by Joanne Rock
“You have a good memory.” She had changed a lot since she was seventeen. Especially in the last few months. Plus, she’d thought the older man suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“You should tell my nurse,” he grumbled, pointing toward a middle-aged woman in a pressed gray uniform standing a few feet away and taking photos of the table arrangements. “She doesn’t think I can remember anything.”
“Your nurse?” She studied the woman more closely and realized now the older man was confused after all. “That can’t be her. I recognize that woman from Gervais’s house. She’s on the housekeeping staff.”
Leon’s eyes bulged. “Confound it, woman!” He turned on the housekeeper and gripped her arm. “I knew you weren’t my health-care worker.”
His raised voice attracted more turned heads even though the band continued to play. Jean-Pierre was by Tatiana’s side almost instantly, while Henri and Dempsey attempted to take their grandfather aside.
“What’s wrong?” Jean-Pierre asked, slipping an arm around her shoulders, the muscles hard and firm against her.
She pointed to the maid who darted out of the pavilion the moment Leon released his hold.
“That woman.” Tatiana pointed her out, a sinking feeling in her gut. “Leon thought it was his caregiver, but I know she was the same woman who greeted us the night we had dinner at your brother’s home. I just said I didn’t think that could be his nurse and—”
“Who in the hell was she?” Leon was shouting now, loud enough to pull Gervais away from his new bride.
“Gramps, what’s wrong?” He tried, like his brothers, to usher the agitated man aside, but the more they tried to move him, the more belligerent he became.
“You all sent me to a strange place with a woman I didn’t even know and tried to convince me she was my nurse.” Leon scoffed as if the word left a bad taste. “She’s a harlot and a liar. She told me I missed seeing Jean-Pierre’s son, but I know damn well Jean-Pierre isn’t a father yet.”
Tatiana froze.
Everyone close to her seemed to turn stone-still as well. Jean-Pierre looked to her helplessly while his brothers looked at him, all of them waiting for someone to say something. To announce whatever story it was that they wanted to use.
Now was the time, while a whole pavilion full of wedding guests listened. Including Blair Jones, who would surely have reason to want to spread the gossip with malicious glee after Tatiana had threatened to turn her in for perjury.
Tatiana shook her head at Jean-Pierre. She had no idea what to say. If she’d had a good cover story for César, she would have given it out months ago instead of running off to the Caribbean to give birth privately.
“Come on, Gramps.” Dempsey slung an arm around his grandfather as some of the fight seemed to slip out of Leon. “Let’s step away to figure out what’s going on and let Gervais have his wedding, okay?”
“Sure,” Leon said agreeably, although his expression remained troubled. “You’re a good boy, Theo. Always were my favorite.”
Tatiana’s heart squeezed painfully in her chest as she listened to him say words destined to hurt his other children—and knowing she’d also lost her window to admit the truth. That she and Jean-Pierre had a child together. End of story.
Wasn’t it? But if so, why had they waited so long to reveal it, missed so many opportunities and flirted with disaster this way? It was as if they’d set themselves up for failure.
She looked at Jean-Pierre, the man who’d come back into her life to help her discover the truth about her lying client. She hadn’t listened to him then, and their argument had turned into something beautiful and complicated. A night she would never regret.
But these last days, she’d hoped they were moving toward that common ground they’d shared long ago when they were teenagers. He’d taken her to his bed with all the passion she’d once dreamed of and more. But he still hadn’t claimed to love her. And she knew him well enough to know he’d never speak those words if he didn’t mean them. She could hardly believe he’d simply overlooked them...
“Tatiana.” He hooked his arm around her now, guiding her from the pavilion and out into the clear, warm night. He purposely walked her past Kimberly and stopped, interrupting the woman’s phone call. “Kimberly, I’d owe you a favor forever if you would cut the power to that cell tower as fast as possible.”
“Seriously?” She frowned.
“We’ve got leaks all over the place and I want to sit on a story to let the bride and groom have their day.” His hand gripped Tatiana’s waist gently, his fingers grazing her hip.
“I do love being off the grid.” Kimberly grinned, stabbing a few buttons on her phone. “And I don’t mind going incognito for however long you like. Although, I’ve got to warn you, if my father finds out we’re disconnected, he’ll be on the first boat out here.”
“I just need to buy some time,” Jean-Pierre assured her while the country band turned up their amps and the fiddle player kicked into high gear.
“Done.” She flipped her phone toward him so he could see. “Look close because I’ll lose the image as soon as I shut down that tower.” She showed him a picture of a cell tower disguised as a pine tree on the screen, then hit a button.
The image vanished. Thanking her, he continued toward a section of the island Tatiana hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t the dock where their ferry had parked, but it was a pier of some sort. And, she could see by the moonlight, a boathouse.
“Where are we going?” She had worn low heels for the wedding, but there’d been carpet on the beach. Now, she tugged the shoes off and left them on a planter incorporated into the landscaping.
