fall from a building, they didn't see anyone splattered on the sidewalk as they pulled up in the ambulance. They were motioned inside and up the stairs by people who didn't really know what was going on. How were they supposed to know that the man fell out of a window and landed on a roof-overhang that was four stories up?

That assumption had almost gotten her killed!

If they had just brought a board with them, the first thing they would have done would have been put his sky-high ass onto the board and strap him down, and then he never would have had the chance to struggle and she never would have gotten knocked off the roof.

One look at Jerry told her he was probably thinking the same thing. His lips were pressed tightly together in a pained little line. He was the one who had said "nah, we don't need the board," when she had wondered aloud if they did. She shoved the thought away - she was just as responsible as him. She could have brought a board anyway. No use blaming anyone but herself and that never went well.

Instead, when they saw the naked druggie on the roof and figured out that he had come from a window above them, they had sent one of the engine crew to the ambulance to get the board, and by the time he got back, she was the one who needed it.