Second chance lover an a.., p.1
Second Chance Lover: An Age Gap Surprise Pregnancy Romance (Taboo Daddies), page 1
SECOND CHANCE LOVER
AN AGE GAP SURPRISE PREGNANCY ROMANCE
NATASHA L. BLACK
Copyright © 2022 by Natasha L. Black
All rights reserved.
The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers.
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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
His Daughter’s Best Friend (Preview)
A Note from the Author
Books by Natasha L. Black
Connect with Natasha L. Black
INTRODUCTION
I swore I’d never ask him for anything.
Now I need his help, his protection.
Landon’s irresistible--older, experienced, head of a top security firm.
We agreed what we had was nothing serious.
I fell for him anyway.
When I found out I was pregnant, I ran.
He told me he never wanted kids,
So I left before he could reject me.
My family lost everything.
Someone’s making threats on my life.
Landon’s the only one I can turn to.
He’s going to be angry.
He’s going to be overprotective.
He’s going to make me fall for him all over again.
1
LANDON
The news broke on Tuesday afternoon while I was at happy hour. I was sitting with my four closest friends when I saw the news scroll out on all three television screens behind the bar—the founders of Lavigne Beauty had been ordered to pay out two hundred million dollars to their former consultants.
“Fuck,” I said, interrupting Con. I leaned sideways and squinted past Dominic’s head to read the banner.
Garrett craned his neck to read it, too. He blew out his breath in a low whistle. “Two hundred million. That’s going to make a dent.”
Julian said, unimpressed, “Huh. My last movie cost four hundred million to make.”
I was still watching the screen, but I felt the others turn to stare at him. No one knew what to say. Most of us had come from modest backgrounds and worked our way up. Julian had been born wealthy and spent his life getting wealthier.
“Drinks are on Julian tonight,” Dominic said finally, slapping him on the back. He glanced over his shoulder at the screens, but he wasn’t very interested. He looked back at me, clearly wondering why I was still half out of my seat, eyes fixed on the news.
Con remembered though. “You worked with the Lavignes, didn’t you?”
I nodded even as I moved away from the table to get a better view. One that didn’t have Dominic’s fat head in the middle. Yes, I’d worked with the Lavignes. It hadn’t all been business though. With one particular Lavigne, it had been a pleasure. Until it wasn’t. Now Cami Lavigne’s family business was all over the news. Those were her parents walking out of the courtroom. Her stepfather, Robert, looked like a crane in a black suit, picking his way down the steps, limbs long and gangling, his awkward movements strangely graceful. He kept his head lowered, but he was so tall the cameras got his expression easily. Stone-faced, like always.
If he was a crane, Cami’s mother, Elyna, was a flower. She wore a pale pink dress and a brave, tremulous smile, her perennially youthful face turned up to the sun so that the world could see the bewildered innocence reflected on it. Her dark eyes, so much like Cami’s, were shining with unshed tears.
My chest tightened. I hadn’t seen those eyes in four years. Not since Cami Lavigne disappeared from my life, leaving only the lingering scent of Bleu de Chanel and a note that said she was going to live in an ecovillage in Turin. She’d call when she came back to town.
As far as I knew, she’d never come back to town.
She’d sure as fuck never called.
“What happens now?” I asked, returning to the table and interrupting my friends’ debate on what constituted a fortune. Julian was of the opinion it had to be at least half a billion. The others were taking turns calling him an ass.
Dominic, a financial advisor, said, “If they were my clients, I’d advise them to declare bankruptcy.”
Garrett offered his perspective as a crisis manager. “If Elyna leaves Robert, she can recover. Maybe she can anyway, but it’ll be easier if she can cast him in the role of the bad guy. People don’t want to believe she knew what was happening. She’s too beautiful. The single-mother-who-worked-her-way-up-from-food-stamps origin story is too good.”
“It is good,” Con agreed. Con had hardly been on food stamps, but he’d been a single father who had worked his way up. He frowned at the screen now. “Maybe Robert was the one pulling the strings.”
I saw what he did. A tall, thin, awkward man with a coldly handsome face that looked like it had never once relaxed into a smile. Robert was standing, vulture-like, over a beautiful, petite woman who was clutching the pearl handle of her purse with both hands, offering genuine-sounding apologies for anything they might have unintentionally done to hurt someone.
