Page 1 of Secret Baby: Billionaire Stepbrother

Chapter One

“Well, Baby Bart, do you want to chance going to see your grandmother?” I muttered, looking at my six month old son with gray eyes exactly like his dad’s and mashed carrots painting his cheeks, chin, and lower lip. Bartie did not like his veggies. He cooed at me, waving his hands trying to get to the baby spoon as I expertly scraped carrot off him like a pro, then tried to get it into his mouth.

I did the train sound and he opened up with a grin, and I shoved. His eyes widened almost as if he was accusing me of the sneak attack, but then he started munching.

“See—” I tickled him under his chin. “It is good.”

Just as I said that half of it spurted out of his mouth and dribbled in globs down his chin. I laughed. Oh my gosh, he was the most precious thing. But the instant I thought that, I got sad.

His dad would never know his specialness.

I continued to feed Bart while thinking over my newest dilemma; whether to go home for a visit or not. Back home, no one knew that I’d been pregnant and had a baby. When I’d first found out I was pregnant, and things being what they were, I’d determined I would never see my family again. That I couldn’t, not with the baby ... so I wouldn’t.

I didn’t even mind giving them up. It was only my mom and stepdad, both of which I wasn’t super close too. Of course the one person in my family it tore my heart out never to be able to see again was my stepbrother Beck. But for my baby, I even tore myself away from him.

I looked out the window of my house on the gulf of Texas as I multi-tasked giving Bart his after lunch bottle of juice. I wasn’t going to get anymore veggie’s down him so I would resort to liquid fruit. Bart chewed the nipple on the bottle before he started sucking on it.

His eyes drooped a little ... God, I missed breastfeeding him. I had only managed to do it for six weeks, because I had to go back to work. I still expressed, but it wasn’t the same. Being the single breadwinner for my little family of two meant I had to work full time at my business which staged houses.

I was glad for the business and the fact that it had moved so well, when I’d had to leave my home town, to hide my pregnancy. But that was before my mom broke up with my stepdad, which now opened up a door for me to maybe step through. It’s not like I thought my mom was going to be a great grandmother ... because I could not picture her that way. She’d never been the kind of mom saying “You have to get married. You have to give me grandbabies.”

“But a kid deserves a grandmother,” I muttered, playing with my cell phone on top of the kitchen table in my kitchen nook overlooking the gulf.

Bart would have a great place to play there once he got older, and it’s the reason I’d picked the place. I’d managed to swing a down payment on it from some money my grandmother left me. Now she was someone in my family that would have loved Bart.

Maybe I was just lonely ... being a single mother was tough all alone, or maybe it was my guilt working. If Bart couldn’t have his father, then he deserved some other extended family.

For the thousandth time I looked at my baby wondering if anyone could guess who the father was. I didn’t think so unless they were side by side, or I’d never chance it.

***

It was a four day holiday weekend and I was driving like I was crawling back into my home town. Bartie was asleep in the backseat after I had exhausted my entire knowledge of upbeat kids' songs during the six hour drive. I think I was a little hoarse, but I proudly thought my son had actually started humming along during small bits of my car recital.

My eyes darted like someone was going to pounce on me and my slow moving car and proclaim my worse secret to the entire town. I unclenched my shoulders and shook my head, trying to loosen up. I was being paranoid. The biggest problem facing me was springing a grandbaby on my mom that she had no clue about.

But my mom was always so busy I would bet she’d spend only a second over it, if that. Still, I really looked over her house as I pulled up to it, checking to make certain it was her car in the driveway.

She’d told me three months ago that she and my stepdad Murray, had split up over his bad finances. She’d said it like that too; as if they had been single and living together, and it wasn’t their married finances.

Mom had acted like she had no control over it. But whatever, of the two of them I liked Murray a little better, and his son, well—

“Don’t think about him,” I muttered, clenching my fingers on the steering wheel as I stop my car out front of my mom’s house. Just looking at that brick ranch house brought back memories I didn’t want to remember.