“I thought about taking you to the boathouse on Lake Pontchartrain. But there wasn’t enough time, so this is going to have to do.” He slid off his shoes, too, and left them by hers.
“We used to fool around in the boathouse.” She’d fallen in love with him there.
Of course, that was a long time ago and she’d buried all those feelings. Did he know they were breaking through all the barriers she’d put around them? That the past and present had mingled in her mind and heart, helping her to see the old hints of the boy she’d loved along with the more reserved man she’d carefully avoided ever since he’d come to New York two years ago to play for the Gladiators?
“It remains my fondest teenage memory.” He held her hand as they walked out onto the pier and then up the steps of a simple boathouse with a deck on the flat roof.
Jean-Pierre led her past a small shed containing extra lifesaving gear and utilitarian jackets to the front railing that looked out over the gulf.
She wanted to ask him more about that. To hear why he remembered those days fondly, too. She’d always suspected his heart hardened toward her when she’d told him to leave and not come back—a directive given by her father, but one that she meant since his family had hurt hers irreparably.
Only by being the best in her class had they afforded Columbia. Only by being the best in her job had she afforded her apartment, and even then, she’d been fortunate to have a connection in the law firm who knew the building owner. But she didn’t want to win cases at the expense of the truth. She never would have taken that case if she’d known that Blair Jones lied through her teeth.
“Who do you think that woman was who posed as Leon’s nurse?” She felt as if she had too many puzzle pieces that she couldn’t fit together. And maybe she was avoiding thinking about what mattered most. One benefit of having the truth come out about César would be she didn’t have to hide him any longer. She wasn’t going to live for the sake of keeping up appearances anymore.
“Someone looking for a payout by obtaining unauthorized pictures of the event.” Jean-Pierre shrugged. “You said she was taking photographs, so I assume she planned to sell out the family and offer wedding photos to the highest
tabloid bidder.”
“But doesn’t Leon have a real caregiver? Do you think the nurse made the trip?” She felt worried about him after seeing the way he’d veered from clarity to confusion and back again. It must be frightening to lose your grip on your memories.
“We’ll find out,” Jean-Pierre promised her, taking her hands in both of his. “She might have made a deal to split the payday with the nurse, or just paid the woman outright. It’s very difficult to find loyal employees, especially when scandal draws us into the headlines and the price for a story goes sky-high. Once interest in us dies down, the staff will go back to honoring those confidentiality agreements they all signed.”
“It’s my fault that interest really ramped up right before the wedding. I’m so sorry. I never meant for any of this to spill over into Gervais and Erika’s special day.”
“Erika is tough. She would probably be the first to say it’s not a royal wedding without a tabloid crasher.” Jean-Pierre tried to smile, but she could tell the turn of events troubled him, too.
“What should we do next?” She shivered as the breeze turned cooler.
A wave splashed against the boathouse with a little extra force, enough to cause a fine spray of mist on her skin.
“I hope we will do what I’ve wanted all along.” He withdrew a ring box from the breast pocket of his tuxedo jacket.
Her heart stilled. Her mouth went dry.
Jean-Pierre, the father of her child, got down on one knee in the moonlight. She could hardly process what was happening. She’d expected a game plan. A strategy for coming up with a story. Not a heartfelt proposal.
Hope stirred within. Maybe their time together had cracked open his heart and made him realize he loved her after all.
That their common ground could be so much more beautiful than just co-parenting according to a contract.
“Tatiana.” He looked up at her, his eyes as dark as the water below, his expression inscrutable. “You and César are more important to me than anything in the world.”
In her old fantasies of this moment—the ones she’d dreamed up a decade ago—he’d led his speech with “I love you and I can’t live without you.” But she recognized that she wasn’t speaking to her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, dammit. Jean-Pierre was a formidable man. A world-renowned athlete. A business tycoon with interests all over the globe.
For him to say she was the most important thing in his world—along with their baby—was saying a great deal.
“When I look at you holding our son in your arms, I want to give you the world. To make sure that nothing ever hurts you. To keep you safe forever.” He kissed the back of her left hand and then the left ring finger. “Nothing would bring me more happiness than if you would be my wife.”
Her heart pounded so loudly she wondered if she’d missed that he also wanted to give her his heart. But maybe he included that when he said he’d give her the world? Worry made her heart beat crazily as he opened up the ring box and withdrew a magnificent diamond, a huge, sparkling pear-shaped central stone with two smaller stones to either side. There was an elegant simplicity about it, but her longstanding interest in appearances told her that it was at least eight carats. If she was still a woman who cared about those things, that ring would have dazzled her.
It still dazzled her.
But had she missed hearing the one thing her heart most craved?
She swallowed hard.
“Jean-Pierre.” She savored his name on her lips. How many times had she stenciled it on notebooks or in her diary once upon a time, adding his last name to her first? “You know how nervous I can get. And I hope to remember this moment always.” After all they’d shared the last few days, after the way he’d made love to her, surely that had nudged his heart into a more tender place toward her? “Do you...love me?”
