Just Marry Me Already (BWWM Romance Book 1) Read online

  Just Marry Me Already

  A very convenient marriage, but a love neither expected...

  A sexy marriage of convenience romance by Ayo Campbell of BWWM Club. Features another free bonus book.

  Vanessa’s been going alone for so long, she could have a degree in independence.

  Estranged from her mother and abandoned by her father as a child, she's trying to carve out a new life in Seattle.

  But everything’s thrown out of whack when her mother dies, and Vanessa returns to Boston for the funeral.

  It turns out everyone’s depending on her to take over her mother’s diner - the two workers need the job.

  But it’s the diner's handsome stranger Justin who catches her eye.

  As Vanessa tries to track down her father and brother to share the inheritance, Justin is the one by her side.

  But the independent, make-it-on-my-own attitude Vanessa has worked hard to cultivate comes crashing down with an unusual proposal, and long lost family members coming back into the frame.

  Will Vanessa push everyone away, just like she always has?

  Or will she find the strength to let love - and romance - become a part of her life for the first time?

  Find out in this emotional, super hot romance by Ayo Campbell of BWWM Club.

  Suitable for over 18s only due to sex scenes so hot, you’ll be looking for your own handsome stranger.

  Tip: Search BWWM Club on Amazon to see more of our great books.

  Get Another BWWM eBook Free!

  Hi there. As a special thank you for buying this ebook, for a limited time I want to send you another one completely free of charge directly to your email! You can get it by clicking the cover below or going here:

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  Copyright © 2017 to Ayo Campbell and AfroRomanceBooks.com. No part of this book can be copied or distributed without written permission from the above copyright holders.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Bonus Book – Carrying His Baby

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

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  Chapter 1

  Eat Mo’ Bettah

  The sign above the lunch counter of Roxy’s Diner had always annoyed Vanessa. Printed in some huge loony-tune font, as if the letters themselves were dancing, the words were shouted from a cartoonish, fat mammy complete with polka-dot apron and head scarf holding up a bluish Afro.

  The first time she had seen it, Vanessa was only nine years old. But even at that innocent age, she knew that there was something humiliating about the caricature, though she didn’t have the words for it. But her brother did.

  “It is demeaning,” he said. “It is demeaning, degrading, and shameful.”

  “It’s funny,” her mother replied.

  “It’s oppressive. It represents every stereotype that black people have been fighting against for two centuries.”

  “Samuel,” her mother said with a sad little sigh. “Not everything is about race.”

  “In this world,” he cried, “in this time, everything is about race, because if it wasn’t, after all the blood, sweat, and tears that you’ve put into this crappy place, you should be running a fancy-assed restaurant uptown like that Lillian woman, and not still stuck in this shithole.”

  “Watch your language!”

  “Well, it is a shithole of a neighborhood. And if you think that I am going to wash your dishes and scrub your pots while Aunt Jemima hangs up there, all smiles and happy to serve, you can think again.”

  “Samuel!”

  But her mother spoke to his back as the diner door slammed shut, the little bell above tinkling as if angry too.

  “Why’s her hair blue?” Vanessa asked, still looking up at the sign.

  “Because it’s funny.”

  After that, Vanessa remembered being given an old, wooden lettuce crate to stand on, while her mom taught her how to run the dishwasher.

  It seemed so very, very long ago. And while sixteen years was a long time, it felt so very much longer. She remembered how, as she grew, she had come to see that that scene more as Sam’s excuse to quit the diner than it was about his sense of racial exploitation. She also remembered how that was the year that so many things in their lives as a family had changed.

  Of course, she realized as she walked along the counter, spinning the stool tops, that it may not have been that things had changed so much, as it was that, at nine years old, she was becoming aware.

  Her mother and father weren’t getting along. But then, Vanessa could never remember a time when they did. Her father was stevedore, working since he was sixteen at the shipyards in East Boston. Years of long hours and manual labor had sculpted the man into a black Adonis. She remembered his complexion as being that deep, rich, almost coal black of the Caribbean. She remembered how that color would sometimes shine, especially on sultry summer days.

  Those days, they would often picnic with friends on the elementary school playground; the parks had been overrun by the gangs. They’d share the foods that the mothers had made in the early, early mornings; at five AM, you could fry chicken or catfish, and by that afternoon, the refrigerated food would still be moist, tender and so tasty.

  “Oh, yeah,” people would say as the fare was presented. “Gonna eat mo’ bettah.”

  But it was the watermelon that always made the meal. Impervious to heat, the luscious melons were so cheap, and yet they were so priceless. There would always be a long, fat one on the picnic table. And when it came time to cut it open, the children would be called from their play to watch as Vanessa’s father, always with his shirt off, would take an old island machete, raise his powerful arms, and slice it deftly – right there, on the middle of the table. Then he would grab the heart of the red pulp for his own, the muscles in his arms gleaming so very black and proud.

