Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (132 page)

“I want to be with you,” I told her. I
reached out and found her hand amongst the sheets and gripped it tight. “I’ve
wanted to be with you for weeks. I thought—like you did—that it was just some
stupid infatuation thing, that I just liked you because…” I shook my head. “But
if dating other women showed me anything, it was that none of them are as
perfect for me as you are.” I laughed. “I even went so far as to basically
describe you to Katie, to try and steer her towards someone who might be as
much like you as possible because I thought I wouldn’t—in a million
years—actually get
you
.”

“You what?” Natalie’s eyes widened and she
stared at me.

“I tried to give Katie a description of a
woman that would be like you,” I explained, laughing again. “When she asked me
about my preferences to start setting me up with women, I basically described
you to a T—as much as I thought I could, without setting off some kind of alarm.”

“And…”

“And the woman she set me up with was
just…” I shook my head. “I knew in the first fifteen minutes of the date that
it wasn’t going to work between us.” I looked down at our hands. “Even before
this, I’ve never met a woman who makes me feel like you do.” I glanced at
Natalie’s face. She was smiling, with tears in her eyes. “Hey, don’t cry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” she said, shaking
her head even as a tear rolled down her cheek. “It’s just so crazy, don’t you
think?” She sighed and brought her free hand up to rub at her eyes. “So
obviously I’m going to have to quit. That…” she shook her head again. “That is
going to make life interesting for Brady and me.”

“You can’t wait to get a job lined up?”

Natalie shrugged. “Do you want to keep
this a secret? Because I’d have to. And eventually, you’d have to tell Katie
that you’ve found someone. In the meantime, you’d have to at least pretend to
date other people.” She met my gaze. “I really—really—don’t want you to do
that. Please.”

“Then I’ll get you a job in the office
where I work,” I told her. “I can’t hire you directly under me—obviously—but I
could get someone else to hire you. You’re smart, you’ve got tons of skills,
I’m sure you’d be a great fit somewhere.” I smiled. “Or…”

“Or?” I swallowed; the thought that had
occurred to me was definitely the better option in my mind, but Natalie was so
independent, so self-willed, that I wasn’t sure how she’d take it.

“Or, I can support you, if you wanted to
be a full-time mom,” I said finally. “Just—just if you wanted it. I wouldn’t in
a million years try to make you do anything you didn’t want, but it is an
option.”

Natalie stared at me. “You’d…support me?”
I held her gaze for a long moment and nodded. “Or—or get me a job at your company?
Just…just to stay with me?”

“Of course,” I said, laughing. “I’d do
whatever I needed to do to keep you.” I cleared my throat. “And Brady, of
course.” I grinned wryly. “I like that kid. And like you said—he needs a father
figure.”

“You’re…you want to be his father figure?”
She stared at me with wide eyes.

“Well, I mean…” I shrugged. “I don’t want
to overstep my boundaries or anything, but if I’m dating you seriously…if we
end up together long-term…”

“You’re thinking about long-term?” I
reached out and pulled Natalie into my arms, pressing her body against mine.

“If I didn’t think it was way too soon,
I’d ask you to marry me right now,” I murmured in her ear. “Besides, I haven’t
had time to get a ring.” I kissed her on the lips, holding her tight.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking
her head. “I can’t actually believe it.”

“You’d better believe it,” I told her. I
kissed her forehead, her nose, each of her cheeks, and then her lips again.
“When that asshole attacked you…that was when I knew. I mean, I really knew.”

“Why didn’t you say something then?”
Natalie looked up at me from my chest.

“Because I didn’t think you felt the same
way,” I explained. “But now I know. And, you’re going to have a much harder
time shaking me now that I know you feel this way.” I squeezed her waist. “I
plan on sticking around. After all, the whole reason I wanted to use the
matchmaking service was because I wanted to find someone I could marry.”
Natalie laughed.

“I guess that makes sense,” she said,
laughing again. “I guess in that case, you should probably stay the night.
Brady will be so thrilled to see you at breakfast.” I laughed with her, and
pulled her down between the sheets with me, holding her close. “Whose apartment
are we going to live in?” I considered it.

