Secret Daddies (Reverse Harem Daddies)

1. Maya

1

MAYA

Seven Years Later

“Mom! Come on! The movie’s starting!”

“I’ll be right there!” I called back to Matty, watching the countdown timer on the microwave as the popcorn finished its cycle. I could hear the opening credits music playing already, and I was sure Matty would make me run the movie back to the start if he thought I had missed anything. Not that these superhero flicks were ever cerebral enough to need it, but still.

The microwave pinged, and I pulled out the hot bag of salty-sweet treats, decanting them quickly into a bowl before I headed back to join my son on the couch once more. I dropped the bowl into his lap and ruffled his mop of curly auburn hair.

“What did I miss?” I asked as I reached across to stick a handful of popcorn into my mouth.

“Nothing yet,” he replied, snuggling up a little closer to me. “It’s just started. You remember what happened in the last one, don’t you?”

“Barely,” I admitted. “But at least I have the world’s foremost expert on this franchise to help me if I’ve forgotten.”

I flashed him a playful smile, but I could tell he was already so enthralled by the movie he could hardly give a damn. And I was happy for him, I was—I loved our Saturday nights together, watching these silly blockbusters. I’d pick one the first week, then Matty on the second, and we’d go back and forth together. Though, to be honest, it was getting harder and harder for me to keep a straight face through his choices.

I tried to focus on the screen before me. It was the usual superhero movie fare, at least what I had seen so far in this Trio franchise—each one of the heroes had a solo movie of their own, and there was some big team-up flick that was due out sometime down the line, though I didn’t know when. This particular movie, though, starred a character named Cormac the Destroyer—at least, that was what Matty had told me. All I knew about him was that he was played by one of the biggest movie stars in the world right now.

Who also just so happened to be my son’s father.

Lightning crashed on the screen, and a bolt of it flashed down to split the earth—as the camera panned back dramatically, it revealed a man standing right where the lightning had hit. His head was lowered, his fist driven into the ground, the brawny muscles of his arms flexing. Slowly, he lifted his head and looked past the camera, his brow furrowed…

And my heart skipped a beat. I reached for another handful of popcorn and crammed it into my mouth, trying to distract myself.

Devon.

The man I had been doing my level best to forget about for the last seven years. The man who left me with no warning, pregnant, and with nobody to turn to. The man who had made a damn good career for himself in the world of cinema, who was probably rolling in enough cash to buy and sell the entire crappy apartment building I lived in—the man who I swore I would never rely on again, not as long as I lived.

But there he was. And God, he was just as sexy as he had been back then, maybe even more so. When I’d met him, working as a makeup artist on the indie rom-com that turned out to be one of his major breakthroughs, I’d fallen for him at once. The stupid, desperate, silly kind of romance that you can only experience when you’re nineteen, and you haven’t had the good sense to get your heart broken a few times first.

I really thought we had something. And yes, a big part of that was the sex—because the sex had been crazy, the kind of hotness I hadn’t even come close to matching since. But it was more than that. It was his attitude, his confidence, his ambition, that sense that he could take on the world and win—and, I guessed, he had actually managed to do that. He’d gone and launched his career into the stratosphere, while I had been left behind to pick up the pieces and try to raise our son alone.

I glanced over at Matty, who was staring at the screen, his eyes wide, a grin on his face as the first action scene played out. He didn’t look a whole lot like Devon, I supposed—not now, at least. But I could see him growing up to be the spitting image of his father. It would probably just be some curio that people mentioned to him at bars— hey, you look just like that superhero actor guy, what was his name…?

As though people were ever going to forget Devon’s name. I might have tried to tell myself he would just fade into obscurity, that I would never have to see him again, but of course the universe thought it would be way funnier if he wound up on billboards all over the country, so I couldn’t turn around without facing the ex who had dumped me out of the blue.

Who had no idea that I’d actually gone on to have our child together.

I had thought about telling him when I found out about the pregnancy, of course I had—I had considered it, the possibility of coming clean and telling him everything. I thought that, maybe, it might bring him back to me. There was a part of me that wanted that, no matter how crazy I knew it was. A part of me that liked the idea of just…convincing him to come back and play happy family with me, forgetting about our careers and focusing on this little life we could build together.

But of course, I didn’t. I’d been way too proud for that. Hell, I was too proud now, and I wasn’t about to go crawling to any man, trying to convince him to come be with me when he had made it as clear as day that he didn’t want a damn thing to do with me. He never reached out to me again after he left—probably because he got his big break, and he was done with small-fry girls like me.

Sure, I could have gone after him for child support if I really wanted to. But I’d been so focused on taking care of my little boy that I didn’t have time to think about it, and then he was so famous that it would have brought down no end of chaos onto my son’s head if I had gotten into a legal battle with him in public. No, it just seemed easier, safer, to keep my distance—to make ends meet picking up shifts at a local café and forget about working in the film industry, forget about my dream of working as a makeup artist for some big studio.

