Accidentally All Of Me Read online

  Accidentally All Of Me

  Ali Parker

  BrixBaxter Publishing

  Contents

  Find Ali Parker

  Description

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Want More?

  Insider Group

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Find Ali Parker

  www.aliparkerbooks.com

  Description

  I’m raising someone else’s kid.

  My sister’s daughter, and where I thought I’d never make it as a single father bachelor, I was wrong.

  This little girl has my heart. And only her.

  Until a stray dog happens upon my place and we’re forced to call a vet.

  And a beautiful woman showed up.

  I didn’t believe in fate.

  But it seems to believe in me.

  The beautiful woman who helped us out with the dog shows up again later on a blind date across the table from me.

  And I’m sold out for her before I realize what’s happening.

  Pulling back is my only hope for survival.

  After losing my sister, I’m far more protective of me and her little one.

  But it’s a losing battle. No way I’m going anywhere, until I’m forced to.

  It would seem I have a kid of my own in the world.

  Maybe this is the breaking point where I can walk away from the all-consuming passion of my new romance.

  Because I’m good with giving my time, my body, and all of my money.

  But to her?

  I’ve accidentally given all of me.

  Introduction

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  Chapter 1

  Harry

  I checked my watch for the dozenth time that morning. If we didn’t get moving soon, we were going to be late. Yet again.

  “Winnie, come on!” I called to the girl who I was acting as a father to. “We have to get out of here, or else we’re going to be late!”

  “I need a minute!” she called back, and I practically hopped from foot to foot on the spot with my impatience. I didn’t have time to wait a minute. I needed her out here now. Then maybe I would have time to grab something for breakfast before I—

  Breakfast. Shit! That reminded me.

  I hurried to the kitchen to grab the bagged lunch the housekeeper had left for Winnie on the kitchen counter, and I thanked God that I had thought to hire her way back when all of this had started.

  “Okay, I’m going to leave without you!” I shouted up the stairs, and sure enough, a couple of seconds later, I heard little footsteps thundering down the stairs toward me as Winnie finally decided that she was ready for school.

  I handed her the paper bag, she took it from me, and the two of us hurried out to the car as I patted down my sides for keys to make sure I had everything I needed.

  “You never forget anything,” she reminded me, smiling in my direction as she saw me panicking. “Remember?”

  “Well, I obviously forget that I never forget, or else I wouldn’t need you to remind me,” I told her, and I opened the car door for her and helped her hop in.

  “Did you remember your lunch?” she asked as we pulled away.

  “No meetings on a Monday,” I said. “I’m going to go out for something to eat instead.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “I’m not sure I would be able to get all the way across town and back in time,” I replied apologetically. “But when you get into high school and start having free periods, we can do that.”

  “I want to,” she said happily, leaning up on the window and smiling as she looked outside. There were times when she looked so much like my sister, her mother, that I found myself caught off guard. It was like there was a reflection of her right in front of me, even though I knew she had been gone for a long time now.

  “You doing anything fun today at school?” I asked, trying to draw my mind from my late sister. The last thing I wanted was to kick this morning off with another wave of the grief that had ruled me for so long. I was just getting to the stage now where I didn’t suffer every time she passed through my mind, but thinking about her was still a shock to the system.

  “We’re making birthday cards for our teacher,” she said. “I’m going to do one with a frog on the front. She likes frogs. She always wears a necklace with a silver frog on it.”

  I listened to her as she chattered away, and I couldn’t help but smile. She had such a passion for life, and it made me so happy to see my sister’s spirit living on in her sweet little daughter.

  I dropped her off outside the school gates and leaned through the window to give her a kiss goodbye.

  “I’ll be here to pick you up after school, all right?” I told her.

  “Not Yara?”

  “Not Yara,” I replied. “You cool with that?”

  “As long as we get ice cream,” she said hopefully.

