For Love of Freedom (Stone Brothers Book 3)

by Samantha Westlake

  "Tori?"

  I turned back around at Seb's voice. Sure enough, he stood in the entrance to our destination, frowning down at the two of us. "What are you doing?" he continued.

  "Coming up to see you," I answered, pushing a smile onto my face. I marched up the driveway, pausing only momentarily to snag Ellen's elbow and pull her along with me. She bounced up and down with every other step, thanks to missing one of her shoes, but she at least tugged her skirt back down to mid-thigh.

  Seb smiled at me, although his smile faded a little as his eyes panned over to Ellen. "I didn't realize that you were bringing anybody with you," he said.

  "Well, you wouldn't tell me what was happening over the phone, so I thought that it would be best to have some back-up." Admittedly, Ellen wasn't the first person I'd call in a crisis, but Seb didn't need to know about that.

  Seb looked like he wanted to say more, maybe send Ellen away, but I hurried past this possible objection. "So, what are we doing out here in... this neighborhood?" I asked.

  "Oh! Right. I wanted to show you the house!" And before I could ask him why, whether this had anything to do with the sign out on the front lawn, he turned and disappeared back into the house.

  I exchanged a glance with Ellen. The front door to the house stood open in front of us, but I felt more threatened than invited. Something about it reminded me of an open mouth, waiting for prey to innocently wander in.

  I forced these thoughts out of my head. It was a house, not a tiger, I told myself. It wasn't going to hurt me. And Seb had to have called me here for a reason.

  I crossed the threshold, Ellen following rather reluctantly behind me.

  Inside the front hall, Seb popped back up beside us. "Kitchen's on the left, living room is on the right," he said, leading us towards the rooms. "It's got all new appliances – stainless steel!" His brow furrowed slightly, and I could see that the words didn't really mean anything to him. "I guess that's a good thing."

  I stopped in the living room, looking around at the expanse of white. The designer of this house, apparently a true believer that cleanliness is next to godliness, had made everything white that they could possibly color. White leather couches sat on thick white carpeting. On the far side of the living room, a fireplace of white-painted brick rose up the white wall to vanish into the exposed rafters of the ceiling, which were painted a particularly vibrant shade of neon green.

  Just kidding. They were also white, like every other object in the room. I felt like my eyeballs had stopped processing color, and I had to keep sneaking glances at Ellen's bronzed skin to reassure myself that they still worked.

  Seb frowned slightly at me. "I still have to show you the four bedrooms and three bathrooms-"

  "Seb, what are you doing?" I interrupted him.

  "What?"

  I gestured around at the whiteness. "With all of this. Why are you showing me this house?"

  "Oh, didn't I say?" His frown cleared on his face. "I bought it for us!"

  I don't think that I needed to say anything. My jaw dropping open should have been reaction enough.

  The slight little frown reappeared on his face. "Tori, what's wrong?"

  I dropped down heavily on the white couch, not even worrying that I might stain its pristine finish. "You bought me a house?" I repeated, still dumbfounded. "Why?"

  "Well, because..." His eyes flicked over to Ellen.

  "The pregnancy?" Ellen said, turning around from where she'd been peering curiously at a bowl filled with white seashells. "Don't worry, I knew about it. Before you did, too."

  "Okay. Well, I was at home, thinking about this, and I realized that I didn't want to be a shitty parent. Tori, this isn't really how I imagined things working out, but that doesn't mean that I don't want you to have a good future." His eyes dipped down towards my stomach, wordlessly insinuating that he wasn't thinking just about my own personal future.

  Well, that all sounded kind and noble, but... "And the best way you could think to help me was to buy me a house?" I asked, shaking my head. "Seb, what about things like taxes, and a mortgage? I can't afford to live-"

  "I saw where you were living," Seb said. His tone made it clear what he thought of my little one-bedroom apartment in the city. Okay, he did have a point that it wasn't the nicest place, but it worked with my limited income. This place was almost hilariously out of reach, fiscally speaking. "And that's not where you want to raise a kid."

