by Amira Rain
I hadn’t exactly been anticipating this response, or the one before it, and now I found myself rendered a bit tongue-tied.
After raking his hand through his hair again, gaze on Tommy, Gavin spoke in a voice that I thought held the slightest hint of a tremor. “How old is he?”
“Two. Twenty-seven months, to be exact.”
The very last remnants of color in Gavin’s face quickly drained. Not a moment later, Tommy stirred in my arms, calling out for Softie, even though Softie was still in his arms.
After brushing a kiss against Tommy’s forehead, I spoke in a low voice near his ear. “You’ve still got Softie, sweetie. He’s right here with you. You’re holding him.”
Closing his eyes, which he’d opened just a crack, Tommy seemed to go back to sleep, and I looked up at Gavin, seeing that he was frowning with his gaze seeming to be on Softie, as if he were wondering something.
“Yes, Softie is the same blue-bow-tie teddy that you won for me at the fair.”
Before Gavin could respond, Tommy stirred again, opening his eyes and kind of twisting in my arms, grimacing. “Mama, me…me throw up. I icky.”
Gavin, still extremely pale-faced, looking like he might throw up himself, quickly grabbed a small trash can and handed it to me just in time for me to have a seat on the couch, sit Tommy up, and position the can under his face. While he got sick in two fairly forceful heaves, Gavin stood raking a hand through his hair, clearly not sure what else to do.
Once Tommy lifted his face from the can, saying he felt “all better,” Gavin grabbed a box of tissues and handed it to me. “To wipe his mouth with.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course. How long has he been sick?”
Pulling out a tissue, I glanced up at Gavin. “I don’t think he actually is sick. Not with any human ailment, anyway. He got sick about an hour after inadvertently putting on a ‘shifter child light show’ at the daycare earlier today, but then he was completely fine. But then he did another ‘light show’ back at the bridge, and now here we are nearly an hour later, and he just got sick again. And now he’s once again fine.”
Handing me an unopened water bottle he’d taken out of a desk drawer, Gavin nodded. “That makes sense. Some shifters become extremely ill after each of the first few times they shift. Usually the ones who end up becoming the strongest.”
While I helped Tommy fill his mouth with small amounts of water, directing him to swish it around and spit it out into the garbage can, Gavin fell silent and went back to his hair-raking again, pacing a little now. Once Tommy was finished, Gavin wordlessly took the can and set it out in the hallway. When he came back in, I told him he could sit next to Tommy and me on the couch if he wanted. My anger had cooled slightly, for the moment anyway, and I did want to talk to him without having to crane my neck to look up at him.
Still silent, he had a seat maybe a good two feet from Tommy and me, as if afraid to get too close. As if he was afraid of some terrible thing we might do to him.
After a long moment spent just looking at Tommy, expression unreadable, he lifted his gaze to my face and spoke in a low voice that held a hint of the faint tremor I’d heard earlier. “So, is he…is he mine?”
Incredulous, I just stared at Gavin for a long moment. "Well, if his mini-you facial features aren’t sufficient to convince you, have a look at his eyes. Granite gray with gold-ish little flecks. Do they look at all familiar to you? And have you ever seen another human being on the planet with eyes like this, other than your own?” Giving my head a shake, I paused, completely unable to resist making a little snort. “Yes…you're his dad, Gavin."
Tommy, who’d been staring at Gavin, suddenly whipped his face from Gavin to me, frowning. "No, Mama, me no have daddy. I have Unca Zee-zay. He go daycare, play bee-ball."
Sure that Tommy’s speech was probably half-gibberish to Gavin, I looked from Tommy to him to explain. "He's talking about my brother, his Uncle DJ. Every year at Tommy’s day care, they have a special lunch for Father's Day, and after, all the kids and their dads play an outdoor baseball game with foam 'baseballs' and foam bats. Since Tommy didn't have a dad until just this evening, DJ went to the Father's Day lunch and baseball game a couple weeks ago. He also went the year before."
