Claiming Her_A Romance Collection

by R. R. Banks

  I opened the door and Edmond immediately ran inside. He was giggling, his hands up above his head as he rushed past me. Ella stepped inside, looking embarrassed.

  “Edmond!” she called out. “We don’t run inside, baby. Don’t run in Mr. Mason’s apartment.”

  I turned and saw the little boy rush back toward us. I was helping Ella take the bags that she carried off of her shoulders and wondering at the sheer amount of stuff that such a little child needed for a few hours somewhere other than his house when I saw Ella’s eyes open wide.

  “Edmond, no! Don’t touch.”

  I turned and saw Ella’s son standing next to the table that the staff had put back into the foyer. One chubby little hand was grasping the side of the silver frame, trying to drag it off of the edge toward him.

  “Stop that!” I shouted. “Get your hands off of that frame!”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Edmond’s little face scrunched up and I saw tears forming in his once bright, smiling eyes. He let out a wail and I felt Ella’s hand grasp my back. She yanked on me, whipping me around to face her.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” she shouted in my face. “Don’t you dare talk to my son like that.”

  All of the sweet softness that had been so appealing about her was gone, replaced by sheer fury. Her teeth were gritted so hard against each other that it seemed they would break. But I didn’t care. He could have pulled the frame down onto the floor and damaged it.

  “He shouldn’t be touching that,” I said. “What have you been teaching him? To just go into people’s homes and touch whatever he feels like touching?”

  Ella looked stung and she took an aggressive step toward me. Her hands were clenched at her sides and she had pulled herself up to her full height, forcing her chest toward me with everything in her. I could see her shaking, the anger building up inside of her until it was ready to explode.

  “How dare you say anything to me about how I parent my child? Who are you to judge me, my son, or my parenting? You know absolutely nothing about raising a child. You know nothing about anything in the real world. You live with your head so far up your ass that you think that the way that you live is normal and that everyone has it exactly the way that you do. You don’t know struggling. You don’t know just going about your day without people fawning on you. With all of the staff that crawls all over this place, I wonder if you even know how to go to the bathroom by yourself. You think that you are so damned important that you can just push everyone around any way that you want to, and that everyone should bend to your will. It makes you think that it is perfectly alright for you to treat anyone like absolute trash if they dare do something that you don’t like. Like it’s alright for you to scream in the face of a tiny child for touching an empty fucking picture frame. A frame that’s probably empty because you don’t have a single person in your life who matters enough to put them in there.”

  I was so stunned by her outburst that I barely registered Ella pushing past me to scoop Edmond up into her arms and hug him close, cooing soothing words to him before she picked up the bags that she had brought and stormed out of the apartment. The door slammed behind her, leaving me standing alone in the foyer. I felt like the silence of the space was closing in around me. Her words reverberated through my mind and I struggled to process them all, to put them into something that I could understand and that wouldn’t bore through me the way that they were.

  I couldn’t. She had sliced into me, bringing up thoughts and emotions that I hadn’t felt, that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel, in many years. I turned my eyes away from the door toward the small table. Edmond jumping away from it when I shouted at him had caused the frame to tip over and I reached out to put it back in its position in the middle of the table. Once it was in place I looked at it for a few seconds before picking it up.

  I carried the frame with me into the living room and sat down on the couch, holding it in both hands so I could stare down at it.

  “Is everything alright? Where’s the little one?”

  I looked up at Faye, who stood at the entrance to the room, looking at me with concern in her eyes. I shook my head.

  “He’s not here. Ella decided not to stay for dinner. Thank you, though.”

  Faye nodded, but didn’t say anything else. I knew that she had heard the screaming. She had to have. But she would do what I had done for so long—just pretend it wasn’t happening. Faye walked away and soon I heard the door to the apartment close. I was still staring at the frame in my hands, thinking about what it meant to me and why it still sat on that table after so long. Soon my mind wandered to Ella and what she could mean to me if I only let her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ella

  My phone rang, and I picked it up, already knowing whose name was going to be on the caller ID. I looked at it and let out an exasperated groan, tossing it aside so that it skittered across the surface of the kitchen table and away from the bowl of obscenely sweet fruit-flavored cereal that I had been trying to get through for half an hour.

  How did he get my number? …Oh, wait. Money and power. The same way he gets everything that he wants.

  I tried another bite, but I just couldn’t deal with the overpowering sweetness.

  Molly isn’t allowed to do the grocery shopping anymore.

  I was standing up to bring the bowl to the sink when I heard my phone start ringing again.

  “For the love of all that is good and pure in this world, will you please answer the damn phone?” Molly asked as she came into the room.

  “Aunt Molly said a bad word.”

