Millionaire Boss: A Secret Baby Romance (Freeman Brothers Book 1) Read online

  Millionaire Boss

  A Secret Baby Romance

  Natasha L. Black

  Copyright © 2020 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.

  Cover Photographer: Wander Aguiar Photography

  Model: Jaden Goetz

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Forbidden Crush (Sample)

  A Note from the Author

  Books by Natasha L. Black

  Connect with Natasha L. Black

  Introduction

  It was easy for me to make the mistake of sleeping with my boss.

  And much, much harder to actually deal with it.

  Quentin Freeman. He’s a millionaire.

  Owner of a racing company.

  Every woman’s wildest dream.

  Unfortunately, including mine. His employee.

  That wild dream turned into reality when we hooked up in my office.

  Then again, outside, behind the office building.

  Now that was only the fun part.

  The only way I thought I could escape him was to freeze him out.

  But how do I escape from the father of my child?

  A child that he knows nothing about.

  I know I have to tell him about my secret baby.

  And that… is going to be the not-so-fun part.

  Book 1 in the Freeman Brothers series brings you Quentin and Merry’s story. Millionaire Boss is a standalone, full-length romance with burning passion, secrets, and drama. And don't forget the HEA that makes it all worthwhile…

  1

  Quentin

  There was nothing like a summer night. The North Carolina heat searing away the edges of the day and stinging on your skin the instant you walked out of the house faded and softened. As the sun seemed to melt and slip down the edge of the sky until it pooled on the horizon, it took the miserable humidity with it. In its place it left relief and a welcome breeze. It was like the temperature hovered so high it finally reached its capacity and cracked, and I felt like I could breathe.

  Even better was a lazy summer night when I had nothing hanging over me, no expectations. When I just got a chance to relax and enjoy it. Those were rare. Life was busy and it felt like far too often my plans to just take in a night and savor it got steamrolled by something. I could spend the day absolutely determined to take a break and head out into my backyard for the evening, then get wrapped up in something and by the time I was able to pull away from it, I realized it was the middle of the night. Not that it stopped me from still wanting to head out. There were plenty of times when midnight found me tempted to wake up my fire pit and sit out there in the dark.

  I stopped myself from doing it, willing myself into bed instead, but the longing was still there. But not that night. I finally had some time when I didn’t have responsibilities and urgent needs pressing in around me, and I could actually have one of those coveted lazy summer nights. And I fully intended on absorbing every minute of it. Grabbing the tray of food I’d put together, I carried it outside onto my deck, then down the large staircase that led to my lawn. Despite not being able to spend much time in it, it was entirely possible my backyard was actually my favorite feature of my house. A lot of time, energy, and money went into creating the exact space I wanted, so when I did get the time to enjoy it, it was everything I could want.

  That included the massive stone fire pit surrounded by large custom-created log benches and stools. They reminded me of the camping trips my family used to take when I was younger. My brothers and I would sit around the fire for as long as our parents let us, roasting anything we could figure out how to impale on the end of a stick or stuff into a sandwich maker. While we ate scorched hot dogs and stuck our fingers together with the remnants of s’mores, we told increasingly disturbing ghost stories with the singular goal of scaring the hell out of each other. There was the ongoing challenge to see which one would sneak up closer to the fire to get in more of the light, which would turn on their flashlight first, and which would try to make enough “accidental” noise to lure our parents out of the tent to stop the story.

  This pit was a bit more sophisticated than the ring we built from whatever rocks we could find scattered around in the woods, and I rarely had to worry about critters scurrying out of the logs when they lit. Our snacks had gotten less messy and were usually accompanied by beer. We hadn’t told ghost stories in years. But the spirit and sentiment were still there.

  My brothers and parents were already sitting around the blazing bonfire. My father occasionally prodded the logs, sending cascades of sparks up into the darkening sky.

  “Here we go,” I said. “A few more things to dig into.”

  My youngest brother stared at the tray as I set it down.

  “Seriously? We’re going to make snakes?” he asked. “Are you sure you’re the oldest brother?”

  “I hate when you call them that,” my mother said, shuddering. “I never hear the whole sentence, and it always gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  My brother Nick lifted up from the seat beside Darren and grabbed one of the pieces of dough stretched out on a plate in the middle of the tray.