We can’t fight it. Maybe if we do it, it will take the crazy forbidden desire away.

I could still hear Beck’s deep voice saying that as we’d stood alone in the basement’s den of our house, which was now my mom’s house since she and Murray split. But he’d been wrong, because it hadn’t gone away. Not at all for me ... and it still hurt. I looked back at sleeping Bart. It hurt a lot.

Forcefully, I shrugged off the memories, because I had not come home for that. I’d had to leave that behind, and I wouldn’t admit out loud, even to myself that I still thought about Beck every damn day. But I wasn’t coming home for me; I was coming home for Bart. So I got out of my car and I went to get my baby.

Two minutes later, my mom screeched out of her opened front door. “A baby! How could you have a baby and I not know!”

I grimaced, looking around the neighborhood, thinking now they’d all know. But I knew it was a shock, so I told the lie I had planned.

“Mom, you were having trouble with Murray and I just couldn’t dump more on you.”

My mom surprised the heck out of me by shooting out the open front doorway to grab the baby from me. She held Bart up in front of her and cooed at him. My mouth fell open. My mom? She jiggled Bartie, and he laughed at her.

I decided I was on an alien planet, but then my world stalled with a cosmic heartbeat when my mom turned her head toward the inside of the house, and then she shouted, “Murray! You’re not going to believe this, but we have a grandbaby!”

I think my heartbeat might have stalled for a full second, but my mom was hauling Bart inside, holding him like a pro on her hip, while he tugged on her hair.

“Murray,” I gasped. “But I thought—”

“Murray!” mom shouted again, disappearing deeper into the house. “Come look at this!”

Oh, this was so bad; so, so bad.

Only one thing could make it worse, and then I heard it—

“You have a baby, Millie?” My stepbrother Beck’s deep voice came from the living room I was passing by.

I was very much not a wilting flower. There hadn’t ever been a time in my life where I had even felt faint, but suddenly the hallway started to spin and I couldn’t seem to breathe. I needed everything that was happening too quickly to go away, and I needed to be able to time travel backward, to before I drove up to my old house, so I could just drive past and all this would have never happened.

“Whoa, baby,” Beck uttered.

His arm was across my back, then my head felt as if I couldn’t hold it up and everything went black.

***

Beck lifted his stepsister up into his arms, feeling that she was much curvier than the last time he had held her. His dark gaze looked down the hallway where his stepmom had disappeared; her and the baby.

“Is that baby why you have such tits and ass now, baby sister,” he muttered under his breath as her lax face pressed against his upper arm. Out loud he yelled, “I’m taking Millie upstairs, she’s wiped out.”

Their parents made some affirmative sounds that they’d received the message from somewhere deeper in the house, while Beck started up the stairs. He knew the shock of seeing him at home had probably made Millie faint.

Then he realized that he was angrier than he’d been in his entire life. And that was saying a lot, because the last night he’d seen Millie he’d felt rage unlike anything he’d felt before. All because she was making it impossible for them to stay together.

But this eclipsed it. Because seeing her baby meant some other man had fucking touched his sister.

He was surprised that he wasn’t more upset over her fainting, but he’d known she’d not expected to see him or his dad at their old house. It had to be a huge and stunning surprise to her, obviously. He’d been shocked when he’d come home to visit his stepmom, at her request, and there had been his dad, with the both of them saying they had reconciled.

Beck looked down at Millie as he laid her on his bed with her blond hair fanning out across the pillow on his bed in his old room. It was impossible she could be any prettier, but she was, and a little bit of his anger receded just looking at her.

It wasn’t hard to believe another man could desire her, and have moved on her so quickly. As much as he’d tried to forget her, seeing her again was like a punch in the gut. It had made him nearly walk out the back door once he’d realized it was her at the front door. But the news of a baby had stopped him.

Beck drew his knuckles down her soft cheek. It seemed as if being pregnant had made her even more beautiful, and it soured his gut to acid thinking that some other man had bred her.

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