Mountain Made Baby Read online

  Copyright 2018 Aria Ford - All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  MOUNTAIN MADE BABY

  A Bad Boy Romance

  By Aria Ford

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  MOUNTAIN MADE BABY

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  NEW SECOND CHANCE ROMANCE: AGAIN

  THE SECRET: A SECRET BABY ROMANCE

  MY HOT STEPBROTHER

  WET: A BROTHER’S BEST FRIEND ROMANCE

  DADDY’S TEMPTATION

  PREVIEW OF ARIA FORDS BOOKS

  THANK YOU!

  ABOUT AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  His eyes held mine as he pushed inside me. I saw the passion written in their depths as he filled me, moving slowly so I could take him all in. I sighed.

  “I…” I murmured.

  He held my shoulders as he moved, a low growl escaping his throat as he began to pulse in me, his climax slowly building.

  Mine was building, too, and I shook as we moved together, my entire body throbbing as all my pleasure places caught fire under his body. I had never had an experience like this until I met him.

  I shuddered and closed my eyes until I could bear it no more. I cried out, and then he was moving inside me, thrusting wildly until he too cried out.

  “Oh! Oh, baby! Oh man…”

  He collapsed on top of me and our bodies molded together as we dozed.

  As I lay there, my mind just returning from the place of intense wonder where it had been, I thought about how incredible it was to be here.

  I could so easily have lived my life without knowing such pleasure existed.

  If it hadn’t been for one letter, I would have been done.

  I smiled. In this day and age, one doesn’t even expect to get letters anymore, but that was how it had all started. Without that, I would never have left my home in LA and traveled up to wild Wyoming, to Sheridan, and settled down.

  My body felt as if I had been taken apart and put back together, every inch of me tingling and throbbing as he slid off me.

  We lay together and he wrapped an arm round me, smiling down into my face.

  “You enjoyed it too, eh?”

  I smiled. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Good.”

  We lay like that, as we always did, with my head on his shoulder and my hand over his. I felt so safe there, so right. I stroked his hard body and he sighed.

  “I am so glad we met,” I said contentedly.

  He chuckled. “Goes without sayin’ I am.”

  “Good.” I said it firmly and he chuckled.

  “Pretty remarkable, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  We closed our eyes and I think he fell asleep—I could hear his regular breathing. But I was still awake. I was still thinking about the remarkable chain of events that had led to us being together.

  Out in the yard I could hear a horse neigh and somewhere in the distance a tractor coughed to life, rumbling off across a field or down the street. I was so happy in this vast, barren landscape with its rural way and its huge sunsets.

  I belongs here, I thought with a smile. Here everything is rugged and rough edged, like him. I rolled onto my side, looking at him more closely. He was made of muscle, with that surprisingly beautiful face—the long nose and firm jaw. His eyes were deep-set and looked to me the way a bear’s eyes do—fierce and strong and proud. A bear has black eyes, though, and his were leaden gray.

  I reached out to run a finger down his straight nose and he stirred, his eyes opening.

  “Mm?” he asked, seeing a question in my eyes. I laughed.

  “I was just thinking you’re stunning,” I said innocently.

  “Mm.” He sighed and closed his eyes again. I thought he was asleep, but then he kissed my forehead.

  “Same to you.”

  I thought my heart would melt.

  I closed my eyes and snuggled close to I and thought about that day, that felt so long ago now, when I had received that letter that had caused us to meet and had changed everything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kelly

  I put my notepad with the spreadsheets aside, put my head on the table and did the silent scream. It didn’t make anything any easier, but it did make me feel better.

  “Kelly Gowan, you’re crazy, you know that?” Telling myself also didn’t make my job easier, but then, it wasn’t really going to get any easier. One of my duties, in my job as secretary at Friedman and Barne law firm, is keeping a current list of the year’s clients. And I had kind of forgotten about that bit until the week before the AGM. Which meant I had to do it all now. This weekend. Agh.

  It was two P.M. on Saturday and I’d been at it since eight in the morning. I ran a hand through my tousled red hair and sighed. My head hurt. My eyes crossed. I was hungry and fed up and I felt mad at myself for my oversight during the year. I was only a quarter of the way done too. How was I going to keep at it?

  “Coffee.”

  I stood up and went to the kitchen, grumbling under my breath about everything and nothing.

  “If only I’d kept track of it all year.”

  That was just part of my list of “if only.” If only I had decided to stay in Florida, where I had my distracted and frazzled mom, my circle of friends, and quite possibly a job writing for a sports magazine. That would have suited me way better than all this tedious number crunching. If only I had some company in this city. If only I wasn’t so terribly forgetful.

  “Damn it!”

