Also by Alyse Zaftig

  Angeleno Billionaires

  Sunshine

  Trouble

  The Bad Boy's Pregnant Bride

  The Reformed Bad Boy's Baby

  Chased by the Dragons

  Galapagos

  Chased by the Dragons

  Her Dad's Best Friend

  Working for Her Dad's Best Friend

  Paying Off Her Dad's Best Friend

  Fake Marrying Her Dad's Best Friend

  Seduced by Her Dad's Best Friend

  Saved by Her Dad’s Best Friend

  Spying on Her Dad's Best Friend

  Protected by Her Dad’s Best Friend

  Falling for Her Dad's Best Friend

  Guarded by Her Dad's Best Friend

  Sleeping with Her Dad's Best Friend

  Tempting Her Dad's Best Friend

  Imperial Draka

  Secret Prince's Bride

  Standalone

  Fresh

  Tonight Only

  Billionaire's Assistant

  Drug Lord

  An Heir for the Billionaire Werebears

  The Volleyball Coach's Surprise Baby

  SLEEPING WITH HER DAD’S BEST FRIEND

  ALYSE ZAFTIG

  Copyright © 2022 by Alyse Zaftig

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  1. Kidnapped Partner

  2. Staying at Charlie’s Place

  3. Invitation

  4. Dinner in Quito

  5. Lightning Striking Twice

  6. Group for Extraction

  7. Cloud Forest

  8. One Bed

  9. First Time

  10. Awakened

  11. Warning Note

  12. Baby Reveal

  13. Revealed

  14. Meeting Ximena

  15. Video’s Impact

  16. Changing of the Guards

  17. Hospital

  18. Ultrasound

  19. Gestures

  20. New Home

  21. Malachi

  KIDNAPPED PARTNER

  Charlie

  I was in an Italian restaurant with my pregnant daughter and her husband. I hadn’t liked the way that they had gotten together so quickly, but it was hard to be mad about my first grandchild. At least the two of them had invited me to their wedding.

  We were chatting over her Fettuccine Alfredo and my steak. My son-in-law, formerly a green recruit, had a burger. We were discussing the schools that she wanted to scope out and maybe get on the wait lists for as soon as the baby was born. As long as Brandon was paying for it, I didn’t mind giving her advice. She had gone to public school the whole time that she had grown up. Even now, she was in state school to work on her criminology degree. I still didn’t like the idea of my daughter working in corrections, but I could see that remaining in her position under Brandon’s twin sister Brittany Adams meant a lot to my daughter. Her grades were good, so I let things go. I was still helping with her education, because I always promised I would.

  I had no idea how much money Brandon had. He had his own home, and Kayla had broken her lease and moved into his home after the wedding. I was going to have to find somewhere slightly more permanent than the furnished executive home in Beverly Hills, which charged outrageous rates.

  The conversation was petering out, which made the two of them look at each other. I was sweating a little, trying to think of my daughter all grown up and ready to have her first child. Brandon touched her nose with the tip of his finger, which immediately triggered me. Kayla’s dead mother, Annemarie, used to do it when she was chastising me in a playful manner.

  “I’ve got to go.” All three of us looked at my half-eaten steak. “I have a business meeting that I’ll dial into from my place. Nice to see you.”

  At least with Brandon there, I didn’t feel like a tool for letting my daughter pay the check. I was worried that she wouldn’t make all that much money working in corrections, but Brandon’s security firm charged top dollar. I thought that the two of them would be financially stable for now. I felt comfortable paying for my daughter’s tuition, and they hadn’t told me to stop. When my grandkid was born, I was going to contribute to a 529 for the day that the baby went to college.

  Annemarie would be over the moon about our new grandkid, even if Kayla was slightly too young. Annemarie had been a new grad from college when we had Kayla, and so I was only in my early forties now. I didn’t feel old enough to be a grandfather. What Annemarie and I had was something special. I knew I’d never feel that way about anybody else.

  I walked back to my hotel room to spend the night alone, as I had ever since she died when Kayla was small. My phone buzzed. I wondered if my daughter was contacting me for having left the restaurant so abruptly.

  When I looked at the screen, I didn’t recognize the number. Normally, I’d turn it off so I wouldn’t be harassed by a telemarketer. But my instincts told me to pick up the call, so I did.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Selena Jarret.”

  “Selena?” I hadn’t seen my business partner’s daughter in years. The last time she had shown up at a business dinner, she had been all angles and skinny. She wore glasses with thick frames, which were apparently in fashion, and had acne and braces. Like me, my business partner traveled all over the world for the oil industry business that we ran together. He kept her in the United States, as Kayla was. “What is up?”

  “I think my dad is in danger.”

  I blinked. “What makes you say that?”

  “I haven’t been able to get in touch with him for a few days.”

  Our families, even though they knew that we were on the road, could always get in touch. If Selena couldn’t, something was definitely wrong.

