How To Have Surprise Quadruplets (How To... Book 2) Read online

  How To Have Surprise Quadruplets

  Layla Valentine

  Contents

  1. Alexis

  2. Rian

  3. Alexis

  4. Alexis

  5. Rian

  6. Alexis

  7. Alexis

  8. Rian

  9. Rian

  10. Alexis

  11. Rian

  12. Alexis

  13. Alexis

  14. Alexis

  15. Alexis

  16. Rian

  17. Alexis

  18. Rian

  19. Rian

  20. Alexis

  21. Rian

  22. Rian

  23. Alexis

  24. Alexis

  25. Alexis

  26. Rian

  27. Alexis

  28. Alexis

  29. Rian

  30. Alexis

  31. Rian

  32. Alexis

  33. Rian

  34. Alexis

  35. Alexis

  36. Rian

  Epilogue

  Also by Layla Valentine

  Alexis

  “Give me more, Lex, give me more! Commit to it, girl, or we’re never going to get the shot!”

  I breathed sharply in through my nose and pressed my lips together, willing myself to keep the words on the tip of my tongue where they were. No, I didn’t want to be there. No, I didn’t feel sexy or attractive, or like giving this shoot any more than I already was. No, I didn’t want to be working with this photographer, who was the biggest jerk I’d ever met.

  To be honest, I didn’t even want to be working in the fashion—or modeling—industry anymore. Or more accurately… I wanted to be on the other side of the camera. I wanted to be where Pierre was right now, looking through that lens, seeing the world in a completely different way, framed so that I got to see the beauty of it in the bits and pieces and in the composition. In the layers. Without the complication or messy emotional aspects.

  I didn’t want to be the one taking the orders anymore. The one dressed in almost nothing while a range of photographers and assistants and managers stared at me, waiting for me to perform. While my business manager and agent waited anxiously in the wings, ready to run me out to yet another client, yet another job, the moment I was finished. The one being served up like a cooked goose on a silver platter, to be ogled by the photographer who had been assigned to a specific shoot.

  Photographers like this one, who I knew for a fact had a history of taking advantage of girls like me. Well, not me. Girls who were younger, more vulnerable, less secure in the industry than I was.

  Girls like I had been when I was younger. I’d learned the hard way about men like Pierre.

  But saying any of that would just get me in more trouble. The people who had hired me didn’t care about Pierre and his reputation. They didn’t care about my aspirations about becoming a photographer. They certainly didn’t want to hear my philosophical musings about the industry itself, what was wrong with it, and how it could be improved. They had hired me to do a job. I had been paid to do a job—or, at least, I would be once it was finished—and I had to get it done.

  That was what made me successful. That was what made me one of the highest-paid models in the industry, these days, and what had given me my long, successful career. I knew how to keep my mouth shut and get to work, get a job done, and move on to the next booking. Getting out of the industry might be my long-term goal. But right at that second, and for the foreseeable future, I needed my career to keep paying the bills. At least until I had my Plan B together and knew how I was going to get out.

  So, I forced my lips up into a smile and turned my gaze up to meet the Frenchman’s eyes. “You got it, Pierre, just give me a minute, okay? I need to find some inspiration.”

  He gave me what he must have assumed was a charming smile—but there was nothing charming about him—and turned away, mumbling something about not being able to give me long, with the rain coming in the way it was.

  I glanced at the sky and saw exactly what he meant. The clouds were building up, and they were turning dark. The wind was picking up, starting to ride that dangerous edge where you could feel a storm building, almost smell it on the air. Yeah, it made for great footage—the perfectly diffused lighting for photography, a natural wind that would make for dramatic, beautiful pictures…but rain was definitely coming.

  And unless you were doing a very specific sort of shoot, rain was never a good thing on a set.

  I turned to look out over the scenery, trying to get my head into the space I needed. The view was gorgeous. We were at a deserted, wild spot on the Great Wall in China—specifically the Jyong Pass, a part of the structure that stood in the Juyongguan stretch of the wall. This stretch surrounded the valley that acted as the doorway from the northern part of the country into Beijing itself, and as such, was incredibly important and one of the biggest tourist attractions in the entire country.

  The Chinese government had shut it off from the public for one day, for a number of shoots, so we could get them done without people trying to photobomb us. It gave the entire place a weird, deserted feel—which had just increased the wild, untamed beauty. Below me, bright green jungle traveled as far as the eye could see, broken only by the dark gray, dappled stone of the wall itself. I was stretched out along the edge of that wall, draped over it in a manner that probably violated every safety regulation China had listed for the wall.

  But since we were there with special permissions, and the wall in that section was entirely ours for the moment, there was no one there to tell us no. And Pierre was taking full advantage of that. Which was a big part of my problem. Every time I draped myself over the edge of that wall, I started thinking about how long the fall would be if I slipped.

