Need You Now
Also by Molly O'Keefe
Into The Wild
Redeemed
Tempted
Seduced
The Debt
Lost Without You
Where I Belong
RUIN YOU
Need You Now
Standalone
Christmas Eve: A Love Story
And Then There Was You
The Story of Us
Need You Now
Molly O’Keefe
Contents
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
Epilogue
23. Lost Without You Excerpt
Introduction
A sexy single dad fights for the woman he wants in the most emotional stand-alone romance you’ll read this year.
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Dear Reader;
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Thank you so much for picking up Need You Now. I can’t wait for you all to read Rosa’s Happily Ever After. I don’t think I’ve written a heroine who deserves one more than Rosa.
* * *
I want to send a quick thank you to:
* * *
Bold Book Designs
Mayhem Cover Designs
Jude - my amazing editor
Nina - my publicist who has been INVALUABLE in helping me stay organized and reach new readers
And as always to YOU! Thank you readers for picking up this book. I really hope you enjoy it.
1
NOW
* * *
San Francisco
Rosa
The little girl was beautiful.
It wasn’t just her striking looks—dark hair that flashed red against her coppery skin, a gap-toothed smile like the sun coming out in the morning, the strong, healthy body she used to run and swing and slide for hours at this park.
It was more than all that. She just radiated joy. She leaped and bounced and beamed with it. Like she was her own little light source.
I read somewhere that children who knew they were loved unconditionally were way more confident. Like, no matter what happened, they knew there would be someone to help them if they needed it. And they could be brave because of it. Bold.
And that little girl playing at the park was confident, brave, and bold. In a way I could never even understand.
The park was one of the nice ones. No cement under the climber. Or those pebbles. Just that bouncy stuff made out of old tires. It was a rich person park, in a rich person neighborhood.
There were lots of trees, and even a little garden with daffodils and tulips the little girl always tried to pick. There were swings and twisty slides. One of the fire poles that the little girl was always warned away from.
Swear, I lost a year off my life every time she wandered over toward it.
Today the little girl and her father had brought plastic shovels and buckets to the park and she was really loving the sandbox. I was too far away to see what she was doing, but she was very serious about it. And when another kid came over, she even shared her bucket.
What a sweetheart.
And she was really smart. I didn’t know a lot of four-year-olds, but her father was teaching her Spanish and Italian. Or maybe his parents were. In any case, sometimes she asked him in Spanish if he would push her on the swings. And in Italian she would ask him if she could have a snack.
She was probably a genius. Which, of course, she got from her father.
She looked like him, too. His square face and strong stubborn chin. Big eyes. I didn’t know if they were green like her father’s. I had never gotten close enough to see.
The auburn hair, though, that didn’t come from him.
But it was straight as a pin and shiny like her father’s. And almost always coming out of her braids and ponytails. Half the time she looked a mess. But like a busy, happy mess. The kind of mess four-year-old girls should look like.
Today she looked a mess and was wearing a costume—Elsa from Frozen.
It was her favorite. Or at least her favorite for now. Two months ago she was wearing a Christmas party dress every Sunday and making a mess of it in the sandbox and grass.
Her father didn’t seem to mind.
Maybe he was too busy, or maybe he was picking his battles, but I liked to think that he was letting her express herself. Another confidence builder that I’d read about. I liked to think that he was that kind of dad.
I needed him to be that kind of dad.
Right now he was the kind of dad who studied at the park while the little girl buried her new friend up to her neck in the sandbox. I could see from where I stood behind the baseball diamond dugout, fifty feet away, how hard he was working.
That was his thing, always working.
Not that he had to. His father was a rich man and the construction company he’d built from nothing was Marco’s for the taking.
But Marco had always wanted more. He expected more. He worked for more.
And once upon a time he’d made me think I could have more, too. That I deserved it.
In the end he’d been wrong about me. And I got what I deserved.
But him, he was still reaching. Head down and focused.
Hey Marco, I thought from my safe place at a distance, maybe glance up once in a while, make sure your daughter isn’t suffocating a little girl under a pile of sand.
Like he heard me, he looked up.
“Hey!” he cried and went running over from the bench where he’d been sitting. The textbooks he was writing notes in slipped off into the grass. Physics, I imagined. Engineering. That had been his plan. His North Star. Kicking his father’s construction company up a level.
“Ariella…” He helped the little girl up and out of the sand. “We don’t bury our friends.”
