It was no contest.
“Yes.”
“Will you come with me tomorrow to look at places? You can bring Percy, too, since he’s going to be living there. He might have an opinion.”
She couldn’t help but grin. It was a thoughtful thing to say. If only everything he said and did was that thoughtful. “Yes.”
He stared at her for a moment longer. There was something in his eyes, something deep and serious. “Will you marry me?”
She needed to say yes. For Percy. But... “I need to know what this marriage will actually be before I agree to it.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“Will you see other women?”
“No.” He didn’t hesitate at all, which was good, she guessed. There was a pause. “You?”
“No. I have too much on my plate to even think about dating.”
That got her a nice smile. “So we’re agreed. No seeing other people. What else?”
Just the small matter of the facts. And the fact was that Beaumonts always cheated. Hardwick Beaumont always took the kids. Beaumonts were not to be trusted, no matter what.
“If it doesn’t work out,” she asked in a quiet voice as she picked up Percy and held him to her chest, “you won’t take him away from me, will you?”
Byron sat up, as well. He leaned forward and kissed the top of Percy’s head and said, “I am not my father, Leona.”
She didn’t reply. The silence seemed to stretch, pushing him away from her.
“And what about you?” His voice had turned colder. “If it doesn’t work out, you won’t take him and disappear? I will not stand for another lie, Leona. Because if you betray me again...” The words trailed off, but there was no give in his voice.
A cold chill ran up her spine. The threat was implicit. If she did something he didn’t like, he would make her suffer for it.
“I never lied.” It sounded weak to her own ears. “I told you my last name.”
“Is that what you tell yourself? It wasn’t a bald-faced lie, therefore you’re completely innocent? How touching.” He held out his arms for Percy.
She held her baby so tightly that he started to fuss. Byron sighed, the only acknowledgment of her feelings. “I want things to be different, you know. I don’t want to be my parents.” He came and sat beside her. Percy squirmed in her arms and she had no choice but to hand him over to Byron. “I know exactly what my father did to my mother,” he went on in a quiet voice. “I would never, ever do that to you or to Percy.”
She shouldn’t believe him, shouldn’t trust him. But he said it with such conviction that she couldn’t help it. She looked down at her son, who was happily trying to suck on all his fingers at once. “I need help with him. If May doesn’t move down with us, we’ll have to find a day care for him and that’s not cheap. The drops for his ears aren’t cheap, and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for Percy’s surgery to get tubes, either. For the ear infections.”
“I’ll take care of it. All of it.” He said it in an almost dismissive way, as if he’d never had to worry about money.
Well, maybe he hadn’t. After all, she hadn’t, either—not until she’d walked away from her father and his fortune. There’d been a very real price for her independence, but it’d been one she was willing to pay to keep Percy happy and safe.
Would she really give up that hard-fought independence and let Byron call the shots just because it was best for her son—even if it wasn’t anywhere close to what was best for her?
No, she would not panic. She forced herself to breath and keep her head on her shoulders. “What about your family?”
“What about them?”
She gave him a hard look. “You saw how Frances reacted to me. If we get married, are they going to be...difficult about it?”
He grimaced. “Things have changed. It’s almost like we all finally figured out that Hardwick is really and truly dead and we don’t have to be what he thought we were anymore. Even Chadwick is different now. He smiles and everything.”
“I wish my father realized that, too,” she said wistfully. If only they could all just go on with their lives without a decades-old feud to haunt them.
Percy made the high whining noise that signaled he was getting hungry. “Oh, I should be making dinner.”
She started to get up, but Byron was quicker. “Let me. What else does he eat?”
“He liked the applesauce,” she called after him as he headed for the kitchen. “And yogurt and cereal. But it’s still mostly baby food at this point.”
Byron ducked his head around the kitchen door, a jar of what looked like green beans and mashed potatoes in his hand. “This stuff?” He made a face.
“Yes, that stuff,” she replied, trying not to be defensive about it. “That’s a good brand—all organic, no added anything.”
After giving her a dismissive look, Byron disappeared back into the kitchen. Leona stood and checked Percy’s diaper. “I have a feeling,” she told the baby as she carried him back to the changing table, “that he’s going to start from scratch.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. By the time she got Percy changed, Byron had peeled potatoes boiling and a can of green beans heating. “I don’t like using the canned stuff,” he told her in his chef voice. “I’ll pick up some fresh or frozen ones for him.”
“You don’t have to...” He cut her off with a look. She sighed in resignation. “Fine. Go ahead.”
In forty minutes, they sat down to mashed potatoes and green beans—Percy’s being slightly more mashed together than theirs—and pan-fried chicken in a parmesan crust. “This is delicious,” she said in between spooning Percy’s dinner into his mouth and taking bites of her own. Percy agreed by thumping the top of his high-chair tray with both hands and opening his mouth for more.
