by Leah Vale
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.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and cleared his throat. "The reason I didn't come back was that I had to devote all my time and energy to running my family's paper producing company. Now that I know about
Nathan, I promise, from here on out I'll do whatever I can to make everything right. I intend to be a father to Nathan. I will live up to my responsibilities and provide for him in every way. I-"
"Whoa, whoa. Hold on." She slid her feet off the boulder and stood. "What do you mean, be a father to Nat? Live up to your responsibilities? Provide for him?" Her voice gained in volume. "If you think you can just show up here with your sad stories," her voice cracked, but she continued, "after deciding my baby looks like you, and take him away, you've got another thing com-"
"Now you whoa. I never said anything about taking Nathan away from you."
"Maybe not now, but later..."
"No." He said the words with the echo of this afternoon's conversation with his father and grandmother still in his head.
"That's right. Because you're not Nathan's father!" she shouted and turned toward the trail.
He caught hold of her arm, instinctively pulling her tight against him. He couldn't seem to touch her without wanting to touch all of her. She trembled against him, and he instantly lightened his grip to a caress.
"Please, not that again. Can't you-"
"Nat and I were doing fine until you showed up." She stepped away and yanked her arm from his hand. "We don't need a thing from you."
"He needs a father."
"Well, you're not him," she stated, and headed for the path to the road.
He watched until she disappeared in the underbrush and then he buried both hands in his hair. That hadn't gone the way it should have. Not one damn bit.
He should have focused more on what he could do for Nathan, on how easily he could improve their child's life by moving them to the estate. Surely she'd want what was best for Nathan. He knew he sure as hell did, and he'd only had Nathan in his life for a day.
Unfortunately, after having Juliet back in his life for a day, he feared what was best for Nathan would not be best for Nathan's parents.
"We gotta leave. We gotta leave," Juliet chanted to herself in a panting whisper as she mounted the stairs to her room. Her heart slammed around in her chest, and her breath did a rotten job clearing her throat.
Forcing her mind to concentrate on what she needed to do wasn't easy with Harrison's words reverberating in her ears. He needs a father, he'd said.
A father who didn't want the mother. He would decide she wasn't good enough, then take her baby away.
She wouldn't let him. She would pack their things, bundle Nat up in his quilt, and go. Problem solved, she thought as she quietly opened the door and slipped into the room crowded by Nathan's crib, her narrow bed and a single dresser.
But he only said he'd wished you'd left and gone to college because he felt bad about not coming back. You might still have a chance with him.
She shook her head at such nonsense and forced the tiny voice that had kept her hopes alive back into the bruised corner of her heart where it belonged.
Quietly moving to the crib, she checked on Nat. Seeing her baby-curled i
n a little ball around the quilt she'd made for him, his breath coming in tiny, even huffs-eased the tightness in her throat and allowed her to breathe again. But while the tightness eased at the sight of Nat's sweet back, in its place was something as debilitating-the pain of a mother's love. She loved her child with an intensity that invaded every pore and threatened to twist her guts till they were of no use to her anymore. She couldn't lose him.
Keeping an eye on her sleeping toddler, Juliet tiptoed to the side of her bed and got down on her hands and knees. After groping about beneath the old bed, she retrieved her lone duffel bag and put it on top of her faded yellow comforter. The duffel wasn't very big, but she and Nathan didn't have much. They had each other, and that was enough.
She yanked open the top drawer of the dresser. Scooping up an armful of Nathan's little undershirts, footed pajamas and socks, Juliet shoved the clothes unceremoniously into the duffel.
Harrison Rivers couldn't waltz in and lay claim to her child. Especially not for whatever price her own family naively decided on. Nor did he have any right to come back into her life and make her want things she now knew she could never have with him. He was worth millions, and she was worth, well, at the moment, not much.
Whatever had led him to deal with his grief by slipping his hand into
hers that early summer day more than two years ago had apparently faded or he got over it or he came to his senses, or something.
The nasty little voice that camped out in her brain whispered, The only thing that made him touch you back then was your willing smile.
She stubbornly shook her head again as she packed the duffel. It hadn't been like that. They'd talked; they'd connected in a very profound way, They just hadn't talked much about things like names or jobs or inheritances.
Or futures.
She had foolishly allowed herself to live in the moment, to take a chance. To dream.
Now that dream of one day being with him again was being taken away from her by the realities of their lives. She didn't belong in his world, but she didn't belong in hers, either. She'd never had the guts to face that fact before. She'd never had the guts to face a lot of things.
Struggling to ward off a fresh torrent of tears, Juliet went back to the dresser. She and Nathan didn't need to stay here in her world. Not when her family couldn't see past their greed. With a hip to the bottom edge of the drawer to keep the broken front from falling to the floor, she pulled the second drawer open and emptied it of Nathan's overalls and sweats. She used the same hip to push the drawer closed.
Her reflection in the mirror above the dresser caught her attention. Nathan's bunny lamp gave off enough light that she could see a dirty handprint on her shoulder. Harrison was still leaving his mark on her.
She didn't want a man who popped into her life and made her believe in things that didn't exist. Like soul mates and knights in shining armor. She curled her lip at the thought. The guy just said he never wanted to love someone so much it cost him his control.
She and Nat would simply leave. She stuffed her armload into the bag. The two of them would go so far away no one would ever find them, no matter how rich he might be.
The thought of riches made Juliet pause before going back to the dresser to collect her few belongings. Instead, she knelt and pulled a large, dented, Dutch shortbread cookie tin from beneath the bed. Popping the lid open, she released a quiet sob and sat on her heels to stare at the white envelope resting on top of a battered, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare's works.