“You know, I feel like I want to get a
real house, for the two of us,” I told her. “With a yard and all that. We could
get a dog for Brady, walk to the park. It’ll be great.” Natalie stared at me
for a moment, still shocked, but gradually she started to warm up and lose her
surprise, and we lay in bed, talking about the future. I couldn’t wait to get
started on it; I was definitely done with practice.

Epilogue

I stepped through the doors at the agency
and out onto the sidewalk, looking around me; it didn’t look different—and I
had expected that it would. It was my last meeting with Katie, and my last
official day of working for her as a dating coach.
It should feel different. It should look different.
The landscaping
up and down the street looked exactly the same as it always had and so did the
building. I shook my head, smiling to myself as I started towards the garage
where my car waited. I couldn’t afford to stand around staring at things—I had
somewhere to be.

Brady and Zeke would be waiting for me at
the park. I had—for once—a real date, with a man I was in love with. After
spending such a long time going on dates with men I didn’t care one bit
about—at least romantically—it almost felt weird to know that if Zeke wanted to
kiss me, he could. If I wanted to go to bed with him, I would. Brady was
warming up to him, as well, and he’d stopped making any kind of comment about
me needing a man in my life.

As I walked towards my car, I thought
about my last several meetings with Katie. I had put in my notice only a few days
after Zeke and I had both come clean about our feelings for each other, and I’d
planned the situation carefully. At first, I didn’t admit to starting a
relationship with Zeke. I knew that if I did, I would probably be fired
immediately—even if Katie liked me and liked the results that I had been
getting. I wrote up my letter of resignation, signed it, and presented it to
her at our status meeting, explaining that I didn’t feel like I wanted to
continue—I wanted to move onto other things.

But as the weeks wore on and Zeke kept
postponing meeting with other matches that Katie found for him, she figured it
out. In my second-to-last meeting with her, she asked me if I knew anything
about why Zeke was suddenly slowing down on the prospect of meeting potential matches.

“That would be because he already found a
match,” I said. “Me.” My heart was pounding in my chest when I told her, but I
knew that I could survive getting fired a week early.

“About time you admitted it,” she had
said, grinning—shocking me.

“You knew?”

She had nodded. “I’ve known there was
something between the two of you for a while now,” she had told me, shrugging.
“Especially when he turned down the second match I made for him—and I suspected
back when he failed to establish a rapport with Chelsea.”

“Why didn’t you fire me, then?”

Katie had shrugged again. “First, because
I wasn’t sure either of you would act on it,” she’d explained frankly. “Second,
because even if you two did act on it, I wasn’t sure it would last. Honestly, I
probably should have all of my clients end up in threatening situations on
their dates: it certainly seems to bring people together.”

“That’s not the reason why,” I’d told her.
“There were…feelings…before that.”

“Of course there were,” she had said,
laughing. “If there hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have been so on-the-spot about
interfering.”

“So you knew that there were feelings
between us and didn’t care?”

She had grinned. “I cared, but I figured
that you would keep Zeke out of trouble, and then if things didn’t work out
between the two of you, he’d be even more suited to finding a serious match.”

I unlocked the driver’s side door on my
car and climbed in. My last meeting with Katie had gone more or less as I
expected it to; she hadn’t had anything negative to say about my performance,
and she definitely couldn’t fault me in terms of keeping things professional
with the rest of my clients. It probably helped that Zeke had paid her a bonus
for the fact that he was, in his own words, “taking you away from the agency,”
and the fact that he’d found a suitable match within a month of signing up with
the company. I started the car and checked the time. As long as traffic wasn’t
too bad, I should make the meeting with Brady and Zeke in the park, and Brady
would just be settling down from his romp, just in time for us to go to the
first place on our agenda.

The fact that I could trust Brady alone
with Zeke was a major thing, in my mind; when I’d told Katie where I was going
after our meeting, she had looked—if not shocked—then at least a little
surprised that I trusted someone I was dating so much. “Brady loves him,” I’d
told her.