“Good,” Byron said, watching Percy swallow another mouthful. “I used to cook for the new kids, you know. When my dad would remarry and his new wife had babies. Dad expected us all to like the same things he did, but it was hard for a four-year-old to really get into steak au poivre, you know? George always had something else for us, but we had to eat it in the kitchen so neither of our parents would catch us.” He looked at his plate. “That was a long time ago.”
“That sounds a lot like dinners in my house growing up.”
Byron looked at her. “We never really did discuss your past. You always changed the subject.” He stabbed at his chicken viciously. “And I never caught on.”
She couldn’t tell who he was madder at—her or himself. “I knew who you were—it was hard to miss that last name. But I...” She sighed. “I wanted something different than Harpers versus Beaumonts. I wanted to see if you were really what my father claimed you were. I wanted to know if you liked me for me, not because I was heiress to a fortune.”
She’d never gotten the chance to say those words out loud to him. Everything had happened so fast that night... “I just wanted to be something more than Leon Harper’s daughter.”
Byron set down his fork. “You were.” He stood, picked up his plate and headed back to the kitchen. “You were...”
Leona leaned forward to catch the end of that sentence because it seemed important. But when she didn’t hear the ending, she got up and followed Byron into the kitchen. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said gruffly, scraping his plate into the trash and running hot water into the sink.
“Byron.” She stood next to him and put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to turn him toward her. He didn’t budge. “What?”
“You should have told me,” he replied, grabbing his plate and scrubbing it furiously. “It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d told me yourself. Instead I had to learn it from your father.”
Guilt, which had been creeping around the edges of
their conversation for the past few minutes, burst out into the open. “I wanted to. But I didn’t want to risk ruining the best thing that had ever happened to me.”
For a second, she thought he was going to give her that smile, the one that always melted her. But then his face hardened. “You didn’t trust me.”
She stared at him as a new emotion pushed back at the guilt—anger. “First off,” she snapped, “I’m not the one who bailed. I was right here, dealing with the fallout of you abandoning me. I went on with my life when all I wanted to do was run and hide, too. I did not have that luxury, Byron.”
Byron opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off. “Secondly, this is exactly why I haven’t said yes to your marriage proposal. At least this time it wasn’t an order, but I simply do not know when you’re going to switch from doting father to angry ex-lover.”
Percy began to fuss, no doubt unhappy about being left behind while everyone else was in the kitchen. However, for the first time in her life, Leona didn’t rush off to pick him up.
“And finally, you didn’t trust me, either. Four days, Byron. That’s how long it took to get away from my father—and you were gone. Gone. You couldn’t even stick around for a damn week to wait for me.” Unexpectedly, her throat closed up, but she would not crack. “So you’ll forgive me if I want a little more reassurance that you’re not going to up and disappear again, that you’re not going to marry me only to dump me and take my son.”
“You need me,” he said in a quiet voice.
Percy let out a wail of impatience. Leona heard a spoon clatter to the ground.
“I need child support,” she corrected him. “I need a job. You have yet to prove to me that I need you.”
And with that, she turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Nine
It was hard to focus on bathing Percy with Leona’s words ringing in Byron’s ears. Wasn’t offering to marry her enough reassurance that he wasn’t going to disappear and take the baby? Marriage was... Okay, maybe it wasn’t a permanent legal bond, but it was not something to be taken lightly. Once they were legally wed, it wasn’t as though he could just walk off with the boy. Didn’t she see that?
Besides, where were the reassurances he needed? The promises that she wouldn’t lie to him again? Or that she wouldn’t sic her father and his horde of lawyers upon Byron and his family? The reassurance that she wasn’t just waiting until he let his guard down all the way to hit him where it would hurt the most—Percy? She’d already lied to him twice. Even if that had been a series of massive misunderstandings, it didn’t change the fact that she had lied to him for months and months. How could he trust her, really?
Of course, he didn’t get far in these thoughts because Percy slapped at his bathwater, splashing it into Byron’s face. The baby made a trilling noise as a toy boat floated past him. There was more splashing. Byron’s shirt was getting soaked and Percy was not getting any cleaner.
Just then, Percy twisted to reach the boat and Byron lost his grip. “Whoa!” he cried as Percy’s head dunked under the water.
Immediately, Leona was next to him, pulling Percy upright. “I’ll hold him,” she said and amazingly, she didn’t sound panicked. “You wash.”
“I’m sorry,” Byron said as Percy sputtered and coughed. He let out a disgruntled cry but stopped when Leona nudged the boat back in front of him.
“It’s okay,” she said softly and Byron was surprised to see she was smiling. “It’ll get easier.”
“If you say so,” he said, scrubbing Percy’s legs as fast as he could.
The argument—well, it wasn’t quite an argument, but it’d certainly been more than a discussion—hung in the air between them. As they finished Percy’s bath and got him ready for bed, Byron thought about what Leona had said. That she hadn’t told him who her family was because she didn’t want to be a Harper.
Did he believe her?