  I laughed. She always seemed to know just how to press my buttons to get me to do whatever it was she wanted, even though I knew I should have been harsher on her. I didn’t have it in me. Not after what had happened.

  “We’ll see,” I replied, though I already knew that she had me just where she wanted me. She gave me a quick hug and darted off inside the school to escape the impending Portland rain.

  I drove up to the office in record time. I was going so fast, I was actually a little surprised that nobody tried to pull me over. I guessed they could see how serious I was about this. I wanted to get there, settle in, and actually get some work done. I had been so distracted last week, struggling to keep my shit together. The good days and the bad days sometimes piled up very suddenly, and I just had to accept that t
he hard days were going to control me when they came along.

  “Morning,” Yara called to me as soon as I entered my office. We were on the third floor of a beautiful office building—well, the main part of the company was, anyway. This was where all the heads of department hung out, where we worked to make sure the pieces below us were running smoothly. There were dozens of our offices all over the country, but this was where it had all started.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. It had started with my grandfather, the same man who had started this business all those years ago. He had gotten in on the tech bubble before it had even really swollen to the all-consuming state it was in now, and he had set our family up for life with some amazing investments and by working with some talented up-and-comers. I had taken over as CEO as soon as I was old enough, as soon as my father had stepped down from the role. And the first thing I had done as head of Neo was hire Yara as my publicist.

  “Morning,” I said, greeting her right back. Hiring her had been one of the best decisions I’d ever made as part of my time here. I knew from the moment that I met her that I wanted her working alongside me as much as I possibly could. She was passionate, dedicated, and intelligent—everything that I wanted from the people I worked with. Her mind was sharp, and her tongue was sharper, and she knew just how to get what we needed from the people around us.

  “You get Winnie off to school okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Just about. It was kind of a rush.”

  Yara had been so helpful with me since I had taken in my niece. We’d become fast friends in the time that we had worked together, and she would never know how grateful I was that she had stepped up to help me parent when I had least expected to become one.

  “You picking her up after school today?” she asked, tucking a strand of her cropped brown hair behind her ear. She was wearing the same pair of sensible silver studs in her ears that she always wore, and they caught the light.

  “Yeah, no meetings on a Monday, remember?” I said. I had put the rule in place when I realized that I was leaving other people to take care of Winnie for me most afternoons. I wanted there to be at least one day a week that I actually got to spend time with her properly, even if I knew she was going to twist my arm to get something everyone else wasn’t enough of a soft touch to hand over to her.

  “Of course, of course, right.” She checked her schedule. “For you maybe, but we aren’t all so lucky.”

  “Well, all you have to do is get born into a family that owns the company, and then you can make your own rules,” I said, teasing her lightly. She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Hey, you’re getting dangerously close to letting me hate on you right now,” she warned me. “I’ll catch you for coffee at eleven or so, okay?”

  “Please make sure I’m out of here by two-thirty at the latest,” I said.

  She nodded, offering me a little salute. “Anything you say, boss.”

  And with that, she was off, leaving me to answer all the emails that had accumulated over the weekend. I had started taking that time away from work so I wasn’t hanging on my phone constantly and was actually doing something constructive with Winnie, but it meant that I had at least fifty to get back to by the time I arrived back at my desk.

  It was good to keep my mind busy, though, because it was far too easy to get caught up in what was going on in there when I was at rest. It was even harder when I was around Winnie all the time. She was only nine years old, and yet, I felt like she had been through so very much that it sometimes hurt to think about all the pain that she had suffered.

  I wondered how she coped sometimes. I struggled enough without my sister, Theresa, Winnie’s mother. About a year ago, she’d died in a car accident—quick, fatal, no room for argument. Everything in my life had flipped into flux in that instant. Nothing could stay the same, not when the person who had done so much to keep it that way was just gone. She had always been the person I’d looked to for support and advice when I felt like I couldn’t keep my shit together, and now I had to step up and take care of her daughter. It was what she had wanted. I had known that for a long time, sure, but the truth was I hadn’t actually imagined that I would ever have to come through and actually do it. I didn’t think I could be a father, not really. But it turned out that when you had no choice, it was amazing what you could achieve. The things that you could do. The places that you could take yourself.

