Whatever It Takes - A Standalone Second Chance Bad Boy Romance (Bad Boys After Dark Book 8) Read online

  Whatever It Takes - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance

  (Bad Boys After Dark, Book 8)

  Gabi Moore

  Contents

  About the Author

  1. Chapter 1- Emily

  2. Chapter 2 - Felix

  3. Chapter 3 - Emily

  4. Chapter 4 - Felix

  5. Chapter 5 - Emily

  6. Chapter 6 - Felix

  7. Chapter 7 - Emily

  8. Chapter 8 - Emily

  9. Chapter 9 - Felix

  10. Chapter 10 - Emily

  11. Chapter 11 - Felix

  12. Chapter 12 - Emily

  13. Chapter 13 - Felix

  14. Chapter 14 - Emily

  15. Chapter 15 - Felix

  PARANORMAL/URBAN FANTASY:

  Manipulator of Elements - A Young Adult Urban Fantasy

  A New Dawn - An Urban Fantasy

  Faerie Rift - A Paranormal Romance

  Star-Reach - A Paranormal Romance

  STEAMY BAD BOY ROMANCE

  Break

  Surrender

  Doing It Faster

  Damaged

  Unholy

  Rough (a full-length novel)

  BAD BOYS AFTER DARK - The COMPLETE Series

  BAD BOY BONUS BOOK

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Gabi Moore. All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Created with Vellum

  About the Author

  Hey there! I’m Gabi Moore and I’m on a mission to love like I’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching and write sex scenes like my mother didn’t raise me right.

  I write about some of the naughty things I’ve done, and some of the naughty things I still wish I could do. Some days, I forget which is which.

  I like coffee and men with accents. And lately, I’ve been trying to give up dirty puns …but it’s hard.

  So hard.

  PS: You’ll find additional steamy bonus books and the complete Bad Boys After Dark series in the table of contents!

  - Gabi Moore

  Join me on Facebook:

  authorgabimoore

  Chapter 1- Emily

  February 3, 2077

  He was going to be a space jockey, and I was going to save the planet.

  Boys had been telling me all my short life that they loved my eyes, loved how intelligent I was, how pretty …but Felix was the only one who truly understood what really made me look up from my books and pay attention. He had said to me: “we’ll make history together, baby, just you wait and see,” and I had laughed at the time but admittedly, in hindsight, he wasn’t exactly wrong.

  Let me start from the beginning.

  Felix Stone was too tall, too loud, and had too much energy. But in weird ways that were hard to pinpoint, he was also completely adorable. He had the bright, wide blue eyes of a kitten, but biceps that always made you a little nervous he’d knock something over in the middle of one of his impassioned explanations of exactly how the auxiliary thrusters on the new D series airships worked, or why he thought cosmologists were full of shit.

  Felix was the boy who’d get worked up explaining some new concept he learnt in his aeronautics course, complete with the salt and pepper shakers standing in for different planets, or a napkin held in his broad hands to show what happened when space curved. He was a little crazy. He was the kid who had scraped though the math and physics modules by averaging a semester of hangovers with an impromptu term paper that impressed even the most cynical professor, and had them eating out of his hand.

  Like I said, adorable.

  But let me explain something – he might have been adorable, sure, but I was no idiot. I knew I was a conquest for him, plain and simple. He liked a bit of a challenge, and …well, let’s just say that I could make Galois theory look like a cake walk.

  He had pursued me in that goofy, clumsy way of his all summer. And all summer I had pursued my studies.

  I didn’t care much about the new space program or that he was enrolled on it. As far as I was concerned, we had no business expanding the Mars colony until we fixed up the mess we already had on Earth. I didn’t care about the mass emigrations, or about the outbreaks at the new settlement sites, or about the few superstar pilots that came back, pretending they were in their own sci-fi movies and gloating about expanding the frontiers of science. To be honest, the frontiers I was interested in were …smaller. Subtler.

  One day, Felix had cottoned onto the idea that I’d be thrilled to take a peek at the new colloidoponics lab on the west campus, and he had wrangled a special pass for us to visit the facilities, probably by smiling and flirting with the project head. Of course, I agreed – I’d be a fool to pass up the opportunity – but quietly decided ahead of time that he would not be ‘getting lucky’ that evening, and while he slowly figured that out, I’d be soaking up all the interesting things they were doing at the lab.

  “Hey, Em,” he said, “what would you say if I gave you some cheesy line about the stars and your eyes right now?”

  It was a few hours past sundown, and some faint droplets of dew were forming on the isolation tanks. The wide, cold night sky lay distant and lonely above us and all the colloidal tanks and cells were lined up, powered down for the evening.

  I lay my hand over the reinforced plastic and felt the chill run through me. Forget about the glory of shooting around the solar system in rockets …if Earth had any chance of survival, it was in here, in these quiet, humble wombs of the future. We had torn through the resources our planet had gifted us. Now, we could only rely on this new, truly renewable energy source: ideas.