  "But I can't afford this place, Seb!"

  "But I can," he said, as if this was the obvious answer that I'd somehow missed.

  I just looked at him, not even trying to guess what he meant. "What?"

  "I bought the house," he echoed. "Bought, outright. There's no mortgage to pay, and I'll help out with the property taxes, whatever other fees go along with it. Even groceries and stuff, since I'll be here, too."

  Whoa. Second bombshell. "You?" I echoed.

  Most people wouldn't have seen the little slip in his confident façade, but most people didn't know Sebastian Stone like I did. For an instant, his confidence cracked, and he looked scared and nervous, a man charging forward blindly into the unknown without any sort of plan. It only appeared for an instant, however, before it vanished back behind his normal mask.

  "Yeah, of course," he answered. "Someone needs to take care of you, right?"

  Thankfully, I didn't have to snort at this ridiculous comment, because Ellen did it for me. "You?" she burst out, holding up a hand to her lips as if trying in vain to contain her laughter. "You're even worse than she is!"

  I waited for Seb to snap back at her. That's what he normally would do. The Seb voice in my head had half a dozen devastating retorts lined up, ready to deliver a perfectly executed comeback.

  The real Seb, however, just swallowed. "Maybe," he allowed, his lips tightening until they were almost white. "But I need to learn how to change, how to be more..."

  He struggled for a second with the next word, but finally got it out. "...mature. And I can't learn that if I'm not around to help."

  For a second, all three of us were silent. Ellen, perhaps sensing that this conversation might grow too personal for her, started backing away gingerly towards the doorway leading out to the rest of the house.

  "Tell you what," she volunteered. "I'll go wander around and look at the other bedrooms and bathrooms, shall I? Flush the toilets a bunch, make sure that the water works everywhere. You two can talk things out here."

  I gave her a slight little nod, and she vanished out of the living room. For a moment, watching her go, Seb's lips twisted into a quirky smile, and I waited for the old Seb to re-emerge, to make some snarky comment about the inappropriate outfit she'd chosen for this house visit.

  The comment went unspoken, however, and his little smirk faded as he turned back to me. "Come on, Tori," he said, and I felt astounded to realize that he was pleading with me! Sebastian Stone, who never had to plead for anything in his life! "I'm trying, here. Let me help out, so I don't feel like such a shitty future parent."

  Those last words gave me pause. "Seb, I don't think that you're going to be a shitty parent," I said. "I just..." I gestured around at the white living room. "This is all a bit much for me, that's all. It's all moving fast. One day, I'm living my normal life, and the next, I'm finding out that I'm pregnant. And now you're buying me a house!"

  "Bought you a house," he corrected. "I don't think I can return it."

  I covered a chuckle at the thought of Seb arguing fiercely with a realtor, trying to return a fully purchased house. "But are you really going to be able to handle this?" I pressed on. "You're going to move out of your big mansion, live here with me? And what are you going to do while you're here?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Whatever a father is supposed to do for a pregnant woman. Cook and clean, drive you to hospital appointments, watch football. Isn't that what most dads do?"

  I didn't have much of a better answer for him. And to be honest, most of me knew that this w
as a mistake. If there was one constant about Seb, it was that he very easily grew bored – and usually started trying to entertain himself by breaking whatever rules he could find. I couldn't even begin to imagine what trouble he'd get up to if he was stuck here in this house in suburbia with me, all day, for the next nine months.

  And what did he think would happen after the baby was born? Was he planning on returning to partying and having fun, or was he intending to stay here for the next eighteen years? He wouldn't make it a single week with a screaming infant.

  All of these thoughts passed through my head as I looked at him – but surprisingly, my mental version of Seb spoke up. And it wasn't chiming in with an insult. Not this time.

  He's trying, it pointed out to me in that smug, self-satisfied voice that I hated so much, that Seb only used when he was making a point that was, at least to him, totally obvious. He's trying his best, and it's more than you ever expected to get from him. Don't throw it away.

