Accidental Daddy: A Billionaire's Baby Romance

by R. R. Banks

  When I stepped out onto the porch, however, it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t the positive, optimistic grandfather I had known. Instead, he looked even more tired and worn than he had and I felt the concern rise up in me again.

  “Granddaddy?”

  I stepped up beside him and he glanced over at me, then looked out over the fields again. I followed his gaze. Even they looked tired and old. There was a time when at this point in the year the fields would be overflowing with pumpkins, their rinds starting to change to the bright globes of orange that would delight families that came in from miles away to find the perfect one to add to their porch. Many of the women from around the Hollow knew to go to the back fields where they would find little sugar pumpkins perfect for baking into pies and the sometimes oddly colored and shaped heirloom styles that looked gorgeous in the middle of a Thanksgiving table. Now the fields had pumpkins, but the rows were uneven in some and the crop not nearly as dense as it had once been. Many of the vines had simply grown from where the pumpkins the year before had sat in the field and disintegrated away.

  “I couldn’t pick her up,” he said.

  “What do you mean? Lorelei?”

  He nodded.

  “She was crying and I went to pick her up, but I couldn’t get her up past my knees. It’s like my whole body just stopped working.”

  “That’s alright, Granddaddy,” I said, patting him on his back comfortingly. “You just need to get up and moving around more. Maybe this just means that the cool weather’s going to come earlier this year.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, Ladybug. I’m just old.” He let out a long sigh. “I know now that it’s really time.”

  “Time for what?” I asked, my heart starting to pound nervously in my chest.

  “To let go of the farm. If I can’t even pick up a little baby, how can I expect to get back out in the fields and work?”

  “I can do that,” I insisted.

  He shook his head.

  “You worked so hard this year. I know you have. But you just can’t handle it on your own.”

  I looked out over the pumpkins again. I had put everything into the pumpkin and corn crops since coming home. I had tried to follow everything that Granddaddy had taught me growing up, but without farmhands and with Lorelei to look after, I had only been able to do some of the fields. A sense of defeat was starting to settle in, but I fought it. I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to just give in and let my childhood disappear.

  “I’m just out of practice. I’ll get better.”

  I wanted to tell him about the haunt, but I worried that he was in such a sad place in that moment that he wouldn’t be ready to hear it, much less agree to it. He shook his head.

  “Running this farm is hard. It takes all of your time, your energy, your soul. You have Lorelei to think about. Your baby deserves all of those things. I can get a good price for the land and the houses. It’ll be enough to set the two of you up and take care of you for a good long time.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll get by. I don’t need much.”

  “Granddaddy, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do, Ladybug. This is the last season for Galloway Farm. We’ll start preparing it for a spring sale.”

  He turned away and walked back into the house, and by the time that I followed him in, I heard the door to his bedroom close. I looked at Roman, who was lowering the baby into the playpen where she promptly began her devoted pilgrimage around the edge. He turned to look at me, his expression falling as he noticed the look on my face.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “This has to work,” I said, fighting the emotion in my voice. “It has to.”

  “It will, Bitsy,” he said, coming toward me. “It will.”

  “Let’s read these responses. They’re the last ones that we’re going to get, so we have to make a decision today. If we’re going to be open by October, we have to get started. I can only imagine it’s going to take time to get this thing built and going.”

  Roman shrugged.

  “We’ll work it out. I promise.”

  I nodded and walked over to the couch, dropping down on it and leaning forward to drag the disturbingly light mailbag toward me. Without Granddaddy in the room we could stay in the living room with the baby to read the responses. It kept me that much closer to the coffee pot bubbling and sputtering in the kitchen. Apparently Roman had been courageous enough to face the coffeemaker on his own.

  Roman reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of envelopes. I reached in for the next batch and found the bag empty.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “How abundant.”

  “Well, to be honest we already got responses from what seems like most of the Hollow. We’re lucky to have even gotten this many.”

  “Let’s reserve qualifications of luck for after we’ve read them.”

  “Here we go.”

  Roman picked up the first envelope and opened it. He took out a notecard and started reading.

  “Why don’t y’all do a haunted house with clowns and dolls and they’re creepy clowns and dolls, you know with all the makeup and the blood and the ripped-up clothes. Why are their clothes always ripped up? If they’re going to be having company, even company that they want to scare the living hell out of, they should really try to look presentable and do a little bit of mending on those clothes. It just doesn’t make sense. Who tore up their clothes? Did they fall over or something? Did they---”

  He stopped and flipped the card around.

  “Did they what?” I asked.

  “That’s it. They ran out of room.”

  “Well, that was helpful.”

  Roman handed another envelope out to me.

  “This one looks like it has the same handwriting.”

