15 Days Babysitting For My Star Quarterback Bully
My smile dies the second the door swings open. Gasping, I stumble back as if burned by the deep scowl aimed at me.
“You!” I whisper, and at the same time, my arch-enemy’s scowl morphs into a sinister smile.
Tyler Brooks raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you’ve added stalking to your nerdy tendencies,” he finally says, his deep voice causing me to shiver.
I feel cold sweat break across my forehead, but I curl my fingers tighter around the strap of my purse. “I’m here to… for… um…”
Tyler snorts, seemingly taking pleasure in my embarrassment. “What are you doing here, Garcia?”
***
Lila Garcia thought her life couldn’t get any worse as the infamous nerd of Princeton High, constantly bullied by the jocks. But when Tyler Brooks’ parents leave town and they need someone to watch his younger siblings, Lila is roped into babysitting duty.
Tyler has always been a jerk to her since day one, but now Lila’s stuck in his world and seeing him as more than just an arrogant football star. In close quarters, Lila learns that Tyler has secrets, and that he isn’t the guy she pegged him to be.
As her feelings start to change, and the lines between love and hate blur, Lila must decide if this new version of Tyler is worth trusting, or if she’s just another target in his game.
قراءة
Chapter: Chapter 140 Lila The morning we leave for college arrives much too soon, and it feels strange how ordinary the day looks. The sun rises exactly as it always does. Birds chatter outside my window, a lawnmower starts up somewhere down the street, and the world keeps moving even though mine is about to change forever. Mom insisted on making breakfast this morning even though none of us had much of an appetite for it. And since we arrived at the Brooks’ house, Dad hasn’t stopped checking that my suitcase is zipped every five minutes. I’d be thoroughly amused if I wasn’t so nervous. “You’ve looked three times,” I tell him. I check the time on my wristwatch again before looking back at the towering suburban house in front of us. The sudden feeling of déjà vu rises in my chest as the memory of my first time at the Brooks’ house flashes in my mind. It’s still surreal to me how far Tyler and I have come from that day. Mom r
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-16
Chapter: Chapter 139I swat my mom’s hand away for what has to be the tenth time. “It’s fine.”“It isn’t straight,” Mom argues, reaching up to adjust my cap anyway.Dad immediately raises the camera around his neck and takes a picture. He’s been doing that all morning, saying he can’t afford to miss a “moment.”All around us, Westfield High is buzzing with teachers organizing lines, parents wandering around looking just as overwhelmed as their kids, and students dressed in the same navy-blue gown as me.“We should go say hi to your teachers,” Mom says, before dragging Dad along with her.I breathe a sigh of relief as soon as they’re gone. I may love my parents to death, but their excitement has been nothing short of suffocating. My eyes scan the crowd, looking for familiar faces, and I finally find one.Maya throws herself at me as soon as our eyes meet across the crowd. “Can you believe it? We’re actually graduating,” she screams.“I know.”“I think I’m going to cry
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-16
Chapter: Chapter 138Tyler’s POVThe smell of coffee and vanilla wakes me up, and for one blissful moment I forget everything else.Then, Sophie comes barreling into the living room wearing one sock and yesterday’s dinosaur pajamas, shouting “Morning!” loud enough to wake the dead.Maya groans from somewhere beneath three blankets. “I’m never having kids. They don’t understand mercy.”“I heard that!” Sophie shouts proudly.“I know you did.”I laugh quietly and sit up from the air mattress we all ended up sleeping on, causing the living room to look like the aftermath of a camping trip.Alex is already halfway through a bowl of cereal, his tuxedo traded for sweatpants and one of my old football hoodies. “Morning sunshine,” he says to me, ducking when I fling a throw pillow at him.Lila walks in with Mom, wearing my old shirt and shorts, her hair tied into a messy bun. She catches me looking. “What?”I smirk, a fuzzy feeling spreading through my chest at the sight
