Resist You (Unchained Attraction Book 3)

by K. L. Shandwick

  “I can’t remember… can’t concentrate,” she said in a flat tone.

  “I suspected as much. You look exhausted. Did you sleep much last night?”

  “Maybe an hour or two.” She shrugged, helplessly.

  “Give me five minutes to tie up a couple of things from the office. Drink the tea, then I’m taking you back to bed.”

  For an hour I lay awake spooning with Tricia close to my chest as she slept cocooned in my arms. The one underneath her had gone numb, but I didn’t care because her steady breathing as she slept was worth it. I was concerned because the last thing she had needed was for her health to suffer on top of everything else.

  My thoughts were scattered and I had what had become a familiar tight feeling in my chest again. The timing of the girl’s contact worried me, and it made me consider whether Tricia had been having second thoughts about confronting her mom in light of this.

  My cell buzzed somewhere in the distance, but thankfully I’d kept it on vibrate so as not to disrupt Tricia’s sleep. Easing my arm slowly from beneath her, I made it out of bed and tiptoed quietly into the sitting room. Finding my cell, I saw a message from Richard and called him back.

  “Got all registered births for a week either side of the date you gave me, and all adoption papers filed in the state of New York and matched them against the parents details we have. Nothing coming up for that name, are you sure she had the baby in New York?”

  “Yeah, definitely, I confirmed that again with her,” I said in a low voice, as I sat on down on my couch and ran my hand through my hair, confused.

  “Then there’s something odd about this. Could be a private adoption where the parents registered the baby as their natural child. It’s rare and illegal, but it does happen.”

  “Who is that?” Tricia asked, padding out of the bedroom, her hand holding her head.

  “I’ll call you back in a while, let me talk to her.” I glanced at Tricia and she still looked tired, but her eyes were wide in question.

  “Come and sit here,” I coaxed, patting the seat beside me. She sat down and I turned my body to face her and took her hands in mine.

  “Right, I know this is tough, but I need to take you back to the day the baby was born. Can you remember what happened after you gave birth?”

  “Not a lot immediately after, I was bleeding and they didn’t give me the baby to hold. They gave me a jab to stop the bleeding and I had cramps. I wasn’t feeling well and began vomiting. There was some rushing around and someone gave me another jab of something… a sedative I think, and something for the nausea. I remember crying—being distraught—then I don’t remember much.” Tricia bit her lip and wrung her hands together, and I saw how disturbed she felt by my question.

  “Can you remember anything about the paperwork?”

  “Just two papers which stated I was placing the baby for adoption, it was on letter-headed notepaper, no names, but I do remember both me and my mom had to sign it, but that’s all.”

  “Okay, you did great, baby. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to Richard with what you’ve told me and see if it helps him make some progress.”

  After encouraging Tricia to have a bath, Rhea called to ask if I could swing by the office again and sign a couple of contracts that were pending and couldn’t wait. Tricia assured me she’d be fine while I was gone.

  On the way down in the elevator, I suddenly wondered what Erin looked like. I texted her before I left the building on the cell number she had provided and asked her if she would mind forwarding a picture. The excuse I gave was that it may ‘humanize’ any appeal when approaching any potential relatives.

  I had arranged to meet Rhea at the front desk in the entrance lobby of our building and quickly fact checked the two contracts that had been prepared for me to sign off. After I did this, I left the office and started again for home. A text alert came in which I knew instinctively had come from Erin.

  My feet faltered and I ground to a halt when I opened the message and stood. My heart racing as I stared at the image of a woman around Sawyer’s age, who looked strikingly like her mother. Long dark blonde hair, but with hazel eyes, yet the rest of her features looked almost identical to Tricia’s. I had expected to look for some similarities, but the likeness to her mother threw me completely off-kilter.

  I began walking quickly back to our apartment then stopped wondering what to do with this new piece of information I’d found. Do I just show her? Do I wait until she’s spoken to her mom? Do I wait for documentary evidence or dive straight in and share what I know with Tricia? In five days, she may have answers from her mom. Could she wait that long?

  Instead of rushing back I called her therapist, Miles. After waiting on the sidewalk for eight whole minutes Miles called me back.

  “Sorry, I was in session, James. I know who you are, but I’m afraid I can’t discuss anything my client says without her permission.”

  I explained I understood but went on to tell him about Tricia’s decision, the visit to her parents, and Marnie’s disclosure. Once I had done this and I brought him up to speed, I asked for his advice.

  “I have an emergency slot at 4:00 p.m. I’m going to call Tricia now. I will tell her you’ve called me, and I’ll suggest a couple’s session this afternoon. Does that work for you?”

  “Anything works as long as she gets the support she needs to make the right choice. I don’t want her to feel pressured into meeting Erin unless she’s had time to absorb all of this. Everything is happening too fast. The last thing she needs is another event that’s going to make her feel worse.” I’d seen a picture of Erin, and after seeing what she looked like, it had left me in no doubt she was Tricia’s daughter.