  I took it and looked down at it before opening it and taking out the notecard inside. The handwriting looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “—get into some sort of fight with somebody and they got their clothes knifed? If that happened, why isn’t their skin cut? And why are their faces always bloody? Does that mean they’re eating people? If you’re going to do this idea, you really need to tell us all this stuff. You can’t just think that we’re going to believe it. We aren’t dummies, you know. We’re not just going to go along with something because you say that it’s scary but don’t give us a good backstory that explains it all up. You really should have –”

  Roman picked up another envelope and took out the notecard.

  “—thought this through better before you started throwing this whole clown and doll haunted house thing together. You really should have come up with a backstory and shared it with all of us so that we could let you know what we thought about it and getting excited about the haunt before the season starts. We might have even been able to give you some suggestions that you could have put into the house, but no. You just built the whole thing all willy-nilly without any thought about if we—”

  One last envelope.

  “—understood it.”

  I put the notecard down and looked at Roman. He was staring back at me with an expression on his face that said he was just as stunned by what just unfolded as I was.

  “That was an interesting progression of thoughts,” he said.

  “And now you’ve seen the effects of Cletus’s Clementine Moonshine at its best. In fact,” I picked up one of the cards and looked at it again. “This might have been Cletus.”

  “There are a couple more.”

  I picked up a postcard.

  “Still thinks there’s a serial killer.” I tossed it down and picked up another. “Wants to know why it was only girls that you cut up. I’ll not say I told you so right at this moment, but know that it’s reserved.” I picked up the second-to-the-last envelope. “Aaaand…. Jesus.”

  I tossed the letter down and rubbed my temples,
squeezing my eyes closed and leaning forward to rest my elbows on my bent legs.

  “There’s one more,” Roman said. “Do you want to read it?”

  “Sure,” I said, letting my hands drop as I turned my head to look at the last envelope lying on the couch between us. “Let’s wrap this up with a bang.”

  I picked up the last envelope and took out the letter. As I unfolded it, I immediately noticed that this one was different. I adjusted my position on the couch so I faced Roman, my eyes scanning the letter quickly before I glanced up at him, then back at the paper and read it to him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Bitsy

  Dear Miss Galloway,

  I have been very interested to hear of the plans you have for turning your family’s farm into a haunted attraction for this Halloween season. I read the stories that you presented for the consideration of the residents of the Hollow and while I commend you for your creativity and willingness to be courageous and present a truly gruesome and terrifying haunt, I offer you a recommendation. Rather than crafting a tale of horror, I suggest you look into the true history of the land that is now your family’s farm and build your haunt around the grisly secrets that it holds. I assure you reality is far more horrifying than anything that you could create out of your mind and will draw in more curious visitors than you could even hope to attract.

  But I warn you, once you have begun to delve into what has happened on this ground, you may never be able to look at your home the same way.

  Sincerely,

  Steven McAllister

  The letter sent a chill through me, but in a way that was welcome.

  Finally, something that made some damn sense. Even though it didn’t really say anything and didn’t make any sense at all- which was pretty sad.

  “Do you know him?” Roman asked.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The man who wrote the letter. Steven McAllister.”

  I searched my mind, trying to find the name in some distant memory of the people of the Hollow, but I couldn’t find it. I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember ever hearing it.”

  Roman took the letter from me and looked down at it.

  “What do you think he means that you should look into the true history of the land?” he asked. “Do you know of anything that might have happened here?”

  “No,” I said. “I only know that my family has been here for generations. We were actually here before the Hollow was even formally established. They say that the little original house was the first thing that the men who escaped from the prison saw when they came near here, and that they were welcomed no-questions-asked with supper and a bed for the night in the hay loft. That’s when they decided that they were going to stay here and build up the Hollow around it.”

  “That didn’t bother your family?” Roman asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t think so. If you and your family were the only people living within miles and miles and probably only saw other living souls when peddlers came around to sell goods, wouldn’t you be relieved when other people showed up and wanted to stay around?”

  “I think that it might be wonderful to live in my own world with my family.”

  There was something different in his voice and I looked up at Roman, my breath somehow caught in my chest. We stared at each other, his emerald, velvety eyes seeming to look beyond me and into somewhere deep within me where no one had ever ventured. He had already gone so far, delved so much further than anyone else ever had. I had already given over so much to him, but then it was my body. Now I felt like it was my mind and my heart that were pulling toward him, going against all of my instincts, all that I had convinced myself of over the last year and a half. I pulled my eyes away from him, needing to break the tension between us, and picked up the envelope that the letter had been in.

  “No return address,” I pointed out.

  “You said that you wanted the responses to be anonymous,” Roman said.

