“Only that Mr. I-have-a-schedule-set-in-stone is changing himself because of you.”
“But—”
“Men don’t do that if they don’t care, Tula. Why would they?”
“No,” Tula said, shaking her head, “you’re wrong. Simon doesn’t care about me. Beyond the obvious pluses about having me in his bed and here, taking care of Nathan.”
“I don’t know…”
“I do,” Tula insisted, closing her mind to thoughts of Simon for a minute as she stared at the baby settled at her hip. She wasn’t going to pretend everything was great. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t only the question of Simon’s feelings that had her wrapped up so tightly.
Every day that passed she was that much closer to having to say goodbye to Nathan. She was going to lose the child that felt like her own. She was going to lose his father and the illusion of family she’d been living in for weeks. She was going to lose everything that mattered to her and that knowledge was tearing a hole in her heart.
“I’m going to have to leave soon, Anna. I’ll have to walk away from Nathan and Simon. And the thought of it is just killing me.”
Sitting back on her heels, Anna looked up at her. “Who are you and what have you done with Tula?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you are the world’s biggest optimist,” Anna told her, turning back to the mural she had been working on since the day before. “Even when you had no reason for it, you always maintained the upbeat attitude. Heck, Tula. Even your dad didn’t rock your boat. If you wanted something, you went after it, no matter how many people tried to tell you it couldn’t be done. So what’s happening?”
Tula sat down, balancing Nathan in the circle of her crossed legs. “He did,” she said, dropping a kiss onto the baby’s head. “This little guy changed everything for me, Anna. I can’t just go my own way anymore. Not when I have him to think about.”
“Ah,” her friend said, “so this isn’t about Simon at all? You’ve been kidding yourself and me? You’re just worried about Nathan, huh? Not pining away for the baby’s father?”
Eyes narrowed, Tula warned, “No one likes a know-it-all.”
“Oooh. Scored a point!” Smiling, Anna swept paint over the forest on the wall, wielding her paintbrush as expertly as a surgeon used his scalpel. “Come on, honey. This sudden case of the poor me’s is about more than Nathan. More even than Simon. This is about you finally finding the place you want to be and thinking you have to leave it.”
Tula cringed inside because Anna was exactly right.
“You found the home you’ve been looking for since you were a kid, sweetie.” Anna looked at her, understanding and sympathy shining in her eyes. “You love Simon and Nathan both. But it’s what they are to you together that’s making this so hard. They’re the family you always dreamed about. Your heart took them both in, made them yours and now you believe you have to let the dream die.”
Nathan babbled and slapped playfully at Tula’s hands on his legs. The scent of paint hung in the air despite the two opened windows. Anna’s mural was almost complete. Once the woman got started on a painting, she was a whirlwind of activity. Tula looked at the realistic scene of a forest, with a flower-strewn meadow stretching out into the distance. And she smiled at Lonely Bunny, right up front, sitting under a tree and smiling out at the room.
From the house next door, the sound of wind chimes played like a distant symphony. As time passed in a lazy, unhurried way, Tula thought about what her friend had said and admitted silently that Anna was right. She did love Simon and Nathan both. She did love the family the three of them had become, however temporarily. She hated knowing that she was the one who didn’t fit. The one who didn’t belong. And knowing that she would have to walk away from what might have been was desolating.
“You’re right,” she finally said.
“The one time I wish I weren’t,” Anna told her.
“But what can I do? I can’t stall Simon forever. He has a right to be his son’s father. And I can’t stay once I sign over custody.”
“It’s a problem,” Anna agreed. “But there’s always a solution. Somewhere.”
Tula sighed. “You know, it was a lot easier on me when you were the one with man problems.”
“I bet,” Anna said on a laugh. “But it’s your turn now, girl. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do?”
The last few days had been wonderful. And confusing. She had Nathan to care for and work of her own to accomplish during the day. But every night, she and Simon found each other. They shared taking care of Nathan, and once the baby was in bed it was their time.
The sex was incredible. It only got better each time they came together. But for Tula, it was bittersweet. She loved being with him—the problem was, she loved him. More than she had ever thought it possible to love someone. Every day here dragged her deeper and deeper into what was going to become a pit of despair one day soon.
Though even as she thought it, she realized that neither of them had so much as hinted about that situation lately. It might still be the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the middle of the room, but if no one was talking about it, did it matter?
Nathan babbled happily and Tula sighed.
“Honey, if you want him, why don’t you go for it?”
“Oh, I am,” she assured her friend.
Laughing, Anna said, “I’m not talking about sex, Tula. I’m talking about love. I know you love Simon. Heck, I can see it. Chances are he can, too.”
“Oh, God,” she said with a groan. “I hope not.”
“Why?” Anna turned to look at her. “Why should you hide what you feel? Didn’t you tell me to go for what I wanted?”
“Yes, but—”
“If he doesn’t love you back, that’s different.” She rubbed her nose and transferred a streak of green paint. “Although, I’m willing to bet he does love you. I mean, how could he not? What’s not to love? Besides, I saw you two together yesterday and again this morning. The way he looks at you…”
“What?” Hope rose up in Tula’s chest.
