Comfort 4: Command Performance

by Annabel Joseph

  “I’m not letting her grow up in Hollywood, in the spotlight, as your celebrity daughter. No.”

  “And how do you propose to keep that from happening? Everyone will know this baby is mine.”

  “Now they will, now that you’ve barged in here trailing paparazzi. Why didn’t you come in the back door?”

  Mason snorted. “I’ve got news for you. There are paparazzi at the back door too.”

  She wrapped her arms around the baby. Around his baby girl. “Forget it, Miri,” he said. “You’re not taking my daughter away from me. No fucking way.”

  “How’s it going to work then?” she asked. “I won’t let her grow up being followed around by photographers, mobbed like Jessamine’s baby girl. I don’t want them snapping pictures of her on the way to school, at the playground when she’s playing with her friends, when she’s having a meltdown at the grocery store. If she’s raised as your daughter, she won’t be able to ride her bike outside, or play in the backyard, or do anything without some stone-faced bodyguard at her side. I don’t want that for her!”

  He buried his head in his hands. “There won’t be anything you can do about it.”

  “There is something I can do. I can go away, go into hiding. Grammy is...” Miri’s lips trembled. “She’s getting worse. When she’s gone, me and my dad are going to move somewhere in the middle of nowhere, to some small town where people will leave us alone.”

  “And what will you do there in this small town paradise?” Mason asked, his rage making him nasty. “Flip burgers? Get a job down at the Gas N Go?”

  “I’ll get a job, yes. A real job. Not acting.”

  “Acting is a real job.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  He stared at her belly. That was his baby growing inside her. He still hadn’t managed to wrap his mind around it, but he knew he couldn’t let his baby—or Miri—disappear from his life. He didn’t want to be the one left behind, abandoned and alone.

  Miri’s face softened. “I’m sorry. I thought it would be kinder not to tell you. We can’t raise this baby together. I won’t do that to her. I’m just trying to protect her.”

  “Protect her from me, her own father?” Mason shook his head. “You’ll protect her so much you’ll smother her, just like your father did to you. To protect you from the sins of poor Aunt Maddy,” he added bitterly.

  “You leave Miri’s sister out of this!” Her father was back again, blustering and slurring his words.

  Mason glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, and drunk grandpa over there will be happy to help you raise her, I’m sure. He’ll be a much more positive influence than a few damn paparazzi hiding in the bushes.”

  “Daddy!” Miri screamed.

  Mason felt sharp slicing pain in his left shoulder. He looked down to see his shirt gashed open, red blooming over the white of his sleeve. “Jesus Christ.” He touched the spreading pool of heat in a daze. “He stabbed me.”

  Miri ran past him, grabbing the knife away from her father. “Daddy, are you crazy?”

  “Yes, he’s crazy,” Mason yelled. “He fucking stabbed me in the shoulder!”

  “I was aiming for your neck,” Peter barked, shaking a fist at him.

  Mason clamped a hand over his bleeding shoulder and winced at the pain. “Thank God you’re such a fucking drunk then.” He looked at Miri. “Should I go out the front door or the back door? What will make a better photo for the ages?”

  She stood there frozen, knife in one hand, the other hand pressed to her mouth in horrified disbelief.

  *** *** ***

  Mason decided not to press charges. Or rather, he agreed not to press charges as long as Peter underwent ninety days of treatment at a leading inpatient rehab facility. On Mason’s dime.

  Something was very wrong with him. Fortunately, it wasn’t a knife in the neck.

  His shoulder ached, but it was just a flesh wound. They didn’t even put him under to fix it, just stitched him up using local anesthetic. Yeah, that had been fun. It had also been fun trying to keep Miri calm so she didn’t go into premature labor. He finally sent her to her dad’s house with a slew of bodyguards. Good God. Miri Durand, his ex-fiancée, secretly knocked up with his baby. The entertainment shitstorm of the year.

  Kai and Jeremy arrived at the hospital early the next morning to visit, although Mason suspected it was more to grind his gears than offer any real sympathy.