For the past year, he’d been operating under the assumption that she’d misled him on purpose, that she’d intentionally withheld the information so she could use her family name against him at the right time. And hadn’t the right time been that awful night?
But maybe...maybe that’s not what had happened.
He ran through his memories again—of Rory calling him out and, when Byron mouthed off, firing him. Of taking a swing at Rory because, damn it, he’d put up with enough of that man’s crap over the year and a half he’d worked there and that was not how it was supposed to end.
And then Bruce—the pastry chef Byron had counted as a friend—had grabbed him from behind and physically hauled him out of the restaurant and thrown him down on the sidewalk, just in time to see Leona getting into Leon Harper’s chauffeured vehicle.
Except...had she? Or had Leon shoved his daughter into the car? It’d been dark and rainy and Byron had thought...
Had it been part of the lie? Or was she now telling the truth? Was she being truthful about the lies she’d already told? Was that even a thing?
This was what she did to him. She spun his head around and around until he didn’t know which way was up anymore.
While Leona nursed Percy, Byron furiously washed and dried the dishes, trying to remember exactly what Leon Harper had done in the minute before he’d gotten up into Byron’s stunned face and taunted him.
That’s when Leona came back into the kitchen.
“He go down okay?” Byron asked, because it seemed like the thing a parent would ask about.
“I gave him something for his ears. Hopefully he’ll sleep for at least a couple of hours.”
“Hopefully?” A couple of hours did not seem like enough.
Leona gave him a tired smile. “That’s why we were looking at tubes.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He dried another dish. “How many ear infections has he had?”
“I’ve lost count. May gets up with him sometimes, but he usually just wants to nurse.”
Byron’s gaze dropped to her chest. She wasn’t wearing a bra and he could see the outline of her nipples poking through the thin fabric of her shirt. Lust hit him hard and low as his mind chose exactly that moment to remember the kiss from earlier this evening and the one from last night.
“A-hem,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Sorry,” he replied, focusing all his attention back on the pots and pans.
Leona sighed. “Are you sure we should live together?”
He tensed. Damn it, this was going from bad to worse. “As opposed to what?”
“As opposed to a regular custody agreement where we each have Percy for a week or two and then trade, with child support and the like.” She paused. “It might be better that way.”
“Better for who? Not better for Percy—not when your father can take him. No way.”
She grabbed a towel and one of the few remaining pots. “Byron, I don’t want this to be hard.”
“Hard?” He snorted. “I hate to burst your bubble, but nothing about this is easy.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “All I’m saying is that you’re obviously still mad at me and I don’t want Percy to grow up in a household where his parents are constantly sniping at each other. That doesn’t make me the bad guy here.”
“I didn’t say you were the bad guy. And I’m not mad at you.” He was, however, getting pretty pissed at himself. He couldn’t be doing a worse job fighting for what he wanted if he tried. His father was probably rolling over in his grave.
If Hardwick Beaumont were still here, he’d slap Byron on the shoulder and say, “Stop screwing around. She’s just a woman, for God’s sake. You’re a Beaumont. Act like one.”
Except Byron didn’t want to be a Beaumont if it meant bending Leona and Percy to his will just because he could. He didn’t want to rule by force and fear.
Sh
e glared at him. “No, but you don’t have to say the words, Byron. Your actions speak quite loudly.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what does this say?” He grabbed her by the arms and hauled her to him. The kiss was not sweet or gentle—it was hard and unbending. He might not be able to get her to say yes to his proposal, but he was damned sure she wasn’t going to say no.
After a moment, she bent. Her head slanted sideways and she opened her mouth for him with a sigh. He deepened the kiss. Could he kiss her like this without getting lost in the soft sweetness of her body?
Because that’s what she was now, all soft and warm in his arms. His pulse beat out a faster rhythm. When she broke the kiss, he let her. “What are we going to do, Byron?”
“We’ll do a trial run. I’ll get us a place and you and Percy can come stay for a little while—say a week or two. You won’t have to pack up all your things here. And if it doesn’t work...” He paused and swallowed. He didn’t want to admit it might not work. He didn’t want to be wrong. But he had to give her something, a fallback to prove that he wouldn’t hold her hostage once he had her and Percy with him. “If it doesn’t work, then we’ll go to your plan.”
He could do that. He could trust her enough to bring her under his roof. And once he had her there, then he could figure out which part of her story was the truth—or if she was still lying to him.
For some reason that could only be described as self-destructive, he wanted to take her at her word.
She leaned back to look at him. “And if it does?”
Her eyes were wide—but not with fear. Instead, she looked hopeful. And hope looked good on her. He lifted his hand and stroked her cheek. “If it does, I’ll ask you to marry me again.”
She leaned into his touch and exhaled through slightly parted lips. He’d kissed her to end the argument and remind her that he was in control, but instead of it dampening his desire for her, it’d only ramped it up. He needed her—only her. No one, not even sensual European women, could satisfy him like this woman did.
“Two weeks?” she said softly, staring into his eyes.
His Son, Her Secret Page 9
