Boss Daddy: A Secret Baby Romance by Black, L. (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

but it was a pressure valve that only a best friend could release. Being able to joke about pain helped you heal, I’d always heard.

“Oh, did I tell you what happened with Becca?” he asked suddenly, and I cocked an eyebrow.

“No, what’s up with her?” “She was supposed to get married a couple weeks ago.”

“Supposed to?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t tell you about this,” he said, almost laughing, though I could see something else in his eyes too. Something close to anger. “She got stood up.”

“Like at the altar?”

“Yup. The fucker didn’t even show up. Or if he did, none of us saw him. I wish I had—I’d have wrung his neck.”

“What happened?”

“Me and a couple other guys went looking for him, calling the hospitals and police stations, making sure he didn’t get arrested or wreck his car or whatever. Turns out, nope, he just left my sister at the altar.”

“That’s bullshit. I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“She’s understandably really upset about it, and I’ve been trying to help her while also dealing with my shit. I guess I just didn’t want to even talk about it, or else you’d know by now,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry over,” I said. “Man, maybe relationships do suck.”

“What about Mason?” he asked. “And Tom. Isn’t he just stupidly happy now?”

“Exceptions to the rule,” I said. “They got lucky.”

“Perhaps. Maybe you would too, if you gave it a shot.”

I laughed. “What are you? Cupid? A walking Match dot com? Get out of here.”

He laughed, standing and bringing his glass over to the sink behind the bar and washing it out.

“I just want to see you happy,” he said.

“I already am,” I said. “Now let’s help Mason get this bar ready before he has my head on a pike.”

2 Becca

It seemed like the absolute longest flight of my life. I wasn’t the world’s best plane passenger. Despite every bit of logic reminding me air travel wasn’t exactly a new science, I always walked onto a plane with a sense of trepidation. It often made my stomach turn a little, and I tended to clench onto the arms of the seat right up until we were at elevation.

As soon as I sat down and hooked my seat belt, a man behind me laughed and my stomach tied itself into a knot. It sounded just like my ex. So much I almost turned around to see him.

That would have been the official end of my rope. If he was on the flight laughing like that, it would mean she was, too. No one wanted to see that conversation.

There was the anger.

But right on its heels came the sting of tears in the backs of my eyes as a fresh wave of sadness and embarrassment washed over me. I combed my fingers back through my hair, not for the first time noticing it actually felt different to do that without the ring on my hand. The ring Steven had the audacity to ask for before I left.

And there was the anger again.

By the time we got to elevation, I’d gone through another cycle of emotions, but at least my hands weren’t clenched into tight fists. The plane finally started circling the airport outside of Astoria, and I gathered up everything around me. In addition to being a nervous flyer, I was a messy flyer.

I had everything collected and was back in my seat belt in time for the descent. Finally, we touched down, and I let out a sigh. I was back in Astoria. My childhood home and a place I never saw myself moving back to once I left for college.

And yet, here I was, walking out of the plane into the little airport with that disoriented feeling coming back. I had been in this airport before, of course. But I still felt like I was out of touch and couldn’t quite decipher where I was or what I was supposed to be doing.

Maybe that was because I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in an airport, just not this one. It made me feel like I had managed to get on the wrong flight somehow and ended up in Oregon rather than the Bahamas.

Of course, if I was in the Bahamas, I wouldn’t be tossing my carry-on over my shoulder and walking by myself to the luggage claim. I would have Steven beside me and a wedding ring on my hand. It seemed like such a good idea when we were engaged to delay our honeymoon. We wanted to take some time after the wedding to settle down and really enjoy being freshly married, then head out on our dream trip at the perfect time. To the perfect island and to the perfect hotel.

Three weeks after the wedding I ended up attending solo, I wasn’t landing on a picturesque island for my dream vacation. I was dragging myself home to lick my wounds and figure out how I was going to start over.

As I approached baggage claim, a familiar face looked back at me from the crowd, and I felt the tension and stress drain out of my body. My brother, Nick, was waiting by the luggage carousel for me, my bags already at his feet. He opened his arms to me as I walked up and pulled me into a warm embrace.

“Thank you for coming to pick me up,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let you get a taxi to bring you home.”

He reached down and picked up my luggage. I looked at it, then back at him.

“How did you know those were my bags?” I asked.

“You didn’t exactly make it difficult to identify,” he said. “The colors gave you away.”

Each of my suitcases had several brightly colored ribbons and a garish luggage tag so it was easy to identify them when they were swirling around the carousel. We left the airport, and I