  As much as I hated to admit it, Seb's little voice in my head did have a point.

  "Okay," I said in a rush, and Seb glanced up from his seat next to me on the couch. "Okay – on a trial basis. I still think that this is a huge mistake, but let's give it a try."

  He jumped to his feet. "Really??"

  "Really," I nodded, and let him tug me up to my feet.

  His arms slid around me as I rose to stand beside him, and he drew me in. For a moment, I forgot about how fucked up our situation had become, forgot that we were standing in a crazy white living room in a suburban house instead of at a club somewhere. My ears didn't register the absence of thumping music, and my stomach didn't point out that it wasn't filled with liquor like usual.

  All that was different – but Seb, my friend and partner in crime and in bed, was still the same, still here with me.

  I leaned in toward Seb, feeling the strength in his body, his arms. He looked down at me, and I finally saw a little hint of his little half-smile, the smirk he wore when he was trying – and failing – to conceal actual happiness. He leaned in towards me...

  "Hey, I've changed my mind – this place is great!"

  We both jumped as Ellen appeared from around the corner, grinning at us. "The upstairs bathroom has a Jacuzzi in it!" she continued, waggling her eyebrows. "Pregnant or not, you'll have fun with that, I bet!"

  Seb let go of me, stepped back as he ran a hand through his hair. "Well, I'm sure you need to go back home, figure out moving,' he said, looking away from me. "I've got to do the same, I guess. Get boxes, pack up, rent a truck somewhere, all that sort of stuff."

  I nodded. Whatever that brief moment between us might have been, we could revisit it later – or maybe not at all. Seb was trying to be a good person, I reminded myself, but he wasn't in love with me, wasn't going to be anything more than an involved sperm donor.

  And that's all I wanted from him right now, I added inside my head. I needed to make sure that I didn't project anything else on him. I needed to keep myself grounded and away from any domestic fantasies.

  Chapter Nine

  TORI

  *

  I can't believe that I'm saying this. I told Ellen about what Seb had in mind as we drove back into the city, and she immediately denounced every aspect of the plan. "It's going to end in failure and heartbreak, probably for both of you," she prophesied. "There are so many red flags with this plan that I can't even remember what other colors look like. It's going to go down in flames, right from the beginning."

  "You could be a little more optimistic," I said, although inside my head, I suspected that her words were depressingly accurate. "Maybe it will work."

  She shook her head, so emphatically that her Gucci sunglasses flew off and landed at her feet. "Not a chance," she restated, her voice slightly muffled as she bent forward to pick up the dropped accessory. "Just wait. You'll come crying to me, soon enough, telling me that I was right and you were wrong."

  "That'll be the first time," I thought, but I kept those words inside my head, not letting them off my tongue.

  Moving into the house took several days, although Seb at least hired a couple brawny young college boys to show up at my apartment and carry the boxes down the stairs and over to the new house. Not so bad to look at - except that I was pregnant, and would soon swell up like a whale, and couldn't even think of hitting on anyone with that huge secret inside my head. Box by box, my clothes vanished from my apartment closet. The cupboards of my shitty little kitchen emptied, the plates and bowls moving over to the new house. On the last night at my old apartment, I sat on the floor and ate take-out Chinese food straight from the Styrofoam container. I told myself that, as a pregnant woman, I could now satisfy these cravings, instead of worrying about how much of the greasy, fatty food would go straight to my hips and waist.

  Not that they'd stay slim and trim, anyway. No matter how many times I looked at pictures in People of Jennifer Aniston and other celebrities looking smooth and seductive even as they toted a baby around in their stomachs, I knew that I'd end up looking more like a beached whale. So long, perfect figure.

  For the first few days of living at the house in suburbia with Seb, things didn't feel quite real. I kept on convincing myself that I was off on a vacation, an extended holiday retreat at a sub-par resort, instead of actually living with a man, in a house he'd purchased for me, carrying his child. No matter how many times I repeated that truth to myself, it never seemed to click, never felt quite real.