  I met Yara for our usual coffee, and we talked about what had happened over the weekend—Yara still went out and partied every now and then, and I listened to her stories of hitting the town with some nostalgia. I had used to be able to do that whenever I wanted. Parenting was fulfilling in a whole different way, of course, but that didn’t mean I didn’t find myself missing it once in a while.

  When two-thirty came around, I shut off my computer and drove across town to pick Winnie up from school. She was just approaching the gate when I got there, and I pushed open the door and let her roll across the seat toward me.

  “Seatbelt,” I reminded her, and she clipped herself in. She clasped her little bag to her chest and looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “Did you think about the ice cream?” she asked.

  I laughed at her. She could be so stubborn when she wanted to be. And I just didn’t have it in me to say no.

  “All right, just one scoop,” I replied, though I knew that she would basically be having two—one of hers and then a bunch of mine because I never had much appetite at this time in the afternoon. Besides, now that I had less time to hit the gym, I had to be more careful about what I ate so that I didn’t get that notorious dad body.

  “Yay!” She clapped her hands together, and I reached over to give her a hug. I just couldn’t say no to her. I didn’t want to, not after everything that she had been through already. She deserved the best life that she could have, and I was always going to go out of my way to provide it to her.

  We pulled away from the school, and rain started to patter on the window. I didn’t mind. I could handle a little gloominess because all the sunshine I needed was right there in the seat beside me.

  Chapter 2

  Raina

  “Hey, Reed, over here!” I called to my brother, and it felt like half the coffee shop turned around to give me a hard look. I didn’t much care. I was just glad to see my twin brother, even if I knew it was only going to be for a half-hour before we both took off to work.

  “Hey!” he called back, carefully navigating around the seats with his cup of coffee in hand. He slipped into the seat opposite me and let out a long sigh.

  “How can this day be hard already?” he asked me, though I knew it was a rhetorical question.

  “What happened?” I asked, checking my watch. It was only eight in the morning, but I knew my brother could have already gotten himself wrapped up in something serious. A lot of the clients he was representing were overseas, which meant that serious shit could go down overnight and he wouldn’t know anything about it until he woke up and checked his messages in the morning.

  “It seems like Marco wants his hearing moved up a few weeks,” he explained. “Something about a family wedding? I’m not sure. It means that everything has to go into hyperdrive for a while.”

  “Yeah, and you’re just so averse to working more,” I teased.

  He grinned at me. “Am I that transparent?”

  “You’re a workaholic,” I told him. “I don’t know where you get it from.”

  “Yeah, like you don’t spend all day, every day doing more than you have to,” he shot back.

  I grinned and held up my hands. “Hey, no rest for the wicked, right?”

  “Raina, you’re a vet,” he said. “I don’t think you could get further from wicked if you tried.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. He had a point. I supposed the two of us probably had the most stereotypical do-gooder jobs anyone could have come up with. I was a vet, and he was a lawyer who worked his ass off to bring cases that were be
ing ignored in front of judges who could actually hear them. Even though he was younger than me—by ten minutes—we had the same drive to try and make the world a better place.

  “You should take some more time off work,” I told him, playing the fretting big sister. We hardly saw each other, given how demanding both our jobs were all the time, and I needed to cram in all my motherly worrying over him into the half-hour we grabbed coffee every morning.

  “And so should you, but neither of us are actually going to do that, are we?” he said.

  I shrugged. “Nice idea though, right?”

  “Nice idea,” he said.

  “You know I’m so proud of you,” I told him, as though I didn’t tell him this every time I had more than a single glass of wine in me.

  “I know.” He grinned, and he reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Right back at you.”