A Secret Vow: A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

gonna float you forever.”
     
    “We had a deal.”
     
    “And you can’t keep up your end of it. If you’re not selling, how are you gonna make the loan payments you owe me?”
     
    We come full circle with a sickening crunch. I’m transported back to five years ago. I was fresh out of art school. My head was spilling over with a million ideas and the praise of every professor who told me to go for it, to take a stab at being a professional artist. I was going to sell paintings and make beautiful things that would bring happiness to people. I had the talent and the willpower. It was only a matter of time before I made it big.
     
    Confident that success was right around the corner, I’d taken out loans I couldn’t possibly afford in order to buy the studio space and start filling it with the supplies I needed to make masterpieces. Costs just kept adding up—insurance and electricity and air conditioning and all the tools that being an artist required. Before I knew it, I was eyeballs deep in debt and drowning.
     
    Enter Grady. The promise of some help with the loan payments was music to my ears. “Just for a couple months, until I get going,” I’d warned him. And I’d meant it. Things had settled into a workable situation. I got back to work. But then I needed some paint or a brush, and the no he gave me was much harsher and more sudden than I’d been expecting.
     
    Slowly, like everything else horrible in my life, it snowballed, until the studio had become a symbol of all the things I wouldn’t ever be. Still, when I was there, I could find the tiniest sense of relief. It was the last safe haven in my life.
     
    And now that was being taken away.
     
    “I need supplies to finish paintings,” I told him. “Then I can sell them.”
     
    He chortled. “How can you know for sure? You haven’t sold anything in months. Naw, we’re gonna sell that piece of shit place. That’s the only way I’m gonna get any kind of return on all the cash I’ve sunk into it.”
     
    “But—”
     
    “No, shut up. It doesn’t matter. That’s what’s happening.”
     
    It feels like all the sound has been sucked out of the world. I sink low into my seat, trying to wrap my head around what the loss of my studio would mean.
     
    It will be the loss of everything. Once this last link is severed, I’m all alone in Grady’s world. It’s a world of fists and drunken anger and I won’t have any recourse from it, not a single avenue of escape.
     
    Well, except for one: Mortar.
     
    I think about the kiss and as I do, I feel the phantom heat creeping over my skin again. It’s tantalizing. “I don’t break promises,” he’d said. I believe him. He said he’d protect me from Grady. I believe that, too. I believe he would try, at least.
     
    But then I look over at the man to my left, and I realize that there is no one in the world I could trust to keep me safe from him.
     
    I feel a sudden heat on my mouth, and a fingertip touched against my lip comes away wet with blood. I’ve chewed my busted lip open without even noticing. As I fumble for a tissue in my purse, Grady looks over and sees the injury. Some twisted expression, halfway between a grin and a scowl, takes over his face.
     
    “Had a good time last night, did you?”
     
    “It was fine.”
     
    “You and that biker sleaze seemed to be having an awfully interesting conversation.”
     
    “It wasn’t anything.”
     
    He smacks a flat palm against the steering wheel. “Like hell it wasn’t!”
     
    “Grady, it wasn’t anything. You overreacted.”
     
    He pauses. His sudden coolness scares me. I’m used to explosions from him. This icy glee is something new and frightening.
     
    “No, I didn’t overreact. It made me realize something, actually.” I wait, too scared to say a word. The other shoe is about to drop. I can hear my pulse in my ears. “And I made a decision.”
     
    We pull into the driveway. The garage door opens, its shadowy interior