The Christmas Baby Bonus

by Yvonne Lindsay

  A sound at the door to his office made him turn around. Relief flooded through him as Faye stepped through the doorway. He didn’t know what to say or to do. All he could do was stare at her as if he was afraid to look away in case she disappeared again.

  “Hello, Piers,” she said, looking straight at him.

  “Long time no see,” he said stiffly.

  His eyes raked over her. Something was different about her, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Sure, her hair was slightly longer than it had been two months ago, but that wasn’t it. There was something about her face, her expression, that had changed. She looked less severe somehow and it wasn’t just because she wore her hair in long, loose waves that cascaded over her shoulders.

  The last time he’d seen her hair unbound like that had been when they’d been in bed together back in December last year. She’d still been asleep and he’d had to force himself from the bed to attend to Casey. The memory sent a shaft of longing through him. They’d been so good together. But she’d chosen to leave him. Which made him want to know—what was she doing here now?

  “Have you got a minute?” she asked shyly.

  There was a hitch to her voice, betraying her nervousness. He was unused to seeing her like this. Soft. Unsure. Unguarded even. It made every one of his protective urges rise to the fore, compelling him to close that distance between them and to hold her in his arms and kiss her until every uncertainty was soothed and they were both senseless with need. Instead he stood his ground. He’d meant what he said two months ago. Every last word. If she couldn’t commit to him fully and freely, they had no future.

  Was the fact that she was here an indication that she was ready? That she’d found a way to pull down the walls she’d kept around herself for almost half her life? Was she ready to give her all? He wanted to believe it but, despite the open expression on her face, he couldn’t read her.

  “I can make time,” he answered. “For you.”

  “Thank you. Do you, um, want to talk here?”

  He looked around his office. “It’s as good a place as any, isn’t it?”

  She firmed her lips and nodded.

  “Would you rather go somewhere else? A restaurant, maybe?”

  “No, this is fine. Can we...can we sit down?”

  He’d never seen her this unsure of herself before. Her calm confidence had been such a strong part of who she was that he found himself worrying for what had caused this change in her.

  “Sure,” he said, gesturing to the twin sofas set adjacent to the window that looked out over the city.

  He waited for her to sit, then took the other end of the sofa. “Can I get you anything?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine, but grab something if you want it.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  He stretched one arm across the back of the sofa and angled his body to face hers while he waited for her to speak. Silence thickened in the air between them, coercing him into saying something, anything, to fill it. But this was her time to speak, not his. He’d said all he could say the last time he’d seen her. Now it was her turn.

  Faye cleared her throat and her fingers tangled with the strap of her purse. “How’s Casey doing?”

  “He’s home today. He has a cold and I didn’t think he should come into the office.”

  A glow of concern filled her eyes. “Poor wee guy. His first cold?”

  “As far as I’m aware,” Piers conceded. “He’s pretty miserable.”

  Miserable had been an understatement. All blocked up, Casey had woken, crying, four times last night, which in turn had only made things worse. Jeremy had been on duty and between him and Piers they’d taken turns to soothe Casey back to sleep. Even so, it had been a tough night for all of them.

  Faye twisted the purse strap into a tight coil, then let it go again before threading her fingers through the leather to start all over again.

  Frustration bubbled to the surface for Piers. She’d come here of her own volition. There must be a reason for that. So why the hell didn’t she just come out with what she wanted to say?

  “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” Faye said in a rush.

  Piers simply nodded.

  Faye scooted to the edge of the sofa and put her bag on the floor, then she stood and stepped over to the window. With the afternoon light streaming around her, he could see she’d lost weight. Another point of concern but not his problem, he reminded himself firmly. Not unless she was willing to allow it to be.

  “I’m sorry for leaving the way I did. I see my old desk is unused. Don’t you have a new assistant yet?”

  “Faye, you didn’t come here to talk about whether or not I have a new assistant, did you? Because if so, I have somewhere I need to be.”

  She spun around to face him, worry streaking her pale face. “I’m holding you up? You should have said.”

  “I told you I could make time for you and I can—but please, get to the point of why you’re here.”

  It pained him to be so blunt but he couldn’t bear to have her beat around the bush any longer. He’d left message after message for her. Worried about her welfare, where she was, what she was doing. And she hadn’t responded to him. Not even so much as an email or a text. It had alternately concerned and then angered him before rolling back to concern all over again. He hoped that whatever she was here to say, it would let him off this crazy roller coaster of emotion.

  She drew in another breath. “Like I said, I’m sorry for how I left you. You deserved better than that, but I didn’t know how to give it to you. I just knew I needed to get away, so I did. Just like you always said, I ran. Except this time, instead of running away from my problems, I decided to run right to the root of them. To face them.”