I stared at her, marveling at how much things had changed. The Lavigne name was poison now, but when my security company did work for the Lavignes six years ago, their brand had been pristine. Public opinion wasn’t sure if Elyna was a victim or a villain now, but back then, she had been considered a cross between a success story and a saint. She’d pulled herself out of poverty and now was determined to pull other women out with her by giving them their own “companies.”
The world had been fooled, but I hadn’t been. Even before the scandal, I’d seen that there was something off lurking behind that beautiful exterior. Elyna loved her husband and her daughter and money, and she didn’t see anything else. She fawned over her “consultants” when they were in front of her and forgot they existed when they left the room. I’d had to work with her house manager to ensure the men I had working the Livin’ Lavigne Loco events got basic necessities like water in hundred-degree heat and bathroom breaks at day-long events.
After six months of dealing with shit like that, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t cruelty that kept Elyna from providing for them. It was an inability to see them as fully human.
Public opinion might have been divided, but I had no doubt Elyna had done everything she’d been accused of. Defrauded, lied, stole. Whatever she had to do to add to her bottom line, no matter who it took from. And I had no doubt that she genuinely didn’t understand why she was being punished for it now—why all that hard earned money was being taken away. She’d won it with her cleverness, her boldness, her ruthlessness, and they’d lost it with their softness, their weakness, their gullibility.
It might not have been legal, but I was sure that in Elyna’s mind, it was fair.
Her daughter couldn’t have been more different. Cami saw everyone, felt everything. She’d been too young for me—only twenty-three to my thirty-eight—but that hadn’t stopped us. It had taken an ecovillage in Turin to do that.
“Earth to Landon,” Julian said, dragging me back to the present. “Ground control to Major Landon.”
“What?” I snapped. “I’m paying attention.”
And I was, more or less. Even as I was reading the closed captioning on the screen behind Dominic’s head, part of my brain was tracking the conversation. Con was talking about his daughter, although I couldn’t have said whether it was the older one or the newborn. I replayed it in my head. The kid in question was waking up three times a night, so probably not his 22-year-old.
“Get a night nanny,” I advised to prove I’d been listening.
“It’s amazing,” Garrett marveled. “I know he didn’t hear a word we said.”
“It’s like he has a recording device in his head,” Dominic muttered, frowning at my forehead like he might see wires poking out if he looked hard enough.
“It’s called a fucking brain,” I told them. It was true though. I had a preternaturally good recall and a near photographic memory. It was partly how I had made my name in the security industry. It wasn’t just the cutting-edge equipment, it was me. I saw what everyone saw, but I never forgot it. If something was moved a few inches the next time I looked at it, I noticed. If someone had a tell, I caught onto it almost immediately. I was good
Her daughter on the other hand–she’d fooled me. If you’d asked me four and a half years ago, I’d have said Cami was falling in love with me. I didn’t feel good about it because she was too young to fall in love with a guy like me. She deserved someone who cared about her enough to give her everything she wanted—a future and a family. Things that just weren’t in me to offer. But then she’d blindsided me by moving to another country without so much as an ultimatum or a goodbye, so maybe she had fooled me after all.
I wondered if Cami knew what was happening now. I knew fuck all about ecovillages–maybe she had no idea that her family business had collapsed, and her parents were potentially facing jailtime. It was the only thing that made sense to me, knowing her like I thought I had. She had been close to Robert and Elyna. The three of them had been an unshakeable trio. If I suspected Elyna didn’t have a heart, I only had to look at how she was with Robert and Cami to know she did. If I doubted Robert had any emotions at all, the way he smiled around Cami and Elyna proved me wrong. And so, Cami should have been in the courtroom with them. My friends didn’t know this, but I’d watched the coverage every day, expecting to catch a glimpse of her. A younger version of her mother with the same heavy-lidded dark eyes, masses of thick black hair that framed a pale face with a high forehead and pointed chin. Her full, sensuous lips that always seemed on the verge of a smile would be unusually sober at her parents’ trial.
But even today, she wasn’t there.
Not for the first time, I wondered where she was.
And if she’d ever come back.
2
CAMI
The cameras in the courtroom didn’t miss a thing. I sat glued to the television set, watching as the jury filed back into the courtroom. A closeup of my parents interlocked hands tightening, both sets of knuckles going white. A shot of my mother that was so close I could’ve seen her pores if her skin hadn’t been immaculate. Then the camera panned to the attorneys approaching the bench. The judge frowning at the form the jury foreman handed her, shaking her head. My stomach knotted up. What did it mean?