“Clearly, but the fact that you trust him
to take care of Brady without any supervision…maybe I should dock your last
paycheck, consider you a member.”

“You got a bonus out of Zeke! What more do
you want?”

I pulled out of the garage and started
towards the park, across town from the office. Katie was pleased for me, I
knew. She would miss having me as an employee, but even if I hadn’t given her
grounds for dismissal, I knew I couldn’t keep dating Zeke and coaching men in
their attempts to find a relationship. Part of me thought that even if Zeke
hadn’t come along, all things being equal, I probably would have gotten burned
out anyway—especially with the situation with Nathan. I would have to continue
being in contact with the agency for a while longer, since the case was
ongoing, but from a professional standpoint, I was done with them. My last
paycheck would be mailed to me, and Zeke had made his final payment on his
account. We were both finished with matchmaking.

I’d thought long and hard about how I was
going to move forward. Zeke’s invitation to me—to support me while I went back
to being a full-time mother—had been tempting. But I’d decided instead that it
would be better for both of us if I let him put my name forward for a position
at the company he worked for. I wouldn’t be working for him—that was one
condition I’d insisted on, and one that Zeke was happy to fulfill—but I’d be
putting the skills I’d gained as a dating coach to good use in the HR
department. I was set to start at the company in two weeks’ time; my first day
would be the Monday after Zeke, Brady, and I returned from a little vacation
together, camping in the mountains.

Traffic didn’t let me down, and I pulled
into a spot in the lot outside of the park with five minutes to spare before
the time I’d told Zeke I’d meet up with him and Brady. He had given me the idea
to do a little tour of the final five pre-K places that I’d come up with for my
son to go to in a few months’ time, after he turned four. It was hard for me to
believe that in a little more than a year, my only son would be starting
Kindergarten—but then, I thought to myself, I still had years of fertility
left; there was always a chance that I’d have another kid.

“Mama!” Brady ran up to me, ignoring
Zeke’s protest, and I laughed at the sight of my boyfriend on the ground,
pretending to be a bear for my son’s amusement. I scooped Brady up in my arms
as soon as he was within range and gave him a quick hug before setting him down
again.

“Are you two goofs ready to check out some
pre-K places, or should we call it a day and just hang around the park?” Zeke
pulled himself up off of the ground and dusted the stray grass off of his clothes.

“I think—I hope—I managed to keep Brady
going long enough that he won’t get bored,” he told me, wrapping his arms
around me and kissing me briefly—but deeply—on the lips.

“Let’s get going then,” I said. “I have a
fabulous idea for dinner, but we need time to stop at the store to make it
happen.” Zeke took my hand in his and I grabbed my son’s hand as well, and we
walked towards my car in the parking lot. To anyone watching, we would have
looked like a completely normal family—someone might even assume that Zeke was
Brady’s biological father, that we’d been married all along. As far as I was
concerned, Zeke, Brady, and I were already a family. It was only a matter of
time before it became official.

The
End

Click here to get an email when my next book is
released

HERE’S
YOUR FREE BOOKS!

TRY
– THE COMPLETE SERIES

By
Nella Tyler

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Nella Tyler

PART 1

Chapter One - Mackenzie

Fifteen minutes after work ended for the
day, I made my way to my favorite bench, not far from the children’s physical
therapy center where I worked. It was cold outside, of course, but I’d been
stuck in the stuffy, heated office for long enough that it was a nice change,
especially with a hot drink in my hands to keep them from freezing in my
gloves. I sat down and took a sip of the thick, sweet hot chocolate, looking
into Amundsen Park. It was late enough—and dark enough—that the park itself was
mostly deserted, but the quiet was nice.

I took another sip of my drink and thought
about Thanksgiving; it had seemed to come so much faster than usual this year,
and I’d been taken by surprise when the office announced the closure.
Nobody—least of all kids—wanted to do physical therapy on Thanksgiving, and
very few people wanted to do it the day after. The holidays were a little
different; with vacation happening and parents trying to get their shopping
done, they were more than happy to schedule as many sessions as their insurance
would allow. All day at work I had been debating whether or not to put myself
on the on-call list for overtime during the week of Christmas; I had a few days
to make up my mind still, but I didn’t know how I felt.