  Edmond came in after Molly, gripping his dinosaur and rubbing sleep from his eyes. When I was pregnant with him people always told me that I was going to have to get used to early mornings because children like to get up with the sun and go full force from the moment their eyes open. Not my son. Edmond was like a little old man who hadn’t gotten his morning coffee yet.

  “Yes, she did,” I said, pulling my little boy up into my lap and nuzzling into his hair. He smelled sweet and fresh like the green apple shampoo he had chosen because of the cartoon character on the bottle. “She shouldn’t say things like that.”

  I cringed thinking of all of the bad words he had heard Mama say a few weeks before when we were standing in Mason’s apartment. He had been crying too hard to admonish me for them, and part of me didn’t know if he had even heard them, but I knew I had said them. Mason had earned every single one of them, though, and I wasn’t going to feel bad for saying what I did, just the fact that my son was only a few feet away when I did it.

  “I’m not answering,” I said. “If I had wanted to talk to him, I would have in the last 300 times he’s called me.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re being like this.”

  “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the way he talked to Edmond.”

  “He yelled at me,” Edmond chimed in.

  “I know that,” Molly said, “but he was in Mason’s apartment touching things that were probably really expensive.”

  “Thing. Not things. And where do you get off being on his side? You’re my sister.”

  “I’m not on his side,” Molly told me. “I’m just saying that you really didn’t give him an opportunity to say he was sorry or to explain himself.”

  “There’s nothing that he could say that could explain that,” I said. “I’m just glad that I got to see him for who he really is now, before…”

  I stopped before I went any further.

  “Before what?” Molly asked. I didn’t respond, and she grabbed a cup of coffee, settling into the chair across from me. “Before what?”

  I kissed Edmond’s head and patted his hip.

  “Why don’t you go get dressed? I put some clothes out for you on my bed.”

  Edmond slipped down off of my lap and headed toward the room we shared. I looked at my sister.

  “Before anything else happened,” I said.

>   “From what you told me, there really isn’t a whole lot else that could happen between the two of you.”

  She laughed, but I just shook my head.

  “That’s the thing. There is. The sex was amazing. I’m not going to lie about that. But that’s all I thought it was going to be. One night of blissful, blistering sex and then I could go back to my life. Then I woke up and he was right there beside me. He had his arm draped over me and I just completely freaked out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I felt something,” I said. “We had barely spent any time together, yet I could tell that I was developing feelings for him. It wasn’t something that I expected at all, and something that wasn’t at all welcome.”

  “Oh, obviously,” Molly said, nodding. “A gorgeous, exorbitantly wealthy man with muscles you could do laundry on falls for you and wants to spend more time with you. I can definitely see why you’d be so conflicted. Nobody would want something like that.”

  She glared at me over her coffee cup as she took a sip and I sighed.

  “You just don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t been with anyone since Branden died. I didn’t think that I was even capable of having those feelings anymore, and now it’s like I’m betraying him.”

  “You aren’t betraying him. He would want you to be happy.”

  “That might be true,” I said, standing and picking up my cereal bowl. “But it won’t be with Mason Dupree. I never want to see him again.”

  “Then let’s hope he’s not at home this evening.”

  I put my bowl in the sink and sighed, knowing that that couldn’t be a good introduction.

  “Why?”

  “I got us another job at The Avalon. We’re supposed to be there at eight. I’ve already talked to Mrs. Moskowitz next door and she said that Edmond can come stay at her house. They’ll make more cookies.”

  “My son is going to think that the food pyramid is made up of 11 different kinds of cookies.”

  I dreaded the thought of going back to The Avalon, but after how uncharacteristically supportive Molly had been in the weeks since I had left Mason in his apartment, I knew that I couldn’t let her down.

  That night Molly and I walked into the lobby of The Avalon at exactly eight. I had insisted that we leave early so that we didn’t have a replay of our race from the night of the party. She hadn’t forced me to wear the horrible uniform that she had chosen for us, instead encouraging me to wear a pair of black slacks, heels, and a soft mint colored sweater. It felt like a strange outfit to wear to an event gig and I was starting to worry that she really had added escort to our list of services when I saw Mason come out of the Avalon Café toward me.

  I started to turn around, but Molly grabbed me by my shoulders and turned me back to him.

  “Thank you, Molly,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”

  I looked over my shoulder at my sister.

  “You did this?” I asked. “You knew all along?”

  “Yep,” Molly said. “I got tired of listening to your phone ring a couple days ago, so I answered it and it was Mason. We talked for a while and I really think that you need to hear what he has to say. So, we arranged for this little dinner for the two of you. Have a good night.”

  I glared at my sister as she walked out of the apartment building and back toward her car before turning back to Mason.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” I said.

