Be My Bride and Have My Baby

  Be My Bride And Have My Baby

  This will be the greatest adventure of them all!

  A clean pregnancy romance by Kimberley Taylor of BWWM Club.

  As a librarian, Melissa lives more in her head than in the real world.

  She wouldn’t change anything, except for the fact she’s perpetually single and her biological clock is ticking!

  Now she finds herself on a dating app, agreeing to go on a date with a handsome stranger!

  Billionaire Rodger is gorgeous, successful, ad a total adrenaline junkie.

  And after a particularly dangerous date leaves Melissa injured, she’s told she must have a baby now—or never!

  But is Melissa ready to go on the biggest adventure of them all: parenthood?

  Especially now that Rodgers is agreeing to be the father?

  Find out in this emotional, clean romance by Kimberley Taylor of BWWM Club.

  Tip: Search BWWM Club on Amazon to see more of our great books.

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  Copyright © 2019 to Kimberley Taylor and AfroRomanceBooks.com. No part of this book can be copied or distributed without written permission from the above copyright holders.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

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  Chapter 1

  In a way, she kind of missed the Dewey Decimal system.

  Don’t get me wrong, Melissa thought to herself, I type a keyword into the search bar of the clunky old library computer at which she was sitting, and waited almost impatiently for the 0.23 seconds it took to return 1,342 results.

  It was much faster but the old method had a sort of dusty, soul-y feeling about it which a computer would never be able to replace. With the old system, locating a book felt a bit like an Indiana Jones or National Treasure-esque scavenger hunt.

  Find the numbers.

  Decipher the code.

  Look at the map.

  Lightly tap your fingertips over the weathered spines of hundreds of books before you locate the precise tome which you wished to uncover…

  But this was faster, thought Melissa, and while certainly less romantic, there was an expediency to it. She glanced over the list of titles her search had returned, jotted down the location of the book on a small pad of paper she kept on her person, and wheeled her swiveling chair from behind the desk of the library at which she worked. She stood, cast a quick eagle eye over the patrons at the library—there were only two people in there besides herself, and they were both quietly perusing shelves on opposite ends of the large room; unlikely to get into any sort of trouble while she was out of the room for half a minute—and then turned and quickly stepped out of the room.

  Two books, she thought, looking down at the list in her hand. Just the two. The person whose hold list she was fulfilling right now had decided to request an old copy of Murder in the Cathedral, by T.S.Eliot as well as the most recent Dan Brown book. The Dan Brown book she hadn’t had to look up. It spent most of its time being requested and therefore it felt like half of the time Melissa spent tracking down books to put on the hold shelf were in pursuit of one of his books. She knew where it was by memory; could probably have walked there in her sleep.

  The Eliot book was a little bit more of a mystery. She could certainly see the connections between the two—both thrillers in their own right—but she couldn’t remember the last time that someone had requested Murder in the Cathedral. Perhaps it was for a school project, Melissa thought. She brightened. That made sense. Someone was reading the Eliot book for school and the Brown book to keep up with popular literary culture. That would do it.

  Melissa ducked down a long hallway and into the front room where she kept the more popular adult fiction books and slipped the Dan Brown book—or, well, one of the many copies thereof—from the shelf. She then reversed her steps to return to the literary section at the back of the library to hunt down the T.S.Eliot book. Having secured both books, she then walked back to the front desk to print out the request receipt, bind the books together with a rubber band, and set them carefully on the shelf next to the front desk so that when the requester came in, the books would be waiting right there for him or her.

  Melissa had long since learned that trying to guess whether a man or a woman was reading the books generally didn’t end in any sort of accuracy. But there were many other things which one could tell about people from the books they requested. Melissa knew which of the library's patrons were interested in gardening and which pursued aspirations of being involved in high fashion. She knew which were avid Agatha Christie fans and which only wanted to be—the latter simply requested Murder on the Orient Express time after time, clearly unable to finish the book but longing to be able to. Melissa rather thought that people in the latter category should just go ahead and purchase the book so that it could remain on their personal bookshelves at home and stand both a trophy and a silent admonition, where the purchaser could pretend that it had indeed been read when they had really just gone and seen the movie.

  She smiled and put the books on the shelf, then sighed and looked out the window.

  The rays of the sun streamed through the window, bringing out golden tints in her own warm brown skin and flecks of gold in her dark black eyes. The white cashmere sweater she wore may have seemed strange to some, given that it was July, but Melissa had dressed for work, not play. The air conditioning in the library was always set to somewhere in the sixties. The bills to keep this up were high, but Melissa suspected that half of the reason people came to the library in the summer was for the chance to cool off for free after a stint under the blazing sun, and she didn't want to disappoint anyone who went in with that expectation.

