My Secret Santa's Secret Baby Read online

  My Secret Santa’s Secret Baby

  This is Book 17 in the His Secret Baby series,

  which are based on a theme and can be read alone

  but are best to binge-read altogether!

  Copyright © 2020 Jamie Knight Romance

  Jamie Knight –

  Your Dirty Little Secret Romance Author

  All rights reserved.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One - Skye

  Chapter Two - Simon

  Chapter Three - Skye

  Chapter Four - Simon

  Chapter Five - Skye

  Chapter Six - Simon

  Chapter Seven - Skye

  Chapter Eight - Skye

  Chapter Nine - Skye

  Chapter Ten - Simon

  Chapter Eleven - Skye

  Chapter Twelve - Skye

  Chapter Thirteen - Simon

  Chapter Fourteen - Skye

  Chapter Fifteen - Simon

  Chapter Sixteen - Skye

  Chapter Seventeen - Skye

  Chapter Eighteen - Simon

  Chapter Nineteen - Skye

  Chapter Twenty - Skye

  Chapter Twenty-One - Simon

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Skye

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Simon

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Skye

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Simon

  Epilogue - Skye

  Sneak Peek of My Bad Boy Boss’s Secret Baby

  Chapter One - Skye

  Few things hold more terror than the first day of anything.

  First day of school, first day of a new job, first day of the rest of your life.

  The sheer open potential could be almost paralyzing. It was for me, anyway, the potential for making a fatal error weighing on me like bricks.

  My state of mind wasn’t helped by the fact that the job I was starting had been an accident. No, not an accident really, but more of a coincidence. The fates had smiled, the planets had aligned, and it had just so happened that at the exact moment in world history that I was looking for a job, a major New York publishing house was looking for a junior editor for their speculative fiction imprint.

  It wasn’t a secure position, or even a permanent one. The ad was crystal clear about that fact.

  Without putting it in so many words, potential applicants were warned that the job in question was basically an emergency stop gap over the holiday season. The annual buying glut, affecting everything from Black & Decker blenders to Black Metal albums also applied to the publishing industry.

  Most of the houses, from biggest to smallest, found themselves in various degrees of short-staffage compared to the demand, around the time the Halloween decorations started coming down and the Christmas lights started being stocked mere steps away from the turkey and stuffing.

  The first item on the potential glitch list, at least the one running through my head, was the outfit. I’d always been taught that you only got one chance to make a first impression and once it was there, it was unshakable. Because the job was basically probationary, I wanted to make sure I made as good an impression as possible and carried it on until the new year.

  Sophisticated and slightly sexy or studious and serious? That was the question.

  Pigeon Press was counted among the most important publishers in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, I was going to be working in the speculative fiction area, known for its casualness.

  Pigeon was different among the corporate entities, acting more like a nation of city states than a vast and all-powerful cohesive kingdom. The department heads were given a free hand as long as the profit margins lined up, despite the personal feelings of the higher-ups. This freedom came at a cost, however, the commanding editors the first to go should even the smallest thing go wrong on their watch.

  I couldn’t find much online about the speculative fiction department in general. The head editor, Simon Del Rey, was a bit of an enigma. He had no photo on the company website, or anywhere else online, and there was precious little biographical information to be found on him.

  All I was really able to glean was that he was thirty years old and was an almost obsessive fan of the 19th century British author William Morris, the mad genius who was generally credited with innovating the modern Fantasy genre with books like News From Nowhere and The Wood Beyond the World.

  According to GoodReads, Del Rey had written no less than ten books on Morris or his work, encompassing everything from biography to fanfiction, most of it self-published, though all of it with very respectable ratings.

  I got the strong sense that editorial wasn’t Del Rey’s first choice of career. Like so many writers before him, he had to take a writing adjacent job while climbing what Neil Gaiman once describe as the mountain of becoming a successful author.

  I could definitely relate, having upwards of twenty finished novels on my hard drive, dating back to grade-school, some of which might actually be publishable. Not that I was likely to find out.

  I was 18, fresh out of high school, and my parents were insisting I either secure a ‘proper’ job or a degree that would help me get one. They made it clear that they would be having none of that ‘Liberal Arts’ nonsense.

  Usually, the best I would have been able to get at a place like Pigeon was an unpaid, and probably technically illegal, internship. Happily, they were desperate right about now, and my powers of creativity made my resume look rather convincing.

  Which was a major part of my outfit dilemma. I needed something that made me look as old as possible without coming across as too severe.

  Settling on form fitting black jeans with a tucked-in t-shirt and tailored suit jacket, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail. That was something that was easier said than done, considering it hadn’t been cut since I was 14 and it had grown down to my hips.