  “Getting stabbed by her dad, Mace. Interesting gambit in the ongoing PR war,” Jeremy snarked.

  “Maybe the stabbing will take some attention off the pregnancy,” Kai agreed. “Hm, but probably not.”

  “Fuck both of you. Drop off the flowers and chocolate and get out.”

  “We don’t have flowers or chocolate.” Jeremy made himself at home in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs while Kai folded his tall frame into the other one. “Where’s Miri?”

  “I sent her into hiding last night with a fucking security detail. The press is going nuts.”

  Kai grimaced. “I guess she feels pretty bad about all this. But if it brought you guys back together...”

  “We’re not back together. Her dad stabbed me in the arm. That’s about the extent of it.”

  “Oh, sorry. I must have been misinformed.” Kai held up a folded-over tabloid. DRAMATIC DOMESTIC DISPUTE REKINDLES SORDID LOVE AFFAIR. “This was the most tasteful headline of the bunch, wouldn’t you say, Jeremy?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Let me guess,” Mason said. “She came at me with a knife and then realized she couldn’t live without me.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “No, they got it right about the dad stabbing you. Nice of you, by the way, to let him off the hook.”

  “I did it for Miri.”

  Jeremy and Kai exchanged speaking looks.

  “So what’s going to happen now?” Kai asked in a carefully moderate voice. “I mean, it’s your baby, right?”

  Kai was Mason’s oldest friend, so he was allowed to ask stuff like that without getting punched in the face—although Mason felt a really strong impulse to punch him in the face. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are kind of crazy at the moment.”

  “It’s a lot of pressure for you both,” Jeremy said. “It’s too bad you can’t go away somewhere. Work things out.”

  “There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere far enough away that things would work out for us. She just...she doesn’t want this, you know?”

  He didn’t have to explain what “this” was, especially to Jeremy. He knew Mason meant the fame, the disruption of her life. Jeremy shook his head. “That’s too bad.”

  “It’s mostly about the baby. She wants to protect the baby.”

  “You can protect a baby. We protected Rhiannon. We still protect her.”

  “But you and Nell aren’t as royally and publicly fucked up as me and Miri are,” Mason pointed out.

  Kai shrugged. “You and Jessamine were royally fucked up, and you got past that eventually. At least, until all the sex pervert shit started up. And the whole getting stabbed by your pregnant ex-fiancée’s father and everything.”

  Mason rubbed his shoulder with a groan. “It never ends, you know? No matter what I do, bad shit happens. It makes me afraid to do anything at all.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?” Kai asked after a pause.

  “Not for now.”

  Jeremy looked over at the door. “I think you’d better do something,” he said softly as Miri poked her head in. She looked exhausted, like she’d spent a restless night.

  He and Kai excused themselves, exchanging awkward congratulations with his ex-fiancée. Congratulations? Ha. That baby she was carrying was a ticking time bomb. He could try to keep her near, keep her in his circle of protection, but how much power did he have? She fretted over the media circus, but he fretted over the idea that the baby she was carrying—their baby—might be kept away from him, raised in some faraway town. He could sic lawyers on the problem.
He could throw money at it, but he didn’t want to do that to Miri. He understood that in this situation, either way, someone lost. Either way there would be pain and frustration, just like in their relationship.

  She came into the room, eyeing his bandage as she shrugged out of her concealing coat. “How are you?” she asked. “Does it hurt?”

  Yes, it hurts, he thought to himself. You have no idea how bad. “I’m okay,” he said, putting on a brave front. “I get to leave today, as soon as I get my discharge orders.” He didn’t know what happened after that. He didn’t know what to say to her. God, she was so beautiful, even tired, even frowning and anxious. Would his daughter look like her, or have a head of dark, tousled hair like him?

  “I have to be able to protect you,” he blurted out.

  Miri looked up at him and then down again. “The bodyguards can do that.”

  “No. I need you with me. The baby too. You belong with me, especially now when you’re both so vulnerable.”

  Miri sighed, staring down at the side of his bed. “I almost can’t bear to look at you.”