At least I got Matty to make up for all of it. I put my arm around him and dropped a kiss on top of his head, though his eyes were still glued to the screen. I was trying my best to pretend like I was paying attention, but honestly, I didn’t want to look at Devon right now. His name flashed as the opening credits finally kicked in, and I averted my eyes from the screen. Seeing his name up in lights like that, Devon Hart, like he was the most important person on earth, it stung a little. Well, more than a little, if I was being honest.

“He’s so cool,” Matty sighed. “I wish I could do all the stuff he does…”

“I don’t think he does all of it,” I replied, before I could stop myself. “There are stuntmen who?—”

But Matty shot me a look out of the corner of his eye that was clearly intended to tell me to stop talking. He didn’t want me to wreck all of this movie magic for him, and I raised my eyebrows at him and pressed my fingers to my lips apologetically, allowing him to stay focused on the story. What little of it there was, at least.

It was…surreal, seeing him react to his father like this. Devon had popped up in the other two films of the series too, but just in little cameo roles. This was a whole movie about him. A whole movie starring my son’s father, and my little boy didn’t know a damn thing about it.

A twist of guilt nagged at my chest. Sometimes, I second-guessed that choice. How could I not? When I picked Matty up from school, all the other kids would come streaming out to their parents, and I would see him grin and wave at me, and I wondered if he thought about why he didn’t have a dad to pick him up. He had asked about it a few times when he was younger, and as much as I tried to keep my voice neutral, he must have been able to tell that it hurt, because he didn’t bring it up again.

He wouldn’t believe me now, if I told him that the man on the screen before him was his dad. It was what so many little boys his age dreamed of, finding out something huge about their past and being whisked away into a brand-new life. But this life was…it was good, wasn’t it? I had worked as hard as I could to make it nice for him, to build a comfortable home for us in this tiny apartment—we didn’t have a lot, but we got by. And surely, that was all that mattered.

I focused on working my way through the popcorn at a record speed as the movie played out in front of us, and when it was gone, I sprang to my feet and headed to the kitchen to make more.

“I’ll be back in a minute!” I chirped to Matty, glad for the break from the screen. Seeing Devon like that, all rippling muscles and sharp jawline, was throwing my memory back to some things that were decidedly not appropriate for a film night with my son.

But I managed to make it through the rest of the movie—including the post-credits sequence, which Matty insisted on sitting through—without giving the game away. I closed my eyes for a moment as the screen turned to black, and gave myself a silent pat on the back. Well done, girl. You got through it.

“ Right!” I exclaimed as I jumped to my feet. “Bedtime. Come on, you need to wash your stinky butt before you go to sleep.”

“Mom,” Matty pleaded. “Can I?—”

“No, you can’t,” I told him, lifting him off the couch and planting him on his feet. “No excuses. You think superheroes don’t brush their teeth?”

He pattered off toward the bathroom, and I grinned as I watched him go. Even though he was just six, it felt like he was turning into such a distinguished little guy. It was crazy to me, how much personality he had developed in the last few years—how he had come out of me a little fleshy blob, and now he had opinions and an attitude and a taste in movies.

I laid out his pajamas on his bed, and helped him change into them before I tucked him beneath the covers—I could tell he wasn’t going to sleep well tonight, his mind racing with all the bright colors and exciting action scenes he’d just watched.

“You sleep well, baby boy,” I murmured to him, dropping a kiss onto his head. “I love you.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

I smiled as I pressed my forehead to his for a moment, breathing in the scent of him—yes, I had done it a million times before, but I would never get tired of it.

Finally, I flicked out his light, leaving the door propped open just an inch or two so he could come find me if he had a bad dream—he rarely did these days, but it felt like a little lifeline tied between the two of us, as much for me as it was for him. And then, heading to my own room, I let out a long sigh as I undid my hair from the clip and brushed it out before I crashed out for the evening.

Stifling a yawn, I tried not to let my mind stray back in the direction of the movie we had just watched tonight. Devon was pretty good, I had to admit—not that it should have come as a surprise, given how skilled I knew him to be, even when we had been together. He’d always told me that he was going to make it big, and given the way he approached his work, it had been clear he wouldn’t stop until he got there.

And now he was the lead of some big superhero series, so good for him. I wasn’t bitter. Not at all. I’d had to give up everything I was working for to find a solid income to take care of my son, while Devon had been off gallivanting with God knows who doing God knows what, probably on a private yacht, but I wasn’t bitter.

Flopping down onto my bed, I stared at the ceiling—at the spiderweb of cracks that inched out from around the light fixture that the landlord had sworn he was going to get fixed, though he never quite found the time to get around to it. And maybe he would, or maybe he would just be another in a long line of men who had let me the hell down.

I turned over with a sigh and flipped out the light on my bedside table—but even as darkness fell around me, I found my mind drifting back to Devon Hart, and the way those blue, blue eyes used to look at me instead of a billion-dollar audience.