  I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and decided to go for a bun instead. It looked more like a dessert plate, but it would do. I glanced at myself again, liking what I saw. I had curves in all the right places, but my outfit didn’t accentuate them so much that I felt too exposed.

  That hurtle crossed, I was ready to give it a whirl and hope for the best.

  No one warned me about the cold. Portland wasn’t exactly tropical, but it was nothing like the winter wonderland that I was finding out New York could become after November. I’d dressed in a way that I thought of as warm, not counting on the windchill, a term I had honestly never heard before until I got into my little rental house in Williamsburg.

  I hopped onto the B62 bus route over to the island. I knew the subway was faster, but my claustrophobia kept it from being a viable option. There was something about being underground in particular that freaked me out.

  I was the kind of girl who needed to be able to see the sky. According to family legend, ‘sky’ had been my first word, which was how I got my name. Traditional types, my folks refused to name either myself or my older sister until we were at least a year old, just in case they changed their mind along thew ay.

  They also fancied things up by throwing an ‘e’ on the end to make the spelling of my name look like the island in the Hebrides. My dad, William Stewart, claimed lineage to the legendary Stewart clan of kings. Though with no actual documentation to back up such a claim, it was largely hearsay.

  No matter how many letters he wrote to the governments of both England and Scotland, and in one infamous example Queen Elizabeth her royal self, demanding his land and title, we never received any solid proof.

  There were certain a
dvantages to living in New York that I’d never considered before moving here. For one, not driving was not seen as odd. The fact that I’d been strictly forbidden from learning to drive for reasons far too sexist to even contemplate didn’t need to come up in conversation as it so often had back home.

  I was soon no longer even tempted to learn just to spite my folks, like my sister had a couple of years before. Almost as soon as she was off to college she was on the road. But I didn’t really want to drive if I didn’t have to— it seemed scary to me, with the threat of an accident always looming over my head, especially with all the different streets and alleys of a city as large as New York.

  I’d seen pictures and oh so many examples, of course. Even so, there was nothing like actually going over one of the bridges in person to really appreciate its structural beauty.

  I guessed the people who were born and raised here stopped noticing after a while, like how astronauts probably got used to seeing space up close on their umpteenth launch. But I still had a sense of novelty about the whole thing, despite my best attempts to try and not look like a tourist.

  I lived here now and might as well do my best to fit in. I just hoped I could get this job, as my money was running out and I needed to replenish my bank account if I hoped to be able to stay here instead of having to return home to Portland with my tail between my legs.

  Chapter Two - Simon

  The thump of my feet matched the pounding of my heart. I was running aimlessly with no particular goal in the mind other than fighting the middle-aged spread before it could start.

  Both my dad and grandad had been spry and sprightly until they finally keeled over, the sand in their hourglass just running out. And how big that hourglasses must have been. Grandad was almost 100 when he joined the choir invisible and my dad lasted until age 95 but his fact-paced lifestyle eventually took a toll on his heart, strong as it was.

  I wasn’t there at the time, Dad always flying off somewhere beautiful to do something crazy. But according to eye-witness reports, backed up by that of the coroner, the old fella had been hit with a massive heart-attack while mid-glide, minutes after B.AS.E. jumping from the highest cliff he could find, Mt. Everest being off season and not able to get a permit for Kilimanjaro.

  The blast beats thundered, the melodic guitars driving me on like a hyperactive sled dog as I ran as quickly as I could, despite not actually going anywhere at all. Then the alarm I had set to notify me of the end of my work out went up like an air raid siren, heralding the coming of the cool down period.

  The treadmill eased down from a panicked bolt to a Sunday stroll, my heart rate following suit. It might well quicken up again when I got into the shower.

  Icy water like a melted glacier cascaded down onto my prone skin, easing the ache my muscles felt from the hard work out and putting all my nerves on high alert as they started rebounding from the beating I’d just given them. Some in my position used cocaine to perk up. But I preferred endorphins, which in addition to being free, were also a lot less dangerous. Rarely had I heard of anyone over-dosing on exercise.

  Wrapped in one of the Egyptian cotton towels I’d gotten as a housewarming gift, I noticed that the inventory of berries available in the fridge were duly plundered, along with no small portion of banana and orange juice. Once whatever was left was joined in happy harmony in the efficiently German stainless steel blender, I pushed the button and unleashed the high vitamin twister.

  After stowing what was left in the uncannily modern Freon-free fridge in order to save some time later, I took a drink. The concoction flowed down my throat in the sweetest waterfall, pleasing my tongue at the same time that it nurtured my stomach.

  Fighting the inevitable brain freeze, I counted backwards from a thousand, paying careful attention to each number as it passed in smooth succession, once again reassuring me that my mental faculties were indeed intact. You could never be too careful with all the additives being put into nearly everything these days.

  I wasn’t paranoid, per se. More like possessed of a reasonable caution based on a scientific fact.

