Читать книгу Georgia Meets Her Groom - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 11

Three

Her son? Jack echoed to himself, the small word nearly choking off his breath. Georgia had a son? How the hell had that happened? Well, of course, he could pretty well figure out how it had happened, but when? And with whom? And why?

Why? That was the question that stuck in his head most profoundly. Not so much Why does she have a son? but rather Why cou/dn’t she have waited for me? And then he asked himself further just what the hell he was thinking by asking himself that. Before the incongruity of all those questions had time to jell in his brain, he shook them off—both mentally and physically—with one quick, imperceptible gesture.

Then he studied the boy more closely, only to find that Evan was just as intent on studying him right back. For one long, silent moment, the two men sized each other up in the way men do when both of them care deeply about the same woman. While Evan considered Jack, Jack considered Evan. Looking at the boy was like seeing himself too many years ago to consider. He towered a good four inches over Georgia, his dark, shoulder-length hair unruly, his casually hooded gaze from piercing blue eyes hiding anything he might be feeling, his menacing stance announcing to the world that he was ready for any and all takers.

Evan narrowed his eyes even more angrily at Jack and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”

“Evan!” Georgia cried as she took a step away to glare at the boy. “That was completely uncalled for. You apologize to Mr. McCormick right now.”

For Jack it was the proverbial déjà vu all over again. A quarter century melted away, and he was standing back in the parking lot of Carlisle High School East, getting to know Georgia’s family for the first time, up close and personal. And he was seeing all over again, too, just how badly he measured up to the standards of the other man in her life. Only this time it wasn’t Georgia’s father who found him so lacking. It was Georgia’s son.

“Name’s Jack McCormick,” he retorted in much the same way he had to Gregory Lavender that day two decades ago. He would have tacked on another Who the hell are you? as well, but seeing as how Georgia had just introduced the boy as her son, it wasn’t exactly necessary.

Nevertheless, he felt compelled to add, “Not that it’s any of your business.”

This time Georgia pivoted to glare at him. “Jack...” she said softly, her voice edged with warning.

She turned back to her son. Her son, for God’s sake. “Evan,” she began again, her tone stern, “Jack is an old friend of mine who used to live in Carlisle. I will not tolerate you speaking to him in such a way. Apologize to him.”

Evan met Jack’s gaze levelly, but no apology was forthcoming.

“Now,” Georgia told the boy.

“Sorry.” Evan spat it out without an ounce of contrition.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack told him, certain the admonition was completely unnecessary. Evan didn’t seem the type who was likely to lose any sleep over his transgressions.

Georgia shook her head at both of them, as if trying to figure out what she’d done to deserve being saddled with two such men in one lifetime. “You want coffee?” she asked the room at large.

“Yeah,” both men chorused as one.

She nodded, and when she went to pick up Jack’s mug, he remembered that he hadn’t even touched his coffee yet. “Just top mine off,” he told her.

She looked down at the full mug. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Fine.”

“I’ll take mine back to my room,” Evan told her, his gaze still fixed on Jack. “I have an exam tomorrow, and I have to work tonight. So I need to spend the afternoon studying.”

“Fine,” Georgia reiterated, her vocabulary now fully reduced to single-syllable words.

“On second thought,” Jack told her, still watching Evan, “don’t bother topping me off. I need to get going.”

From the corner of his eye he saw her whip around to stare at him. “But I thought—”

“I have a dinner date, and I need to get back to the hotel to shower and change before I go.”

He had deliberately chosen the word date instead of the word appointment—which would have been much more accurate—because he specifically wanted to give Georgia the wrong impression. Although he knew it was childish, he wanted to get back at her for having a son, even if his retaliation was lame and unfounded. And evidently his ruse had worked, because when he glanced over at her again, she looked stricken and hurt.

“Okay,” she muttered. “No problem. Maybe we can get together for lunch tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I’m pretty booked up for the duration of my visit.”

“But you said you wanted to—”

“I’m going to be busy.” He cut her off.

When he turned to retrieve his jacket, his gaze inevitably fell on Evan, and he realized immediately that Georgia’s son understood exactly what had just passed between the two adults. Oh, he might not have known the particulars of the situation, but Evan was obviously smart enough to see it for what it was, and he glared murderously at Jack as a result.