  “But he signed his name. Why would he leave off his address so he could be anonymous, but then sign his full name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned the envelope around to look at the flap, but there were no more identifying marks. By the postmark on the front I knew that, as opposed to the vast majority of the other letters and cards, this one had actually been mailed.

  “Do you think that Coy would know who mailed it?”

  “Coy?” Roman asked.

  “The Post Master-slash-newspaper-man.”

  “Coy’s a person?”

  I looked up at him strangely.

  “Of course, Coy’s a person. What else would he be?”

  “I don’t know, a dog? A fish, maybe? A palm reader?”

  “A palm reader? You think that Whiskey Hollow has a palm reader named Coy?”

  “I’m sorry. It just seemed from what I’ve seen that there was probably a palm reader around here somewhere.”

  “There is. But her name’s Barbara.”

  “Barbara the Palm Reader.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mystical.” He suddenly snapped his fingers. “Coy. Is that that Luther Heggs-looking guy at the post office?”

  “Who’s Luther Heggs?” I asked.

  Roman stared back at me as if he thought that I was going to laugh.

  “Are you serious?”

  “What?” I asked, feeling suddenly defensive. “Who is he? Oh, no. Is he another guy that I met at the party?”

  Roman shook his head.

  “No. Luther Heggs. The Ghost and Mr. Chicken? Don Knotts? You seriously don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  Now it was my turn to stare back at him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not all that familiar with movies that were made decades before I was born.”

  “That’s right. I forgot that you were an infant from a generation that has forgotten how to appreciate actual entertainment.”

  The truth was I could barely even name movies that had come out in the last five years, so he was probably entirely right, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to defend myself and every member of my generation. I leaned slightly toward him, planting my hand on my hip.

  “And I forgot that you were twice my age and probably don’t understand three-quarters of the words I use.”

  “In all of those text messages that you send to your friends on the phone that you lost in one of the fields three months ago?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that.

  “Shut up.”

  Maturely, apparently.

  Roman laughed and shook his head.

  “Alright, well, I’m going to give you a proper film education.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  I stood up and started for the playpen.

  “What are you doing?” Roman asked.

  “I’m going to get Lorelei ready and go to the post office to talk to Coy. He might know how to get in touch with this Steven McAllister guy and then he can tell us what he meant about the ground the farm is on. This is actually sounding like it has some potential.”

  “Why don’t you just go? I can watch the baby.”

  I straightened and turned around to look at him, positive I hadn’t just heard what I thought I did.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Roman said. “She’s having a good time in there and it wouldn’t be any fun for her to go all over the place. Besides, what if you do find out who this guy is and you want to go talk to him? Would you want to bring her along with you? Just go. I’ll just sit here and watch her play.”

  I thought about the offer for a few seconds, unsure if I felt comfortable with the idea of leaving my daughter alone with Roman for what could be a couple of hours. The image of him cradling her in his arms came into my mind again and I realized that no matter how I felt about him, or how I was going to allow myself to feel about him, he was still her father and
they had a year of her life to make up for. Besides, even if he was hiding in his bedroom, Granddaddy was there in the house and if something went truly wrong, Roman could get him for help. I let out a reluctant sigh and leaned down to kiss the baby on her head as she made her way past me. She continued her progress around the playpen for a few steps before she seemed to process that I had kissed her. She turned enough over her little shoulder to send me a drive-by kiss and kept on her way.

  “Alright,” I said. “If she gets hungry, there is food for her in the refrigerator and some snacks in the top drawer. Her diapers are in her nursery. If she needs her clothes changed –”

  “I can figure it out.”

  I nodded.

  “OK. I know. I know you can. I won’t be gone long.”

  I grabbed up the letter and envelope and swept my purse over my shoulder. I didn’t look back over my shoulder because I knew that if I did I would have second thoughts and stay firmly planted in the house with the baby rather than going out and doing what I needed to do to protect the future that I wanted for her. I could feel tears starting to form in my eyes when I closed the door behind me. I brushed them away sharply and squared my jaw, forcing myself to get control of my emotions again.

  Dammit all to hell. What’s wrong with me? Did Roman bring my pregnancy hormones back with him?

  When I got to the post office I could hear another ruckus going on inside. I braced myself and stepped through the door. The sound of the bells above my head didn’t seem to make any difference to either Coy or Rue, who were yet again locked in apparent mortal combat over the counter.

  “You said that you would release the mail as soon as you got a request from my daddy,” she said.

  “And I will,” Coy said, “but this is not a request from your daddy.”

  He held up a piece of paper, which Rue promptly smashed back down to the surface of the counter with her finger, poking at something on it.

  “It has his signature on it,” she said. “Right there. It says to please release all held mail for my address and has his signature. You are welcome to compare it to the hold request.”