“As if you’re the only thing in the room,” Anna said with a smile. “But Tula, you’ll never know for sure what he feels if you don’t try to get him to admit it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
Anna grinned. “The best opportunity for getting a man to talk and lower his defenses at the same time? Right after sex. They’re happy, they’re relaxed and very open to suggestion.”
Sometimes, she thought. Other times, they were too crabby entirely. Still it was worth a shot. Tula shook her head in admiration. “Does Sam know how truly devious you can be?”
“Sure he does,” Anna replied, still grinning devilishly. “But by the time he figures out that I’m sneaking up on him, it’s too late.”
“I don’t know…”
“Who was it who said all’s fair in love and war?”
“I don’t know that, either,” Tula admitted. “But I’ll bet it was a man.”
“So,” Anna said softly, “if it’s okay for a man to be sneaky, why can’t we try it? Look,” she added, “while you’re here, don’t hold anything back. You can’t tell him you love him, but you can show him. Make him want what you could have together. That’s all I’m saying.”
While her friend turned her attention back to the mural, and Nathan studied his toes with fierce concentration, Tula started thinking.
“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
“Do what?” Simon didn’t take his gaze off the pitching machine. Getting hit by a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball didn’t sound like a good time.
“Tula. You’re going to mess it all up and toss it aside, aren’t you?”
Simon hit the pitch high and left. Only then did he glance at Mick in the next cage over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, forget it, Simon. I’ve known you too long
to be fooled.”
“Have you known me long enough to butt out?”
“Apparently not,” Mick said good-naturedly. “Besides, you can always fire me if you don’t like what I’m saying.”
Simon snorted. “Sure. I fire you, then your wife comes over to kick my butt.”
“There is that,” Mick said, a pleased note in his voice. “So. About Tula.”
“Let it go, Mick. I’m doing what I have to do.”
“No,” his friend insisted, “you’re doing what your damn pride is telling you to do. There’s a difference.”
Simon hit a curveball dead center, line drive. “This isn’t about my pride,” he muttered darkly, irritated that his best friend wasn’t on his side in this.
Mick was normally an excellent barometer for Simon. If the two of them agreed on something, it turned out to be a good idea. The times when Simon hadn’t listened to Mick’s advice were a different story. But this time, Mick was wrong. Simon knew it. He felt it.
Ever since her friend left last weekend, after painting a mural of a forest glade, complete with Lonely Bunny sitting beneath a tree, things had been…different.
Actually, the last few days with Tula had been great. Better than great. Amazing even. But it wasn’t real. It had all been staged by him. They’d laughed and talked and gone for picnics and out to dinner. They took Nathan for walks and set him in a swing for the first time, making them both nervous. He had felt closer to her than he had to anyone else in his life, he thought darkly.
But none of Tula’s responses to him were real because he had seduced her back into his bed for a deliberate reason. So if what he had done wasn’t on the up-and-up, how could her reactions be genuine?
If he felt the occasional twinge of guilt over tricking her into being a weapon to use against her father…Simon dismissed the feeling. He didn’t do guilt. Plus there was the fact that Tula was an adult, he assured himself, able to make her own choices. And she had chosen to be in his bed.
Yet, even as he told himself that, a voice in the back of his mind whispered the question, Would she still have chosen to be with you if she knew what you were really doing? If she knew she was nothing more to you than a sword to wield against her father?
Uncomfortable with what the answer to that might have been, he dismissed the mental question. Besides, he argued with himself, Tula wasn’t only a weapon he’d waited years to find against Jacob Hawthorne. She was more, damn it. He actually…cared about her. Hadn’t meant to, but he did.
Which was why he was standing at the batting cages arguing with himself while his best friend ragged on him. But the bottom line was, just because what he and Tula had together was mutually enjoyable, it didn’t mean it was necessarily more than that, did it?
Besides, this wasn’t even about Tula.
It was about her father.
After hearing what little she’d told him about her parents, she might even be grateful that he had found a way to take a slap at Jacob Hawthorne.
He snorted to himself and hit the next pitch, a slider, into right field. Sure. She’d thank him for using her. God, what universe was he living in anyway?
“This is all about your pride, Simon. You got cheated by a guy with no principles.”
“Damn right I did,” he snapped, turning his head to glare briefly at Mick. “And it wasn’t just me, remember. Jacob maneuvered my father, too. That miserable old thief almost cost us our house, damn it.”
He hated knowing that Jacob Hawthorne was out there, still chortling over getting the best of two generations of Bradleys. The need for revenge had been gnawing on him for years. Was he expected to now just put it aside because he had feelings for a woman? Could he put it aside?
“And your answer to that is to become as unprincipled as the old pirate himself?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Mick shook his head, clearly disgusted. “If you do this. If you use Tula to get at her old man, then you’re as big a louse as he is.”
Simon chewed on those words for a minute or two, then shook them off, determined to stay his course. He’d made a plan, damn it. Now he had to follow through. That was how he lived his life and he wasn’t about to change now. Wasn’t even sure he could change if he wanted to.
