A Bad Boy for Christmas Read Online Free

Your new family’s loaded.”
    “I don’t want their money.”
    They were driving down a pretty ribbon road flanked on both sides by coastal shrubbery. Give or take five more minutes and the shrubbery would give way to a winding river that ran beside the road all the way into the small seaside town of Brunswick Bay.
    “So what do you want from them?” she asked finally. “Besides answers, which you kind of already have. The dad didn’t know about you. Your mother never told him.”
    “ If you can believe a word they say.”
    “They may not have been overly welcoming, but I think they were honest in their reactions. Especially the older one. I think you can take what that one says to the bank. He is what he is, he feels what he feels, and he sees absolutely no need to change any of it.”
    “Says the woman who wants to sully him.”
    “ Sully? That would imply a level of purity I really don’t think he has.”
    “Enough. Before I have to start defending him.”
    “You wouldn’t.”
    “I might. I’m definitely leaning towards having some sympathy for him. Can’t be easy trying to figure how we fit into his picture-perfect world. So cut him a break and leave him alone. He has enough to chew on.”
    He did. They all did. Even Mia had some adjusting to do when it came to Nash’s new brothers and the overwhelmingly tight-knit family vibes they gave off.
    “Sorry,” she said and meant it. “I’ll be on my best behavior from here on in. I won’t let the heat or my jealousy that they actually are related to you get to me. Cool as a cucumber here. Promise.”
    Mia had wriggled her way into this road trip not because she’d thought it a good idea but because she’d thought it a bad one. Walking into a long-lost family required backup, and she was it. This situation with Nash and his father … the potential for rejection was huge and Mia didn’t want Nash to be alone when it happened. Not when he’d buried his mother three weeks ago in a graveside ceremony attended by no one apart from them.
    “Do you want to be part of that family?” she asked. “Don’t you already have a testosterone pack back at the garage?”
    Nash shrugged, his gaze never leaving the road ahead. “I just want to talk to the man who fathered me. Ask him what kind of relationship he had with my mother, why he left her. She was the way she was for a reason.”
    “Yeah. Drugs.”
    He shot her a swift, bleak glare. “Something had to have set her on that path. Maybe it was him. Maybe it wasn’t. I just want to know.”
    “Are you really going to try and blame him for the way your mother was? Because, honestly …” Mia didn’t know how to say what she wanted to say next without hurting him. Sometimes people were beyond repair to begin with and nothing anybody did was ever going to fix them. “Your mother made her choices. Mostly they were bad ones. You couldn’t stop her. No one could.”
    Nash said nothing.
    Nash had loved his crack-ravaged mother, no matter what.
    “Sometimes I think your heart is too big,” she said quietly.
    So much room for hurt in it.
    The rest of the trip passed in silence, all the way into the little township shoehorned around a pretty blue bay. Brunswick Bay boasted one pub, one workmen’s club, and a couple of blocks of tourist shops, restaurants and shabby holiday houses built in the seventies. There was a surf club and a community hall. A tiny police station and a row of tall seaside pines packed with lorikeets.
    “Wonder what it’d be like in the dead of winter?” she said.
    Dead, obviously. She was just trying to change the subject. “Whoa. Tattoo den at ten o’clock! Can we take a look?”
    Nash nodded and turned into the angle parking outside the little shop. It wasn’t much. A blue wooden door was flanked by waist-high shopfront windows. Western-style lettering proclaimed that this was Beryl’s Tattoo and Piercing Emporium. According to the window display and the inventory outside,