  The doorbell rang just as I had just discovered I’d forgotten to buy detergent. Now all my cups were dirty too. I stormed to the door in a foul mood.

  “Hello?” I snarled.

  The neighbor grinned at me. He lived across the hallway and I had half a mind to seduce him except that I don’t know if he’d have been up for it. He was cute in a boyish way and I had to admit he set my heart racing a bit. Now, he looked a bit ruffled.

  “Sorry, Nic.” I sighed. “What’s up?”

  “A letter for you,” he said. He held it out, looking nervously at me as if he expected I might take out his throat. I sighed.

  “Thanks. Have a good day.”

  “You too.”

  “Thanks.”

  I closed the door and leaned against it, sighing. Have a good day. I’ll do that—and I might also fly out the window and circle over the seafront. Both things had the same level of unlikely.

  I ran my hand through my untamed, frazzled auburn curls, sat down at the table and looked at the letter.

  Where’s this from?

  The envelope l
ooked beaten up. The rain had soaked it once at least, and then it had dried crinkled, the ink blurred here and there. It was a miracle it had gotten here at all.

  I tore it open—it had no return address on the back, so where it came from was a mystery. I held it up to the light.

  “Dear Kelly,” I read aloud. “I am writing this letter because I haven’t heard from you for years and I wonder, sometimes, what’s going on.”

  I frowned. Who could it be from? I scanned on through the large, rambling writing.

  I am still on the farm. I have a sore chest and I can’t sleep at night. I think I’m getting sick. Your mom doesn’t answer my phone calls, and I haven’t heard from her in years. The farm is a mess. Can you come and visit sometime? Grandpa H.

  “Oh, for goodness…” I sighed. It was from my grandfather.

  My grandfather, Josh Hayley, was my mom’s dad. He still lived on a farm in Wyoming, somewhere on the far end of the civilized world. He was a textbook eccentric and my mom had always despaired of him somewhat. I loved him. I recalled a big, friendly face, round glasses and a permanent grin. Grandpa was always content. He never got mad about anything. During the hard times when my mom was going through the divorce he had visited us. I had loved him. I wondered how he was now.

  I have a sore chest and I can’t sleep at night.

  I felt a stab of sorrow, reading that. Poor Grandpa. That sounded bad.

  Your mom doesn’t answer my phone calls. I haven’t heard from her in years.

  I wondered if he even had Mom’s new phone details. Probably not. My mom probably forgot to update him. That would be typical. Incapable of malice, Mom was entirely capable of forgetting about her entire family in the middle of a big project. A landscape designer, she was always getting swept off her feet by her latest inspirations and forgetting to make her own dinner, never mind forgetting other basic things like sleep. Her dad was probably the last thing in her thoughts.

  “Someone has to help,” I said aloud.

  I sighed. Why that someone had to be me, I wasn’t sure. Here I was, thousands of miles away, probably about as equipped to get stuff done in the back of Beyond as I was to man a hovercraft. But then I thought, as I dug out a sponge and some good old-fashioned Dawn dishwashing liquid, if I didn’t, who would?

  Mom was Grandpa’s only living relative. And if she wasn’t doing something, it would have to be me.

  I scrubbed the dishes and planned. As I worked, a crazy idea came into my mind. Why not just go? I had some leave left over, so why not just take a week off? Go to Wyoming, sort him out, come back? What was stopping me? In that moment, I made myself a promise.

  I was going to finish the list of names for the company and get everything ready for the meeting. Then I was going to treat myself to a holiday. In wild Wyoming.

  I finished the dishes, made coffee and some toast, and went back to work. With my mind thinking so positively, it seemed like the work was going faster. I was surprised when, by five P.M., I was more than halfway done. If I kept it up at this rate, by Sunday lunch I would be finished.

  I stuck at it until dinnertime and then headed downtown to see if Alexa, the company accountant and a good friend of mine, was up for going out.

  I drew up outside her stylish apartment block. She lived only three blocks away and so we were used to me turning up at her door, or the other way, at odd times, and ringing the bell.

  “Yoo-hoo!” her cheerful voice came down over the mic when she heard my voice. “Dinnertime?”

  “If you’re around?”

  “Sure I am! You want to eat here, or go out?”

  I shrugged. “Go out?”

  “Great. Come up if you like. Just getting changed.”

  “Okay.”

  While Alexa changed out of jeans and a T-shirt into something more going-out worthy, I sat outside the bedroom door and asked her about the day.

  “It was good,” she shouted, voice muffled as she shrugged off her top. “I went to the gym, then I headed up to The Table for lunch and then I went shopping…” she went quiet again as she reached for something. “How was your day?”

  I sighed. “Not bad,” I lied. In contrast with her day, mine was unremarkable. I wasn’t really going to own up to it.