I sighed, snuggling deeper into my coat,
trying to convince myself to get up and start for home. I had a ton of shopping
to do—and of course, with Thanksgiving being over, and the first full week of
the holiday season starting, it was going to be a madhouse anywhere I wanted to
go. I was tired just thinking about it, especially after a long day of working
with kids who were almost frantic between one school holiday and another. I
grinned to myself as I drank down some more hot chocolate, remembering little
Ruby-Lee; she had made a lot of progress since I had started working with her
three months before, and she had wanted to show off the fact that she could
actually walk a straight line finally—by trying to run along a balance beam set
on the floor until she’d nearly twisted her ankle.

Helen, who’d come in with unbearable
sciatic nerve pain, was starting to make progress too. It made my heart ache to
have to tell her that she wasn’t likely to ever be able to continue her ballet
instruction—at least, not enough for her to become a professional danger—but
she was slowly coming to terms with the idea on her own. The twelve-year-old
girl had given me a look while we went through the back stretches at the
beginning of her session and said, “They’re doing
The Nutcracker
starting this week. I’m already too old to play half
of the parts and too young to play the rest of them.” I had given her a quick
hug and told her that there were a lot of things she could still do; the fault
in her spinal alignment that caused her sciatica wasn’t something that could
really be cured—but at least she could get back into dance for fun if she kept
moving along at the rate she had been.

My phone vibrated in my pocket,
interrupting my thoughts, and I cringed as I slipped my glove off to answer it.
I really—really—wanted a pair of smartphone gloves, but they were so expensive
that I hadn’t bought myself a pair yet.
Add
it to your Christmas list,
I told myself as I slipped my phone out of my
pocket and tapped the accept icon, without even really looking to see who it
was calling me. I set my cup of hot chocolate down and balanced my phone on my
shoulder while I put my glove back on; it was way too cold to leave it off for
longer than a few seconds.

“Hello?”

“Hey Mackie-sweetie!” My mom’s voice
filled my ear and I smiled. “It’s officially the holiday season, and you know
what that means.”

“You’re asking everyone to turn in their
lists by tomorrow or risk having no Christmas presents?”

My mom laughed on the other end of the
line.

“That is one thing,” she agreed. “The
other is that I need to know whether I can expect you here for the holidays.” I
frowned, worrying at my bottom lip for a moment. I definitely wanted to see my
family for Christmas—and there would be a big New Year’s party to go to as
well—but I knew that if I spent as much time with them as possible over the
holidays, I’d have to avoid a bunch of questions about my love life…or more
accurately, my lack of a love life.

“I’m definitely planning on being there
for Christmas,” I said quickly. The office would be closed on Christmas day;
there wouldn’t be any reason for anyone to be there anyway. “And I’m hoping
that nothing will come up on New Year’s Eve that would mean I have to come in.
But in-between I’m not sure.”

“It was such a shame last year that you had
to leave during the week,” Mom said.

“Well we had a lot of people in,” I
pointed out. “Everyone was pulling overtime.” It wasn’t exactly true; I’d
signed up and along with everyone else who had signed up, I’d gotten called in.
It had been a bit of a relief; being around my family was nice, but the fact
that my cousin—three years younger than me— just had a baby and then had been
planning to get married in another three months, meant that the entire time I
was home everything became speculation about me being a bridesmaid yet again. I
had lost track of how many times I was asked
 
when it would be time for me to don a white dress of my own. “I’ll try
to make sure I can stay for the whole holiday,” I said.

The office didn’t entirely close between
Christmas and New Year’s, but we tried to schedule as few sessions as possible.
Of course, physical therapy required a lot of consistency, which is something
we explained to all of our young patients’ parents, but even people in the
medical field like to be with their families during the holidays if they can.