And, really, Jack couldn’t blame him. If someone—some interloper from the past—had just gone out of his way to hurt the woman he loved, Jack would feel pretty homicidal, too. Good thing he didn’t love Georgia, he told himself. At least, not like that.

“Where are you staying?” he heard her ask as he jammed his arms into the sleeves of his jacket.

“At The Bluffs,” he told her.

The Bluffs was the local nickname for The Carlisle Inn, a historic cliffside resort overlooking the Atlantic, a hotel that drew only the wealthiest, most elite vacationers. It was where Jack had worked as a busboy when he and Georgia were teenagers.

“Oh, great,” Evan said. “Then I guess I’ll be seeing more than enough of you.”

“Evan...” Georgia said, her voice laced with warning.

Jack narrowed his eyes at the boy, but Georgia was the one to enlighten him. “Evan works at The Bluffs,” she said softly. “As a busboy.”

Jack nodded, but kept his gaze trained on Georgia’s son. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

Georgia took a few steps forward to stand between them, shaking her head once again at both men. But instead of commenting on the animosity burning up the air between them, she only instructed Evan to take his coffee back to his room and hit the books. As he moved to follow her instructions, she turned to Jack.

“We need to get together again before you leave town,” she told him. “How long will you be here?”

“I’m not sure. A week. Maybe two. But like I said, I’ll be—”

“You won’t be that busy,” she interrupted him.

He turned to watch Evan’s retreating back, knowing there was little chance the boy wasn’t eavesdropping on every word the two of them uttered. “All right,” he said. “Maybe we can do lunch tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Georgia told him. “I’ll even make it easy on you. I’ll meet you at The Bluffs, all right?”

“I’ll be in the lobby at noon.”

“I’ll see you then.”

What had started off barely an hour ago as a warm, wonderful welcoming had dissolved quickly into an anxious, awful antagonism. Jack knew when it had happened—the moment Georgia’s son had walked into the house. But he didn’t know why. And he didn’t know what to do to put things back to rights. Geo was correct about one thing, though—the two of them needed to get together again before Jack left Carlisle, and for more than just lunch. What she didn’t know was the real reason why.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he told her, not knowing what else to say.

And before Georgia could answer him, he crossed quickly to the door and made his way back out into the cold.

Jack had concluded his dinner with Adrian an hour earlier and was poring over the Lavender file in his hotel suite when a knock sounded at the door. Expecting it to be room service delivering the industrial-sized pot of coffee he was going to need for the work he had ahead of him that night, he left the scattered papers where they lay on the table, tossed his reading glasses down on top of them and rose to answer the summons.

So The Bluffs hadn’t changed the service uniform at all in the twenty-plus years since Jack had worn one himself, he noted when he pulled the door open and frowned at the kid standing on the other side. But where he himself had always grudgingly followed the rules and kept his hair short, Evan—was his last name Lavender, too?—had simply gathered his long tresses at his nape with a rubber band. And while Jack had always given in and worn the requisite—and very dorky—black patent leather oxfords with the black pants, white jacket and bazillion brass buttons, Georgia’s son wore ratty black hightops.

“Your shoes aren’t regulation,” he said to the boy by way of a greeting.

Evan thrust his chin up in what Jack supposed was meant to be a threatening posture. Funny, though, how it just made the kid looked scared somehow. “You gonna report me?” he challenged.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jack retorted. “It would give you yet another reason to dislike me.”

“Hey, I don’t need another reason to dislike you. I’ve already got plenty.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at the boy. But instead of commenting on Evan’s contempt, he said, “I thought we agreed to keep out of each other’s way.” To punctuate his assertion, he barred the kid’s entrance by bracing both forearms against the doorjamb on each side.

Evan shook his head. “No, you agreed to stay out of my way.”

Jack chuckled without humor. “Guess I just assumed that meant you were going to steer clear of me, too.”

Georgia’s son sneered at him. “Guess you guessed wrong, man.”

Boy, the kid had an attitude, he thought, deciding not to dwell on the fact that it was a lot like the one he’d nurtured himself when he was Evan’s age. “I thought you worked as a busboy,” he said instead.

Evan shrugged, glancing at the carafe and coffee accoutrements—cup, saucer, creamer, sugar—he balanced on a tray in one hand. “On slow nights, if they want to send someone home early, we double up on jobs sometimes. So tonight I’m room service, too.”