  I couldn’t explain the feeling of awe and peace I felt when I thought these thoughts. I only knew that our global crisis wouldn’t be solved by more narcissistic men with more narcissistic plans. It wouldn’t be solved by big ships and clunky spacesuits inspired from violent video games. It would be solved like this… by the small seedlings growing as if by miracle in a life-giving jelly crafted by scientists who were as good as alchemists. Zero-input farming might not have seemed radical to the boys on the space program, but to see these little maize hybrid plants burst out from their seeds seemed to me like much more than a giant leap for mankind.

  I turned to look at him.

  “Sorry, what did you say?” I said, my hand still on the tube.

  “Forget it,” he laughed, and blustered off, looking at the rest of the outdoor cell system.

  It’s not that he wasn’t hot. In fact, he was annoyingly good looking. So happy and carefree you’d swear he didn’t have an early tutorial the next morning or a coveted scholarship with the space program to work for.

  “That’s the immersion tank! Ooh, I remember reading about this!” I said and raced over to look at the equipment he was now in front of.

  “Hey Em?’

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are a serious nerd,” he lauged.

  “Whether that’s true or not, do you know what you’re even looking at here?”

  “Some mangy weeds in a glass container?”

  I laughed again, and peered inside.

  “No, you big idiot.
This might be nothing less than humanity’s last hope. Without these weeds we’d be really fucked.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty, Emily,” he said, his breath fogging the glass up as he pressed his face to the surface alongside mine.

  I couldn’t help but giggle. I turned to look at him directly. Though I had had all semester practicing my sharp one-liners on him, at that moment my tongue was tied and I could think of nothing biting to say to his sweet, playful face and the way he lifted one naughty eyebrow at me.

  “Can we just be honest for a second, Felix?” I said, and tried to put on my best serious face. “You know I’m not looking for …anything right now, right? With my course load I just don’t have time for a boyfriend or anything and--”

  “Woah whoa woah,” he said and lifted his hands out in defense.

  “Miss Emily Warren, are you trying to suggest…?” He hoisted his naughty eyebrow even further up and hammed up looking positively shocked.

  “Oh my goodness, have you lured me out here to … to …seduce me?” he said in a silly voice, and covered his mouth with his hands. I giggled and slapped him.

  “Be serious Felix!”

  “Oh I’m deadly serious,” he said, shaking his head. “Here I came out to see these …these …amazing weeds in all earnest and now I found out you’re just planning to take advantage of me?” he said, eyes twinkling in the semi-darkness.

  I tried not to, but I couldn’t help but laughing.

  “You big idiot. How did you ever convince them to let you see the facilities, anyway?”

  “Easy, my boyish good looks and winsome charm,” he said and leant in close. “I don’t know why it never seems to work on you though,” he added, more quietly this time. With his face just a few inches from mine, I could make out faint swirls of his breath going cold and white in the night air. He smelt good. Not like soap or cologne or washing detergent or anything like that. He smelt like skin. Warm, soft skin that was suddenly the only thing I could think about.

  I cleared my throat.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a hard ass all the time,” I said, trying to squirm my gaze somewhere other than directly at his beautiful blue eyes. His voice was suddenly deep and serious.

  “Are you kidding? You’re not a hard ass. You’re smart. You’re the smartest person I know. That’s why I like you.”

  I suddenly became aware of his lips. Of the heat of the words as they left him. It was getting cold out here, but it was beginning to feel so easy to lean in closer to him, to where it was so warm. Damn, he smelt good.

  Too good.

  I pulled away and tried to clear my head.

  “Felix, I …please don’t take this the wrong way, you know I like you too but…”

  “Just kiss me,” he breathed.

  I could hear myself swallow.

  “And then what?” I asked. The bright green of the seedlings inside the gel tanks blinked out through the foggy glass at me. It was an easy question, and had an even easier answer: then I’d fall in love with him, and then he’d leave me, and then I’d be heartbroken, and what would be the point of any of that?

  It might be fun for some people to prance around college hooking up and treating one another like temporary entertainment, but I didn’t want to start something unless I knew it was real. That it would last. Human beings had wrecked everything with their consumerist greed, their throwaway attitudes, their desire to use and discard… I wouldn’t be like that. Unless it was sustainable, unless it was permanent, I wasn’t interested.

  “What do you mean then what? Then you kiss me …again,” he said and flashed me a mischievous grin. I sighed and made my way to the exit. This was pointless.

  “Hey Em, please, don’t go.”

  I spun around and tried to hide how irritated I must have seemed.

  “What will it take for you to trust me?” he asked.

  I was taken aback. This was Felix, the class clown, the eternal jokester, being sincere for once. And even more crazy was that I didn’t have an answer for him. What was I going to tell him? That the ice-princess-good-girl spiel was just a convenience, and that deep down, it’s not that I didn’t want what a life would him would involve, but rather I was afraid of just how much I’d want it, and how vulnerable that would make me.