  Maybe it was that illusion, that persistent lie. But living with Seb turned out to not be nearly as bad as I feared. Each day, I learned something new about him.

  Sometimes, however, that discovery was something less than ideal. For example, on the morning of the first day living at the house with him, I discovered that Seb was, quite possibly, the world's worst cook.

  "What's that smell?" I complained as I struggled down the stairs from the second floor, wrinkling my nose. "Seb, are you trying to bring on my morning sickness for me?"

  I came around the corner into the kitchen and found him standing over the stove, a frying pan in one hand and a spatula in the other. He blinked at me, looking confused beneath a layer of stubble on his cheeks that he hadn't yet shaved.

  "I'm cooking," he said, as if this should have been obvious from the sulfuric, burnt smell hanging in the air like a miasma. "I thought that I'd make you breakfast as a welcome to the house."

  "And you decided to use expired eggs?" Nervously, I peered at the rubbery, yellow-brown mass in the pan that he held. "What did you do to them?"

  His brow furrowed. "I cooked them. I haven't done it before, but it seems easy enough. I saw it on television."

  I lowered myself into one of the stools at the granite center island in the kitchen. "Wait a second," I said, holding up my hand. "Seb, you've never cooked before? Not once in your life?"

  He shrugged. "Nope. But I guess I thought it would be straightforward."

  I moved around the counter, gently but firmly removing the pan and spatula from his hands. "I think you've got a bit more to learn," I told him. "Here, grab me some eggs, and I'll show you how to not turn them into rubber."

  Over the next couple of weeks, I kept on trying to help Seb master the art of preparing anything more than a basic sandwich in the kitchen, largely without any success. Somehow, despite his obvious intelligence, the man just couldn't figure out how much heat to apply to a piece of meat, how to combine ingredients in a bowl without spilling it everywhere, how to taste foods and determine when he'd added too much salt. I ended up taking over the majority of the cooking duties, not even trusting him with a knife to chop vegetables. He'd probably end up lopping off most of his fingers before I noticed and took the knife away.

  All part of my plan to domesticate you, smirked the inner Seb voice in my head.

  But while Seb couldn't handle any of the cooking, he seemed to be making a genuine effort in other areas, trying to be useful. I woke up on the third morning and came downsta
irs to find him sprawled out on the couch, his nose buried in a book! If this wasn't surprising enough, it seemed to be the first of many, judging from the size of the stack standing on the coffee table next to him.

  "What's this? You know how to read?" I gasped, looking at him in surprise.

  He groaned as he sat up, reaching up to scratch his head with one hand. His fingers tousled his thick hair, making it stand up adorably on one side. "Thanks, Tori. Just what I want in the morning – mocking."

  I laughed as I went to fetch myself a cup of coffee. Holding the steaming mug in both hands, I returned to the living room to get another look at Seb. "Seriously, what are all of these?"

  "See for yourself." He stuck a scrap of paper into the book in his hands, set it aside, and reached for his own cup of coffee. "I ordered every one that came up as a recommended read. Figure I've got a few months to make my way through them."

  I picked up the first book from the tall, teetering pile on the coffee table. "Dr. Spock's Guide to a Healthy Baby?" I read off from the cover. "The guy from Star Trek wrote a book on raising babies? Live long and bottle-feed?"

  "I don't think it's the same guy," he said. "But they're every top book on pregnancy and raising a kid! And I'm going to read all of them."

  I put the Dr. Spock book down and looked over at Seb. I didn't say anything, but he didn't have any trouble reading my expression.

  "Really!" he insisted. "Look, I don't know the first thing about having a baby, or a pregnant girl, or anything like that. Do you?"

  "Of course I do," I lied. "As a woman, I naturally understand far more about these sorts of things than men do."

  He snorted at my lofty tone. "Yeah, because that's why you got pregnant. Too much knowledge. But if we're going to have a baby, at least one of us should have some idea of what to do. And I figure that if I can make it through even half of these, I can probably go ahead and call myself an expert."