Claiming His Baby

By Arabella Rae

AN OFFICER AND NOT A GENTLEMAN

Audrey Williams

Audrey has been waiting for this moment. After months of communicating long-distance, her boyfriend, Daniel Underwood, has finally come to see her for the first time. He's a Marine officer serving in the Middle East.

Now he's standing in front of her. In the flesh. Those pictures he sent her don't do him justice. Daniel is the embodiment of her fairy tale fantasies. Tall, dashing, heroic—a modern-day knight. The man she's been waiting for all her life. Her one true love.

She runs toward him, throwing herself into his arms. He catches her effortlessly. So strong. So hard. So warm. So hers.

She stares into his eyes and knows she belongs to him forever.

"Danny," she sighs his beloved name.

Then she lifts her face and kisses him.

Zak Underwood

Veteran Soldier Zak Underwood's twin brother, Daniel, was killed in action in the Middle East. A part of him has died, too, but Zak is left with one important thing to do for his brother, to see Daniel's fiancee and tell her the sad news himself.

The truth is, Zak doesn't care about Daniel's very young girlfriend. He always thought that Daniel was nuts for promising to marry a woman sixteen years his junior, whom he hadn't even met in person, but the war could turn lonely soldiers into textbook cases of hopeless romantics.

So here he is now, face to face with Daniel's fiancee. Zak can understand now why his brother was smitten with her. He's been staring at her picture on the plane, but she's even more beautiful in person.

She recognizes him right away from the crowd. Her face lights up in the most breathtaking smile he's ever seen in his life. When she throws herself at him and shyly plants a sweet kiss on his lips, he forgets what he's come here for. And when she calls him 'Danny' in this breathy voice, her eyes awash with emotion and so much love… he doesn't correct her.

God forgive him, but he wants to take Daniel's place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arabella Rae
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386060451

Book preview

Introduction

The events that take place in this novel, specifically the war in Iraq are part fact and part fiction. The author deliberately and slightly embellished the timeline and created fictional events around the true events for dramatic purposes. Overall, this story is a work of fiction and shall be enjoyed as such. Happy reading!

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BLURB

Audrey Williams

Audrey has been waiting for this moment. After months of communicating long-distance, her boyfriend, Daniel Underwood, has finally come to see her for the first time. He’s a Marine officer serving in the Middle East.

Now he’s standing in front of her. In the flesh. Those pictures he sent her don’t do him justice. Daniel is the embodiment of her fairy tale fantasies. Tall, dashing, heroic—a modern-day knight. The man she’s been waiting for all her life. Her one true love.

She runs toward him, throwing herself into his arms. He catches her effortlessly. So strong. So hard. So warm. So hers.

She stares into his eyes and knows she belongs to him forever.

Danny, she sighs his beloved name.

Then she lifts her face and kisses him.

Zak Underwood

Veteran Soldier Zak Underwood’s twin brother, Daniel, was killed in action in the Middle East. A part of him has died, too, but Zak is left with one important thing to do for his brother, to see Daniel’s fiancee and tell her the sad news himself.

The truth is, Zak doesn’t care about Daniel’s very young girlfriend. He always thought that Daniel was nuts for promising to marry a woman sixteen years his junior, whom he hadn’t even met in person, but the war could turn lonely soldiers into textbook cases of hopeless romantics.

So here he is now, face to face with Daniel’s fiancee. Zak can understand now why his brother was smitten with her. He’s been staring at her picture on the plane, but she’s even more beautiful in person.

She recognizes him right away from the crowd. Her face lights up in the most breathtaking smile he’s ever seen in his life. When she throws herself at him and shyly plants a sweet kiss on his lips, he forgets what he’s come here for. And when she calls him ‘Danny’ in this breathy voice, her eyes awash with emotion and so much love… he doesn’t correct her.

God forgive him, but he wants to take Daniel’s place.

Prologue

ZAK

DANIEL AND I went a long way. A long, long way .

We were soldiers. Hardass ones. Eighteen years in the service, close to a dozen tours in the Middle East. Yeah, we were still alive. Call it luck. Or we were simply born for this.

I would speak for myself. I was born for this.

I’d wanted to be in The Corps after high school. My mind was set on entering NROTC and becoming a commissioned officer after graduation, and no one could stop me.