  “You went back to Michigan?”

  Faye nodded and clasped her fingers tightly together. “It wasn’t easy but I knew I had to face everything I’d left behind. One of my old high school friends—she’s a doctor now—put me in touch with a grief counselor who has helped me put a lot of things into perspective.”

  “I see. And now?” he prompted when she fell silent again.

  “Now I think I’m ready. Ready to be honest with myself and with you about everything. You see, I’ve been carrying so much guilt since the night of the crash. What I’d never told anyone before was that I’d been an absolute bitch to my stepdad in the weeks leading up to Christmas. He’d always done his best by me and always allowed me to take the lead in how our father-daughter relationship developed. To be honest, he was too good, too kind, too patient. For some stupid reason that made me lash out. Teenagers, huh?” She gave Piers a wry smile. “Anyway, when I started pestering him about allowing me to drive home from the carol singing I could see he was torn. I almost wanted him to say no, just so I’d have something to complain about.”

  “But he said yes,” Piers said heavily.

  Faye nodded again, her eyes washing with sudden tears. She wiped at them and accepted a handkerchief from Piers when he dragged it from his pocket.

  “Thanks. I’m sorry. It seems in the past two months I’ve cried a lifetime of tears and I don’t seem to be able to stop.”

  “It’s okay, Faye. Sometimes we just need to let go.”

  “Do we? Do you?”

  He thought of the days and nights he’d endured since she’d walked out on him, of the pain of losing her and not knowing where she was. It had been a different kind of grief to that of losing his brother, but it had been grief nonetheless.

  “Yes, it’s only natural. We might not like it, we might not be able to always control it, but sometimes we have to give in to it.”

  “That’s another thing I’ve had to learn. And here I thought I was all grown up.” Faye gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Anyway, I was doing okay on the road
that night. Maybe going a little too fast for the conditions, but Ellis, my stepdad, just cautioned me gently to be aware of where I was and what I was doing. Henry was fussing in his car seat and Mom said he needed to be fed. Ellis had just turned around to say something to Mom when I saw the tanker take a curve in the road in front of our car. He lost traction and jackknifed—then he slid straight into us.

  “If I had been going slower, we’d have been farther back, I’d have had a longer time to react... Or, if I’d only let Ellis drive, we’d probably have been past that spot already, instead of wasting time bickering in the parking lot about who’d drive, and the truck would have missed us altogether.”

  “Faye, you can’t torture yourself with the what-ifs and maybes. You don’t know that it would have made any difference at all.”

  She wiped her eyes with his handkerchief again and nodded. “I understand that now, but fifteen-year-old me certainly didn’t and, unfortunately, it has been fifteen-year-old me—still fighting to make sense of what I did—that’s been driving my life for most of the past thirteen years.”

  Faye came back to the sofa and sat again. “I was told later that Ellis and Henry died on impact, but Mom and I were both trapped. The car caught fire almost immediately.” She shuddered. “I still see the flames licking up over the hood and coming from under the dash. I can still smell my legs starting to burn. Mom was screaming in the back, telling the people who arrived on the scene to save her babies. Someone managed to drag Henry out in his car seat, but by that point, there was nothing they could do. Another man wrenched my door open and pulled me free. The last thing I remember is begging him to save my mom and dad—then I passed out. When I woke up, they told me I was the only survivor.”

  “It sounds like a nightmare. I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Faye.”

  She stared unseeingly out the window, her mind obviously lost back in that awful, tragic night. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that so much of what happened was out of my control. It seemed like I should be able to blame someone for me losing my family—even if the only target I found was myself.

  “When I helped with the babies at my foster home, they were my substitutes for the brother I lost. In them I saw that chance again to love him, to make up for what I’d done—until they left, anyway.”

  “It’s why you were so reluctant to let yourself near Casey, isn’t it? Because you were afraid of loving him and possibly losing him all over again,” Piers said with sudden insight.

  Faye inclined her head and clenched the sodden handkerchief in her hand. “My counselor has helped me understand why I behaved the way I did. Helped me realize that I was still trying to protect my teenage heart—the one that had lost everything and everyone. But she also helped me understand that it’s okay to try again—to trust in my feelings and give them a chance to blossom. To open my heart to others. To accept that while things won’t always work out, not everyone will be taken from me. It...it hasn’t been easy and I’m not all the way there yet, but I’m determined to win this time. Because, if I don’t, I will lose the most important thing in my life for good, if I haven’t already.”

  Piers felt a spark of hope flicker to life in his chest. “And that is?”