A faded Polaroid of her and her grandpa marked the page he'd been reading to her right before he died. Her grief hadn't allowed her to open the book since. Missing a loved one was probably the only thing besides Nathan she and Harrison had in common.
Looking at the envelope, she didn't need to pick it up and count how much money was inside. She knew exactly how much it held, exactly how much she'd managed to squirrel away since she'd convinced her mom to pay her minimum wage out of any profits the store made. Unfortunately, lately there rarely were any.
At one point she'd had close to five thousand dollars saved in that envelope. Five thousand dollars saved for college, for the school she'd been trying to screw up the courage to apply to.
Then she'd had Nat and had started dipping into the envelope to pay for things. Important things like the hospital, trips to the doctor, his crib and car seat. And that cute, fuzzy, blue snowsuit with bear ears that she'd bought when it had been so cold last winter. Juliet's gaze rose to the open duffel. And those overalls embroidered all over with little trains he loved so much. Important things like that.
Now her envelope contained exactly $249. They wouldn't get far on so little. Not far at all. Nat might even end up in danger. She'd rather die.
She slid her hand beneath the envelope to satisfy her ritual of tracing the tired lines of her grandfather's face peeking out above the book. Fresh tears streamed down her cheeks. Quietly she replaced the lid of the old cookie tin with a hollow snap.
Grandpa would have told her to fight for what was hers. He wouldn't have stood for this running-away nonsense, either. Grandpa would have gone toe-to-toe with anyone who'd tried to mess with his family. Shoot, he'd done as much when the state had made noises about taking her away from her own mother back when Mom couldn't declare which of her boyfriends had fathered Juliet. At least that's how he'd told the story.
No, Grandpa wouldn't want his granddaughter sitting on the floor crying because she didn't have enough money to run away. He'd want her to fight.
Since her grandpa was the only person Juliet had ever wanted to make proud, besides Nathan, of course, she shoved the round tin back beneath the bed and got to her feet. She would march herself downstairs and tell her no-good family again that she was the only one who had the right to decide anything about Nathan.
But after she eased closed the bedroom door behind her, a male voice reverberating up from the kitchen stopped her at the top of the stairs. Her hand turned to stone on the knob. She knew that voice in her heart as well as her head.
Harrison Rivers was downstairs, in her kitchen, talking to her greedy family.
The tremors that had seized her earlier in that very kitchen started once again, and she felt the blood leave her head. She couldn't face Harrison like this, with her eyes red and nose running. She didn't want him to think that she was weak and vulnerable. Not when he was the poster child for the confidence and self-assurance she had always wished she possessed.
But she had to know what he was saying to her family and. More important, what they were saying to him. So she started down the stairs.
Harrison's deep voice increased her shaking. "It wasn't my intention to upset Juliet."
"Don't you worry about that girl. She always did tend toward the emotional side," her mom said in a girlish, high-pitched voice reserved for men who caught her interest.
As if things weren't bad enough.
"Really." Harrison didn't sound particularly happy to hear the news.
Juliet scoffed. Wait until he tried to take Nat from her. Then he'd really see her emotional side.
"It's not like she's unstable or anything," she heard Willie offer.
Juliet moaned inwardly. Leave it to Willie to make things worse. She sank down on a stair, her knees too unsteady to support her.
Great. Just great. Plant words like emotional and unstable in Harrison's brain. Then he'd be chomping at the bit to rip Nathan from her arms at any cost.
She fisted her hands and forced herself back to her feet. She'd be damned if she'd cower in a dark stairway and let her family work up to portraying her as an unfit mother. That was one thing she was not. With renewed determination she descended the remaining stairs and turned the corner into the brightly lit kitchen.
At the sight of Harrison, she pulled up short not two steps into the room. While she had stopped a good yard from him, the breath left her as if she'd slammed into him at a dead run. She had never thought of their kitchen as
big, but it had become absolutely tiny with him crowding the area. He completely filled the space between the table and the back door with his broad shoulders and tall frame. And he practically pulsated with an animal magnetism that made her break out in a very feminine sweat.
She hadn't noticed down by the river, but he still wore the clothes he had on earlier that day, and his white designer shirt and olive-colored pants looked as out of place next to the dingy linoleum and gold-speckled Formica as they had in the store. Only the strained look on his handsome face and finger-mussed, dark-gold hair kept him from looking like he'd just stepped out of his country club.
When he turned toward her and caught her gaze with his, Juliet couldn't regain the breath she'd lost. The look he gave her was far more wary than before, though just as intense. His wariness scared her, more than what her family had said. But as terrified as she was by what he might say or do, she couldn't tear her gaze from his, and the blood that had pooled in her feet at the first sound of his voice came surging back up through her body like a tempest.
Why did she feel so connected to him? So in tune that she swore she could feel his heartbeat throbbing through her from three feet away? Didn't her body know how dangerous he was to her? With a snap of his fingers he could take away her reason for living- Nathan. Not to mention what he could do to her heart. She forced herself to look away from his probing gaze.
"Well, speak of the devil," Willie piped up when he, too, caught sight of her from where he stood leaning against the fridge. "Sheesh, Julie, you look like you just ran one of those stupid marathons."
Juliet covered her flushed cheeks with her hands. It took a physical
effort to cease gasping for air. She had to get ahold of herself or Harrison would easily believe what her family spouted about her mental health.
"Glad you decided to show, missy," her mom said from her permanent spot at the head of the small table. " Rivers, here, came to see his son."
She frowned at her mom. "My son is asleep."