  She still had so much power to hurt him. “Do you hate me that much?”

  When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes. “No, I miss you that much.”

  He put his palm against her face, against the heat of her tears. He stared down at her baby bump and wanted to cry himself. “God help me, I can’t just let the two of you go away from me. I can’t waltz back to my life and carry on. I love you, damn it. I fell in love with you ages ago. In the back of a limo, when I smeared lipstick across your cheek. Just saying. I don’t know about all the other stuff. I don’t know how to fix us, but I know I need you. I need your laugh, your smile.” He took her hand, rubbed a thumb across the back of it. “It was good between us for a while. We fit together like pieces of a puzzle, you and me.”

  Her expression tightened. “No, we didn’t. You overshadowed me. We didn’t fit together at all.” Brutal truth. Okay.

  “So let’s try again,” Mason said. “Let’s try again without worrying about the tabloids, about public opinion or our careers.”

  “We already tried that. It didn’t work. That other stuff will always be there. I’ll always be jealous of you. I’ll never catch up to you.”

  “Why do you have to? Don’t you understand that means nothing to me? Compared to me and you and our daughter’s happiness, all that other stuff is just noise.”

  “It means something to me.” Miri swiped at a tear. “I don’t want to spend my whole life as Mason Cooke’s pretty, useless partner.”

  Mason sympathized with her. He’d been there, done that. He’d been Jessamine’s arm candy, her beefcake cabana boy for years. The difference was, Jess hadn’t loved him, and he loved Miri so, so much.

  “If you don’t want to be my partner in public, then you don’t have to be,” he said. “You won’t have to come to any of my appearances, and if you don’t want me to, I won’t come to yours.”

  “Mine? I don’t have any.”

  “You will,” he said in a determined voice. “We won’t allow you to be in my shadow. From here on out, we just won’t let it happen. There are ways. We’ll figure it out and you can find that success you want. I know you can do it because you’re stubborn as hell.” He cupped her chin, using his thumbs to brush away her tears. “We can’t go on like this, pretending we aren’t in love. You do love me, don’t you? Miri?”

  He looked at her familiar, adored face. Please, please love me. That will be enough to take a chance on. Just as she opened her mouth to answer, the shift nurse bustled in to take his blood pressure and temperature.

  “Aw, hell,” Mason muttered.

  While the woman arranged the equipment beside the bed, Miri pulled his face to hers and kissed him, a sweet, desperate kiss that had Mason forgetting the nurse and everything else. “Yes,” she said when they finally broke apart. “I love you. But I’m scared. It’ll crush me if things don’t work out.”

  “We have too much going for us for things not to work out.” He clutched her hand, terrified to let go. “We’ll protect our baby from the media, from the cameras, I swear. Jeremy and Nell have been through this celebrity baby thing. They can help us out, give us advice. If you want to move somewhere else after your grandma dies, we will. I have twenty-one houses. You’re bound to like one of them.”

  “Twenty-one? Really?” Miri bit her lip as the nurse strong-armed Mason into a blood pressure cuff.

  “And most of them are far off. Places paparazzi don’t lurk. At least most of the time,” he added, remembering the time at Cap Camil.

  “We need to go back there,” she said.

  “Open up,” the nurse prompted, brandishing a thermometer.

  “Cap Camil?” Mason asked around the probe under his tongue.

  “Yes. That was where everything started to go wrong. We need to go back and make things go right this time.”

  At the beep, Mason spit out the thermometer and grabbed her hand. “God, Miri. I remember standing in the water with you, so in love. I was afraid to say I loved you, but I did. I loved you so hard.”

  “I was afraid too. You called me your fearless girl, I’ll never forget it. But I was so afraid. I’m still so afraid.”

  “We’re a couple of fucking cowards, you and me,” he said, shaking his head.

  The shift nurse gave both of them a look. “Drama queens,” she said under her breath. “Just get on with it already. Go to the beach, go to a counselor. Whatever it takes. But stop whining. You’re Mason Cooke and Mireille Durand, for God’s sake. The whole world knows you belong together.”