  How far I would have to fall into the jungle before I hit the ground.

  Believe me when I say that it wasn’t the ideal working situation. Particularly when I was wearing a very skimpy dress and trying my darnedest to be sexy.

  I turned back to Pierre, doing everything I could to paste a brave smile on my face.

  “Right, let’s get this over with,” I said. “The sooner we’re done, the sooner we’re done, right?”

  “Exactement, ma cherie,” he said with a lascivious grin.

  I made a mental note to watch my back when we returned to the hotel, to do whatever it took to protect myself against attempts of the amorous sort from the sleazy photographer. You could never be too careful as a model.

  Then, I went back to work, stretching out against the cold stone, looking up into the sky, closing my eyes, and doing my best to radiate sex and glamour.

  Roughly half an hour later, we were walking back to the trailer. Pierre had been correct; once I got into the shoot and got into the right mind space, it had gone relatively quickly. Modeling was funny that way. People really thought you just had to stand there and be a pretty face. But it was a lot more than that—and a lot more like acting than people realized. You had to get into character, put yourself in the right place, literally become what you were trying to get down on film. Once you found that spot, it was easy to get photographs that jumped right off the page.

  It was also very hard to come out of that spot once you found it. In that way, I guessed it was a lot like many other jobs. You found the groove, got into that place, and went full speed ahead. Getting back out of the groove, getting back into your own skin and out of the skin you’d created for the piece… that was tougher.

  I wasn’t good at the second part. I’d been doing shoots for ten years at that point—ever since I was sixteen when I b
roke into the industry to help my grandma with her overwhelming medical bills—and I’d gotten really, really good at getting into different characters for different shoots. But I’d always had trouble getting back out again. It took me hours to sort of strip the character off of my real self and feel like me again. And during that time, I was always a bit… well, hazy, for lack of a better term. Not all there. Definitely lacking the sharpness of mind necessary for operating in the real world.

  Which was my only real excuse for literally walking right into another shoot that I hadn’t known was even happening.

  Rian

  I was standing in a clearing in the jungle that only measured about a hundred square feet. A rustling from within the jungle off to my right caught my attention. I tensed, anticipating what creature might emerge, ready to run so I wouldn’t get bitten or attacked or eaten.

  A woman stalked into the clearing. Not a threat, but man oh man, did she make an immediate impression.

  The girl was all eyes and long legs, wavy brown hair, and a waist that I thought I could have wrapped around with my two hands. She was the most gorgeous creature I’d ever laid eyes on, and she was just in the midst of putting a robe on over those scraps of fabric that fashion magazines like to call clothes. It would have been impossible to miss her, even in that crowded, loud jungle.

  She was also wearing an expression that looked like she was caught between furious and dazed, but couldn’t really decide which side to come down on. And though I couldn’t say why, it made me want to take her under my wing and protect her from whatever had made her look so…conflicted.

  She came walking out of the jungle by herself, in bare legs and a pair of slippers to go with her robe, and hurried right onto our set like she didn’t even see it, definitely on her way somewhere. She looked completely out of place and distracted—but she wasn’t lost.

  In fact, she looked so damned intense that I wondered if she ever been lost in her life. Or if she was one of those people who always knew exactly where she was going, and why.

  I was there shooting some stupid ad to do with the upcoming tour for my band. We had at least three photographers with their cameras going at a hundred clicks a minute so they could get that all-important casual shot where I wasn’t paying attention. Add to that about a dozen assistants and producers and whoever else the shoot required, all of them yelling different directions and suggestions.

  They all dropped completely silent the moment she emerged from the jungle and walked onto our set.

  Then, they all started shouting again.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Don’t you see the cameras here, girl? Where did you come from?”

  “Oh my God, isn’t that Alexis Taylor?”

  At that, I looked more closely at the girl and did a double take. Alexis Taylor, one of the most famous models in the industry? The one that had started walking for the biggest lingerie companies and the most important designers by the time she was only eighteen years old? The woman who people said was not only a pretty face but also a brilliant businesswoman, and who was out to change the industry itself? The one who had been dating a major league football player six months ago, and had so famously dumped him in the midst of a big gala they’d been attending?

  A closer look and I realized that it absolutely was her. She looked different. More heavily made-up than she was in any of the paparazzi shots I’d seen of her, and less heavily made-up than she generally was on the runway.

  Yeah, I’d seen pictures of her. A lot. She was on billboards, TV—everywhere, really—and was hard to not pay attention to. I liked beautiful women; sue me. But what the hell was she doing in the middle of a Chinese jungle by herself?

  She’d stopped at all the shouting and was looking around now, confused, and I stepped forward quickly to take her arm, my black combat boots crunching over the detritus that made up the floor of the jungle.

