Leah Vale - The Rich Man's Baby

Not caring anymore where he stepped, Harrison moved to her side. This close, he could easily make out the features of her profile. As before, he was struck by her loveliness. Little wonder he’d never completely forgotten her. Seeing her, free from the earlier distractions, Harrison confirmed again that he’d had very good reasons for never contacting her. She was more than a threat to his vow to never care about a woman enough that he lost control of his emotions; she was an all-out assault.

Not even the hardness of her expression diminished her effect on him. Once again he found himself wanting to get lost in her, to forget about the burdens he carried, the frustrations he bore. He wanted to meld with her and not have to manage or dictate or supervise, but just be.

Damn it.

Thank God he wasn’t the same irresponsible man he’d been over two years ago. He couldn’t allow himself to give in to the out-of-control desire he apparently still harbored. He was stronger now. He could risk having her in his life. As the mother of his child. Nothing more.

“Juliet,” he whispered. Her knees dropped away from her chest an inch or two, as if the sound of her name on his lips weakened her defenses. “Juliet, please. It’s just you and me here. You don’t have to pretend. We need to talk about our son.”

She finally looked at him, but in the failing light he couldn’t identify the emotion in her tear-swollen eyes. “He’s my son. Not ours. Not anybody’s but mine.”

He heard what he hadn’t been able to see. The tortured strain of her voice told him what she was feeling, why she’d been crying. He wasn’t surprised when she pulled her knees up tight against her again. She was feeling besieged.

“Look, Juliet, I know how you feel. I know you’re afraid. Of what, I’m not exactly sure, but—”

“Oh, so you know how I feel? How is that? Considering you don’t even know me.”

His empathy beginning to give way to frustration, he leaned in close. “You and I both know how well I know you.”

She jerked away from him like she’d been slapped. Harrison pulled back and let out a noisy breath. He was doing this all wrong. She would never let him help her if she stayed mad at him. He needed to make up for the damage he’d done before he found out about Nathan.

“I’m sorry, Juliet. Today has been a little trying for me, too. It’s not every day a man walks into a store to buy gum and walks out a father. So forgive me if I’m not as patient or as understanding as I should be.”

She turned to look at him again. “Is that the only reason you stopped? For gum?”

Harrison squinted hard at her, trying to cut through the gloom to see what emotion swam in her dark eyes. He wanted to be sure that he had been right earlier, that she had been waiting for him to come back for her. The possibility revived the wildness he’d felt then. He did his damnedest to clamp a lid on it.

Planting his hands on his hips, he shifted his weight to his squishy, wet shoe. “Well, since I’m trying to get you to be honest, I suppose I have to tell you the truth, too.” He shifted his weight back and softened the truth considerably. “No. I didn’t stop to get gum. I came up here because a stupid, silly part of me was hoping to see again the beautiful, barefoot woman I’d never been able to forget.”

He could just make out the narrowing of her eyes. “A stupid, silly part of you?”

So she suffered from a touch of vanity. Good. He was powerless against her stubbornness and strength of will, but vanity he could work with. Despite the fact he would be testing his control to the max, he’d have her agreeing to let him be a part of Nathan’s life yet.

He leaned toward her, ignoring how her fresh, clean smell filled his head and opened the door to all sorts of physical needs. “The stupid, silly part of me who still scans the sky for eight tiny reindeer on Christmas Eve and makes a wish when I blow out my birthday candles.”

Her lips parted slightly, then she tightened them and frowned. “But what about when you said you wished I had left for college and gotten married?”

“I panicked,” he lied. He couldn’t very well tell her he’d meant to squash the hope shining in her eyes. “You were so beautiful standing there, more beautiful than I’d remembered, and I felt like a bastard for not coming back.”

Her hold on her legs went slack and her knees dropped away from her chest again. This time nearly a foot.

He let the silence build for a while before he broke it. “Why didn’t you let me know I’d made you pregnant, Juliet? Why didn’t you tell me I had a child?”

“How could I? I didn’t know who you were,” she whispered, then pulled her knees back up.

Rife with regret, he ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” He had to make her understand that he hadn’t used her, that what had happened between them hadn’t been about sex. It had been about trying to focus on life instead of death, about being free of the sorrows and pressures of his existence for a moment or two.

He reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, the material of her white T-shirt doing a poor job of keeping at bay the memory of the texture of her skin. “I’ve thought about you, and our time together, a lot. It’s not that I didn’t want to come back…but…” He fumbled for an explanation that wasn’t as insulting as the bald truth. “But my responsibilities made it impossible for me to come see you again.”

“Because I’m from—” she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers “—the wrong side of the tracks.” Her words virtually dripped with disgust. “I’m sort of curious. Why did you come anywhere near me in the first place?”

“It mostly had to do with my mother.” He surprised himself with his truthful answer. He’d never talked about how his mother’s death had affected him with anyone. His family knew, but they never spoke of that time. There was something about Juliet that made him step beyond the boundaries he set for himself. Something he’d avoid if he were smart.

She gave him a sarcastically doleful look. “Your mother.”

Compelled to defend himself after making such a ridiculous-sounding statement, he explained, “About the time I returned home from school to start at Two Rivers, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had the most radical surgery available and came through the chemo okay, so we figured she’d be fine.”

He ran a hand over his eyes and fought to push down the swell of pain. The pain was precisely why he never spoke of those terrible days. “After a couple of years, the cancer came back, though, and it spread everywhere…”

An image came to mind of his mom, pale and shaking with pain. “She used to refuse the morphine so she would be lucid enough to talk to me about how work was going when I returned home in the evening. I did my damnedest to always have good news for her.

“She was so angry with me when I refused to go to the office near the end. She wanted me to be an even bigger success running the family business than my father, but there was no way I wasn’t going to be with her, to help her fight for her life.”

He shook his head sadly at his inability to help her. The cancer proved stronger than his bright, vibrant mother, and she’d slipped away. “Everyone except my dad was there with her when she died. He couldn’t handle seeing it happen. I couldn’t handle it afterward, so I took off on my motorcycle for a week and ended up here.”

He paused, struggling to put the pain back in the dark pit where it belonged. “It’s never good to love someone so much that you lose control like that.”

He felt the warmth of her fingers, then her palm as she slipped her hand over his forearm, her touch more comforting than anything he’d ever felt. He slowly swayed toward her, wanting to wrap himself around her and absorb her like a balm for his hurt. But she broke the contact and forced him back to the difficult reality of the situation.