“It’s not who you are, Simon,” Mick told him. “I hope you remember that before it’s too late.”
A few days later, Tula was happy.
Anna had been right, she thought. Though she hadn’t actually confessed her love for Simon, she had tried to show him over the last several days just how important he had become to her. She was sure she was getting through to him. She felt it. In his easy smile. His touch. The whispered words in the night and the gentle strength in his arms when he held her as she slept.
He hadn’t mentioned again the subject of hiring a nanny. They hadn’t talked about him taking full custody of Nathan. Instead, the three of them were in a sort of limbo. Locked into a paralyzing state where they didn’t move forward and didn’t go back. It was as if they were caught in the present, while Tula and Simon tried to decide what might be waiting for them in the still hazy future.
She didn’t like waiting. She never had been a patient person, Tula admitted silently. But she was trying to fight her natural inclination—which would be grabbing Simon and shaking him until he admitted he loved her—so she could have the time to show Simon exactly how good they were together.
“Maybe this will work out, Nathan,” she told the baby as she zipped up his tiny sweatshirt for their walk to the bookstore. “Maybe we will become a real family.”
The baby laughed at the idea and clapped his hands together as if applauding her.
“That’s my boy.” She kissed him, then picked up the baby she thought of as her son and settled him into his stroller. “Now, Nathan, what do you say we go see the nice lady at the bookstore and talk about the signing this weekend?”
For days Simon had been living in two different worlds.
In one, he experienced a kind of happiness that he had never known before. In the other, there was a black cloud of misery hanging over his head, making him feel as though he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life.
He walked down the crowded sidewalk in the heart of downtown San Francisco and hardly noticed the bustle around him. His gaze fixed dead ahead, the expression on his face was ferocious enough to convince other pedestrians to give him a wide berth.
His mind raced with too many thoughts to process at once. Something he wasn’t accustomed to at all. His concentration skills were nearly legendary. But even the inner workings of the Bradley department store chain couldn’t keep him fixated for long anymore. That acknowledgment shook him to his bones. The Bradley chain had always been his focus. The one mainstay of his life. Rebuilding what the family had lost. Growing the company until it was the biggest of its kind in the country.
Those were tangible goals.
His entire life for the last ten years had been dedicated to making those dreams a reality. But lately, they weren’t his only goals.
Tula.
Everything came back to her, he thought and waited impatiently for the light to change and the Walk symbol to flash green. Around him, a teenager danced along to whatever music he had plugged into his ears. A young mother swayed, keeping the baby in her arms happy. Taxis honked, someone shouted and the world, in general, kept spinning.
For everyone but him.
Simon knew he didn’t have to go through with this. Didn’t have to walk into the exclusive restaurant precisely at twelve-thirty and “accidentally” meet the man he’d waited years to take down. He knew he still had a chance to turn away from his plan. From the decision he had made before Tula became so damned important to him.
Tula.
She was there again. Front and center in his thoughts. Her short, soft hair. Her quick grin. That dimple that continued to devastate him every time he saw it flash in her cheek. She was there with her stories a
bout lonely children befriending rabbits. She was there, rocking Nathan in the middle of the night. She was in the kitchen, dancing to the radio as she cooked. He saw her in her tiny house in Crystal Bay. So small, yet so full of life. Of love.
Tula had waltzed into his life and turned everything he had ever known upside down.
The light changed and he walked with the crowd, a part of them, yet separate.
For days now, he and Tula and Nathan had been what he had never thought to have…a family. Laughing with the baby in the evening, holding Tula all through the night and then waking up with her curled up against him every morning. It was enough to drive a man out of his mind.
This wasn’t how Simon had planned for his life to go.
Never before had he made room in his thoughts for babies and bunnies and smart-mouthed women who kissed him as if he contained the last breath on earth. Now he couldn’t imagine his life without any of them.
And he didn’t damn well know what to do about it.
The wind off the ocean was icy, chilling the blood in his veins until he felt as cold and grim as his thoughts. Outside the restaurant, Simon actually paused and considered the situation.
If Mick was right, then going inside to face down Jacob would ruin whatever he might have with Tula. On the other hand, if he didn’t go inside and nothing came of whatever was happening between him and Tula, then he had wasted his one opportunity to get back at a man he’d spent too many years hating.
Scrubbing one hand across the back of his neck, Simon stood in the sea of constantly moving pedestrians like a boulder in the middle of a rushing stream. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure what his next move should be.
For the first time ever, he wondered if he shouldn’t be putting someone else ahead of his own needs.
“Make up your damn mind,” he muttered, shifting his gaze to take in the wide windows and the diners seated in leather booths affording a view of downtown.
That’s when he saw Jacob Hawthorne.
Everything in Simon went still as ice. The old man was lording it over a group of businessmen at his table. Seated like a king before supplicants, the old thief was clearly holding court. And who knew what he was up to? Who knew which company Jacob was trying to destroy now?
Have Baby, Need Billionaire Page 13