“She said I could,” Ari said
The sandy little girl nodded emphatically.
“Okay,” he said, “but how about instead of burying each other in sand, I push you on the swings.”
The girls cheered and jumped up, sending sand everywhere, putting Marco on his butt. Where he sat, looking at his daughter like she was made of the stars and the moon. And then he laughed.
My breath caught in my throat.
He was a man now. Twenty-three years old and the father of a four-year-old. He had so much on his shoulders, and they were wide–they always had been–and when most men would have crumbled, he stood strong.
He’d been a man like that even when he was a boy.
But when he laughed he was that tall kid I fell for in English class. The guy who got through all my armor, past every defense. He made me risk everything, because of his eyes. His kindness. His quiet intensity that made me feel like I was the center of his world. And that laugh, that there is so much to be happy about, so much to be hopeful about, to believe in laugh.
It was the same as it had always been.
I retreated behind the dugout to catch my breath. To calm down the pounding of my heart.
“Daddy!” Ariella yelled, and I closed my eyes, resting my head against the cement behind me. She was a real talker, that girl. I could see her and her father chatting it up all the time at this park, but it was never
loud enough for me to hear. And the sound of her low, raspy little-girl voice filled me with electricity. Something so bright and hot it hurt.
This is for the best, I reminded myself. You know that.
The truth was I should stop coming.
But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
Taking a deep breath I ducked back out from behind the dugout to get one last glance at Ariella and her father.
She and her sandy friend were perched in swings, waiting for his attention.
But his attention was on me.
From fifty feet away his green eyes pierced me. Ruined me.
Marco.
I gave myself one second. Just one. To imagine walking over there. Holding that man - and that girl - in my arms. But then I ran my thumb over the scar on the back of my hand and told myself I was doing the right thing.
Not being in her life–their lives–was the right thing.
I walked away as fast as I could and I did not allow myself to look back at my husband and my little girl.
Not even once.
2
THEN
* * *
Four years ago
St Jude’s Home for Court-Placed Juveniles
Rosa
I couldn’t sleep because my baby was currently using my bladder as a squishy toy and I had to pee so bad I could barely think straight.
The electronic readout on the clock in the bedroom I shared with Beth read 6:29.
One more minute and I could go to the bathroom.
Don’t think about water. Or waterfalls. Don’t…
The clock clicked over to 6:30 just as I heard the sound of the key in the lock of our room. You could say a lot of crappy things about St. Joke’s, as we liked to call it, but no one was ever late for anything. The sound of the door being unlocked woke Beth out of her fitful and nightmare-ridden sleep in the bed across from me. She sat up with a wild start, her fight-or-flight mode fully engaged.
“It’s okay,” I said to her. “It’s just morning.”
“Where are we?” she asked, still not totally awake.
“St. Jude’s,” I said. It would be nice to tell her something else, some other place. “We’re in our room in St. Jude’s.” The urge to call it St. Joke’s out loud was powerful. But it made The Wife mad when we did that. And when The Wife got mad, it was never good news for us.
Reality settled over Beth the way it had every morning since she’d been here. I glanced away before it looked like she was going to cry.
I already had to pee, how much more did I have to torture myself?
The Wife was there in the doorway, outlined by the hallway light. The key ring, with all the keys she and The Pastor used to lock us in at night and unlock us in the morning, dangled from her fingers.
“Your turn in the bathroom—” The words were barely out of The Wife’s mouth before I was up and out of my bed, practically sprinting past the witch on my way to the toilet across the hall. Simon and Tommy’s door was still closed but Carissa’s was already open. She’d be downstairs at the table already.
Finally, sitting on the toilet, slouched against the stall, I peed for what seemed like hours.
“Baby,” I said to my swollen stomach. “Please stop bouncing on my bladder. You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
There was honest to god no telling what The Wife would do if I accidentally peed in the bed. But it wouldn’t be good.
The baby kicked once as if she heard me and I imagined she was apologizing.
“I’m sorry, too,” I whispered to her. She deserved better than this place and it was just bad luck that she was stuck with me.
My seventeenth birthday was in a month and my baby was going to be born in three.
My sentence here at St. Joke’s was one full year, so just shy of my eighteenth birthday.
Which wasn’t going to work for me. I was making alternative plans.
When I came out of the stall, Beth was there, brushing her teeth, her freckled face creased from the sheets. She smiled at me and I smiled back.