  “Please just hear me out, Ella,” Mason said. “Just give me a few minutes. You don’t even have to stay for the whole dinner if you don’t want to. I just want to apologize.”

  I let out a sigh and nodded. As much as I didn’t want to look him in the face anymore, I also felt the same powerful draw to him that I had since meeting him and couldn’t resist being close to him, even if only for a few minutes. I didn’t want my last memory of him to be the look in his eyes when he screamed at my son.

  Mason gestured toward the Café and I walked toward it, extremely aware of how his hand hovered just over my back, not quite touching me but somehow guiding me just with its presence. As soon as we walked inside I noticed that there was no one else in the restaurant.

  “They were kind enough to let me rent out the place for the evening so that we could have privacy,” he said as though he had read my mind.

  I nodded, and we made our way toward a table that was decorated with glowing candles and trailing sprays of roses. He pulled a chair out for me and I sat. As soon as he sat across from me, Mason looked into my eyes and let out a long sigh.

  “I think I need to explain to you why that frame is so important to me.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mason

  Ella let out an exasperated sound and I could see that she wanted to just get up and leave the restaurant. I reached across the table toward her.

  “Please,” I said imploringly. “Just give me a minute.”

  She settled back down into the chair.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Thank you.” I drew in a breath. “First, I’m sorry for the way that I talked to Edmond. I had no right to do that. I never should have raised my voice at him. I hope that someday I’ll have a chance to apologize to him myself. It’s just that after thinking that the frame was gone, seeing such a little child touching it scared me. I completely overreacted.”

  “But it’s just a frame,” she said. “It doesn’t even have a picture in it.”

  “I know,” I said. “It doesn’t. Not now, anyway. But it used to. Years ago it had a picture in it.”

  “Of who?” Ella asked, some of the harsh edge in her voice softened with her curiosity.

  “My fiancée.”

  The revelation obviously took her aback and she straightened.

  “Oh,” she said, filling the tense silence. “I didn’t know.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s alright. Not a lot of people did. She was an extremely private person. She hated being in the spotlight, so she stayed out of it. This was before I bought the team, so it was easier for me to keep my personal life to myself. Only those closest to me knew her. We were planning on publicly announcing our engagement in a few weeks when it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  I drew in a breath and swallowed, trying to force down the painful ball of emotion that was forming in my throat. I hadn’t talked about this in years and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to find the words or if I had shoved them to the back of my mind for so long that I could no longer even say them.

  “There was an accident. A car crash. Someone hit her when she was on the way to see her parents to talk about the wedding. I tried to get to her but…by the time I got to the hospital she was already gone.”

  “Mason, I am so sorry.”

  I could hear tears in Ella’s voice and when I looked up at her I saw them slipping down her cheeks.

  “That frame was an engagement gift from her to me. I kept her picture in it for as long as I could, but after a while it was just too much. I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. It was like every time that I saw her, I found out that she was dead all over again. So, I took the picture out and put it away, but I kept the frame out so that at least I had that. Since Danielle died, I haven’t felt anything for a woman. It was easy to just bring them home and then have them gone the next morning because none of them meant anything to me. They were all the same. Until you.”

  I saw Ella’s eyes widen slightly.

  “Me?” she asked.

  “You. When I saw you…I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like something lit up inside me, a part of me that I haven’t felt or even known existed for so many years. I wanted to be near you. I wanted to know more about you. I wanted to spend time with you. It was exciting, but it was also terrifying.” I shook my head and looked down at the table. “I don’t know how to put it into words so that you can understand it.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  I looked up at her again
.

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to try to make me understand. I already do. My husband, Edmond’s father, was my high school sweetheart. We were together since our freshman year and then broke up for a couple of years after graduation. When we found each other again, it was like coming home, like we were always supposed to be together and that time apart was all that we needed to just prove to us that in each other’s arms was where we were supposed to be. We were together for a few more years and then we got married. We were only married for about a year and a half when we found out that he was sick. Right after that, we found out that I was pregnant. Branden didn’t even live long enough to see his son.”

  I felt like my heart was tearing in two. The pain in Ella’s eyes was so fresh, so real, as if all of that had just happened. It was exactly the way that I had felt for so long about Danielle.

  “Ella, I don’t know what to say.”

  She shook her head, forcing a teary smile.

  “That’s alright,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s all been said before. You know what I went through just like I know what you did.” She glanced down and then back at me. “I also understand what you meant about not having feelings toward anyone. When Branden died, I thought that that part of me died with him. It destroyed me. The only thing that kept me going was Edmond. I couldn’t even imagine ever having feelings for someone else. It was just so outside of the realm of possibility for me. I thought that it was going to be a betrayal to Branden if I ever felt like that again.”