  A jolt of heat shot up my own arm as soon as I touched her. I ignored it. I was in the jungle in China wearing black leather, and it had to be at least ninety degrees out there, with humidity to match. Of course I was feeling hot.

  “A shoot,” I told her quickly. “You’ve just walked right onto a shoot. We’re doing it to promo my band’s new album, and it’s—”

  She looked up, met my eyes, and jerked her arm out of my grasp.

  “I know exactly what a shoot looks like, thank you very much,” she answered. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to walk into your space. I’ll see myself out.”

  And with that, she melted back into the jungle like a slinky wild cat that made its home in the trees, all grace and camouflage.

  I stared after her, my mouth still agape, trying to figure out where she’d gone—until the manager of the shoot shouted at me that I’d better get back in place so they could get this session done before the rain arrived. I shot a look up at the sky—dark and forbidding and looking like it was going to bring thunder and lightning—and scampered back to my spot, trying to put Alexis Taylor and her dark eyes and lush lips right out of my mind.

  It didn’t work. I had her stuck in my brain and my imagination was feeding me that look again and again: her gazing up into my eyes like a leopard and jerking her arm out of my grasp. That fire in her eyes.

  Which was probably why that shoot turned into something entirely different. For the first time, my photographers started using words like “smoldering” and “thunderous.” Hell, they even insisted on putting me in eyeliner for the end of the shoot, insisting it added to my “sexy bad boy look.”

  Then, we got caught in the rain and it ran all over my face. When I got back to my trailer, soaking wet, I caught my own reflection in the mirror and had to laugh. This whole thing was so stupid. So patently surface-level. A shoot in the jungle, by myself and without my band. I didn’t even remember what magazine it was going into, or if I was trying to sell something along with promoting our new album.

  I was over it. The label was trying to make me more important than the band, or rather the most important person in the band, and I didn’t appreciate it. Neither did my bandmates. In fact, it was creating a big chasm between us, and I was having trouble finding a way to fill it. This shoot had been a bad idea right from the start.

  Then again, if I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Alexis Taylor—it seemed to me that way out here, there was only a few of them, and only one was reasonably high-end—it might at least give me a reason to appreciate having flown all the way to China for it. I couldn’t get her face out of my mind, and I seriously wanted to see it again and try to get to know the woman behind it.

  Alexis

  I stared through the windshield as the driver parked in front of the hotel, taking in the driving rain. Thank God Pierre had had his eye on the weather and had gotten us out of there in time. I’d been in a backless sequined cocktail dress, for goodness sake, and would have been itchy as hell and freezing my ass off if I’d gotten wet, no matter how hot it had been in that jungle. Plus, there was no way my makeup would have stood up to this sort of weather. I’d been wearing matte foundation and powder, sure, to combat the humidity, but it hadn’t been waterproof. It would have run all over my face the minute the downpour started.

  Much like it definitely had for that guy whose shoot I had interrupted. I’d seen him after the rain had started, when I was leaving the area where various trailers had been set up for the shoots going on that day. Some idiot had insisted on putting him in eyeliner at some point, and they couldn’t have put much thought into it at all, because they’d used something that wouldn’t stand up to moisture. It would have been a mess in the humidity of the jungle, and it had been even worse once it started raining.

  I wasn’t making fun of him. Seriously. I wouldn’t laugh at someone who didn’t know the first thing about makeup and had allowed his assistant or makeup artist to make such a silly mistake. I’d felt sorry for him. Poor guy. When I’d seen him running from his set, the stuff had been absolute
ly smeared over his face, making him look like a brooding vampire from some teen drama.

  And even with all that, he’d still been almost unbearably hot, as in smoking, sexy hot. A hint of stubble across his chin, his now wet, white V-neck T-shirt glued to his pecs under a leather jacket slick with rain, blond hair that stood up in something between spikes and just pure messiness, and those bright blue eyes…

  Ugh. Blond hair and blue eyes. My personal kryptonite. It always had been. Combine that with a muscular body and a somewhat goofy sense of humor, and I was a complete goner. And that guy on the set, well, I wasn’t sure he was the bad boy everyone said he was. Because he’d come up to me with nothing but concern in his eyes when he saw me wandering around in the jungle by myself. In fact, he’d acted gentlemanly and I’d been the rude one. That didn’t quite fit the rock-and-roll tough-guy persona he probably wanted to cultivate.

  Yeah, I’d recognized him. Or rather… not initially recognized him, but had had a chance to think about it and come around to figuring out where I knew his face from. Rian Cassady. Rock star. Front man to the band 858—named for the telephone area code where most of the group members had grown up. He was always in the tabloids for one escapade or another, and he’d practically made a career out of that charming grin and those dimples. He also had a voice that could make you melt into a puddle at the first note—when his label allowed him to sing acapella, without all the noisy instruments. Which wasn’t that often. Still, the guy was undoubtedly talented and successful in his profession.