  “It’s not about trust, Felix, it’s about …values. For me sex is not something cheap and meaningless. Sex is about love.” This last word I almost whispered. It was the final taboo among my peers. The only remaining, hideously old-fashioned idea that deserved universal scorn. Wasn’t I a scientist? A rational, liberated woman? Didn’t I want to take charge of my sexuality, and relish it, and be a free and sexual agent? Well, fuck, I don’t know. I just knew that without that unspeakable L-word in place, the prospect of ‘sexual liberation’ simply left me cold.

  And since it was more or less forbidden to say, “it’s all or nothing for me”, I toned it down to my usual objection: “I guess I’ll just go for nothing, then”. This at least painted me as a relatively harmless bitch or a prude and not the far worse option: a damn romantic.

  He was walking slowly towards me now, and I felt unable to unglue my feet from the ground and continue flouncing out the door with indignation.

  “But I agree with you,” he said.

  “You’re just saying that,” I spat.

  “Come on, Em. Seriously. Not to be rude, but if I was only after some cheap fling, well, you wouldn’t exactly be my first choice,” he said, the beginnings of that naughty smile appearing again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  ‘Well, either I’m a sucker for punishment, or I actually like hanging out with, have you considered that?”

  “I’ve told you I can’t …I’m not ready for--”

  “Hey, Em, I get it. Seriously. I’m not going to pretend that kissing you tonight wouldn’t make me the happiest guy in the world. I won’t say I haven’t been daydreaming about it since Monday, and praying like an idiot you’d want to, and, I don’t know, god forbid, that maybe you’d even like it …but I want you to understand, kiss me or not, I’m not going anywhere. If all we ever get to do together is look at these fucking plants and shit, well, I’ll consider myself a fortunate man.”

  It was the most impassioned I had ever seen him. Felix never spoke like this, especially not to me. The smile was gone, and in its place was a certain stubborn tightness around the jaw. I instantly wanted his face close to mine again.

  “Felix, I’m sorry…”

  “For what? You have principles. That’s what makes you awesome.” He had pulled his jacket more tightly around him and was making for the door.

  I felt awful. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed him as he walked by, and he turned softly to look at me. For a split second, I recognized something familiar. How had I not seen before that he could also be vulnerable? How had I missed all this time how hard it must have been for him to keep throwing himself at me and for me to cruelly reject him over and over again? He looked at me expectantly, but with a kind of tiredness that broke my heart. I took a step towards him, my intent clear. To my surprise, he backed away.

  “Em, don’t. Please. I don’t want your pity. It’s all or nothing for me,” he mumbled, and looked hurt.

  Before I knew it, I had plunged forward and planted my lips against his, and in instant we were frozen there together, tasting the strangeness of the new moment, both with eyes squeezed closed just in case the whole dream fell apart when we opened them. It was the most tender, sweetest bliss to kiss the tip of his warm tongue, to breath him in, to rest there so safe and close to him, that I could hardly believe the effect it had on the rest of me. I was on fire. Like electricity snapping through long-dead circuits, my limbs came buzzing alive, every little atom of my body almost painfully awake, painfully aware of him.

  “Emily,” he mouthed but I kissed the words hard off his lips and leant in further, thrilled at how good it felt to just sink into him, to abandon myself for a mo
ment. Locked to his delicious lips I didn’t notice his hand clasping at my waist. I didn’t notice his other hand float to my neck and pin me there, tilting my dizzy head so he could angle me for a deeper kiss. I didn’t notice the full length of his tall, hard body pressing up close against mine. My whole universe folded away to one tight, hot spot that radiated out from that amazing place where our lips met. It was a revelation.

  The feeling of the wall bumping against my spine made my eyes flutter open a little. He had guided me against the exit door and had me pinned now against it, and I had seemingly followed, half chasing his lips. I had known Felix for a long time. I had spent countless evenings with him over popcorn and cocoa and textbooks before finals. We had helped one another move apartments. I would always make him chicken soup when he got sick and he was always my wing-man and sure fire way to get rid of creeps whenever we went out at night.

  But this was another side of Felix that was completely alien to me. A physical side. A breathy, warm, delicious side that I suddenly couldn’t get enough of.

  I stood on my toes to offer up more of my tongue, and realized with a thrill that the entire front side of my body had become electrified, completely switched on against his hard abs and chest. I didn’t want to think too closely about the rest of his anatomy, I only knew how amazing it felt to press up hard against his firm thighs, his flanks, the hard muscles knotted at the center of his chest, so different to mine.

  He moaned.

  Trailing his lips down onto my jawline and then further down to my neck, I realized with pleasure that I wasn’t the only one distracted by the electricity in the moment. I had never touched anyone like this. Never …kissed anyone. As my hands pawed hungrily over him, my brain slowly caught up with the sensations. This was actually going to happen. We were actually going to have sex. I couldn’t think clearly anymore. I didn’t want to think anymore, I just wanted to feel, and it was him that I wanted to feel. His body, His warm breath. They all melted together into one smooth wave of pleasure so that when he began to peel of my jacket, I shrugged it off easily just so I could find his lips again. When he shook his own jacket off and then glued himself back against me, it only allowed me to feel his form more distinctly under his clothing.