The Story Of Us: A Secret Baby Romance (Serenity House Book 1)

by Molly O'Keefe

  Missing Dad was like another backpack he carried with him everywhere. It was heavy and it hurt and sometimes he could barely stand it. Like right now.

  “Spence?” Mom asked, rubbing his back, as if she knew. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded, and quickly opened his notebook, finding the questions in the back.

  “What’s your blood type?” he asked and Sam blinked at him, looking like an owl.

  “A positive,” she finally said and smiled. “What’s yours?”

  “B negative.” He wrote the answer down in his notebook, a little zing of excitement went through him. He felt like a detective. “So my other dad must have my blood, right?” he asked and turned to his mom, who looked so sad and angry. That’s how she looked whenever he mentioned his mom and dad who weren’t her and Doug. He didn’t know what else to call them, though. Mom One? Mom Two? Birth Dad? Adopted Dad? Like that was going to happen?

  “That’s how that works? Right?” he asked. “I had to get my blood type from someone.”

  Mom nodded. “Sometimes. But it’s no guarantee. Without knowing who your—”

  “Spence,” Sam interjected and he and his mom turned to look at her.

  Whoa, he thought. That’s not a happy face.

  “I can’t answer any questions about your dad.”

  “Doug Stern was his dad,” Jennifer said, through tight lips.

  “Right,” Sam said carefully.

  Spence held his breath, wondering if Mom was going to totally lose it. She looked like it. She looked like she was just a few steps away from a nuclear meltdown.

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you anything about your birth father,” Sam said.

  He almost asked why. ’Cause, if anyone knew his birth father, it had to be Sam, right? But there was something in her face, like a big stop sign, that made him bite his tongue.

  Maybe we’ll try that later, he thought. And looked back down at his notebook.

  “Do you have a history of cancer in your family?” he asked.

  Sam and Mom shared a look. A look he understood well. A look that said, what’s the weirdo doing? He got that look a lot at school. And it made him want to disappear.

  Right now it made him want to put the notebook away and leave. Just run as far away from this place as possible. But he heard Dad’s voice in his ear, telling him that important things were hard things, that’s why they were important.

  “What about heart problems?” he asked, when Sam didn’t say anything. “Diabetes?”

  “Spence?” Mom asked. “What are you doing?”

  “Asking questions,” he answered. Duh.

  “But why—” Mom’s eyes opened wide and filled with tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispered but the tears only got bigger, like they were going to fall right out of her eyes and he couldn’t take it. He didn’t want to make her cry. He didn’t want anyone else to hurt. He just wanted to do what Dad asked him to do. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I won’t ask these questions if it’s going to make you cry.” Dad was dead. He wouldn’t know that Spence had given up before getting the answers.

  Spence had just gotten Mom to get out of bed so they could go on this road trip. He’d gotten her to comb her hair and get dressed, so he didn’t want her to go back to lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

  Then Mom smiled, though the tears were still there, and she pulled him into her arms. “Honey,” she whispered in his ear. “Why are you asking these questions? You’re not sick.”

  “Sick?” Sam asked.

  Spence looked over at her. He had her red hair. If she had cancer or heart problems like Dad, he could have those, too. That’s how it worked sometimes. Dad had died of the same thing his dad had died of, which was the same thing his brother had died of.

  “But I could get sick,” he said. “Any minute. All of us could. I need to know this stuff.”

  “Are all your questions about my medical history?” Sam asked, shaking her head, like she just didn’t get it.

  “No.” He sort of lied. He had some other ones. But he wasn’t ready to ask those.

  Mom and Sam stared at him, just watched him until he started to feel sick. “Is this weird?” he whispered, hating the way he felt right now, like his skin was too tight and his mom and Sam thought he was a dork. “Dad told me I should do this. He helped me.”

  Mom’s face went white and she wiped away at the tears under her eyes. “Helped you with what?” she whispered.

  “With the questions. He told me I needed to know this. I do, right?”