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-16
Chapter: Chapter 137Tyler’s POVI’m still in disbelief as my friends and I drive back to my house in the limousine Alex hired.Maya is showing Alex the hundreds of photos she took tonight, and my best friend has a wide grin on his face even though he’s hardly listening and mostly watching the excitement on her face. They have no idea what it means to me that they decided to ditch going to the afterparty at one of the players’ house and choosing to sleepover at mine instead.Jake was the only one who chose not to come, and I understood his reasons for not wanting to. I could never ask him to be in the same house as the man who took his father away from him. I can only hope that mine is man enough to seek his forgiveness one day.Lila’s shoulder presses lightly against mine, her fingers laced through mine where no one can see them. Every so often she gives my hand a small squeeze, just enough to remind me she’s there. It makes me feel lighter than I have in weeks, and I wonder how I thought I could have s
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-15
Chapter: Chapter 136The school gymnasium has been transformed into something out of a fairytale.Strings of warm lights drape from the ceiling like stars, gold fabric hangs from the walls, and hundreds of tiny candles flicker across the tables. Music fills every corner of the room, mixed with people’s laughter, and teachers pretend not to notice students sneaking extra desserts.Surprisingly, the night isn’t as terrible as I expected.Maya drags us into the photobooth for pictures, with Jake complaining the entire time – even though I catch him posing more than once. He straightens his collar for the camera every single time, then acts nonchalant the moment the flash goes off.For a little while… I almost forget. But every time my eyes wander toward the entrance and the doors open, my heart lifts for a few seconds, only to fall again when someone else walks into the room.The DJ changes the upbeat pop song currently blaring through the speakers to a slower melody that has couples immediately drifting tow
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-15
Chapter: Chapter 135I spend twenty minutes staring at my reflection before I finally decide there’s no point changing anything.The girl looking back at me is still me. She just looks… unhappy.My blue dress, the same one I shopped with Mabel and Maya, falls softly to the floor, the satin catching the late afternoon sunlight pouring through my bedroom window.Mom insisted on curling my hair this morning before leaving me to get ready. “You are not spending prom looking like you’ve declared war on hairbrushes,” she’d announced.I smooth invisible wrinkles from my dress.This isn’t how today was supposed to go. Tyler was supposed to pick me up, and Mom and Dad were supposed to embarrass both of us by making us pose for a hundred pictures on the porch. I would’ve complained and Tyler would’ve laughed at my dilemma.Instead…There’s a knock at my bedroom door. “Lila?” Dad peeks inside, and his eyes widen “Wow.”I roll mine affectionately. “Don’t tell me you’re about to
آخر تحديث: 2026-07-15
5 Years Later, I Returned With His Heirs
Five years ago, I entered a marriage of convenience with the most powerful man in Z City to escape a family determined to control my life. I believed it was a transaction, a protection in exchange for my name.
I never expected to fall in love.
And I never expected to leave.
When misunderstandings, silence, and the shadow of his past shattered what we built, I signed the divorce papers and disappeared, carrying a secret he was never meant to know.
Now I’m back.
Stronger. Independent. And no longer alone.
The man I once walked away from has discovered the truth: the twins at my side are his heirs. He wants answers. He wants his children. And he wants the woman he lost back in his life.
But love born from power and deception does not earn forgiveness easily. As inheritance battles erupt, old truths surface, and control gives way to consequence, I must decide whether the man who once broke my trust deserves a second chance.
This time, I’m not choosing survival.
I’m choosing freely, on my own terms.