It had cost her so much to ask. And she had her answer instantly. It was there, in the fleeting panic in his dark eyes.
The hesitation that told her this was the last question he wanted to field during a proposal of marriage.
“Never mind.” She rushed to fill that moment of silence, thrusting his ring back in his palm. “I’m being overly sentimental, I know. You didn’t expect that from me with all my lawyerly practicality, did you?” She shook her head, babbling and unable to stop herself since her eyes burned and she couldn’t bear for him to see her cry. Damn these postpartum hormones still having their way with her. “And so foolish of me, too, since you had no problem walking away from me after we were together last winter. I mean, who walks away if they have an ounce of tenderness in their hearts?”
“Please, listen.” He was on his feet, tucking the ring box in his pocket again.
“No. I don’t think I will.” She held up her hands defensively. “I don’t think I can. I was listening very hard a moment ago, and when I didn’t hear what I hoped to, I had to ask about it, embarrassing us both.” She headed for the stairs, needing to put space between them. “Now, I’m going to return to my room and we can figure out how to co-parent when I’m not completely mortified over needing footnotes to explain my marriage proposals.”
He chased her down, capturing her before she could descend the wooden steps.
“You’re the only woman to ever break my heart, Tatiana. The. Only.” His face was inches from hers, his grip unshakable. “I put everything on the line to come to New York at eighteen and see you. To tell you all the things I have a hard time saying now. Leon made sure my life was hell afterward since I left without his knowledge or permission and he was furious that I would dare to step foot in Jack Doucet’s house. But none of that mattered to me because you wouldn’t even speak to me.”
She spun to face him, her yellow dress swishing around her legs. “I was just seventeen years old, for heaven’s sake. My father made me say that.”
He thrust his fingers through his hair in exasperation. “I realize that now. Do you think it mattered to me then?” He set her aside gently and shook his head, as if the memory was something he didn’t want to think about. “I became a much different person after that, and I know you did, too. It was no fault of yours or mine. But you, of all people, should understand that I don’t think I can fall in love in a week these days. I turned off that switch a long time ago.”
“You’ve never been in love? Ever.” She didn’t believe him. “If you’ve never been in love, then how do you know what a broken heart is?”
“I’m twenty-eight years old, and call it a cop-out—but I’m married to the game.”
“You can’t be serious.” It added insult to injury that he would use that for an excuse not to get close to someone.
His fierce expression never wavered. “It takes all my time. All my brainpower. Every ounce of my physical energy. Normally, I’m training for hours every day. This week I’ve sacrificed workout after workout trying to show you how much I want to be a part of César’s life. And yours. I wish that was good enough for you, because I’m offering you more than I’ve ever wanted to share with anyone else.”
“So I should be thrilled that I rate higher than your free weights this week?” She wanted to throttle him. To make him see how ridiculous that sounded. To make him stop breaking her heart.
“I hoped you would be happy to sleep in my arms at night and give us more time to fall in love.” The sincerity in his eyes hit home, finding a place in her heart.
Why hadn’t he said this before? Or did he only go to this argument as his plan B? She didn’t want to be his checkdown because he couldn’t complete the long pass. She wouldn’t be his safe option.
“Marriage is forever for me. I won’t gamble on a maybe.” She knew he’d said all he could say. That he’d dug as deep as he could for her.
But no matter how much she wanted it to be enough, she knew she would always feel as if she’d settled. As if she’d be
en too concerned about appearances and married the father of her son to quiet any gossip.
“I respect that.” He shook his head, his proud shoulders falling just a little. “But I’m not going to lie. It hurts like hell to think I won’t be with you and César every day.”
She couldn’t agree more on the hurt-like-hell part. But they’d reached an impasse. And no matter how valiantly Jean-Pierre fought to keep a lid on the news of their son’s existence, the story was going to come out all too soon.
And despite what she’d hoped, there wouldn’t be any wedding news attached to it. Unable to return to someone else’s happy event, she descended the boathouse stairs and headed toward the main house, knowing all that remained for her here was to pack her bags.
Thirteen
Good game, Reynaud, Jean-Pierre thought to himself—heavy on the sarcasm—as yet another poorly thrown pass got picked off in practice the week after Gervais’s wedding.
Back in New York at the Gladiators’ training facility, Jean-Pierre finished up his last practice before the game against the Hurricanes two days from now. The team would fly to New Orleans in the morning and have a meal together the night before the brother-against-brother matchup the media had been hyping for weeks.
His ill-fated reunion with the coach’s daughter had only revved the hype to a fever pitch, putting the game in the public eye in a way that went far beyond the interest of football fans. Since news of their son had hit the papers the day after Gervais’s wedding, the press had mobbed the Gladiators’ practice field during the sanctioned media times, making it impossible to duck their questions. While Jack Doucet—who’d barely spoken to him this week, preferring to glare darkly at him—had texted him a reminder that he did not need to discuss his personal life in the interviews, the questions were nonstop.