  “What are you talking about, Darren? These things are delicious,” he said.

  They were nothing more than canned biscuit dough wrapped around the end of a stick and roasted over the fire until done, then rolled in butter, but they were always a favorite treat on those long-ago camping trips. Cheap and fast, they were an easy way for my parents to feed their brood of four boys, and because they could be dipped in either cinnamon sugar or salt once buttered, they pleased everybody. As we got a little older, we’d graduated to adding garlic or sometimes chili powder to the savory ones, but the cinnamon sugar option was left untouched, a sacred part of summer.

  Unless you were Darren and thought you were too grown-up in all of your twenty-three years to wrap a piece of biscuit dough around a stick and shove it in a fire. Too bad for him. I’d eat a can of biscuits’ worth myself. I grabbed my own piece of dough and got it toasting, taking a draw of my beer as I did. All in all, I was feeling pretty good about life in general. My racing company was doing well
. My bank account was nicely full and getting more so every day. I had my house, my brothers, my parents, my friends.

  “Are you seeing anyone special?” my mother asked.

  Shit.

  And then there was that.

  I took another long sip of my beer and looked at the bottle to determine if there was enough left in it to get me through the rest of the conversation or if I’d need another.

  “No,” I answered after determining I could carry through.

  “Are you seeing anyone at all?” she asked.

  “No. I’ve been really busy. Not exactly a lot of time to devote to dating,” I said.

  “That’s a shame. You really need to meet someone, Quentin. A nice woman who will understand your career and appreciate your lifestyle. Someone to come home to at night and take care of you.”

  And I was officially wrong about the beer. Getting up, I downed the last of the bottle in my hand and headed over to the cooler to select another. A quick snap with the opener mounted on the table removed the cap, and I headed back to my bench.

  “Not interested right now, Mom,” I said.

  “But why?” she asked, her eyes wide as if she couldn’t possibly grasp what I was telling her.

  It gave me a flicker of guilt. Just a flicker. Not enough to change my stance.

  “You know what happened with Victoria,” I said.

  My brothers groaned, remembering my disastrous last relationship far too well.

  “She wasn’t right for you,” Mom relented. “But there has to be someone out there who won’t be like her.”

  “And maybe one day I’ll find her,” I said. “For now, I’m good with living the single life.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t had very much luck with women. It seemed the ones I encountered were far more interested in my money than they were in me as a person. Anyone could have been attached to the other end of the bank card as long as the women got to be the ones to swipe it. I’d been burned more than once, and I’d officially gotten it out of my system. That type of relationship had no appeal to me, and I’d much rather just focus on the single life.

  Not that it was really settling. My life was far from boring and even further from empty. Full of family and work, it kept me running most of the time. And I was fine with that.

  Mom was merciful in letting the conversation drop before I made much more of a dent in the beer cooler. The same couldn’t be said for Darren. For all his scoffing over the biscuit dough, he roasted at least six of them and stuffed himself with hot dogs and s’mores on top of it. With nearly every bite he took a swig or two of beer, and by the time my parents were ready to leave for the night, he was feeling no pain. The four of us brothers hung out around the fire for another hour, giving the alcohol enough time to soak into every fiber of his being, join up with more that he downed during that hour, and render him a mess.

  “Let me get the guest room ready for him,” I told Vince and Nick as we watched Darren dance around the fire to one of his favorite songs. “No need for him to try to leave tonight.”

  “Well, at least you can say you throw a good party,” Nick said.

  “Yeah,” I said with a laugh as I headed up the stairs back onto the deck. “Nothing says party hard like your mother grilling you about why you don’t have a nice wife and a gaggle of babies.”

  “I don’t think she mentioned a gaggle of babies,” Vince pointed out.

  “Not in words,” I said, turning around to face them and using two fingers to swirl melodramatic circles in front of my eyes. “I saw it in her eyes.”

  I left my laughing brothers and went to the guest room to make sure it had everything Darren would need to crash there that night. After adding a bottle of water to the nightstand, I went back down to help Nick get him upstairs. We yanked off his shoes and jeans, rolled him into the bed, and covered him up. I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of my drunk baby brother drooling on the pillow before turning off the light and heading out of the room. That would make a fun addition to the family group chat the next day.