“Well, aren’t I just the lucky boy, then?” Jack muttered.

“I dunno,” Evan said. “Guess we’ll have to wait and see about that.” Before Jack could comment, he added, “You want your coffee or not?”

Reluctantly, Jack stepped aside, allowing the boy enough room to pass by. Where he had half expected Evan to just heave the tray’s contents angrily into the room and leave, he instead followed the hotel procedure, moving swiftly to the table and chairs on the other side of the room, arranging everything just so. Jack moved to the dresser for his wallet and extracted a couple of bills for a tip.

“I don’t want your money,” Evan told him when he noted Jack’s intention.

“Oh, so you’re one of those philanthropic busboys who’s only doing this for the good of humanity, is that it?” Jack asked sarcastically, feeling irrationally stung that the boy had rejected his tip.

Evan narrowed his eyes viciously. “No, I just don’t want your money, okay?”

Jack tossed his wallet back to the dresser, then turned to face the boy squarely, settling his hands on his hips in challenge. “Well, I sure as hell get the impression that you want something from me.”

Evan’s lips thinned into a tight line. “Yeah, I do. I want you to stay away from Georgia.”

That was the second time Evan had referred to his mother by her first name. Jack noted. And although the kid came across as surly enough to do something like that just because it would annoy people, he got the feeling there was more to it than that in Evan’s case.

“Anything going on between your mother and me goes way back before you were even born, and is frankly none of your business,” he told the boy.

Evan shifted his weight to one foot and settled his hands menacingly on his own hips, mimicking Jack’s posture. Although he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, he was only a few inches shy of Jack’s six feet two inches, if much less solidly built—for the time being, at any rate. Doubtless he would fill out considerably before reaching full maturity. And with that big chip on his shoulder, the kid probably outweighed Jack by a good two tons.

“Look, I know who you are,” he said. “Ever since I met Georgia, she’s been telling me how much I remind her of someone she used to know, and—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jack interrupted, his head spinning as he tried to absorb this new information. “Ever since you met her? I thought she was your mother?”

Evan shifted his weight to his other foot, then seemed to soften a little as he replied, “She’s not my real mother. She’s my foster mother. Not that it’s any of your business,” he tacked on meaningfully.

Jack could only stare dumbfounded at the boy. Georgia didn’t have a son? Georgia was a foster mother?

“She calls me her son,” Evan went on, evidently mistaking Jack’s turmoil for confusion. “And I let her do it, because she seems to think it’s important.” He dropped his gaze to the floor before adding, “But I’m not her son. And she’s not my mother.” His gaze was fiery with resentment when he glanced up at Jack again. “But she is my friend. And I don’t want to see her get hurt.”

“How old are you?” Jack asked, thinking the kid was way more knowledgeable about... stuff... than a teenager had a right to be.

“Fifteen,” he answered immediately. “I’ll turn sixteen this summer.”

“How long have you known Georgia?”

“Since I was eleven.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, well, I’ve known her a lot longer than you have,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean squat. If you were really her friend, you wouldn’t have left town and let her be alone for so long.”

“She told you about that?” Jack asked incredulously. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Georgia would have taken up with a young boy.

“I figured it out for myself,” Evan retorted. “I’m not stupid.”

“I never said you were.” On the contrary, Jack thought, the kid was way too smart for a fifteen-year-old.

A fifteen-year-old, he reminded himself. Evan was just a kid, one with all the strange baggage that came with the simple act of being a teenager. And if he was in foster care, then there was more to his story than the average fifteen-year-old’s, at that. Now Jack understood his surliness. Now he knew the root of Evan’s immediate and irrational anger. Now he could sympathize with why the kid overreacted to Jack’s sudden reappearance in Georgia’s life.

But that didn’t mean he had to tolerate any of it.

“Look, Evan, Georgia is my friend, too, and was my friend at a time when no one else would be. I left Carlisle behind—not her—and I had my reasons for doing it. I also have my reasons for coming back. And none of them has anything to do with hurting Georgia. As a matter of fact, what I’m doing back here has to do with helping her. Helping her and me both.”

Evan eyed him warily, straightening to his full height again, seemingly unbothered by the fact that Jack was still a good deal larger. “I don’t trust you.”