  “You,” she answered simply. “You offered me your love—heck, you offered me everything that’s always been missing since that night—and I was too afraid to take it. Too afraid to trust you. It was easier to walk—” Faye made a choked sound in her throat that almost sounded like a laugh “—okay, run away, than it was to accept what you promised me.”

  “And now?” he prompted.

  “Now I want to be selfish. I want you. I want Casey. I want it all.” She hesitated, uncertainty pulling her brows together and clouding her blue-gray eyes to the color of the sky on a stormy day. “If you’ll still have me, that is. I know I’ve had my walls up and I know you’ve done your level best to scale them or break them down. I just hope you’re still prepared to help me—to continue to fill the missing pieces in my life like you’ve been trying to do all along. Will you, Piers? Will you have me back?”

  Piers reached out his hand and traced the line of her cheek, staring deeply into her eyes. He’d waited for these words, hoped against hope that one day she’d be ready to say them. But there was one thing still missing.

  “Like I told you before, Faye, I want it all, not just pieces of you. Like you, I want everything, too. Maybe it’s selfish of me, but I need to know you’re in this all the way. It’s been hell with you gone. Not just in the office, but here, too.” He pounded a fist on his chest. “Some nights I couldn’t sleep for wondering where you were or what you were doing. And every time Casey passed another milestone, I wanted to share it with you, and you weren’t there.”

  Faye swallowed, the muscles in her slender throat working hard as she accepted what he had to say.

  “I can only say I’m so sorry I’ve hurt you, Piers. I love you and I never want to hurt you in any way ever again.”

  All the tension he’d been holding in his body released on those oh-so-important three little words. She loved him. It was enough. He knew Faye wasn’t the kind of person to toss that simple phrase around lightly. If she said it, she meant it.

  “I know you never will. As long as you love me, I will have everything I ever need,” he murmured.

  Piers pulled her into his arms, every nerve in his body leaping from the sheer joy of having her back where she belonged.

  “You know I’m going to want to formalize this. You’re going to have to marry me,” he pressed. “And you’re going to have to adopt Casey, too. We come as a package deal, you know.”

  “Marry you? Are you sure?”

  She sounded hesitant but it only took a second for Piers to realize she wasn’t stalling because of her own feelings, more that she was seeking confirmation of his.

  “Completely and utterly certain,” he said firmly. “It might surprise you to know, I’ve never told anyone that I loved them. Ever. Except for you. It was a leap of faith when I admitted to you how I felt. You’d become such an integral part of so many aspects of my life that I didn’t blame you for accusing me of using the L-word to manipulate you into staying with me. But admitting I loved you came as a bolt out of the blue for me and, once I understood it, I knew that would never change. You’re it, for me. The first, the last, the only.”

  “Oh, Piers!” Faye lifted a hand to cup his cheek and a sweet smile tugged at her lips. “You’ve given me so much already and now this? I’m so very lucky to have you in my life. I never want to spend a day without you by my side. So, I guess that means you forgive me for running out on you?”

  “I will forgive you anything provided you never leave me again.”

  “I never will,” she promised and pulled his face to hers.

  * * * * *

  If you liked this story of passion and family from USA TODAY bestselling author Yvonne Lindsay, pick up these other titles!

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  Little Secrets: His Pregnant Secretary

  by Joanne Rock

  One

  Sun glinted off the brilliant blue Atlantic, full of sailboats bobbing on the calm water. For Delia Rickard, the picturesque island scene meant only one thing. It was the perfect day to ask for a raise.

  Delia mentally gave herself a pep talk as she rushed around the marina in Le François, Martinique. She anticipated meeting her boss at any moment. Her father desperately needed her help and that meant forcing herself to push for that raise. Her quiet nature and organizational skills made her great at her job but sometimes posed a challenge when it came time to stand up for herself.

  She hadn’t seen Jager McNeill in the last six months. Would he be impressed with the changes she’d made both at his family’s marina and the nearby McNeill mansion where she’d taken over as on-site property manager a year ago, on top of her responsibilities assisting Jager?

  She’d worked tirelessly for months just to be worthy of Jager McNeill’s trust in her. He’d given her the job as a favor since she didn’t have a four-year degree—showing more faith in her than anyone else in her life. At first, it had been enough to work hard to repay Jager for giving her a chance. But now, considering the hours she put in to manage both properties and the effort she made to execute every facet to the best of her ability, she knew it was time to approach her employer about a bump up in her paycheck. Her father couldn’t afford his portion of the taxes on the Rickard family lands this year and Delia needed to help to keep the small plot in the family. Her former fiancé had tried to trick her out of her share of the land once and she wouldn’t give his greedy corporate backers any chance to swoop in now and take it from her or her dad. But unless she made more money, the Rickard home would be up for auction by springtime.