As if wanting to make crystal clear to Gavin what I'd just said, Tommy looked at him and gave the toddler version. "Unca Zee-zay play bee-ball. Me no have daddy. Unca Zee-zay go daycare."
While Tommy had been rinsing out his mouth, Gavin had retained a little touch of color. But while I’d just been speaking, he’d paled a degree, wincing a little, and while Tommy had been speaking, he’d went nearly white again, actually seeming as if he were fighting the urge to outright flinch, as if Tommy’s words had been physical blows. He honestly looked like he might soon be sick.
Tommy, however, the one who’d actually gotten sick, now looked a hundred percent fine, maybe just a little sleepy again, with his eyelids beginning to droop. After grabbing Softie, he put his head on my chest and spoke to Gavin. "You please go bye-bye now. Mama go night-night. Me go night-night. Bye-bye, uh-oh man."
Gavin had dropped his gaze to his hands, but he now looked up at me with the whites of his eyes faintly pink. And when he spoke, his voice was decidedly a bit emotion-choked.
"What's an 'uh-oh man?'"
Having developed a sudden lump in my throat, I swallowed before answering the question. "At daycare, one of the teachers read a book about 'stranger danger,' and the phrase uh-oh was repeated about a hundred times throughout the book. Somehow, Tommy got the idea that uh-oh means the same thing as stranger. So, basically, by calling you an 'uh-oh man,' he was calling you a stranger...because to him, you are."
With his pink eyes now suddenly a bit shiny as well, Gavin dropped his gaze to his hands again and nodded a few times, clearing his throat, before abruptly standing. With his gaze toward Tommy and me yet not really on us, he began making his way to the door, raking a hand through his hair, and spoke in a voice thick with emotion. “I need to go now. I’ll send a maid down to get the two of you set up in a bedroom.”
With that, he just about bolted out of the study, closing the door behind him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I hadn’t been able to swallow the lump in my throat, and my eyes became a bit misty not a moment after Gavin had bolted out of the study. Not wanting Tommy to become upset about seeing me cry, like he had at the bridge, I tried blink back my tears while smoothing his hair, telling him to just go ahead and rest.
“In just a few minutes, a lady is going to come take us to our bedroom, and then we’ll go potty and brush our teeth and wash our faces, and then we’ll go to sleep in a nice comfy bed.”
Tommy lifted his head. “Softie, too?”
“Yes, Softie, too. Now just put your head back down and rest.”
He did, leaving me to fight my misty eyes without scrutiny.
It wasn’t that I exactly felt sorry for any of the things that Tommy or I had said to Gavin; in fact, I felt like he’d deserved to hear them. I also felt like if they’d hurt him, which obviously they had, maybe he’d had this hurt coming. After all, Tommy and I had hurt plenty over the past couple of years with Gavin not being in the picture. I wasn’t about to sugarcoat things for him just to spare him pain that I thought he’d essentially inflicted on himself.
It was just that with all this being the case, I couldn’t understand why my heart now hurt so badly while I remembered how Gavin had been so pale, and how he’d winced, and how he’d looked like he’d been dealt a physical blow when Tommy had said what he had.
Bottom line, while I’d felt justified in saying what I had, and still did, part of me just didn’t feel good about this. I could have been kinder, I figured. I might have phrased some things differently, might have been a bit more delicate. Might have taken care that Gavin didn’t get his heart broken in the process of meeting his son.
No, a little voice in my head said He didn’t take any care not to break a
heart himself when he left and didn’t come back.
It really wasn’t like me at all to be spiteful or vindictive, and I didn’t like it. Also, I’d really thought that I had gotten past my anger toward Gavin. Truly, when I’d seen him, I was blindsided by my anger, shocked that it was actually still there, buried somewhere deep inside of me.
Though, of course, this shock had been secondary to the much bigger shock of just simply seeing Gavin again and discovering that he was none other than Commander Iverson, commander-in-chief of the FDS.