The news commentator didn’t know either. Her voice was hesitant, so different from the smooth, pronounced voice she usually spoke in. “I think—yes, Judge Pennington is sending the jurors back. There appears to be a mistake on the form. I don’t–we’ll have to wait and see. Impossible to tell which side–” she trailed off.
I wanted to scream, but my vocal cords were paralyzed. It took fifteen agonizing minutes before the jury returned. Judge Pennington nodded crisply at the new form. The attorneys approached the bench again. Another shot of my parents. Robert’s face was impossible to read, as always. Only someone who knew him as well as I did would know he was worried. It was the white line around his flattened lips, the slight bulge in his cheeks that came from clenching his jaws that gave it away to me. My mother’s face was an open book though. Her eyes, appealingly wide, radiated hopeful innocence. She gave a small nod as the jury foreman cleared his throat, like she was encouraging a small child to take a very brave step forward.
I thought she had them in the palm of her hand, where she kept everyone she’d ever met. Until recently. I squeezed my arms tightly around myself and paced back and forth across the spacious, high-ceilinged room, unable to sit still. I barely heard the foreman’s voice spelling out the first charge, I was so focused on hearing him absolve my parents of this terrible misunderstanding that I almost didn’t understand what I’d heard when he said the opposite.
I stopped and whirled on the television screen. My eyes searched desperately for some sign that I’d misheard him. I expected to see relief etched on my mother’s beautiful face. A ghost of a smile on Robert’s thin lips. Instead, they were pressed tighter than ever, and my mother was weeping.
She was a beautiful crier. Some people’s faces turned red and blotchy, their eyes puffed up, and their noses ran. Not hers. Single tear drops slipped over the curve of her high cheekbones, clung to her gorgeously sharp jawline. Robert handed her a handkerchief with the initials RVL monogrammed in the corner. Only Robert Vernon Lavigne still kept a monogrammed handkerchief on him at all times. I could feel it as though it was my hand he pressed it into. A soft silky square with permanently pressed creases, just like the ones I’d cried into when I failed my driver’s test, when my prom date stood me up, when I fell in love with a man who would never love me back.
I ached to be there with them. I desperately wanted to stand between my mother and that horrible cameraman who kept focusing on her despair. I wanted to wrap my arms around Robert’s elegantly spare frame and feel him pat his back, as though it were him reassuring me and not the other way around.
How could the jury have found them guilty of all those things they were accused of? My mother could be scatterbrained, that was true. Maybe the company had outpaced her ability to keep her eye on every little detail, but she hadn’t purposefully misled people. She’d really thought that Lavigne was their ticket to financial independence, the way it had been for her.
I was shocked by the verdict, but the amount awarded in damages to the plaintiffs landed like a sucker punch in my midsection. I literally gasped and folded my hands over my stomach. Two hundred million dollars.
Two hundred million dollars.
Even Robert’s face flickered with horror. His mouth formed a pursed O, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. My mother gasped and covered her mouth with one hand. Her nails were perfectly filed ovals, painted in her signature color of Chanel Le Vernis Ballerina. She paid a small fortune to keep her preferred manicurist by her side when she traveled. When she needed her hair color touched up, she flew in her favorite stylist from Paris. I couldn’t even calculate how much she spent a month on beauty. It wasn’t a luxury for my mother–it was an essential. Or at least, it had been. Everything was about to change for her.
For some reason, that brought the first tears to my eyes. It would all have to go, wouldn’t it? Not just the manicurist and the stylist, but the houses, the cars, the boats, and the fantastically expensive evening gowns, too. The company’s value had sunk like a stone when the lawsuits first started coming in. There were rumors that the company’s debts outweighed its assets, and now this. A two hundred million wrecking ball was sinking into the life she’d built for herself.
For us.
For the first time, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just my family losing everything. It was me, too. I was living in one of my mother’s houses in Oahu. The screen I was watching her through belonged to the Lavigne estate. It hung in the coastal Italian-style mansion that was hers–and by extension, no longer hers. With a sense of mounting wonder, I wandered to the bay window that looked out on 145 feet of sandy beach frontage. If I went up the grand spiral staircase, into the master suite that I had called my own, and out through the motorized sliding glass doors, I would have a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean stretching out as far as the eye could see. A thirty-million-dollar view that I’d woken up to every morning for the last four years. A view that had never really been mine, and now wasn’t at all.
My heart beat faster as my concern for my parents turned inward. It was still triple timing in my chest when my mother called. I didn’t have to look at my phone to know it was her. The familiar notes of L'elisir D'amore told me.