  Mom’s face looked like it was going to break. “Oh, honey—”

  “Yes,” Sam said definitively. She reached out and squeezed his shoulder and Spence felt his mother tense. But he didn’t know what he was supposed to do about any of it. Mom crying. Dad dying. Sam touching him.

  He felt like he was going to throw up.

  “Yes, you should know whatever you want,” Sam said and sat back, her brown eyes nice and steady. He liked that about her. He couldn’t handle any more sadness. Any more silence in his house. Any more sitting around and waiting for his dad to come back when he was dead. So he looked into those eyes that were all business.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, sounding like one of the doctors at the hospital and he felt himself nod, relieved that she was taking this over.

  It made his skin loosen and his stomach relax. “Ready,” he said.

  “My grandmother had diabetes,” she said. “But she lived with it until she was seventy-two. No cancer as far as I know. I had a great-uncle who died of a heart attack but he was also about three hundred pounds and ate fried chicken like four times a week. My grandmother on my father’s side….”

  Spence bent over his notebook and wrote as fast as he could.

  Sam searched her brain for any more medical history that she knew of, and figured she’d covered it all. Her folks were still alive and kicking in a condo in Florida. She had a cousin alive and producing babies at an alarming rate up in the Catskill Mountains.

  But she wished she had more to give him, because the more she’d talked the more relaxed he’d gotten. But she’d hit the end of her line.

  “All in all,” she said, smiling at Spence, “you come from pretty hardy people.”

  Spence flipped a page on his notebook and Sam spared a glance at Jennifer, who had sat still and silent as a statue for the past twenty minutes. Staring at her son, as if she could soak him up through her eyes.

  Sam didn’t know the finer points of what had happened to these two, but she could fill in most of the blanks. And it made her want to put down her head and howl.

  Clearly, Jennifer’s husband, Spence’s father, had died after a long, drawn-out battle against something, in a hospital. With lots of doctors. And lots of machines. And lots of medical history questions.

  Poor Spence, she thought, watching the boy write frantically, his tongue peeking out between his teeth as he concentrated.

  Every once in a while when she got particularly lonely—usually after J.D. left and she was alone in her apartment, feeling every minute of her age, and every repercussion of her commitment to the shelter—she thought of the boy she’d given up for adoption.

  She thought of what he’d look like. What he would be interested in. She wondered if he was left-handed like her. If he slept on his stomach like J.D.

  And looking at him, now, standing not two feet from her, she realized Spence in reality was better than anything she could have imagined. His hair was damp at the temples from sweat induced by the cramped quarters. His eyes, as he watched his mother, were so solemn, so careful. So aware of what Jennifer might be feeling.

  “Do you have any more questions?” Sam asked.

  “Not right now,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  “Spence,” Jennifer said. “We’re not staying so if you have more quest—”

  “What?” Spence asked. “What do you mean we’re not staying?”

  Jennifer glanced a
t Sam, clearly uncomfortable. But Sam was pretty uncomfortable, too. She wanted to add her protests to Spence’s. Sam just met Spence. He’d just gotten here; they couldn’t go so soon.

  “We’re not staying,” Jennifer said, the Ice Queen once again. “We have to go home.”

  “But we just got here, Mom.”

  “There aren’t any hotels—”

  “You can stay here,” Sam said, ignoring the peeved look Jennifer sent her way. “We have plenty of room.”

  “Here?” Jennifer asked, the irritation on her face turning to horror.

  “Yes,” Sam said. The thought of J.D. entered her mind, but she pushed him away. If he was still here, she could deal with him later. She wanted the boy to stay. “I assure you, the rooms are clean and you’d have plenty of privacy.”

  “Mom,” Spence said and laid his hand on Jennifer’s leg. “Please. I’d like to stay. For a few days.”

  Jennifer took a deep breath that shuddered audibly at the top, as though she was fighting tears or screams or some other powerful response. Sam felt bad for the woman—she really did—but Sam was fighting, too. For something she wanted.