  Mothers would carve and dole out pieces. They would give the succulence according to a pecking order that Vanessa never understood. But every time that she got her piece, she thought it the best, and she ate it down to the rind and beyond.

  The taste of watermelon always tickled that memory. She walked around the counter, gliding her finger along the edge. She stopped at the small refrigerator, wondering if there was watermelon inside. But she knew better; of course there would be. Along with bread n’ butter pickles, six kinds of relish, seven of mustard, horseradish, dipping sauces, and Greek yogurt. She smiled a small sad smile as she looked. There wasn’t a bottle of ketchup to be seen. At home, her father would put ketchup on everything.

  Though he had come up from Richmond, he had always taken pride in his Caribbean heritage. And he also carried a sort of smugness about him because, though poor and put down, his family had never been slaves. Her mother, on the other hand, was the great-grand-daughter of a slave girl who had escaped the burning of Atlanta. Louise Maye had been sixteen and pregnant. A rum runner had smuggled her up t
o Boston, and Vanessa always wondered the price of passage.

  A grainy old framed photograph of Louise had hung lovingly in their old tenement – until the day that her father had gone on that rampage. The glass was smashed and the frame cracked. But the photo survived, and ended up in a cheap, second-hand store frame on the desk in the restaurant’s office. Vanessa had first seen it there the day she was impressed into service as the dishwasher, that year when things began to change.

  When her mother and father had married, they moved in with his mother. Granny Davis had taught Ellen, her young daughter-in-law, Cajun and Creole cooking. But soon, Ellen had been cursed with the black woman’s bane: two babies and a big butt. Ever since Vanessa could remember, her mother had always been a big woman. And ever since she could remember, her father had always berated her for that.

  “When you gonna loose that fat ass?” he’d shout at her, especially when he’d been drinking.

  “When you buy this fat ass a membership to Gold’s.”

  It was the time when fitness was a fad all over the country, and gyms were sprouting up everywhere. But everywhere they sprouted were the places where the white people lived and worked. There weren’t a lot of them in Brookline in those days.

  Vanessa would see them as she rode the bus to school. Slender and pretty white women, dressed in black spandex walking nowhere on those machines, and gleaming with such lovely sweat.

  “They’d laugh you right outta that place,” her father would say.

  “Well, maybe if you’d try and give me some exercise sometime.”

  “I ain’t wallowing in that tub of lard.”

  That was when the shouting would start, and so that was when Vanessa would run and hide in her bedroom. She shared the room with Sam. Her brother was a teenager at the time, and so like all teenagers, he hated his privacy being disturbed. If he wasn’t on the phone with some girl, he’d be practicing his guitar. He’d roll his eyes as she crept in, but he’d hear the shouting, and so put up with it. Vanessa would sit in her corner with her book, and try to be very small and quiet.

  She liked when he would play, though. It was an electric guitar, and he had no amp, so the sounds were soft and low. For the longest time she wondered why the thing had only four strings, and not six like the one the woman in church played. She asked him one time if he couldn’t afford the other two strings, and he laughed long and loud.

  “This, Vanna,” he said, “is a bass. The bass is what drives the rhythm. It is the heart, the soul of soul.”

  She had no idea at the time what he meant. But it sounded nice, and she liked listening as he practiced. He would often play a riff over and over, stopping in the middle and starting again. Vanessa memorized the tunes; she particularly liked the one from The Wizard of Oz. And though she never heard him play with an amplifier and speaker, Sam got very good with his ax that year when things changed.

  That was the time when Uncle-Grandpa started visiting. He was an older white man, with a little bit of grey in his hair. He wore JC Penny suits, but to Vanessa it was as classy as anything she’d see on Law and Order. And he even wore a Rolex watch.

  The diner was closed on Mondays, and when Vanessa got home from school, there would be that man sitting in her kitchen with her mother, drinking coffee. They would always have such real smiles on their faces, and Uncle-Grandpa always had such nice things to say to her mother. He would often have a candy bar for Vanessa, and on the days that he didn’t, he’d give her a dollar to go out and buy one, as long as she’d keep his visit a secret. And when she asked about his funny name, he just told her that his niece called him that because of his grey hair.

  Later on in life, after Vanessa realized that the man wasn’t there just for coffee, she figured that they gave him that absurd name so that if she ever let his name slip, people would laugh, and figure that he was her imaginary friend. But, even later in life, she had to wonder about the name.

  That was also the year of the baseball strike, and her father was quite upset about that. He loved his beer and ball games, and when that was denied him, he took to hanging out at the local tavern, shooting pool. That was just fine with Vanessa, because then she could watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the X-Files, even if they were reruns. But it was August of that year when things really changed. School had just started, and Vanessa was watching TV with her homework one Sunday night, when her father burst into the room.

  “Who the hell is Tony Julliano?” he demanded of her mother.

  “What? Who?”

