The Bad Boy's Baby (Hope Springs) Read Online Free

couldn’t leave her to recover alone.
    Then she’d been so busy balancing a new baby and her job, all while trying to get Grandma to slow down enough to let her leg actually heal. And when the only job offers Emma received were unpaid internships, it was hard to justify leaving. No doubt the internships built skills and would look great on a résumé, but she needed money more than experience at that point, so she’d asked her boss at Hope Springs Construction about taking on more responsibility and ways to move up. Each year she’d gained more responsibilities and another title until this opportunity with Mountain Ridge came up.
    This was her chance to get her career back on track, but with Cam Brantley now in the picture, everything she’d worked for was suddenly at risk. He’d be so upset once he found out about Zoey, and she couldn’t blame him. While she’d like to use her couple of failed attempts to contact him as an excuse, she knew she should’ve tried harder, regardless of already knowing how he felt about having a kid.
    Will he fire me from the Mountain Ridge job? Just make finishing it hell? What if I can’t even use those beautiful cabins in my portfolio? All that work, only to be thrown away…
    During the drive home she played out the likely scenarios, trying to come up with a game plan for each one. But the short trip was hardly long enough, and she had a feeling she’d never feel prepared for what the next few days might bring.
    On her way into the house from the garage, she nearly tripped on the giant rocking horse that Zoey must’ve moved in an attempt to reach the package of cookies on the counter.
    After making a quick dinner and doing the dishes, Emma settled onto the couch with Zoey for what had to be their thousandth viewing of Frozen .
    Thirty minutes from the end, Zoey’s eyelids grew heavy, and she quickly lost the battle to stay awake. Emma ran her fingers through her daughter’s fine blond curls and whispered, “I don’t know what to do.”
    Her gaze moved to the stack of bills on top of the TV—the envelopes seemed to breed like bunnies. She could hardly keep up with her own bills, and while Grandma Bev kept telling her not to worry about her, Emma did. Each year another medication got added to the weekly pillbox, and she knew they weren’t cheap. Once she landed a job that made more money, Grandma would have to stop refusing her help and suck it up and deal with the fact that she was going to pay some of her expenses, like it or not.
    The image of her tackling her surprisingly spry seventy-year-old grandmother and trying to force her to take money made her giggle, but honestly it was probably what it’d take for the stubborn woman to let her help. After all, Beverly Harris was invincible—according to her—and they were still involved in their ten-year battle over reducing fried foods to try to keep her cholesterol and blood pressure under control.
    Zoey stirred when Emma turned off the movie, and she adjusted her grip, stood, and carried her into her room and laid her in bed.
    Emma slipped off the tutu and decided the jammies could handle one more night, even if it was the third day and night she’d worn the outfit.
    By the time she made it back to the couch, exhaustion tugged at her, but if she crawled into bed, tomorrow would start that much sooner, and she wanted to relax with a non-Disney show, perhaps some mindless television where the hero was ripped and occasionally shirtless, as it was the only action she got these days.
    Unless you count Cam Brantley saving me from falling backward down the porch steps, his warm hand on my wrist, his body definitely ripped under that T-shirt.
    She scolded herself for even thinking it when everything about Cam only brought a hundred complications, but her mind wouldn’t stop spinning, his image from today crashing into past ones, namely that one fateful night.
    When she closed her eyes, she found herself back at Seth’s Steak and