  A chance to know her son.

  “A few days,” Sam said, nodding her head in total agreement. “Maybe just for the weekend.”

  It was a long, frozen moment before Jennifer finally conceded and Sam and Spence both let out big sighs of relief then turned and smiled at each other.

  Connection buzzed between them, and all the hair on her arms stood at attention. A wave of something big, something strong and grateful rolled through her.

  This was good.

  She wanted to reach out for the boy, touch one of the ginger curls that twisted near his ear. She wanted to pat his shoulder, feel the small bones beneath his skin and know that part of her was in him.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said to him.

  “Deb.” J.D.’s voice filtered through the office, muffled by the door. Sam’s heart chugged, her blood turning to sludge. “My computer is in the office. I’m just going—”

  The door cracked open and Sam leaped to her feet, but it was too late. The door opened all the way.

  “J.D.,” she said sharply, trying to step in front of Spence, but the kid ducked around, watching J.D. as he entered the office, a big black shadow in blue jeans and a gray shirt.

  Now that J.D. was in the same room with Spencer, she saw that they shared so much more than eye color and smiles. Spencer had the same square shape to his face, the long eyelashes and thick eyebrows.

  Outside of the red hair, he was all J.D.

  “Oh.” He paused when he saw Jennifer. “Sorry.” His crooked smile was brief, warm, the bigger version of Spence’s and Jennifer sat up straight at the sight of it, her hand over her heart.

  She knew, Sam thought. Oh, God. She knew.

  “Deb didn’t say you were with anyone,” J.D. explained.

  “You should go,” Sam snapped. She was on thin, thin ice and it was cracking under her feet. Every moment Spence and J.D. were in the same room was a moment closer to reckoning. And she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t strong enough. Tough enough to handle J.D.’s rage on top of all that had happened today.

  “Okay.” J.D.’s brow furrowed at the tone of her voice. “Can you hand me—”

  She grabbed his laptop even as he talked and she thrust it into his hands.

  “Thanks. Sorry, again.” He nodded to Jennifer then seemed to, for the first time, see Spence standing so still, a tiny statue beside his mother.

  Sam held her breath and prayed.

  “Hi,” Spence said into the vast silence.

  “Hi,” J.D. answered, his voice like sandpaper over Sam’s exposed nerves. J.D’s eyes, identical to Spence’s, looked at the boy, took in everything—the red hair, the distinctive eyes, the quirky smile—and Sam felt her bones melt, just disappear, leaving her without support. Without strength.

  Finally, J.D. turned to her, his eyes on her stomach. On the scar that he couldn’t see but knew was there and she lifted her hands to it, felt the ridge under the thin cotton of her shirt. Felt it pulse under her fingertips like a guilty secret.

  He knows, she thought. This is it. He knows.

  J.D.’s gaze lifted to hers and she braced herself for the rage. The fierce and totally warranted anger that would eviscerate her, totally gut her.

  But his eyes were blank. Empty. His face expressionless. He waited, watching her, like she was a stranger he needed something from and she found herself nodding. One small dip of her chin.

  Yes, the nod said. He’s ours.

  And then, as if he’d never been there, J.D. left.

  J.D. didn’t bother putting his laptop in the soft briefcase. He just tucked the machine under his arm, grabbed his bags and headed for his car.

  Never once looking back.

  He didn’t think of her. He definitely didn’t think of the kid. He thought of the fastest route home, to his empty house in Newark. He thought of construction on the Beltway and of maybe stopping in Baltimore.

  All the skin he shed in order to be the man he was here he pulled back on, inch by painful inch. He piled on his past, his crimes, his genetics and secrets until the man who stayed at Serenity was nowhere to be found.

  And he couldn’t believe how much that sucked.

  “J.D.” Her voice behind him, panting and panicked, was like a stick of dynamite against the dam he erected to keep his reaction to what had just been revealed from flattening him.