I was trying, really hard, not to care about any of the kids I was in here with. Because I had one goal…well, two, and I couldn’t let anything get in the way of them.
Healthy baby was goal number one. So I ate the food they made and I took my vitamins and I didn’t do anything that was going to get me taken to The Office. And I put my pillow over my head and tried to go to sleep when one of the other kids disappeared with The Pastor behind that door.
Goal number two: making sure Marco had custody by the time this baby was born. That was going to take some work, but my plan was coming together. All I needed was my moment.
But Beth was…well, she was kinda nice.
“Did I wake you up last night?” she whispered.
“No,” I said, only because I’d been awake when she had her nightmare.
Something about her mother really haunted her at night.
“Thanks for lying,” she said, and I could hear the smile on her face and I liked that about Beth. This place was terrible but she managed to keep a smile on her face. “How are you feeling?” she asked as I ran a brush through my red hair and then tied it back up in a ponytail. We showered at night in this place, so things went fast in the morning.
“Not bad,” I said, stretching as much as I could before the baby kicked me. “She’s really jumping around this morning.”
“She’s moving?” Beth asked. Her hair was wild around her head, and her eyes were red rimmed. We were all alone here, like, really alone. We couldn’t call anyone. Family—if we had one—couldn’t visit. It was just us and all the things that gave us nightmares at night.
“Yeah.”
Her desire to touch my belly—to feel the baby kick—practically radiated off her. And I didn’t even think about it before I took Beth’s hand and put it at the bottom curve of my stomach.
I swallowed my weird gasp. No one touched me. Only the doctor when he examined me in his cold, detached way. So it was strange to have Beth’s hand on me, warm and a little sweaty. The baby—as if sensing someone new and eager to say hello—gave her palm a big kick.
“Oh my gosh,” Beth breathed with wide eyes. The fear and panic from her wake-up all gone, which made me happy.
We stood there like that for a second. The baby tap dancing against her palm and me wishing it was Marco’s hand against my stomach so bad it hurt.
“Wow,” Beth said. “That’s amazing.”
“It is pretty cool. Except in the middle of the night.” But even then it was amazing. Maybe more than during the day. Because it was quiet and still. Just us. And I could pretend for a little while that everything was all right.
“I’ll bet.”
She removed her hand and we both got into the business of getting ready for the day.
And usually we didn’t talk. Scared, maybe, of what The Wife would do if she heard us. But she’d touched my stomach and my baby had kicked her palm. We were in it now.
“What’s going on with you and Tommy?” I whispered, squeezing toothpaste onto my toothbrush. She blushed bright red, giving me all the answer I needed.
“I just really like him,” she said.
“I get it.” I spat in the sink. “But be careful.”
“We are.”
“Be more careful.”
“How do we be more careful?” she asked, sounding a little angry. “We don’t even look at each other when we’re here.”
That was true enough, but still it was obvious when they were in the same room that something was going on. Like an electric current in the air.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Are you here because you’re pregnant?” Beth asked.
“It’s not illegal to be pregnant and a teenager,” I said. Beth had a real sheltered vibe, but come on!
“So, why are you here?”
“Unlucky,” I said. “Like everyone else.” St. Joke’s was supposed to be a secon
d chance. An opportunity for kids who’d broken the law to rehabilitate without juvenile detention. I was told at my sentencing hearing that I was lucky and I’d believed it at the time.
But there was nothing lucky about St. Jude’s.
“My mom had me put here,” Beth said, and that was somehow so cruel, I couldn’t even get my head around it. But our parents didn’t know how bad it was either. No one did. Apparently, Carissa tried to tell someone last year and she’d been sent away to a psych ward somewhere.
She came back silent and still.
“I got caught stealing,” I said.
“What were you stealing?”
“A car.”
She looked up at me with wide eyes and I shrugged. “It’s kind of the family business.” I hated using the word family when it came to my half brother and my father, the asshole who stuck around long enough to get his name on my birth certificate.
“Where are your parents?” Beth asked.
“My mom died when I was ten, and there was no one for me to stay with so I got shipped off to my dad. But he kicked me out two months ago when he found out I was pregnant.”
“Time’s up,” The Wife said as she threw open the door, scowling at us. Like she was upset she hadn’t caught us doing something worse than splashing water on our faces.
That key ring dangled from her fingers. And the more I looked at it, the more I really believed that was my key out of here.
No pun intended.
3
THEN
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