The day had just been far too long, stressful, and emotional, and I couldn’t help but think that maybe things would seem clearer to me in the morning, after a good night’s sleep, a hot shower, and a cup of coffee.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to get started on the first item in that list. Within just a few minutes of Gavin leaving the study, a smiling gray-haired woman in a starched navy-and-white uniform came bustling into the study, saying that she was Ella, one of Everett House’s “evening shift maids,” which kind of boggled my mind a bit. Growing up, I’d had a few friends who were fairly affluent, but I’d never been in a household with a uniformed maid before, let alone “day shift maids” and “evening shift maids.”
Even while she’d been saying “evening shift maids,” when Ella spotted sleepy Tommy with his head against my chest, she’d immediately lowered her voice a notch.
Now she began sort of tiptoeing backward out of the room, still smiling, motioning for me to follow her. “Let’s get the two of you set up in one of the master bedrooms in this wing. We’ll get the little guy into bed in no time.”
A short while later, Tommy and I were snuggling together in the most comfortable, luxurious-feeling bed I’d ever been in. With buttery-soft cotton sheets scented with a few spritzes of what Ella had told me was an all-natural, chemical-free lavender-vanilla “sleep mist,” and with a pillow-top at least a half-foot thick atop the mattress, the bed felt something like resting on a cloud.
It was a large bed, too, a California king, which was good so that Tommy and I each had plenty of room to sprawl out, which we usually did after falling asleep curled up together. At home, we’d shared a bed from the time Tommy was about one until he was about two, when I’d bought him a “big boy” bed shaped like a racecar, with bright red side panels and even a steering wheel with beeping horn at the foot of the bed.
The purchase of this bed had ended our co-sleeping days, and I’d kind of missed them, so I loved getting a chance to snuggle to sleep with Tommy again.
In the spacious room, with pale moonlight streaming in through the gauzy white curtains, Tommy soon fell asleep, but despite the comfort of the bed, and despite how tired I was, I had difficulty drifting off myself. This was primarily because I kept seeing images of Gavin in my mind. I kept recalling just how good he’d looked, how devastatingly handsome, even with nearly all the color drained out of his face. I also kept recalling how good his physique had looked, displayed to its best advantage in dark dress pants and a white Oxford shirt that highlighted the breadth of Gavin’s strong shoulders.
I definitely didn’t want to be having these thoughts. With Gavin just finding out that he was a father, and with Tommy just finding out that he had a father, things seemed plenty complicated enough without my feelings of extreme attraction to Gavin being rekindled.
But still, after a half-hour or so in bed, just staring up at the ceiling, I couldn’t get Gavin out of my mind, and the more I thought about him, the further from sleep I felt. I was almost beginning to feel keyed-up and restless, in fact.
After a few more minutes spent staring up at the ceiling, I got out of bed, deciding that I’d make my way down to the east wing’s kitchen and maybe make some tea if there was any. Before leaving the bedroom, though, I got a two-part baby monitor from my big duffle bag of things, which Chet had brought inside.
At home, I still used the baby monitor because very occasionally, Tommy would wake from a bad dream, calling out for me but too afraid to get out of his racecar bed to get me, and I couldn’t always hear him in my own room. Now the baby monitor would especially come in handy, with just the east wing of the mansion being quite vast.
Once I’d set one part of the monitor on the night stand closest to Tommy, I put the other part in the pocket of my pajama pants, wrapped myself in a light cotton robe, and left the bedroom, closing the door behind me as softly as I could.
Ella had put us in a room on the eastern end of the wing, “right next to Commander Iverson’s room,” she’d said, so it was somewhat of a long walk down to the kitchen, but I didn’t mind at all, because it gave me the chance to stretch my restless-feeling legs.
When I got to the kitchen, I was somewhat surprised to see Ella still up, wiping down a counter with a bright white cloth. Next to her, a teakettle sat on a glowing burner, and she smiled at me, tilting her head toward the kettle for a second.
“Care for a cup? I was just going to make a cup of chamomile to take upstairs to bed with me.”
Earlier, she’d told me that most of the household staff was live-in, and they all slept upstairs. The space was so vast that they all had their own full apartments, and they weren’t small at all, either, Ella had said.