Daniel, the crybaby, couldn’t bear the thought of us being separated for long, so the fucker had to tag along, passing the mental exams with even higher scores than I did, the smart fuck. At least I kicked his ass in marksmanship later.

Daniel had aways been the softie between us. I knew I could have borne the separation, but then again, the point was moot. We were together, always had been.

Our battle cherries got popped after the Twin Towers went down. We shed our first blood in the Desert Storm.

We survived the gang bang. In fact, we ass-fucked Saddam and lived to tell about it. Got our cammies decorated with lots of colorful stripes and stars, too. We could do the fashion show, and we’d get a lot of pussies weeping to get stuffed by our star-spangled dicks.

You could call us seasoned veterans. Our cammies were always brand new, but our bodies had seen better days. What was inside our heads, the shit we’d seen and done would never be found in the pages of major broadsheets or told on prime time.

The news about the wars that peace-loving citizens lapped up on TV were for the movies, whitewashed and edited to inspire patriotism, not demoralize or antagonize fragile egos and shatter the American Dream. The regular folks back home didn’t have the stomach for the things we did in the name of America.

After almost a decade of fighting, the US troops had withdrawn from Iraq.

The war was over. Right?

Wrong.

It never stopped.

As long as we were here, it would never stop.

It just paused.

With politicians grappling for power in the White House and none of them owning responsibility when shit hit the fan, it all came down to a few thousand US troops left in this badly broken country.

I wouldn’t say the president was wrong in making the troops go home, leaving only a little fraction of its once mighty army, but I’d say the enemy might not have resurrected into a much stronger force had the troops stayed. But that was just my humble opinion.

Analyzing the decisions coming from the ‘echelons above reality’ was not my place. I was a soldier first and foremost, and I just followed orders.

Daniel and I were the remnants of the 168-thousand-strong United States army that shook the entire country from inside out, leaving it in shambles after dozens of bloody battles that toppled a dictator’s regime and broke down rebel resistance opposing the new US-backed transitional government.

It took almost a decade to attain relative peace in the main provinces. The peace that cost the lives of nearly five-thousand US soldiers and hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed.

I didn’t care to count the casualties from the other side or the innocent lives caught in the crossfires. It was paramount to focus on our own fundamental objectives to survive these wars.

Caring for the other side would blur your code as a soldier and make you ask existential questions that would never be answered. It would mind-fuck you. I didn’t want to self-sabotage. I had bigger plans for my career.

For the simple soldier in the battle lines, counting wins and losses was immaterial in the grand scheme of things. You were there to survive or go home in a box, or worse, get left in the desert to turn into the very thing you were created from— dirt.

I was no ordinary soldier. I was a fucking Major in the Marine Corps, and I did not attain this rank by sitting on my ass munching on Slim Jims within the secure walls of a base and barking orders from a radio system. I got my insignias by fighting at the battlefronts. I didn’t have to. I was a commissioned officer. But I chose to.

I lived for this. I breathed the desert like a woman’s dripping pussy. I fucked it like a hungry soldier on his R n R every time, and I never failed to get off on it. It was in my blood.

I could live here forever. Yeah, I could die here anytime, too. I was in it to win it for my country. That was my code, and it never got blurred or diluted by the blood and gore of my comrades fertilizing the barren sands of Iraq.

Even when the troops had moved out, I chose to remain here. Daniel didn’t want to leave me. As usual. So we were here together. Still.

Our new mission was to help rebuild what was left of this country, assist the transitional government in achieving stability. We’d been training their army to be smarter in combat, teaching them how to use more sophisticated weapons, supplying them with it, too.

Of course, what we did on the side and in between were classified. Suffice it to say that we were here to secure the interests of the United States above everything and everyone else.

All in all, it was relatively uneventful the past three years.

Until last week.

It all began.

Again.

Chapter One

ZAK

Tikrit, Iraq

THE STILLNESS OF THE ENCAMPMENT was deceiving. I knew what lurked in those sand dunes. The enemy. Still miles away, but closing in fast. I reckoned they wanted Baghdad, but most of the remaining US troops were still there. There was still a serious defense system guarding that area, especially the airport. They wouldn’t want to engage with heavy artillery there .