  “I’ll send a car to bring you to my place.” If we spoke in the common area, I wouldn’t be murdered by her father.

  “I’m already at your place.”

  I wondered how she’d gotten the right location.

  STAYING AT CHARLIE’S PLACE

  Selena

  I checked my phone again, worrying about the fact that I hadn’t received any messages from my father. It really wasn’t like him to go off-grid for this long. Even when he was out of the country, he had an international SIM card in his smartphone. I also had access to his location tracking, but his phone hadn’t been located in a while. It was really worrying me. I had gotten anxious enough to pack some changes of clothes, toiletries, and my laptop and go back to Los Angeles. I hadn’t told anybody beside Charlie that I was in town.

  When Charlie walked through the door, I saw how much he hadn’t changed. He had a little more salt in his hair now. He did a glance up and down my body, with his body language a little startled. Inwardly, I smiled a very feminine grin of satisfaction. He had seen me in my awkward teenage years, which I had mostly grown out of.

  “Hi. How did you know where I was staying?” Charlie asked me.

  “I asked your assistant,” I said.

  “Oh, I see.” Charlie stood there for a moment and sat next to me on the couch I had chosen to wait on.

  I looked around, uncomfortable with the attention that we were already attracting. I didn’t know if they thought I was some sort of hired woman, but I felt really awkward sitting there with so many people looking at us.

  “Could we go somewhere slightly more private?”

  Charlie rubbed his jaw. “Your dad would probably prefer it if we stuck to the lobby.”

  “Everyone is listening to our conversation.”

  Charlie looked around, which intimidated the bystanders into turn away from gawking at us. Charlie grunted and got to his feet. “Come on.”

  I had to admire how confidently he walked to the elevators. Charlie had a firm sense of self, something I didn’t have yet. Like Charlie’s daughter Kayla, I had grown up in the United States. Kayla and I weren’t close friends, but we were about the same age. At business dinners, we spent time together. I had never told her I had a crush on her dad.

  Charlie had a multi-room place, so when we got into his place, there was a little living room where I could sit down. Charlie kept his space neat. I sat down on an overstuffed chair and started to explain things to Charlie.

  “Dad lets me check on his location, even if I don’t talk to him every day. His phone hasn’t connected for over a week. It has been a few days since his assistant has even heard from him, which isn’t like him.”

  “No, he wouldn’t neglect the business.” Charlie looked at his phone. “Let me see the last time he was in touch with me.”

  I waited there, looking at the intensity on his face. I wondered what it would be like if he really had hired me to come into his home.

  I was wearing clothing that the real me would never purchase, not using credit cards her dad gave her. I had a trench coat over all of it, even though it almost never rained in Los Angeles. I knocked on the door with more confidence than the real me ever would.

  Charlie would welcome me into the room, and he would shut the door behind me. I’d tantalize him by undoing my trench coat and letting him take a 360 view of my body clad in lacy lingerie.

&nb

sp; Charlie would whistle.

  Then, he’d take my hand and lead me to his bed. He’d put me into whichever positions he wanted for the whole night, until both of us were too tired to move.

  I blushed a little from my fantasy. Charlie broke my reverie by saying, “Our last contact was about a week ago. It’s not unusual for us to go a while without talking to each other if a project is intense, but David should have kept in touch with his assistant if the project was still in the works.” Charlie stopped for a moment. “Kayla has always had my cell phone number.”

  Kayla and I had talked about our mostly absent fathers. They made plenty of money working in the oil industry, but neither of us had moms to look after us. Kayla’s grandmother had old-fashioned ideas on how to raise her, so she had some skills that I didn’t. She knew how to do things like can fresh fruits and vegetables that I didn’t. I could barely use a sewing machine to sew in a straight line, because I had taken home economics in middle school. A single pillow was about as far as I had gotten.

  Kayla was going to school in Los Angeles, but I had moved to San Diego to go to school and meet new people. Some kids who went to my high school also went to UCSD with me, but I didn’t hang around with them. My aunt, the one who raised me, had moved as soon as I had moved to San Diego. Her husband’s family lived in the northern Virginia area, near DC. It was still easy enough for us to see each other, but she had more than done her duty by raising her sister’s kid in lieu of having any of her own. She had been a loving aunt, and we still texted each other all the time. She was giving me the space to grow up, which I appreciated. Her husband’s mother, my aunt’s mother-in-law, was getting increasingly frail to the point that she couldn’t live alone. I knew that it hadn’t been easy for my aunt to move into her husband’s childhood home, but it had been necessary if they didn’t want to put her mother-in-law in memory care in a nursing facility.

  Charlie was typing furiously into his phone. “I’m typing up an email to his assistant to give me all the information that she has on where he might be. I’ll hand it over to my son-in-law, who runs a private security firm with ties all over the world. If Brandon can’t help, nobody can.” After he hit send, he looked up at me. “Where are you staying? I’ll drive you.”