  “This woman has sent me a picture and you need to know, I absolutely believe that this woman is Tricia’s daughter. I’m not going to disclose this to her right now, as I am afraid she will jump at the chance to meet her without having all her facts together when she does.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Tricia’s emergency session with Miles was a godsend as he gently probed her to think about the order of events. She had already made arrangements to meet with her mom, and she suggested having a DNA test with Erin to speed up the process of confirming Erin’s relationship to her.

  Personally, I knew if she saw the picture, she wouldn’t need one, but I thought if I had been in Tricia’s shoes I’d have wanted to see as much evidence as I could. Miles had suggested I hold back on further contact with Erin until after Tricia had confronted her mom. He felt Tricia needed a clear focus on her mother to obtain answers she had spent most of her life without, and we knew she would only achieve this if she could stay in control of her feelings.

  During the session, I also pointed out Erin may have questions about her adoption that Tricia would struggle to answer without talking to her mother first. It was this thought that swung it, and so she agreed she would wait.

  As I thought, Miles helped clear Tricia’s head and she later agreed with me the next logical step was to meet with her mother, but the night before they were due to meet I worried she may not go through with it. She was naturally irritable and had a mountain of nervous energy she had been finding hard to contain.

  “Get your jacket,” I stated, when she’d walked in front of the TV for the fourth time in less than five minutes.

  “Why, where are we going?”

  “Out. Times Square. You’re not too old to eat a great hotdog, are you?” It was unusual for us to be in the city on a Friday night.

  Tricia grinned. “Hotdog? Is that a euphemism for something dirty?”

  “Depends on how your mind is working and I know yours has been all over the place these past five days.” Her comment gave me a great idea to distract her. “Get your jacket, I want to take you somewhere.”

  “You said, Times Square.”

  “To start with, yes. Play your cards right and there could be a prize at the end of it.”

  “Oh, now I’m interest
ed, I love a good gamble.” Grabbing a linen jacket from her closet, I took it from her hands and held it while she put it on. “I love you taking care of me,” she admitted, turning and sliding her arms around my waist. “You wanted a girlfriend and look what you got. Don’t you want to run away yet?”

  Smoothing the crease between her brows with my fingertip, I dropped my forehead on hers and my heart leapt at the sudden connection that grew between us. That little spark between us gave me the confidence I needed to know everything would work out okay. All that mattered was we were together.

  I was behind her quest for the truth one-hundred-percent. “I wouldn’t swap you for the world,” I muttered, knocking my nose gently against hers.

  Tricia swallowed audibly, and tears sprang to her eyes. “Why?” she whispered, looking as if she could hardly believe what I said.

  “Because my heart is yours, Tricia, and I can’t live without one unless I’m with you.”

  “Damn, James, how come you always know the right thing to say?”

  “I don’t. I believe you have me confused with my little brother,” I replied, and chuckled because Sawyer was the romantic in the family. “Now let’s get out of here and take an evening walk around our beautiful city.”

  Taking Tricia out proved to be the right course of action when I saw her grinning as we stood by the hotdog stand outside the Museum of Sex.

  “I can’t believe you did that. Did you see the shock on those girls’ faces?” she asked, chuckling, her eyes sparkling for the first time in weeks. I must have looked ridiculous to the group of twenty-something girls on a bachelorette outing, but the number of shrieks, whoops, and whistles I got from them made Tricia’s day.

  “It was like a rebirth,” I stated, laughing heartily. Tricia had bet me I wouldn’t go down a slide that ended with me coming out of a tunnel beneath a massive ass. The museum was partly a fun interactive attraction and part exhibition venue. Some of it had glass cabinets with relics and photographs of sexual rituals from different parts of the world and sexual fetishes, and then there were what I supposed were sexual inventions and artwork.

  My favorite attraction was a pedal bicycle with a giant penis that would fuck the rider while their partner controlled the speed by pedaling the bike. When I had jokingly suggested we found a supplier to fit one in the spare room of the apartment, the questioning look on Tricia’s face was priceless.

  “Hm, I think you may be defunct,” Tricia chuckled, as she held up a massive dildo that could have passed for a kid’s baseball bat.

  “Have at it, it’ll be a poor substitute for the real one in my pants. Besides, that thing wouldn’t fit in your mouth, and that’s the only place I’d let you stuff it, your sweet little pussy is mine.” Tricia glanced down at her hotdog and I immediately chuckled. “You’re welcome to put that in your mouth as well, if you like, it’ll keep you going until we get home and you can suck on the real thing,” I joked, and her face broke into another grin.

  My heart warmed when she looked up with desire in her eyes. “Is all this talk and no action making you wet, baby?” I mumbled close to her ear.

  “Maybe,” she replied impishly in a tight squeaky voice. I laughed again, pulled her into my side, and planted a kiss on her temple.

  “Oye, mustard breath, keep your lips to yourself,” she mumbled around a mouthful of hotdog.

  “Yeah, let’s see if you’re still saying that when I’ve spread your legs wide and my head is between your thighs.”

  “Right,” she said, throwing what was left of her hotdog into a nearby trash can. “Home, I can’t take this anymore. For the last two hours you have dangled every sexual object that museum has collected in front of me. Observation is one thing, but when you start giving a running commentary of phallic symbols and finding inuendo in every comment I make, it’s time we took this somewhere private.”

