From When Good Things Happen to Bad Boys Anthology

Violet Caruthers had known that Frank wasn’t the most attentive of boyfriends. But if she had been asked, she would have thought that even he would have noticed that his girlfriend had fallen off the back of his fishing boat.

She would have been wrong.

Violet coughed as the shock of cool lake water splashed over her face, and she flailed her arms in panic to keep herself afloat. “Frank!” she screamed at the back of the retreating boat.

The churning motor, the spraying surf, and the obnoxious laughter of the fool she was having sex with drowned out her cry.

She hated dating.

Hated flirting, and posturing, and all the awkward accompaniments of sharing an intimate relationship with a man. She was painfully shy, always had been, and if it wasn’t for one deep, driving urge, she wouldn’t be forcing herself to do it at all.

Except she wanted a baby.

“Frank!” she shrieked again as the enormity of the situation smacked her like the rocking wave from the boat’s wake. “Oh, this is bad, this is really, really bad.”

Frank was too busy chatting with his buddies, boasting over his walleye-catching prowess to even notice that she had lost her grip walking to the cooler for a bottled water. Before she could even blink, she’d fallen right off the side of the boat like some lackwit in a Steve Martin movie.

She wasn’t athletic, but she’d never thought of herself as a klutz before. But that was neither here nor there because she was covered in briny lake water, her glasses dripping from the spray, and she was in the middle of bleepity-bleep nowhere.

Surely he would notice. Seriously. In just a second or two. Any minute now. After all, she was his girlfriend. They had been dating for four months, having sex for weeks and weeks now. They were in a committed relationship. All because she had thought he was just quite possibly nice enough, intelligent enough, and egotistical enough to agree to her plan to have him father a child.