  “I said–”

  But Vanessa never heard what else he said. She grabbed her books and dashed into her bedroom, Sam rolling his eyes again. But they both soon realized that this fight was different. It was louder, it was stronger, and though she couldn’t understand it clearly, Vanessa heard words that the teenagers used. Then she heard the door slam, and then it was quiet. She and Sam traded a look, and Vanessa saw in his eyes something she had never seen, something like fear.

  But the next morning, her mother fixed her breakfast, sent her off to school, and all seemed normal, until she came home. She expected to see Uncle-Grandpa, but the place was trashed. Things were smashed and broken all over the place, even the TV had been kicked in. Vanessa stood in the doorway, her little mind unable to grasp what she was seeing. Her mother knelt, stone-face, picking away the fragments of glass from the photo of Louise.

  “Mommy?” Vanessa asked timidly. “What happened?”

  “Your father…” she began, then she got quiet a while. Then she said, “Just, just help me pick this place up, then we’ll have supper. I’ll make you fried chicken. You love fried chicken.”

  “But…but Daddy…”

  “He won’t be home tonight. Now go and get the broom and dustpan.”

  But Daddy never came home, and Vanessa had always been confused about her feelings. There was a hole inside of her, something familiar had been lost. But that loss was perplexing: her father had never been that loving or caring, but he had always been there. After he’d left, Vanessa could never understand why. But then, she realized that so many other girls in her school had no father, and she wondered if that was just the way things were.

  Samuel, however, was angry. When he came home and understood what had happened, he blamed her mother for everything, saying something like, “This is just one more way that the white man uses us, and then doesn’t give a shit about the damage and destruction he leaves behind!”

  “Samuel! Language!”

  It was a few weeks later when everything changed again. Vanessa was at the diner. Her mother was cooking and her brother was the dishwasher. Because her father wasn’t at home, Vanessa had to do her homework on the counter. She didn’t mind that much. The waitresses kept her in soda, and she got to watch the small TV. That afternoon business was slow. Lillian Durkin, the diner’s owner, breezed in that evening and announced that she had gotten some kind of windfall, and so bought herself a new restaurant uptown. She cut everyone their final paycheck, slipping in a little something extra, and emptied her desk.

  “But,” Vanessa’s mother said. “What about this place? What about us? Our jobs?”

  The two waitress and Samuel stood in the middle of the dining room, gaping from their check to Lillian, and then to Vanessa’s mother.

  “Frankly, Ellen,” the woman said, tossing her the shop keys. “I don’t give a damn. Just lock up when you leave.”

  And with that, Lillian turned and left, never to be seen by any of them again. Ellen stared down at the keys, then to the people staring at her.

  “Ellen?” one of the waitresses asked. “What are we gonna do? I need this job.”

  “I…” she began. “We…we’re gonna eat mo’ bettah. I’m gonna need more eggs for the morning. What’s in the till?”

  Everyone began talking at once. Vanessa shrugged and turned back to Family Matters.

  And so Vanessa’s mother became the de-facto manager of Roxy’s Diner. With no ownership, no perm
ission, and no one to care, Roxy’s quietly carried on. Their wholesalers weren’t bothered, as long as the bills were paid. And various city and the health department inspectors could be bribed in a variety of ways.

  For a while, Ellen and Samuel had made peace. She had let him go with his band for practice on Monday nights, he had traded his bass for a trumpet, and her mother and everyone in the building hated hearing him. And he would often leave her stranded on the weekends that he had a gig. She let it go.

  Over the next year, the business did well enough, but the hours were long, and Ellen was growing more and more haggard. She and Samuel would often stay up late in the night talking at the kitchen table about Sam’s favorite topic: the contemporary, black cultural experience. And something in those conversations moved something in Ellen, for more and more her specials began taking on an African, Cajun, or Creole flavor, and they were becoming a hit with the locals. So, it was that by the time Vanessa turned nine, the place had turned almost completely ethnic. It was doing so well that, on a whim, Ellen hired a local artist to create that sign:

  Eat Mo’ Bettah

  And, despite Samuel’s haughty rejection of the thing, her customers chuckled, and over time her customers wouldn’t say, “Let’s go to Roxy’s” but rather, “Let’s go eat mo’ bettah”.

  By the time that Vanessa turned twelve, Samuel had moved out, and in with his girlfriend, Tiffany. Again, Vanessa felt a hole in her where there was another loss, but this time, she had gotten something out of that: her very own, private room. She immediately set about making it her own, pasting the dresser mirror with pictures of her favorite TV stars and a range of pithy and meaningful quotes. Sam was still in the city, and he would come by for holidays and birthdays, and Vanessa liked Tiffany.

  As she entered her teenage years, Vanessa began to hate the diner and her job as a scullery. She would often just skip work, and when confronted by her mother, she’d simply reply that she had more important things to do.

  Of course, those ‘more important things’ were boys. Brookline in the late nineties wasn’t as harsh as Roxbury, but it had its share of gangs and drugs, and while Vanessa managed to avoid the bangers, drugs were just too easy, and a pretty, young teenage girl had lots of ways to pay for them.