  She gathered her sweater around herself and leaned her head on the wooden window frame. As there were no patrons who needed help at that time, she decided to let herself take a minute and flesh out the next chapter of the book she was currently writing.

  Melissa had wanted to be a librarian since she was very small, and she’d wanted that only because she’d thought that by mere exposure to the books, by some sort of literary osmosis, she’d be able to absorb the talent of the authors who came before her and generate enough good words of her own that she might one day join them.

  As of yet this plan hadn't worked out in her favor. She'd successfully written a few nonfiction pieces for the odd magazine here and there, but the grand novels which she had outlined and written and already done the book tours for within the confines of her own head had largely stayed within her head. She had collections of notebooks littering the corners of her tiny one-bedroom apartment with the first glimmerings of novels scribbled within them, but she didn't have the patience, persistence, or perseverance to see any of them through to fruition.

  But still she dreamt, and as she was staring out of the window with her feet firmly planted on the floor there was a large part of her which wa
s far away, flitting through the Amazonian rainforests, jumping with tigers and toucans and building her very own survivalist hut in the middle of the twisted terrain…

  “Hello?”

  Melissa snapped back to attention. One of the browsing library patrons—the man—had ceased his roving around the aisles and brought two books before her. He had stacked them on her desk and was drumming his fingers on them a bit impatiently.

  Melissa gave him a curious look-over. He was about her age, perhaps a little older. There was no wedding ring, but the books he’d selected—one by Sarah Pinborough, the other by Madeleine Miller—were books demographically associated with women, not men. Either this man was sufficiently open-minded to read books not targeted toward him or he was buying for a female relative. Melissa eyed him again. No wedding ring, though.

  “How can I help you?” said Melissa quietly, picking up the books and bringing them to the scanner.

  “Just those two, please,” said the man dismissively. Melissa’s shoulders sagged. She was all too used to being viewed as part of the scenery. It was an experience to which all who work in customer service are innately accustomed, but even her familiarity with the concept didn't make feeling it again any easier. She swallowed and then looked at the first page of the Pinborough novel.

  “Is this your first time reading this one?” she asked. “If so, I envy you—the ending on it is just fantastic.”

  “Oh, it’s not for me,” said the man. “My wife likes these sort of things, I’m just doing a stop-by for her…”

  Wife. Either he was lying, or…

  “I’m in construction, I take off my rings during the day,” said the man, his voice now a little hard. He must have seen her leaning over to examine his left hand. Melissa cleared her throat and hurriedly checked the books out so that he could be on his way. She watched him leave.

  She wanted someone to go out of their way to pick up books for her…

  The sight of the man leaving caused Melissa to hold her head high and slip her phone out of her pocket.

  The life of a librarian was a mainly solitary one. Melissa had never had the sort of skill with small-talk that would ever stand the chance of turning a casual customer into anything more. Her conversations unilaterally consisted of people asking her questions about books. Because of this, she became very good at answering trivia about literature and locating books very quickly in the small library. She was much less good at knowing how to deal with people.

  To this end, she had finally succumbed to what her friends had been telling her to do for years: she'd signed up for a dating service. A quick internet search had showed her that she had many free options. And a slightly longer perusal of the reviews—librarians love reading reviews, and Melissa was no different from the rest of her colleagues in this respect—had led her to choose a relatively new one on the scene: LoveMatches, now in its second edition, the 2.0. This in itself instilled a certain amount of confidence within Melissa. The fact that it survived to a second update meant that it had to have been good enough that a second update was deemed necessary; and it would have given the programmers and writers a chance to catch the typos and bugs which Melissa found so repugnant as a sort-of writer herself.

  She squinted at her phone, used the gap of the sweater at her wrist to polish the screen slightly as it had smudged, and logged herself in to the app.

  There were no new notifications, but this was possibly unsurprising. Since she'd signed up for the service some twelve hours ago, she had checked her phone approximately twelve times. The LoveMatches app had told her, after she’d finished filling in her survey and setting up her profile, that it would likely take twenty-four hours for the app and the algorithm it boasted to find her an ideal mate. But Melissa couldn't help but think that perhaps LoveMatches, just like any other successful business, had employed the business technique of under-promising and over-fulfilling. The app could get back to her at any moment, she thought.

  But there were no notifications and so, mainly to kill a few moments before she got back to her job, she paged over to look at the profile she'd set up. Her profile picture was a picture of herself she'd taken while on a hike—lots of greenery. It wasn’t the most flattering picture of herself, Melissa thought critically, but on the whole she'd thought it would be a better option than some more staged picture. It showed, if nothing else, that she was relatively fit and enjoyed the occasional weekend hike—a fact which she had been sure to note in the text portion of her bio.