  “Great! Let’s go.”

  Alexa always looked good. In a soft gray sweater with charcoal slacks and a midthigh length duster, she looked chic and elegant. I felt clunky in my outsize ocher shirt and faded tan jeggings. I shrugged, ran a hand through my frazzled strawberry curls and joined her.

  “What’s up, Kell?” she asked as we both got into my car and headed downtown. “You’re stressed.”

  “Nothing important,” I lied. Then I paused. “Miller?” I always called her by her surname—it was a tradition we’d started when we met

  “Mm?”

  “Am I crazy?” I sighed. “I mean…why is it I’m not living the life everyone else seems to be living?”

  Alexa put her head on one side. “You’re not crazy,” she said after a long pause. “And besides,” she added as we pulled away from the stop street, “why is that a bad thing?”

  “Why is what bad?” I asked, keeping an eye out for the stoplight. I didn’t need a traffic fine.

  “Not being like everyone else?” she questioned.

  I paused. “Well…I guess it isn’t that bad.”

  She laughed. “It’s not bad at all. You know what?”

  “What?”

  “Some people would wish they could say that. Even I sometimes wish I could.” She made a small rueful face.

  “You?” I laughed. “I don’t believe that, Miller—you’re so perfect.” I thought she was. A good job, great wardrobe, a boyfriend who was starting his own company. She was what everyone was supposed to be.

  She snorted. “In whose opinion?”

  I shrugged. “Well, our bosses. The rest of our colleagues and… everyone, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s nice of you to say so. But really? Since when is doing everything normal anything but, well, normal?”

  I blinked. “Well, when you put it like that, I guess…”

  She laughed. “I do put it like that. You’re great the way you are, Kell.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a flicker of pride in my chest.

  “Now, come on,” she said encouragingly. “Let’s go and get dinner. I’m ravenous.”

  “Me too.”

  As we drove to Green Food, our favorite vegetarian restaurant, I found myself feeling not only a small glimmer of pride, but of excitement.

  I was going to do something out of the ordinary. I was going to pack my bags and head to Wyoming. To help my grandpa. And, for once, to enjoy being myself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Reese

  The dust on the road blurred my vision as the pickup coughed and then died in the drive of my farm. I ran my hands through my dark hair and sighed, my patience fraying even further.

  “My life is a mess.”

  I fiddled with the key in the ignition of the pickup, then put my foot on the gas and did the same thing, trying to get the thing to start. Damned pickup! It was secondhand and had a mind of its own.

  I did the trick with the gas again. It was a delicate undertaking, getting the balance right. The spark plugs were going—I knew that. I just hadn’t found the time to go to the dealer and by more.

  I don’t seem to find time for anything sensible nowadays.

  Ever since moving to Sheridan, WY, I had found my life was full of small, hard-to-solve problems. On the one hand, that annoyed me. On the other hand, it was great—it stopped me from having to think about big, impossible-to-solve problems.

  Like the fact that I’m such a loser.

  That was the litany that played through my head every day, the one that had plagued me ever since I returned from my military service with the 4th Combat.

  The engine made a promising noise. It started. “Yay!” I yelled, relieved. “We did it.”

  I put m
y foot on the gas and shot out of the yard, heading into town.

  The road was hot and steaming, a ribbon of tar through fields that baked under a merciless sun. As I drove across the barren, scrubby landscape, I made a point of not focusing on the place it reminded me of. The stony, wind-scoured hills of the Karakorum. Not that they looked similar—not really—it was just that they were both desolate and uninhabited.

  I am going to forget all about that.

  The last memories I wanted to revisit were the memories from then. My time of service in Afghanistan. Now that I was here, demobbed, and released from that, I could finally forget. Or at least that was the plan. That was what I’d hoped when I returned to Wyoming and bought a farm, settled down. Some hope. It was also then that I had learned, completely and unequivocally, that the memories weren’t going anywhere.

  I couldn’t even manage to save Parker and Hewitt.

  I didn’t want to think about that. The day the firing had started, and they had been following me, I hadn’t made the right choices. I had gotten those men killed, for nothing worse than listening to me. I hated myself.

  I bit my lip, made myself forget. The words that shamed me and called me a coward, never stopped. Not really.

  I couldn’t even make things work with Brody, my girlfriend. I wasn’t the same person when I came back and we had both decided to go our separate ways. I was glad she could be reasonable about it. At the time I hadn’t been too good at being reasonable. Or rational. Or anything.

  Stop it, Reese. Keep your mind on the road. I clenched my big fists round the wheel and focused on the long, winding road up ahead: it calmed me.

  If I was driving or fixing the millions of small issues that happened on the new ranch, I could forget my past; silence those voices that told me I was weak and stupid and a failure. No other time.