  She bustled out with her medical cart, while Mason and Miri stared after her, open-mouthed. Then they looked at each other and started to laugh.

  “We can’t argue with the whole world, can we?” asked Miri.

  He dropped his head back against the pillow. “Honestly, I’m too tired to argue anymore. Kiss me, baby.” He smoothed his hands over her rounded waist as she leaned to press her lips to his. “You and this baby,” he said when she pulled away. “You’re the only world I need.”

  Chapter Eighteen: So Right

  They went to Cap Camil a week later, but they didn’t go alone. They invited photographers from all the biggest agencies and spent two hours posing for staged pics. Mason hugging her. Miri whispering in Mason’s ear while he cradled her little belly in his hands. The ubiquitous shot of him kneeling in the sand, kissing her baby bump. So cheesy. Miri could barely restrain her laughter. At sunset, they kissed for nearly ten minutes while the photogs snapped them silhouetted by the orange ball of the sun. Ah, so conceptual and original. Not.

  In exchange for this unprecedented and exclusive access, the photographers agreed to donate half the proceeds of their photo sales to charity. Satya was happy to coordinate the donations, funneling them to the organizations with the greatest need. Miri felt less frustrated, less used when she was the one in control of the picture taking—and when she knew the intrusive cameras were going to do some good.

  Even better, they made an additional deal with the photographers. Once they had their money shots, they agreed to vacate the island and leave them alone for the remainder of their stay. Completely, totally alone. All of this was brokered by Shane Greenberg, redeeming him in Miri’s eyes. The plan was to develop an ongoing pact with the paparazzi—she and Mason would provide regular photo opportunities and smile nice for the cameras, as long as they left their new baby alone. In that scenario, everybody won.

  The photographers left as agreed once the sun went down, and Miri and Mason hurried into the seaside house. They only had three days, like last time. Miri hadn’t brought much. Mason watched from the bed as she unpacked the things that really mattered. The framed photo from the Golden Globes, her collar, and the pouch with the engagement ring.

  “Bring it here, baby,” he said.

  “The ring?”

  “All of it.”

  He took the photo from her first. “Wow
. This is my favorite shot of us.”

  She nodded and slid onto the bed beside him. “Mine too. It was supposed to be a birthday present for you, but then I felt silly. Everyone else gave you cooler stuff.”

  “Cooler stuff? A watch? Orchestra tickets? I challenge your definition of cool.”

  “That watch cost—”

  He covered her lips with his fingers. “Enough with your price-taggery. It doesn’t matter what any of it cost. This is priceless.” He traced over the photo, his fingers lingering just above the glass. “Do you remember what I said to you, to make you laugh like that?”

  “You said the ransom paid for kidnap victims was tax deductible.”

  Mason threw back his head and laughed. “Jesus, I’m stupid. Why are you with me?”

  “Where did you learn that? That’s what I want to know.”

  He waved a hand. “Movie research. And because I fill my mind with useless facts rather than actual intelligence.”

  It was Miri’s turn to cover his mouth. “Stop. Don’t belittle yourself. You’re a very wise man,” she said, leaning down to kiss him.

  “I’m wise?” he asked against her lips.

  “Yes, because you made me come back to you.” She took the black velvet bag, spilled her sparkling ring on the bed between them. “Do you want to propose again?”

  He gave an indignant snort. “I already proposed once. This time you can very well goddamn propose to me.”

  Miri looked into his blue eyes, sparkling as brilliantly as the diamond, even in the dim light. The waves pounded outside, a rushing, repetitive sound. It might have been her heart beating in her chest. “Mason, I love you. I won’t leave you again. I’m more grown up now, and not as confused about everything. Will you marry me? Will you be my husband?”

  He took the ring and turned it over in his fingers, then looked up at her with solemn gravity. “I will. Because I’m more grown up now too.” He slid the stunning ring onto her finger, the facets winking as if in approval. “Last time I did this, I did it out of desperation. Rashly, like a child. But this time I’m doing it with all my wise, sage brain cells on full power.”