  When she'd been crafting that particular portion of text, she'd found herself dredging up hobbies from what seemed like lives in the far-flung past. At one point she'd been an avid stamp collector; was that a confession worthy of a dating bio? Perusal of bios on other dating sites seemed to indicate that this was a place where she could say anything, from a quote patently and obviously originated by someone else to the fact that she enjoyed Hamilton or The Office or whatever the hip sitcom was these days. Melissa didn't watch very much television. She'd never found herself regretting that decision until faced with an opportunity to make pop culture references.

  She put her phone away. It was silliness to think that the app would change her life as it so boastfully promised. That was a marketing term—a branding strategy—that was all. In reality, she’d receive a nudge from the app in a day or two with the details of some rotund man she’d never actually be interested in; or, worse, he’d be someone completely charming at first, but someone who would look at her profile picture, observe the rather obvious fact of her blackness, and insist that he was not racist—but dating a black girl just wasn’t for him.

  Melissa thought all of this not based upon actual experience but on outdated sitcoms and novels she’d taken in while in her youth. Of course, she wasn’t particularly old at the moment—but then again, she wasn’t particularly young. She looked at herself in a small mirror she had on her desk. She could stand to dress a bit better, she thought, and the corners of her mouth turned down. But then she smiled. It was five o’clock. The library was now closed.

  She stood and looked around. There was no one else in the place—the second patron of the day having long since left. She cleaned up her desk and then made the rounds, locking up windows, setting the air conditioner up to a more reasonable temperature for overnight, putting away a book which a patron had left out. All this done, she picked up her purse, took out her keys and locked the place up before beginning her short walk home. The fact that she lived so close to the library was a huge blessing, of course it was; but it also tended to be a curse in that the radius of her daily life was very small. She woke up, she walked to the library, she walked back, she went to bed, before waking up and completing the short rotation of events all over again.

  Melissa knew that she’d have to change at some point, or her life would seem very flat and short. But change was difficult and an easy supper of cheese and bread and olives beckoned, to be enjoyed with the latest novel from Pinborough and an editing session on her own novel.

  She was therefore puttering around her tiny apartment with her slippers on and her robe gapping open a bit, exposing her cami and sleep shorts beneath, when her phone pinged. Her eyes automatically drifted towards the clock. It was 9pm, who would be texting her at this hour?

  Who would be texting her at all, said a more sardonic part of her brain. Melissa hushed this pessimistic part of her and turned to grab her phone off the kitchen counter where it lay. She opened it and found that there was a notification from the LoveMatches app. Melissa frowned and glanced up at the wall clock again. Well, she thought. It had been approximately twenty-four hours.

  Congratulations!, said the pop-up notification. The team here at LoveMatches 2.0 is beyond thrilled to introduce you to your new romantic partner, said the notification. It continued: Simply log in to the app to find out the details about your ideal man—and set up a meet and greet that will change your life forever.

  Melissa stared at it for a moment. Her heart began t
o audibly thump. She wondered why she was surprised—after all, she'd signed up for the service, she shouldn’t have been surprised to find that it was delivering the result for which she'd paid a small fee. She supposed that somewhere deep down she'd been sure that the algorithm—touted by the company to be able to find a match for anyone in the world—would take one look at her profile picture, one look at the keywords she'd entered into her profile, and begin to laugh in pity. She had, she supposed, thought that she would receive some kind of notification telling her, with greatest sympathy, that (for the first time ever, naturally) the algorithm had failed to compute. She’d hold in her hand a letter which condemned her to solitude forever—mathematically. And then she’d—she didn’t know—go and adopt some cats.

  But that hadn’t happened. Melissa swiped open her phone and navigated to the LoveMatches app, somewhat on autopilot, expecting any moment for the notification to be reneged or for her to simply not be able to find anything within the app to follow up on the notification received. It’ll have been a glitch in the system, she thought, and then—with her breath held—she opened up her private messages within the app.

  Congratulations, said a message from the LoveMatches team. We’ve found him. Are you ready for this?

  A small icon in the shape of an envelope glowed on her screen. She shut her eyes, and then tapped it with her thumb. Instantly—with a small trilling sound—the envelope opened and a yellow heart popped out from inside of it. Inside the yellow heart was the picture of a man.

  He had rather long hair—long enough to necessitate a man bun—and eyes which pierced out at her, and instantly made it hard to look away.

  Her eyes flicked down to the name, cut in over the paragraph in a large, bold white font. Rodger Wyatt.

  Wyatt.

  Why did that name sound familiar?

  She mulled it over for a few minutes before giving up—late night Friday night was not the time to cudgel her brain into giving up details which were probably long forgotten anyway—and clicked over into his profile, not yet letting herself think about the fact that this Rodger had apparently been selected for her as the perfect match. That seemed laughable to her and she didn’t even know anything about him.