  So he kept walking. Faster.

  The sun was out now, but clouds gathered over the distant ocean to the east, which would make traffic a bitch.

  He heard her running, her pounding feet catching up to him and he felt something like anger build like a brush fire in his bloodstream.

  “J.D.,” she cried. “Stop. Please. I want to—” She touched him. The warm, damp flesh of her palm against the skin of his arm.

  And the dam broke.

  He tossed his bags, the computer, his car keys onto the asphalt of the parking lot and turned on her. He couldn’t catalog what he felt. He couldn’t put names to the pain and anger and betrayal that choked him. That sucked the air from his body. The thoughts from his head.

  But it must have been on his face because Sam had the good sense to look scared.

  To look terrified.

  He hated that. He hated the white tension around her lips, the widening of her eyes. He’d spent so many years trying to make sure she was never scared of him. That she never saw the worst in him, what he was capable of. But he couldn’t control himself right now.

  He was turning into the monster he always tried to hide from her.

  She backed up a step, walking away from him.

  “My son?” he said, stalking her.

  “Y-yes,” she stuttered, coming to stop against her own car in the parking space closest to the shelter. “Yes. He’s ours.” She didn’t look away, but met his eyes and his anger head-on and it made him angrier. Where was her shame? For crying out loud? This woman whom he’d admired and respected for so long, this woman he’d moved heaven and earth for in ways she’d never, ever know, who, in his own warped way, he’d loved. Loved to the best of his ability.

  And right now he wanted to rub her nose in this mess.

  Punish her.

  He understood suddenly, how all those clients he pitied felt when he told them the truths they were so afraid of.

  “When?” He didn’t stop until he was a breath away from her.

  “Nine.” She licked her lips. “Nine years ago.”

  “What?” he asked, shocked. The memory of the first time they made love sizzled in his brain. He’d been so taken by her when he’d first met her. So intrigued. So half in love that when they’d touched in the darkness of her office, by accident, he’d kissed her.

  And she’d kissed him back.

  There was no way she’d—

  “I, ah…got pregnant. The…the first time. In the office.”r />
  His chest worked like a bellows and he could barely suck in enough oxygen to keep his mind from shorting out with anger. She’d kept his son a secret for nine years?

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why, what?”

  “Did you lie?” he whispered.

  “I didn’t lie,” she said and her eyelids twitched. “I just didn’t tell you.”

  He shook his head. “Coward,” he spat, and turned away. He couldn’t talk to her if she was going to play games.

  “Yes,” she said, jumping in front of him, her strong body a tall, thin barricade between him and his car. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am. I should have told you. I mean’t to, I can’t even tell you how many times I meant to tell you.”

  One of the first lessons his uncle Milo taught him was that everyone lied. Everyone. And J.D. had believed him. But when he’d met Sam he’d actually thought she was the exception. He’d never thought her capable of lying, but she was doing it right now.

  “Out of my way, Sam,” he said, picking up his stuff.

  “I want to talk to you about this.”

  “No.” He glared at her. “You want to lie to me about this. You want to make yourself feel better about what you’ve done.”

  Her face was white, her bones standing out under the porcelain of her skin. Anger and guilt rolled off her in waves.

  “What should I have done, J.D.?” she whispered. “You left the next morning without saying a word to me and I didn’t hear from you for a year.”

  “You didn’t call me, either.” Not to tell him she was pregnant. Not to tell him she needed his help. Nothing.

  “I told myself I would tell you if you called. If you came through town, I’d confess all. But you didn’t.”

  “What about when I did come back?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it was over,” she said. “I’d made my decision. And it was my decision. My body. It just didn’t make sense-“

  “Didn’t make sense?” He refused to feel bad about the way he’d left after that first time. The way he’d forced himself not to call her, or see her. The way he’d buried himself in work so he couldn’t remember the sweet silk of her body.

  “I thought it was a one-night stand,” she cried. “I never thought I’d see you again. What would have been the point?”