The west wing of the house was also subdivided into apartment suites, though these were “much more luxurious,” with “solid gold fixtures, and Jacuzzis and such” because they were reserved for visiting dignitaries and other guests of Commander Iverson. Ella had casually mentioned that Tommy and I hadn’t been situated in this guest wing and because the commander had requested that we be situated in his private residence wing.
I thanked Ella, told her that I’d love a cup of tea, and asked if she’d like to join me. She said she’d love to, and soon we were seated in the dining room, which really wasn’t a separate room, per se, but took up half the space of a very spacious room containing kitchen and eating area, partially divided by counters and a row of cabinets.
Along with the other parts of the house I’d seen so far, I loved the east wing, particularly the dining room. A long, honey-oak table that seated twelve was polished to a high shine, and at one end, a gorgeous, large, gray granite fireplace with a honey-oak mantel stretched across a good portion of the wall. The wall adjacent was lined with high, wide windows offering a view of what appeared to be a vast back lawn. French doors to the right of the windows opened up onto a well-lit patio with large table and chairs surrounded by numerous enormous urns overflowing with flowers.
After passing me a plate of sugar cookies that Ella had brought to the table for us to have with our tea, she glanced in the direction of the French doors, saying that the commander liked to eat meals outside often. “Sometimes with friends, but usually alone, though, so I’m glad he’ll have more company now.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, just took a bite of my cookie, and Ella continued.
“He left the house earlier, you know…probably just to take to the skies in his dragon form to get some air, I’d guess…but I’d also guess he’ll be back to get some sleep before it’s too late. I doubt he’ll want to miss a minute of spending time with his darling son by oversleeping tomorrow.”
I hadn’t said anything to Ella about Tommy being Gavin’s son, and now I wondered just out of curiosity if Gavin himself had, so I just came right out and asked Ella.
Reddening just slightly, she swallowed a sip of tea and set the cup down, shaking her head. “No, he didn’t, but….” Pausing, she gave me a little smile. “Well, I have eyes, don’t I? I think a person would have to be completely blind not to see that little Tommy is the commander’s son. I’d say it’s probably even the strongest father-son resemblance I’ve ever seen in my life. Particularly with their eyes, of course. Those gray-gold eyes aren’t part-and-parcel of being a dragon shifter or anything, you know; they’re just unique to the commander.”
I’d been wondering about that, but a look at Chet’s normally-colored eyes and the
eyes of his fellow bridge guards had answered my question.
Possibly noticing my discomfort in regards to the subject of Gavin, Ella soon changed the subject, asking me lots of questions about myself and life in Sandstone, not bringing up Gavin again during the rest of our time in the dining room, to my relief.
By the time we parted ways, with her going upstairs and me going back down to Tommy’s and my room, I was finally feeling like I’d be able to go to sleep. I didn’t, however, get back into bed right away. Instead, after a quick trip I went over to one of the windows, parted the white curtains, and leaned against the wall, intending to just look out at the starry night sky for a while.
Part of me knew damn well what I was hoping to see, or, to be more precise, who I was hoping to see. But another part of me was just too stubborn to admit it. I told myself I just wanted to have a look at the natural beauty of the stars and moon before going to sleep, but consciously, I knew this wasn’t exactly what had led me to the window.
Ten or so minutes later, not having seen a thing in the night sky other than the stars and moon, I’d just decided to give it up and go to bed when a tiny dark shape in the distance caught my eye. Appearing as if it were maybe even a mile off, the tiny dark shape was really just a black dot against the velvety, midnight blue sky at first, but ever so slowly, it got larger and larger, until I was able to see that the dark shape had wings.
With my pulse accelerating for some reason, I continued watching while the dark, winged shape drew closer and closer to the house. Even though I knew there were obviously many, many other dragons in Everett, being that the whole city and country was populated by dragon shifters and their families, for some reason I just knew that this dragon was Gavin.
It could have been a house guard reporting for overnight duty or something, but I just didn’t feel like it was. I just felt like it was Gavin, as if the closeness we’d shared during our single night of passion had given me a sixth sense for him.
