When Mia, a world-famous pop star, turns up on Tyler Sullivan's door to announce she's pregnant from a one-night stand, they agree to hide the pregnancy so Tyler can raise the baby alone.
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Despite fame and fortune, Mia...
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Please Note: This story is now available on Radish Fiction as The Popstar's Baby - only a sample is left on Wattpad.
Mia Malone couldn't remember the last time she'd been this nervous. It might have been when she was fourteen and executives from Shooting Star Records knocked on her mom's door to offer her a recording contract. Or it might have been when she was nominated for a Grammy Award at sixteen. That was the year she realized her life was no longer her own. Picking out clothes, styling her hair, choosing her meals were only some of the things she no longer controlled. Every time she turned around her mother was hiring someone else to make life easier. Mia hadn't slowed long enough to figure out if it was working.
From the rental car, she stared at the well-kept second-hand shop on the edge of the small town and bit down on the tip of her nail. The acrylics she'd gotten at fifteen had forced her to stop biting them. Even now, five years later, she hadn't broken the habit of putting her nail between her teeth, desperate for the rip and tear, for something to feel in her control. She'd become so used to other people directing her and her body that coming to his store in Little Falls, New York felt like anarchy.
No one knew she was here.
Out of the corner of her eye, her bodyguard Pasha stared impassively ahead. She didn't think he spoke much English which was why she'd picked him. He also seemed to be the only one her mother didn't have under her thumb. Laura Malone could never know what her daughter was about to do.
"You'll wait here?"
"Yes."
A small smile played at the edges of her lips despite her nerves. At night she stared at the ceiling of the tour bus as it rumbled through another city and practiced speaking like him. Trying out his thick Russian accent was like slipping into another skin, another life.
God, that tour bus. She was so fucking done with that bus.
Tomorrow afternoon she had to make sure she was in the right city at the right time to meet her mom and the bus. Only three more months. It was her mantra. Three more months on that bus. She didn't want to think about all the commitments flooding her calendar beyond that date. Whenever she felt like this, she reminded herself she was lucky. Lots of people wished for the kind of success she was experiencing. She had no right to complain.
"You sure person here?" He raised one pale eyebrow at her and scanned the sidewalk outside the shop. "Not busy."
"It's a second-hand shop and a costume place. Other than Halloween parties and being poor, why would anyone go in there?" She rolled her eyes and threw open the passenger door before she talked herself out of it.
Her best friend Sarah was the only person who knew her secret. As one of the judges on the talent show Center Stage, it was Sarah who suggested Grady Castillo as a songwriter for her album. He'd been a winning contestant who'd produced a single hit album and settled into anonymity writing songs for other people. Mia had been wary at first. Men who avoided the spotlight usually had things to hide, behaviors, interests, habits that made a twenty-year-old girl like her a prime target. That had been a quick, vicious lesson at the start of her career.