  “Private? I can live with that,” I stated playfully. “Lead the way, Ms. Mattison. Transport? It’ll get us home quicker,” I suggested. Tricia’s hand flew in the air and within twenty seconds we were in the back of a big yellow cab speeding our way back to my apartment.

  Two hours after an intense but fun session in bed, Tricia stood on the balcony of my apartment with a glass of red wine in her hand, looking every inch the woman I fell in love with. It felt like the perfect ending to a difficult day. We’d spent most of the day around one another with tension thick in the air and neither of us had been able to focus on work.

  In contrast, seeing how she had looked at me during those last couple of hours in bed, when our chemistry had been on fire, had made me toy again with the idea of proposing to her. However, the timing couldn’t have been worse. There’s never been a good time. I even wondered if the antique teardrop diamond ring I had bought had been cursed.

  Since I’d bought it, the damn thing hadn’t seen the light of day. Then, I told myself to be patient and figured that however long it took for Tricia’s world to feel right wouldn’t matter. The jeweler said the ring had sat around in his safe for years, waiting for the right woman to wear it.

  As soon as I saw it, I had thought it perfect for Tricia, and I figured letting it sit a few weeks or months more in my sock drawer wouldn’t matter. I resigned myself to the thought of loving her had to be enough until her mess was figured out. Until my time was right, I vowed to delay my grand gesture and show her in all the little ways how much she meant to me.

  The bottle of wine we drank between us, along with the respite from her worries, helped Tricia to sleep soundly that night, a bonus I hadn’t expected, since she had been due to confront her mom the following morning. Although she appeared nervous, I sensed she was anxious for the day to come.

  At 7:00 a.m. the following morning she was eager to leave for the penthouse for her meeting with her mom. Betty wasn’t due until 9:00 a.m. but we still ended up at the apartment forty minutes early.

  “Would you stay in the bedroom or something?” Tricia’s request stopped me from filling the breakfast bowls with cereal to look at her.

  “You don’t want me to stay with you?” It hadn’t occurred to me I wouldn’t be there holding her hand while she faced her mom.

  “No, she’d never tell me anything in front of someone else.” I thought it felt deceitful being there without her mom knowing, and to think that Betty might have come and gone and to have never known I’d heard their conversation.

  A pause stretched between us as I stared at Tricia’s anxious, pleading eyes before I agreed. Considering their discussion could become very heated, I decided it was a safeguard to both women if someone was there to intervene should tempers flare or get out of hand.

  Breakfast was tasteless as I tried to distract Tricia from the pending meeting, and when the time finally came she jumped nervously and stared toward the intercom when the security superintendent buzzed up to let us know Betty had arrived. I had left her details with the staff in the lobby downstairs, when we’d entered, for them to send her straight to the penthouse.

  “You’ve got this,” I coaxed, giving her a hug, smoothing her hair, and brushing her lips with mine. I’ll be next door if you need me.” Taking my place in the bedroom nearest to the sitting room, I sat on the end of the bed, head down, legs apart, with my hands between my knees.

  My heartbeat raced as blood pumped faster from an adrenaline rush at knowing what Tricia faced, so God alone knew how she must have felt as she faced the awful truth about her horrific experience and confronted her mother.

  “What a beautiful building.” Betty’s shrill voice echoed through the apartment. “Places like this don’t come cheap, Patty. Your beau is a man of substance and wealth.”

  “The apartment belongs to his parents, Mom. Do you want something to drink?”

  “Coffee would be good. Decaf, you know caffeine makes my heart race,” she reminded Tricia, like it had been said many times before.

  Betty went on to note the artwork and bronze figurines my parents had given one another
as gifts for birthdays and anniversaries, commenting on the eminent artists and sculptors’ pieces while Tricia remained silent. I imagined her pouring coffee and composing her thoughts in her head.

  “Sit down, Mom, there’s something I need to talk to you about.” My heart stopped for a beat at those words, my chest tight from the anguish I shared for Tricia’s plight. I drew in a breath and wished her strength to keep calm, thinking if Tricia stayed measured it may help her find some answers and take her a step nearer to peace from her traumatic past.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Mom, I invited you here today because I need to talk to you about what happened to me when you brought me to Aunt Lydia’s here in New York, all those years ago.”

  “Now, Patty,” Betty warned.

  “No, Mom, I’m talking and you’re listening. Since the day we walked out of that hospital, it’s never been discussed—”

  “You wouldn’t be where you are now if you’d kept that baby,” Betty chipped in.

  “Stop! Just stop it. There’s no one here for you to impress apart from me, so you can stop with the you-know-best attitude for once.” I heard Tricia take a deep breath and huff it out like she was keeping herself in check.

  “Is that any way to speak to your mother, Patty?”

  “Oh, you want respect? Where was mine, Mom? Was how you dealt with me being pregnant any way to treat your daughter? I was sixteen, Mom. A nice kid before all of that happened to me. You’re fucking lucky I kept in touch at all after leaving home.”