So, the insurgents were moving inward, skipping Baghdad. Obviously, Tikrit was next on their agenda. If Tikrit fell, they’d swoop down central Iraq and all would be lost.

A decade of fighting to liberate this country from this old enemy would all be in vain in less than a year if no intervention came in ASAP. Meanwhile, the Dems and the GOPs were busy politicking back home.

Sweet, huh?

I stared at the row of tattered tents in front of me. This Forward Operating Base or FOB was situated northeast of Tikrit, more than a hundred miles from Baghdad, one of the last few bases not dismantled when the US troops pulled out. This was used as a training ground for Iraqi Security Forces now, and Daniel was in charge here.

I chose to be more mobile, traveling from one base to another all over Iraq with my men, checking regional encampments and assessing logistics while gathering intel from the locals. Not many officers would take this assignment. Who needed to lose a limb while navigating the hostile desert?

The war was over, at least where the Americans were concerned. They’d rather wait out the remainder of their tours at the base camps. Me, I wanted the fucking promotion faster. That meant I had to risk losing a limb, or my life.

The heat beating down on me could make omelets in seconds. I was sweating buckets in my already soaked cammies, and my feet were numb inside my dusty boots. I could use some grub.

Where the fuck was Daniel? He should be welcoming me with a fucking feast. I was starving to death and T-Rats would taste like 5-star.

I’d been breathing sand and jarhead sense of humor the whole trip. They were good soldiers, my men, but I wasn’t amused one bit by their ribald jokes. The insurgents had turned the roads into an IED plantation and not knowing where they buried the motherfuckers was like playing Russian Roulette for four agonizing hours.

I’d been playing this game for more than a decade now, and I still hadn’t gotten the hang of it. Everyone had a pet-peeve. Mine was getting blown to bits by an IED. I’d rather die eating bullets while taking down as many as I could with me to the afterlife.

Corporal! I barked at a fobbit. I could easily spot one. Pale in the face and jumpy as fuck. The young soldier most probably had never been far from the base, but he might just join the party on the front lines soon. We needed all the men to defend this place.

He jerked into attention, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Sir!

What was this kid still doing here? He should have jumped on a C-130 the moment he got the chance, along with the majority of the troops. Where’s your commander?

In his tent, sir!

I held back from flash-blasting the kid. There are about a hundred fucking tents here, soldier. Lead the way, I said dryly.

He scrambled to guide me toward Daniel’s tent.

We passed through a mix of Iraqi and American soldiers idling about in their full battle rattles. Most were smoking. Hash by the smell of it, the Iraqis’ favorite poison. The tension was high in the air. They saluted when I passed by, most of them looking at me strangely.

Yeah, their commander looked like a fucking mujahideen with hair and beard down to the fucking sand, only he was in dirty cammies. With the shit I did, I had to blend with the locals for cover.

As you were, boys! I shouted to them in general. My English probably pacified them as they looked relieved.

The fobbit stopped and gestured to the tent slightly separated from the rest. In there, sir.

I nodded. Thank you, soldier. Dismissed.

He saluted and ran away like a scared rabbit, probably to take a leak. I could smell his fear.

Kids who fantasized about being on the front lines while still in boot camp always got a swift kick in the nuts the moment they stepped into the real hot spot. No more simulated battles or pissing contests. Your head could get blown off by a sniper any second without you firing even a single bullet toward the enemy from the gun you’d been practicing with for four fucking years.

Yeah. That was the reality in these parts.

Sucked like a whore, no fucking pun.

I stealthily entered the tent. The sole occupant didn’t even move from his position. I could have blown the fucker’s head off, and he wouldn’t even know what hit him.

I clenched my jaw. I wanted to snatch the fucking phone from his hand. The idiot was laughing at whoever he was talking to on the other line.

Oh, I had a good idea who it was. Only that particular person could put a silly grin on Daniel’s face lately. He was laughing like a giddy teenager, forgetting he was in the middle of fucking war.

Fuck that woman. And fuck my brother for falling in love with her.

Yeah, that stupid shit was my brother. Only brother. Twin brother. I would die for him. Would kill for him. Would probably have not much reason to live without him. And this woman was making him distracted, complacent and careless.

I cleared my throat.

"Don’t get your panties in a twist, brother. I knew it