  The towel furled away like a loose flag as I traversed the bedroom, glorying in the feeling of full nature. It was what my hippie, pagan parents called being starkers. Or ‘naked,’ to put it bluntly.

  Standing in the full glory of the creators' gifts, I opened my wardrobe. Antique and distinctly Narnian in design, it always put me in mind of my boyhood adventures at my grandparent’s place upstate. It had been a world so separate from the forced civility of the city that it felt as though there had been an air of magic about it.

  There were even tales, mostly online in the same forums that went on and on about SlederMan, of a town tucked away in the wilds made up almost entirely of paranormal creatures, with regular mortal humans like me making up only 10% of the population.

  It didn’t seem likely, but anything was possible. In my experience, people like my folks could do ten allegedly ‘impossible’ things before breakfast.

  The choice of possible clothes to wear was dizzying but no less surmountable. Neatly divided by clearly marked signs, the pre-set suits stood in line like loyal sentinels awaiting inspection by their emperor. After I opted for traditional black, it was then a simple matter of wrestling my newly revived body into the tailored silk lining.

  Most of what I had, including the condo, were perks of birth. While my mom was a hippie and managed to coax my dad in that direction as well, they were both from families that could best be described as filthy rich. Some would argue that ‘idle rich’ would be kinder, but it was in no way accurate.

  The alarm tweeted its happy tune as I approached the beloved beast. It had taken some doing to get an alarm system put into a 1945 BMW, but persistence won out in the end.

  While there were millions of non-drivers in the Big Apple, the subway being a viable option for most, there was still no shortage of vehicles on the busy streets. I wouldn’t have driven myself were it not for the fact that trying to take the subway always made me late. As though granted a wish by my fairy godfather, the switch from subway to driving took me from getting in five minutes late every morning to arriving just after the receptionists had unlocked the doors.

  Others in my position would have had a driver, for plausible deniability if anything else. But alas, my fiercely independent nature made me want to drive my own bus, so to speak, in all aspects of life.

  The only exception to this otherwise ironclad rule were those above me at work. Mostly because I was barely aware that they were there. As long as my department made more money than it lost, I didn’t hear a peep out of them.

  There were still a few company-wide regulations that applied to everyone, including the department heads. Except this was a bit like an empire having a law for all its subjects with no practical mode of monitoring or enforcement that law. I didn’t do well with illogical rules in general and it was a relief not to have too many of them to deal with and try to get around.

  The fine beast inched onto the road, ever cautious of oncoming traffic. Hitting my tempo at just the right time, I pulled out right before a maniac could try and take the front end off with their SUV.

  Everything in life had a degree of risk and, as far as I could tell, driving was also safer than taking the subway. Accidents happened, but when they did, both parties were already in a metal box.

  It was also much harder to get knifed while in the car with the windows up than on the G-line at midnight. It all came down to a matter of degrees.

  It was almost a law of the universe. Just as the phone will always ring right when you step into the shower, the closer you get to the city, the thicker the traffic became, inevitably getting to the point of reaching a complete standstill. The city road started to more closely resemble a very long parking lot after a while.

  I’d never been terribly religious, but if there was someone up there with a timetable directing traffic, it didn’t include gettin
g me to the office on time today. Everything else had gone exactly right. I’d even left early enough in the morning to beat the traffic, at least on any other day.

  The only explanation that made any sense was divine intervention, as if giant words were written in the sky saying NOT TODAY, SIMON. But since I was the head of an editing department, I could come in whenever I wanted. I would just prefer to arrive earlier than I was certainly going to arrive today.

  Shops and restaurants of all types called me like sirens on the rocks as I drove towards the office, their undoubtedly tempting smells deflected by the windows. I didn’t have a great reason for wanting to go in and sample their wares.

  My metabolism was high enough that I didn’t have to worry about the calories. It also wasn’t a matter of hunger, the smoothie specially formulated to give me everything I needed for a long morning.

  The thing pulling me off track that morning had as much to do with habit as anything else. The primal need to chew, based on a lifetime of eating for comfort.

  After I took a stick of gum from the pack sticking up out of the ashtray, relief came quick, washing over me in an awesome wave. All craving for food or any thought of it scattered like autumn leaves on a strong wind.

  Jutting up into the sky like a post-modern obelisk, I saw the tower where the office was located. I didn’t know what madness had inspired the original architecture, but I had to admit that the structure had a kind of sinister charm.

  I was finally within viewing distance of my destination, and ready to put in a hard day’s work at the office.

  Chapter Three - Skye

  There are things in life that are unavoidable.

  Dancing to a rumba beat.

  Laughing when others are, even if you don’t completely get the joke.

  And really needing to go to the bathroom at the sight and sound of rushing water. Even if you didn’t need to go just minutes before.