  After saying goodbye to my other two brothers, I locked up the house and went for a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time after the smoky smell of the fire washed away from my skin and hair just to let my muscles relax. When I was done, I threw on a pair of boxers and slid into bed. My eyes flickered over to the tablet on my nightstand. The screen was dark, but I could almost hear all the emails and messages inside waiting for me to reply.

  It was late, but not so late that I couldn’t get some work in. I thought about getting just a little bit done, spending at least part of the night being productive. Even when I wasn’t at the office or the racetrack on any given day, the work didn’t stop. There was far more to be done for the company than just the races themselves, and the messages, questions, and requests never stopped. I started to reach for the tablet, then stopped myself.

  I wasn’t going to do it. I’d gotten a rare, treasured night completely off, and I wasn’t going to ruin it by burying myself back in work again. I had the next week free, and then it was back to racing season. Once that started, it was going to be all stress and schedules so busy they were bursting at the seams until the season came to an end. The whole point of taking the time off before the season got underway was to relax, and that was exactly what I was going to do. For the next week, it was all about giving myself the time to chill, rejuvenate myself, and prepare for the inevitable, unavoidable chaos to come.

  Rather than picking up the tablet, I called out to my virtual assistant to turn on some music to help me sleep, turned off the lights, and closed my eyes with a long exhale.

  2

  Merry

  “Shit, shit, shit, I’m gonna be late!”

  My clothes were scattered all over the floor, a bra was hanging from the back of a chair in the corner, and I couldn’t find one of my shoes.

  It was nowhere near as exciting as it sounded. It wasn’t the fun of a carefree night. Or even an ill-advised, but still thrilling, night. It was the sheer chaos on the morning of the interview for a job I would kill for. I wasn’t usually one for hyperbole and definitely wouldn’t want to just start wishing violence on everybody around me, but for this job, I might make an exception. Working for the Freeman Racing could slingshot my career to a whole new level.

  Being a social media consultant gave me the opportunity to work with a lot of interesting people, but the unfortunate thing about it was the smaller clients often thought they could pick up the skills themselves and start doing it on their own rather than relying on me—thought being the operative word. More often than not, they’d depend on me to build up their social media presence for a few months, see the benefits, then decide they could do it themselves and let me go. Inevitably a good portion of them would realize the whole reason they’d hired me in the first place was because they didn’t know how to run their platform effectively.

  That meant I got repeat business, but it was frustrating as hell. I hated seeing the mess they created out of what I built and having to fix it. It was especially aggravating when I realized it was my name attached to what they made out of it. Of course, there were other times when the smaller companies and private clients actually did pick up on the skills and were able to keep it going on their own. That was a victory of its own kind for me. In the end, the point of my job was to help companies gain more visibility and success through the effective use of social media.

  But it all boiled down to the same thing. I was a professional transient. Not the wander the streets and sleep under the bridge type, but the bounce from post to post, gig to gig, always looking for work even when I had it type. That didn’t sit well with me. It was exciting when I first started. In those first few months when I got my business going, I felt like a powerful contemporary woman standing on my own two feet and running my empire. At least, the beginning of an empire.

  The novelty wore off after a while, and I started longing for something more stable. I set my sight
s on just that, a big company that would need their social media built but then sustained. Larger companies didn’t have the time to keep up with that sort of daily activity, meaning if I could land the position with Freeman Racing, I might be able to settle in for the long haul. That sounded glorious.

  All I needed to do was impress the woman doing the interview, then prove myself as indispensable. No pressure.

  “Ugh, I have nothing in this damn closet!” I complained aloud, tossing pieces aside like a crazed lunatic.

  I put on the outfit I finally settled on, a dark blue suit with a pencil skirt and blazer that nipped in at my waist and added my favorite heels. Topping off the look with a strand of my grandmother’s pearls, I looked in the hall mirror to fluff my hair one last time and rushed out to my pale blue Mini Cooper gleaming in the driveway. Before cranking the ignition, I checked the directions to the complex one more time. My GPS could guide me, but I never liked to rely fully on technology. Ironic as that was considering my career path, I was never one to put my belief solely on the little lines on the screen and the monotonous, perpetually pissed-off-sounding woman telling me what turns to take. Just in case she wasn’t made fully aware of obstacles that might show up in my path, or the satellites decided to go on strike while I was midtrip, I wanted to still have some grasp of where I was.