قراءة
Chapter: This TimeMaraJune. A Saturday. The park near Kensington Academy.Nothing scheduled. Nothing due.I noticed that absence, the way I had been noticing it for the past several months, with the recognition of someone who had spent fourteen months of Saturdays tracking filings and deadlines and the next move in a sustained campaign, and who had arrived, without ceremony, at Saturdays that were what they were.The boys had been here since nine. Junior had a field map of the park that had been revised four times since January and was currently in its fifth iteration, incorporating a newly identified formation in the northeast corner that he'd been building toward documenting for three weeks. Billy had the notebook, the current one, which had been updated to include a new section he'd titled, with characteristic precision, ongoing observations, category: stability.Luke had arrived at nine-fourteen. I had noted the time without noting that I had noted it. Billy had noted it prop
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-15
Chapter: A LegacyMaraMay. The eastern waterfront building.We'd been in it for three weeks. Junior had, as projected, established a geological survey station in the second bedroom within forty-eight hours of moving in. Billy had chosen the room with the city view and had spent the first evening at the window with the notebook, documenting what he could see and what it told him about the neighborhood's composition.On the first Thursday in the new building, Luke arrived at four o'clock.He had a key.He'd had a key since the beginning. Not a question asked or a ceremony made, just a key, because the building was his and because we were choosing something that didn't require ceremony to be real.He let himself in.Junior's voice from the geological survey station: "HE'S HERE."Billy from his room: "I know. I heard the door."Luke in the entrance: "Hello."The specific ordinary of it.I was at the desk reviewing the Hargreaves quarterly.He came to the k
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-15
Chapter: Always Their Choice LukeApril. The eastern waterfront.The corner unit on the fourth floor was empty when Mara came to see it. Not staged, not prepared. Just empty with the unfurnished quality of a space that had been a site office and still smelled slightly of construction documentation.She walked through it without saying anything.The main room. The kitchen. The two bedrooms, described in the original build as guest rooms, were both understood by both of us, without discussion, to be not guest rooms.She stood at the window in the main room.The eastern waterfront below. The Harborview site is visible to the south. The park was seven minutes away, as advertised. The academy was to the north."The park," she said."Yes," I said."Junior will declare this optimal," she said."He already has," I said. "I mentioned the address in a geological correspondence context and he sent back a three-paragraph assessment of the location's fieldwork potential."She held
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-14
Chapter: No More ContractsMaraMarch. One month.I had been thinking about it since the coffee on Meridian Street. The question he'd asked without making it more than it was. What does home look like when you choose it?I'd been thinking about it and simultaneously working on the Hargreaves quarterly, managing the Pryce cooperation documentation, taking Billy to the logic competition at the academy and watching Junior present the Iceland geological findings to his class for the third time in four months because his teacher had, at that point, accepted that Junior had a presentation and was going to give it whenever geology felt relevant.I'd been thinking about it alongside all of that.The original co-parenting framework was on my desk on a Thursday morning in March. Not the revised version. I had pulled the original. The one I had built in London. The one with the forty-eight-hour venue approval requirement, the no-unscheduled-contact provision, and the decision-making authority exclusi
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-14
Chapter: The Life They Built LukeJanuary. The Hargreaves dinner.The board chair hosted it at his club with twenty people, the kind of evening that existed at the intersection of professional and personal, where significant things were acknowledged without being dwelt upon.Mara was beside me.Not at my side as an arrangement or a strategic positioning. Simply beside me, the way she'd been beside me at the Whitfield dinner in October and the board session in November and the courthouse steps in the week after the contempt hearing.The board chair gave a toast. Short, specific, the language of a man who understood that what had been accomplished was significant and didn't need embellishment.He referred to Mara as one of the most capable commercial minds I've encountered in this industry.He referred to me as the kind of institutional partner whose reliability has transformed the way we think about the Hargreaves portfolio's development strategy.He referred to us jointly, briefl
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-13
Chapter: Home MaraDecember. The eastern waterfront building.I had stopped calling it the eastern waterfront building sometime in November. Before we'd moved in. I had started calling it the building, which was a small word for what it had become in the weeks between Luke asking his question on Meridian Street and us standing in an empty corner unit watching the city through the window.Now I call it home.Without the eastern waterfront part. Without the building part. Just home.The boys had called it home before I did.Junior had called it home the day we visited with the empty rooms, and he'd identified the second bedroom's fieldwork potential. Billy had called it home after the first night, recording it in the notebook as 'new address'. feels correct.Thursday evening in December.Luke is at the kitchen table with the Harborview phase two documentation. Junior is at the other end with the geological notebook and the diagram for his end-of-term science presenta
آخر تحديث: 2026-06-13
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