  “That’s not necessary. I’m not staying in Los Angeles. If you’re on the case with your son-in-law, then I can go back to school.”

  “You can stay in my place.” Charlie gestured with one hand. “There’s a spare room for you here.”

  I liked the invitation, but I needed to weigh the pros and cons. I had a huge crush on Charlie now, but my dad would murder us both. I thought about checking hotel prices on my phone in an app I knew about that gave you discounted prices in hotels that had excess capacity for that specific night; I could stay on a friend’s couch, but I’d have to answer questions if I did. Charlie plucked my phone out of my hand and steered me towards a room. The place was way bigger than one man needed, and I wondered why he had gotten a spare room when he and my dad were always pinching pennies despite being millionaires.

  I looked around the room, which was totally untouched. “Why do you have a second bedroom?”

  “I offered to spend time with my grandkid, so that Brandon and Kayla could have time alone in the future. I’m not ready yet to take care of a kid, but I’m trying to get started on the ins and outs of taking care of a newborn in Los Angeles.” Charlie leaned on the doorframe, which pulled his shirt tight. I admired his muscular build. “I’ll probably spend less time on the road now that Kayla has a kid. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of years.” Charlie rubbed his neck. “Your father and I probably have that much in common.”

  I guessed that they hadn’t spoken about it.

  “Thanks for giving me a spare room.”

  “There’s a bathrobe on the back of the door. Did you bring anything with you?”

  I touched my backpack, which was still on my back. “I have a few changes of clothes. I’m used to packing light.” My aunt would take me for weekend trips to get out of smoggy Los Angeles. She had taken me to Legoland with classmates, which was why I’d explored San Diego a little bit prior to going to school there. It was close enough to Los Angeles to still have access to my friends, but it was far enough away that I could build something new there. I still wasn’t sure where I wanted to live once I graduated, but I had years before I had to make that decision. It depended on the type of job that I picked up. Kayla had already made it clear to Charlie that she had no interest in picking up the family business, involved in the oil industry. I was more willing to take over, if I was trained up. My dad and I had already discussed having me come in as an anonymous intern in an international office where they wouldn’t realize who I was. It would be good for me to come in at the ground level and give my dad feedback on whether I wanted to pursue a career in the family business. I was getting a degree in international business.

  “I’ll figure out what I can. Rest tonight, and I’ll talk to you at 8 AM for breakfast tomorrow.” Charlie closed the door to my suite.

  I undressed, getting into the bathtub and worrying about my dad. What could have happened to him?

  INVITATION

  Charlie

  AN HOUR LATER

  I looked at what my team had been able to pull together about David’s whereabouts. The last time anybody had been in touch with him, he was in Ecuador. Our head of security, Seb, was already working on finding out everything he could about David’s condition. We could hope that it was a simple case of his phone breaking or glitching so it couldn’t connect to coverage. I had been to Ecuador, though, and the Internet connections available in Quito were blazing fast. I found it unlikely that he would literally lose all of his technology and not immediately buy more to get back in touch with civilization. Even if he had been mugged, he’d get in touch with the embassy and the Ecuadorian police, so that we’d have some kind of police report to work with. Complete radio silence was unlike him. Because Selena was worried and nobody in our org knew exactly where he was, I had a ticket booked for the first flight out of LAX. I had already texted Kayla that I was heading out of town for business. I didn’t want to worry her, so I left out a lot of details. Now that she was with Brandon, I didn’t have to worry about her safety.

  I wondered if Selena had eaten anything for dinner. I’d eaten half of a steak, so I could do with a little more food. I didn’t want to pick an option that would deliver cold food at a glacial pace. I looked at one of the sites that delivered restaurant food locally, and I picked one that was still open at this hour. I got a turkey BLT for Selena, which is what Kayla liked at this sandwich shop, and I got a pastrami sandwich for myself. I’d give her a choice between the sandwiches once they arrived at my place.

  After an hour, I had the bag of sandwiches in my hand. I knocked on her bedroom door. “I have dinner.”

  She opened the door, and she was wearing just a towel. “Oh, I didn’t know that you ordered food.”

  My eyes drifted to the shadow of her cleavage. Her towel was slipping downward, so I turned around with my fists clenched. “You can have a BLT or pastrami sandwich.”

  “I’ll go with the BLT.” I could hear a trace of amusement in her voice.

  “I’ll pay for you to stay in this place. I’m going to be on the first flight out tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m definitely coming with you.”

  “You’re in school, so you’re not leaving the country.”

  “I can watch the lectures online and do my homework from Ecuador. My dad is way more important than school.”

  “No dice.” Ecuador was a dangerous enough country without bringing a teenager along. Because I was white, I was a target on Quito streets. I was very careful to stay in the right spots after dark.