Emilie Richards - The Swallow's Nest

In the following months they had chatted occasionally, talking about everything, except her pregnancy. She hadn’t told him about the baby, preferring to pretend to herself, as well as to him, that she was carefree and single. After all, who did it hurt? But a month after Toby’s birth, he had invited her to dinner. The new girlfriend was out of his life, and by then, Graham was definitely out of hers.

The community where he lived was divided into villages sprawling over land where a vineyard and winery once stood, and his village was near tennis courts and the clubhouse restaurant. The villa, while small, was still three times larger than Marina’s apartment, with every possible amenity.

Blake fell into the amenity category.

This morning Marina woke slowly and saw the sun was high in the sky. She could hardly remember days when she had slept until she was ready to wake up, but she was rapidly getting used to it. Even before the baby she’d needed to be at her job early, and weekends had been filled with shopping and cleaning or helping Deedee with some project she couldn’t complete on her own. But this morning no alarm had awakened her, and now Blake stood beside the bed they’d shared for a week with a cup of steaming coffee in his hands.

“Sleeping Beauty,” he said fondly.

She slid up to a sitting position and pulled the top sheet over her breasts before taking the cup. On the evening she had volunteered to meet him here, Blake had invited her to stay the night, and she had never gone home. Although he had taken her on a surprise shopping trip during her second day in residence, she hadn’t bothered with a nightgown.

She took her first sip and realized he’d added cream, exactly the way she liked it. She tried to remember when a man had remembered even the important details about her, much less what she put in her coffee.

“This is such a lovely treat. Thank you.” She lifted the cup to her lips. “How long have you been up?”

He smiled, teeth white against tanned skin. “I had a little work to do, so I got up at seven.”

Blake was semiretired from a company that had something to do with network processors. He’d started the business himself, and his two sons—one of whom was a year older than Marina—were now in charge. Blake still went to his headquarters occasionally and worked each morning on a laptop in the kitchen dining nook. If he thought about work when they were together, he never let on.

Cream in her coffee was just one example of the attention he had lavished on her.

She patted the place beside her, and he sat. He was wearing khaki slacks and one of his endless supply of polo shirts. His cheeks were ruddy from shaving, and his brown eyes sparkled. He smelled like soap and aftershave, and she wasn’t at all sorry to wake in his bed.

“I have to go back to work on Monday,” she said, “so I’ll need to go home this afternoon and get all my things ready. But haven’t we had a good time?”

“You’re sure you have to go?”

She pursed her lips seductively. “I’m a working girl.”

“How well do you like your job?”

From the beginning he’d seemed interested, so she’d already told him a little about her position with a building materials supplier, about the way she facilitated sales and analyzed data, about the endless trips to construction sites with promotional items and a ready smile.

She answered truthfully. “I like putting together sales presentations. I like traveling to job sites but not the waiting around.”

“Are you looking for something else?”

She wondered if Blake was going to offer her a job at his company, and then she wondered how his sons would like that. “Right after college I got a great job in public relations in LA, and I loved it.”

She didn’t add that even more, she had liked the fact that single executives had been plentiful, and she’d dated her share. She’d been in no hurry, looking at net worth, future prospects and work habits before she went on to appearance, intelligence and humor. She hadn’t viewed her assessments as particularly calculating. She had simply done for herself what parents in other cultures did for their daughters.

Blake still seemed interested. “Why did you quit?”

She’d quit because Deedee had suffered a heart attack, and of course, Marina’s brothers hadn’t lifted a finger to help. She’d left behind a new lover who owned a chain of blue chip financial planning firms and called a congressman from northern California “Cousin.”

She bent the truth. “I missed my family. And it’s no sacrifice to live in San Jose, is it?” She smiled. “Just think, I never would have met you.”

“My lucky break.”

“What do you have planned for the day?”

“Bridge at noon.”

“Are you going to teach me to play?”

“You’re too smart. As it is I’m going to have to watch myself on the golf course.”

He had escorted her to the Par 3 course yesterday and given basic instructions. She’d realized the real meaning of senior living when he’d introduced her to his golfing buddies who had looked her over the way a starving man looks at a steak dinner. Blake was just old enough to be her father, but his friends were straying into grandfather territory.

“I probably like being outside or in bed better than I’d like being at a card table anyway.” She winked at him.

His eyes lit approvingly. “Do you like it here?”

“Why wouldn’t I? The place is gorgeous.”

“Sometimes I miss my house. Four bedrooms and a view of the mountains. My wife’s garden was her life. After Franny died I couldn’t stand to see it going to seed.”

“Is that why you moved here?”

“I wanted something smaller. Everything I could possibly want is here.” He had long, slender fingers, like a musician or an artist. He touched her hair and pushed a strand off her cheek, his fingertips lingering. “Especially now that you’re here, too.”

“I’ll come back if you want me. Maybe on weekends?”

“You could move in, Rina. There’s room.”

She took a moment to imagine life here. She would still have to keep her apartment, in case Blake got tired of her. She’d have the usual bills, although he always paid when they went out. After Toby’s birth he’d taken her to the symphony, expensive restaurants, a play. Deedee had been persuaded to take Toby for those hours, and Marina had wanted to forget everything about her real life and pretend she was the woman she’d been before the pregnancy.

Somehow, because she hadn’t wanted to scare him away, even then she hadn’t gotten around to telling Blake she was a new mother.

For a week now she’d carefully schooled herself not to think about the baby. Graham’s frantic texts—unanswered—had assured her that Toby was still alive and screaming. She wondered where Lilia fit into that scenario, or if she even did. Since Marina didn’t want to think about any of it, after one text too many she had blocked Graham’s number.

Did she feel guilty? If she did, guilt was buried under layers of disappointment and anger. She had fulfilled her part of their bargain, but Graham had not. Now the baby she had never wanted was his to fix. And okay, that made her a bad person, or at least a bad mother. But sadly she had never felt like a mother, just an overworked babysitter.

The whole situation had finally come to a head one night on one of her marathon phone calls with Blake. Realizing she couldn’t continue to keep such a big secret, she had finally broached the subject of children. He’d confessed he was glad child rearing was behind him. His sons were adults, and he wasn’t sorry they were.

She’d hung up once more without telling him about Toby, but in that final week before Graham’s party, when her thoughts about the baby had frightened her, she’d realized that, like Blake, she needed to put child rearing behind her, too.